Rust Valley

Build Guild is launching Build Guild Pittsburgh at 18:30 on August 12th, 2009 at Silky’s Pub in Bloomfield. Build Guild looks like a loose-knit collection of people interested in building web sites and in web technologies.

In some ways similar to WebNOB (Web North of Boston) that I used to attend when I lived in NH.

I’ll be out of town but otherwise, it’s the sort of thing I’d be strongly inclined to check out. Perhaps you should.

With a massively underdeveloped sense of irony, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is unintentionally running a multi-week parody of the local climate. Last week, you may recall, they noted that the Business section contained obituaries.

This week, it is the lottery that the business section contains.  This may reflect an ill-founded hope by the local business community that they, too, will receive some kind of a bail-out from the tax payers.  Of course, PNC got their own sweet deal in the form of massive tax savings for their acquisition of National City bank.  I guess that’s a lottery win right there.  But just as the lottery is a terrible investment for individuals, waiting for a bail out is terrible strategy for local businesses.

I am coming to the belief that this is some secret, deeper significance to these call-out boxes on the Sunday business section of the post gazette and cannot wait to see what they offer next week.

I am more clever than I thought I was.  Apparently, I got away from the police not once, but twice:

A man who police said stole a car and led officers on a chase that prompted them to evacuate a Wal-Mart store has been caught after spending the night at the home of an acquaintance.
Man accused of fleeing police twice is caught

I’m truly sory to have caused so much trouble. And for those who are asking, no, that is not my hair in the picture.  It’s a wig.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone in the Walmart in Phoenix, Arizona who had to be evacuated when I tried to get away from the Cops. The whole thing started when I took off while they were trying to get me on a warrant. I hid under the bed in some kids’ bedroom in a nearby house, and finally stole a Montero to drive to the Walmart:

“Todd Underwood, 37, was arrested Thursday after he barricaded himself inside a home near 21st Street and Bell Road around 1 p.m., police said.”

I would further like to apologize for the poor choice in car that I chose to steal.  Next time I’ll pick somethingly classier.  Martin Levy has suggested a Classic Land Rover Series-2.  I don’t know what that is, exactly, but I’ll look into it the next time I need to steal a car to flee the cops.

I’d also like to give a shout out to those two kids, aged only nine and 12, who found me hiding underneath a bed.  If they hadn’t been looking for toys to play with, I would have been scott-free!  Good job, kids.

Finally I’d like to thank Google for their Google Alerts product that enabled my friend Adam to send me this news alert about what we can only hope is my Google Doppelgänger.

Yesterday I was walking Agatha (aged 4 years) to school, as I do most mornings. She asked me what day of the week it was. She’s getting curious about time and days of the week and the patterns of life that go along with those. So I replied that it was Tuesday (in Spanish, “martes”). I told her that it was named for Martes, el dios de la guerra (Mars, the god of war—in English “Tuesday” is named for Tyr, the Nordic god of war).

She paused for a minute and asked: “Papa, is Mars the god of George Bush’s war or the god of all wars?” After snorting behind my hand for a second, I calmly told her that I was pretty sure Mars was the god of all wars, not just our current president’s ill conceived adventure. That seemed to make sense to her.

Where the hell she learns stuff like this I do not know.

This cannot have been intentional.  But the confluence of the “Obituaries Inside” call-out right next to the section heading for the Business section in yesterday’s paper was too rich to not be called out.  In these economic times, I’m sure the combination is accurate.

In particular:  Circuit City has decided to seek Chapter 11 protection today in an effort to escape some of its creditors and try to keep something on the shelves for the Christmas shopping season.   This will probably not save them from ultimate dissolution, but it may be worth trying.

On the other hand, at a lovely Mexico-themed brunch at our house yesterday, I heard from another rust-valley resident who just got his start-up technology funded.  So out of despair, sometimes a little home will creep.

I awoke this morning to find that Renesys, the company I work for, is featured in a business brief on the front page of the Business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They probably have no idea that anyone from Renesys lives and works in Pittsburgh.

The coverage is due to the what I mentioned last night: my colleague Martin A. Brown produced an excellent writeup, using Renesys routing data, showing widespread power outages in the Ohio River Valley due to damage from hurricane Ike. So that’s news.

But the meta story here is one of the enduring power of the AP. Renesys has had lots of press over the years. I’ve been quoted for articles in the New York Times, Business Week, the Economist, the Washington Post and a long list of others. But I can tell you with certainty that *nothing* distributes a news story like getting cited in the AP.

In this age of democratized news authorship and distribution (learn more about all of that at Podcamp Pittsburgh next month), we like to delude ourselves with our cute little blogs and our social news sites into believing that we are somehow replacing the established infrastructure. We are nowhere near that. I’ve had stories slashdotted, reddited, dugg and AP‘d. The AP is the clear winner in reach and influence. It’s not even close. It will be interesting to see how and whether that changes.

Hurricane Ike did more than knock out power to 130,000 people in and around Pittsburgh. It is shaping up to be the biggest power outage in 5 years, when power blackouts affected Internet-connectivity (and electricity, obviously) from Ohio and Ontario to the Eastern seaboard. This is all according to an excellent writeup on the Ike outages by my colleague Martin A. Brown over at the Renesys blog.

View Larger Map

The linked blog contains detailed analysis of outages in this whole region of the country, with Ohio and Pennsylvania both hit hard, much harder than one might expect from a hurricane. Notable region outages include Ansoft Corporation (192.149.1.0/24), Continental Broadband Pennsylvania, Inc. (209.114.166.0/24), LogicaCMG Inc. (128.129.0.0/16, since 9/13/2008), and two USWeb networks. OK, let me be honest here: I grew up in the Caribbean and I didn’t know that yinz could have hurricane effects at all this far inland. It’s either refreshing or a little bit scary. I’m still trying to figure out which.

Repairs continue, but as of last night 60,000 people in the local area still didn’t have power. If you’re reading this, I assume you’re not one of them. Good luck out there, people.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a fantastically clever housewarming party that my partner Beth and I threw when we moved to Pittsburgh. That post remains one of the most popular on the site.

Recently, we were invited (well, “invited” is a stretch—more on that in a minute) to another very clever party. The general idea was this:

• If you have kids’ stuff that you want to get rid of, come to this party.
• If you need kids’ stuff (for new babies, or growing toddlers, come to this party.
• Put all the stuff you don’t want anymore in a big pile (which the guests all carefully sorted).
• Take what you need or want.
• Everything left over gets donated to charity after the event.

Simple, clever, amazingly useful. The party built community (people met each other, helped care for each other’s kids, etc.) while solving a practical set of problems: how do you redistribute the amazing pile of baby crap that exists in the world.

Erica, the creator of this party, made it further amazing by showering guests in incredible food and drink. Sangría. Beer. Fresh scones. Madeleines. Watermelon. Roasted corn. The list goes on. Her house on the North Side had a fantastic side yard where everyone could gather and the kids could all run around and play.

As I mentioned before, we weren’t really invited to this party. Our new friend Andrea (who came to the aforementioned housewarming party), heard about this party from a friend, who heard about it from another friend. Who may (or may not) have been invited by Erica. The email chain was long enough to cause my attention to waver halfway through. What’s interesting about all of that is that we went, we were welcome and we had a great time. This is an incredibly open, interesting city, socially.

Chalk another one up to Pittsburgh as a fantastic place to live.

According to the entire Interwebs, and more specifically this article at the Guardian, Google celebrates their 10th birthday this month. Sometime. Like maybe the 7th, or maybe the 13th.

In reality, Google is either 10 or 11 or 13 years old depending on how you count. The press is making a reasonably big deal about this confusion because they like simple stories: ‘Google was incorporated on 7 September, 1998′ or the like. But companies don’t start that way. Someone has a set of ideas. They talk to other people and refine/improve/change those ideas. They try out some of those ideas. Most of them fail. Some succeed. Eventually it gets to the point where it might have real promise. So then they register a domain name (this actually comes before the first idea sometimes).

At some point people look at each other and say: ‘Dude, we should probably register a Delaware corporation and make this thing a real company.’ The press likes to talk about that last date, but the other dates are usually much more important in the gestation of a company. Like a human fetus, it takes a while to be fully cooked.

I find it fairly refreshing that Google refuses to take any particular part of this all that seriously. Starting a company is a process and celebrating a company should really be geared around when the current employees of the company “feel like having cake.” In any case, Mabrook, google. Felicidades. Congratulations. Well done.