Rust Valley

[This is neither about Pittsburgh nor about technology, but it's a Friday night so cut me some slack.]

I love the Olympics.  I’m one of those people who normally doesn’t care at all about sports (tough to live in Pittsburgh without caring about sports, I’m learning) but I love the sports that you can see at the Olympics that you cannot see at any other time. This year, there are fascinating stories of the drama and controversy with China hosting the olympics (human rights, lying about competitors’ ages, polution, Tibet), the wonderful swimming stories, and of course the medal race.

Normally the medal count is straightforward:  most golds, most total medals.  Those are the two rankings that make sense.  The BBC, however, has a hilarious and fascinating proposal of five alternate medal total rankings.  They propose some interesting alternative rankings, including highest medals to GDP ratio and highest medals to athletes in the olympics ratio.

In both of these ratios, the tiny West African country of Togo comes out in the top 10.  As is turns out, I was born in Togo.  Had I been willing to do the mandatory military service, I probably could hvae had Togolese citizenship.  In which case, maybe I could have been on the Togolese summer Olympics team.  I swam a little bit in High School.  I can dream.

Anyway, it’s pleasant to see Togo in the top-10 of some medal ranking. Go Togo!

Technical people complain about tech reporters.  They gloss over details.  They ask dumb questions.  They don’t understand why we are the most important people they’ve ever talked to.

Some of those criticisms are baseless.  Technical reporters have a really hard job. They write about complicated subjects for a really broad audience, so they have to try to both get it right and make it interesting (or at least comprehensible).  The sad fact is that most tech journalists fail on both accounts. This happens in part because tech journalists just don’t have the serious technology background that they probably need to write accurately and coherently about the things they write about.  And it also happens because in an effort to be more comprensible and relevant, many journalists gloss over or flat out change details that matter.

A funny, and frustrating, example of this occurred recently when Jason Perlow tried to explain why Limelight Networks was better than Akamai at serving Olympics content for NBC. Perlow stacks generalization upon inaccuracy and ends up mistating the facts and miseducating readers.  All of this can be clearly, and simply detangled. [Read more →]

Pittsburgh is great. People here are friendly, there are tons of things to do, it’s affordable, and so on. I’ve said it all before here. But one thing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania does not have is low taxes.

We moved here from New Hampshire, the state with the second lowest per-capita tax burden in the US. The lowest is Alaska, with it’s Permanent Fund Dividend—they pay you to live in Alaska and use money from the mineral rights from state-owned lands. In New Hampshire they do it the old-fashioned way: by having very small, frugal state government.

This is clearly not the Pennsylvania way, nor is it the Pittsburgh way. So today is the end of the month and my first paycheck as a Pennsylvania resident was deposited in my account. Since I still have the same job for the same company this provides an concrete, simple way to determine: just how much more does it cost to live in Pittsburgh than it did to live in New Hampshire? [Read more →]

Last weekend we had a housewarming party in Pittsburgh.  We invited everyone we knew (and several people we didn’t) to help us figure this town out.  Our guests were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. The suggestions range from where to eat, to the best places to take your kids. There are recommendations for mechanics and plumbers, which fountains to play in and where to buy replacement clothes when you get yours wet.

I’ve typed in all the recommendations and put the results over at a new wiki I set up just for this purpose:  RustWiki.  There is already a reasonable font of information over there that we will be using to settle in to our new town.  The food page is particularly fabulous for the categories that people dreamed up (”Best Takeout Items for Vegetarians Whose Kids Eat Spicy Food” is probably the most genius of the lot).

Take a look.  It’s a wiki so feel free to edit it.  If you see stuff missing, please feel free to add it.  In particular, if anyone wants to carry out the same Housewarming scheme in some other Rust Belt city and wants to add the results to the RustWiki, you’re more than welcome.  Mi wiki es su wiki.

Perhaps the best life hack I’ve ever been involved with. This genius algorithm was invented by my partner, Beth, and it solves that basic problem that anyone who moves to a new town has: where the heck is the $X here (for values of $X to include (”dentist”, “zoo”, “mechanic”, “Thai place”, “cheap beer” and so on).  In short, how does this new town work?

The Rules

We implemented this algorithm this past weekend and it worked astonishingly well. I strongly recommend this process for anyone moving to a new city. In short:

1. Move to a new city.
2. Unpack like mad (you have to eventually so just do it up front)
3. Schedule a housewarming party. Invite anyone you know and many that you don’t.
4. Ask that people bring references, suggestions, helpful tips as housewarming presents.
5. Give them presents from your previous town, neighborhood, city or country as thanks.

It really is that simple. Let me outline the whole process in considerably more detail for those of you inclined to replicate our success in your own relocation experience. [Read more →]

Pittsburgh is on a Public Relations Bonanza. The New York Times published an extremely positive piece about Pittsburgh (that I commented on previously. Now  USA today has published two articles about Pittsburgh in the past week alone. Whoever the city hired to do PR for this summer and the ongoing Pittsburgh 250 celebration is certainly earning their money.

On a business trip back to Manchester, New Hampshire this past week, I couldn’t get away from Pittsburgh. Now, it’s true that part of this was the result of the ridiculous air traffic delays in Philly, but the rest of it was the ongoing drumbeat of national press coverage about Pittsburgh. [Read more →]

Even our would-be-leader, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is getting into the Pittsburgh spirit.  In a NY Times article about Obama traveling the nation Obama opines:

“I’ve been struck by how many beautiful places there are in the country that you don’t necessarily think of as beautiful. Pittsburgh, for example, is a really handsome town with the rivers and the hills.”

Dude:  we’re handsome.  I certainly would not kick Pittsburgh out of bed for eating crackers.

Mike Shanley has what I regard to be a practical and really interesting idea of the problem of giving early access to music to reviewers over at his blog, shanleyonmusic:

“Tell ya what they ought to do. Buy some old shellacs and an old record cutter and press up promo copies and mail that out to us. We music critics love everything on vinyl, so you’d be doing yourself a big favor. (Yeah, I know the last part is ridiculous and stupid. I just don’t feel like deleting it all now.)”

On the contrary, Mike, I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all.  Pressing records would not be very expensive.  Most serious reviewers would be able to listen to them.  And vinyl, by virtue of being completely analog, is a nice form of copy protection.  It’s mostly a hassle to get a really good digital copy from a record with a typical home set up. 

On the one hand, I seriously doubt whether any label will take up this idea, but I don’t have a clear sense why it won’t work.

Just as with the Sonya Labs posting about Pittsburgh that I wrote about yesterday, a significant number of friends, family and colleagues pointed out this story about Pittsburgh in the NY Times over the weekend.  The feature has some nice praise for Pittsburgh:

“[T]his city of 89 distinct neighborhoods is a cool and — dare I say, hip—city. There are great restaurants, excellent shopping, breakthrough galleries and prestigious museums. The convergence of three rivers and surrounding green hills also make it a surprisingly pretty urban setting.”

This piece echoes an earlier story about the Lawrenceville Design District back in 2007.  The Times likes Pittsburgh, it seems.  /me too.

What was nice for me about the 35-hours features was that it actually had a bunch of suggestions that none of our friends or acquaintances had suggested yet.  We’re still unpacking, settling, repairing, finishing the house, so we’re not really ready to get out and about too much, but it’s nice to have a long list of stuff we could do, if only we had time.

It’s also been nice to see that so many people we know are interested in Pittsburgh and our lives here.  Finally, it’s interesting to see an article like this in the context of Sonya Lab’s concern about Pittsburgh not having a welcome mat out.  This kind of national PR is pretty valuable for a city.  Now if Pittsburgh could just do something about the air quality.

I recently wrote about the Alpha Lab incumbator funding several companies in Pittsburgh.  Yesterday, Shimon Rura, a former colleague of mine at Babbledog, sent me a link to the blog at Sonya Labs, one of the Alpha Lab fundees, and specifically, a nice writeup about the state of startup funding here in Pittsburgh.  Sonya Labs write:

“Of all places, I never would’ve expected to build my startup in Pittsburgh. I moved to the ‘burgh from Chicago when Sonya Labs got a seed-stage investment from AlphaLab. It is not so unfathomable that I’m here, though, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. Even Paul Graham, a Pittsburgh native, who is famous for advising that startups go to Boston or Sillicon Valley says so!”

[Read more →]