ryan kennedy’s blog

2006 had a pretty rough ending for me. I moved from Folsom back to the Bay Area only to have my cats get into a huge fight (a result of move stress and misdirected aggression). It took months to get them back together so we could return to a semi-normal life. I took over as Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. That sounds like a good thing, but it wasn’t. It was fun, don’t get me wrong. But the added responsibility and personal investment simply weren’t worth it. I managed to come down with shingles, merely the first in a long string of ailments to come over the next several months.

So when 2006 was coming to an end 12 months ago, I was happy. I was ecstatic. A clean slate. So, did everything go as planned? Yes…and no. Mostly no.

January 2007

January picked up where December left off, with me in questionable health. I caught a cold and discovered (the hard way) that I have sinusitis. As it turns out, sinusitis can cause you to faint. I woke up one morning, walked into the kitchen, began preparing breakfast, became light-headed and passed out right there in the kitchen. Fortunately, Lisa was there and quickly pulled over a chair before I went down. I sat in the chair and went lights out. Good fun…wait, no…it wasn’t.

March 2007

I enjoy traveling for work. Yahoo! picks up the tab and I get to go different places. In March, Yahoo! sent me to San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. I wasn’t there to sit in sessions, however. I was there for the official launch of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. The culmination of my 2+ years at Yahoo!, releasing the web service to the public was a great personal and professional moment. Years of hard work and patience finally paying off.

April 2007

Every high must be countered by a low. It’s a law of physics…or something. A short month after releasing the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, I was sitting in a meeting. The agenda was a feature. A feature that exists in Yahoo! Mail Classic but doesn’t exist in the new Yahoo! Mail. I was there with several other people, trying to convince the powers that be that the feature belongs in the new Mail. I won’t get into what the feature is (it’s unimportant), but suffice it to say that many find the feature incredibly useful. It was shocking that we were spending any time at all in a meeting trying to convince someone that the feature belonged in the product.

As I said, however, the feature itself wasn’t important. We went into the meeting, armed with every reason in the world for why the feature belonged in the product. The opposition went into the meeting, armed with…nothing. In the end, we were struck down by the opposition. Not because they thought the idea was dumb or because they simply didn’t want the feature in the product. The one-line reason for not implementing the feature was that our competition (specifically citing a well-known competitor just up the road) didn’t provide it, so we didn’t have to either.

Frustration. Anger. Outrage. That sums up the range of emotions I went through.

June 2007

June was a pretty great month, the peak of 2007, I’d say. It started with a trip to London. I’d been dying to visit London. Yahoo! was already picking up the tab to fly me out there for work, so I took a week off and visited the sites. I spent the week crisscrossing London doing as much as I could. It was one of the best trips ever. London’s an amazing place and I can’t wait to go back and see the rest of the UK.

As I said, Yahoo! paid to send me to London. June marked the second Yahoo! Open Hack Day. It was a great event…an epic event. One of those times you’ll remember for the rest of your life. The perfect combination of people and places.

When I returned, it was time to move again. Back in April, Lisa and I found a new house in Santa Clara. The week after returning from London it was time to move into the new house. This move went much smoother than the move from Folsom down to the Bay Area. We knew what to do in order to keep the cats (relatively) calm.

August 2007

I officially transferred off of Yahoo! Mail in August. It was fueled partly by the desire to work on a new project, but mostly it was a desire to distance myself from Mail after what happened in April.

It may seem petty to let something like that affect me so badly, but oh well. It pissed me off. I didn’t come to Yahoo! to keep pace with the competition. I went to Yahoo! to bury them.

September 2007

September started out slow…too slow. Slow enough that I had time to think about it (big mistake) and write about it (bigger mistake).

In the end, I pulled myself together, reminded myself why I was at Yahoo! and put out my call to arms for fellow Yahoo!’s.

October 2007

October started with a trip to Chicago to speak at Adobe MAX. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure how much people got out of my talk. My material seemed a little out of place given the topics in some of the other talks I attended.

Chicago itself was nothing to write home about. I was in the south side, which was a pretty “interesting” part of town to walk around in. Maybe my view is skewed because I was accosted on the streets by a drunk man in search of money to help pay his wife’s hospital bills. Money he later used to pay a woman for sexual favors, right after he offered to have her perform said acts for me.

October ended with a bang…or a shake. On October 30th there was a sizable earthquake centered within 10 miles of our house. The quake shook our house pretty good, knocked a few things down, but did no structural damage. However, it did scare the hell out of the cats. Ricky took it the worst, reverting to his misdirected aggression. He went after Lisa, more aggressively than when we moved from Folsom. He sunk his teeth into her leg and pinned her against the wall, refusing to let her leave. We finally managed to get him into a room all by himself and left him there to calm down.

November 2007

Unfortunately, Ricky didn’t calm down. Lisa couldn’t go into the room without Ricky growling, hissing and taking more swipes at her. We went through a lot of scenarios, trying to figure out what to do. A vet gave us some medication that we could give to Ricky, stuff that would calm him down. Even if we could get him to take it (we couldn’t), we couldn’t leave him on the medication forever. His aggression was getting worse with each episode he had. We were starting to get concerned that he might really hurt our other cat (Lucy), one of us or one of our guests.

It was the most difficult decision either of us has either made, but we decided to put him down. It’s been difficult since then. Ricky and Lucy were kittens when we picked them out in 2000. They’re like children to us. Having to give up Ricky so soon wasn’t something we ever saw coming. Having to put him down when he was in perfect physical health has been hard on the conscious, to say the least.

Around the same time, I hit my 3 year anniversary with Yahoo!. Having that coincide so closely with putting Ricky down is difficult. Yahoo! is the reason I moved back to the Bay Area in the first place, so I feel like my career is partly to blame for what happened to Ricky.

Near the end of the month I was moved to another project, marking the shortest stint I’ve had on any project (3 months). The new project came with a new title: local architect. I’m still figuring out what exactly that means and whether or not I like it. The verdict is still out on that one.

Looking forward to 2008

I find myself ending 2007 the same way I ended 2006, looking forward to the next year. I don’t mean to imply that 2007 was all bad. There were some great moments to be sure. Unfortunately, they’re largely overshadowed by some really bad moments.

And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last

-Counting Crows - A Long December

See you in 12 months…hopefully with better news to report.

Another November 15th, another annual notch in my Yahoo! belt. Today marks three years at Yahoo! for me.

This has been a pretty up and down year for me, personally and professionally. Last year at my two-year anniversary everything was great. Things turned quickly after that. I got pretty sick, pretty stressed and pretty frustrated. I accomplished a lot during my third year at Yahoo!, but it definitely took a toll on life in general. The scars of my third year will stay with me for a while.

There was some good stuff too, though…lest you think it was all bad. I did take a free trip to London for the second Open Hack Day, after all.

As an odd coincidence, this week also marks my third project at Yahoo! (yes, I was only on project number two for three or four months). This new project is completely different from anything I’ve worked on in the past. My role is also pretty different. I can’t talk much about it yet, but it’s accurate to say that year number four will be my most challenging yet. I can’t tell if I’m excited about it or not, time will tell.

Today Adobe sent me the results of my session survey from my talk at Adobe MAX. I was given an overall score of 4.47 out of 5. Here’s the overall breakdown:

• Speaker’s presentation skills: 4.5
• Presenter was knowledgeable: 4.62
• Material was presented clearly: 4.5
• Presentation was reflective of the title and description: 4.53
• Session material was well organized: 4.31
• Relevance of the material to current industry trends: 4.31

Not bad…it sets a nice bar for next time. While I currently don’t have any talks planned, I am hoping there is a next time. It was fun…I’d do it again.

I was looking around at a bunch of stuff tonight, including the current state of my vacation balance. I’m currently sitting on about 5 weeks of vacation (26 days to be exact). This is problematic for two reasons:

• I think in three years the vacation accrual for an individual at Yahoo! should be 41 days. That means I’ve taken a total of three weeks of vacation in the past three years (41 days - 26 days = 15 days = 3 weeks). That seems pretty low.
• My maximum accrual caps out at 32 days during my third year and 34 days during my fourth year (which starts in about three weeks). That means I’m rapidly approaching my cap. I think I determined that I’ll hit my cap at this rate in about 5 months.

Granted I’ll be taking a couple of days off for sure in December simply because of the holidays, but I’m thinking I still need some real, non-holiday time off. I took some time off back in June to tour London prior to the London Hack Day, but that’s the only non-holiday vacation I’ve taken since our trip to New York in November 2005. And that was the only non-holiday vacation I’d taken since my honeymoon back in November 2004.

This, of course, begs the question…when should I take a vacation and what should I do? I’m open to all suggestions: local, domestic and interntional. More details are better, if you suggest Rome in Spring…tell me why.

It’s t-minus a little over a week before my talk at Adobe MAX. It’s a lazy, rainy Saturday and I still have a ton of stuff to get done before MAX. So, do I…

• Start working on my talk slides.
• Figure out a workaround to an Adobe AIR bug so my app (the one I’ll be talking about) actually works on Windows.
• Wander the web, aimlessly looking for something else to do.
• Follow the advice of my cat and take a nap.

I’m open to all suggestions.

My speaking duties for my current job have been limited to the Sunnyvale and London Yahoo! Open Hack Days. Now I’ve been invited to speak at Adobe MAX in Chicago on October 1st and 2nd. This is pretty huge, I’ve never presented at a big conference like this before. I’m equal parts terrified and excited, so it should be a lot of fun.

I’ll be presenting Air Mail, a desktop mail application written using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) and Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth). I wasn’t alone in writing Air Mail, Dav Glass was my co-conspirator. We wrote it over the course of 24 hours (although each of us only coded for about 12 hours each) during one of our internal hack days at Yahoo!. The photo at the right (courtesy of fellow Yahoo! Jeremy Johnstone) was taken during hack day in the tent where Dav and I presented Air Mail. Dav, unfortunately, won’t make it to MAX with me. That’s too bad because Dav has all of the YUI bits covered (since he works on YUI as his day job), so he’s really the best man to talk about the YUI bits of Air Mail.

The talk will be a bit of a case study on how we built Air Mail. I don’t have slides worked out just yet, but I’ve been thinking in my head about the things that would be good to go over. In particular:

• Getting BBAuth working in Adobe AIR. It’s not impossible, but it wasn’t easy, either.
• YUI and Adobe AIR. Most stuff works, but not everything. I’ll have to get more specific details from Dav.
• Problems with Adobe AIR. While AIR is a nice platform to build on, it does have some rather annoying problems. Some of them you can’t avoid as an application developer.

I’m sure more will come to mind as I start on the slides (probably this weekend). If you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

We’re planning on getting Air Mail put up where people can install and play with it. Additionally, I’m working this week to get permission to distribute the source code so people can crack it open and hack on it. Unfortunately, since we did this on Yahoo! time during hack day, Air Mail technically belongs to Yahoo!. As it turns out, it’s harder than you’d think getting the stars to align so you can turn your hack day creation loose.

If you’re going to be at MAX, my talk is scheduled for 2-3pm on Monday (10/1). In addition, we’ve been scheduled to hang out at AIR Park from 10-1pm and 4-7pm on Monday (10/1), 4-7pm on Tuesday (10/2) and 10-1pm on Wednesday (10/3). If you can’t make either of my talks, swing by AIR Park and I can give you the improv version.

Update: Turns out I’ll only be doing the one speaking session after all (Monday from 2-3pm). I’ve changed the post accordingly.

I’d like to dedicate this to a young man who doesn’t think he’s seen any morale today - JR Conlin, this one’s for you.

Danke Shoen, darling Danke Shoen
Thankyou for all the joy and pain

– Wayne Newton

Many people may have taken a recent post of mine and read it to mean that I’m not happy at Yahoo!. When I wrote it, even I thought I wasn’t happy at Yahoo!. A day after I wrote that post I had a 1-on-1 with my manager. It was scheduled before I wrote that post, we didn’t meet because of the post. We both agreed that things had been a bit slow lately with the new project spinning up and quickly remedied the situation by throwing me a meaty design problem to sink my teeth into. Almost instantly, I perked up. Boredom fled and any notions of me being unhappy at Yahoo! quickly evaporated. I had a sudden epiphany:

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass
and I’m all out of bubblegum.

– Nada

Like Rowdy Roddy Piper in his kilt, I had come to Yahoo! to chew bubblegum and kick ass. I’ve been out of bubblegum since I left EarthLink back in 2004. So for the last two and a half years at Yahoo! I’ve been doing nothing but kicking ass. When I switched projects recently, the ass dried up. The new project was slow to get started and the fun/hard problems hadn’t started flowing down the pipe yet. No bubblegum + no ass + bubblegum chewing ass kicker = bored bubblegum chewing ass kicker.

I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m finally going to go all Ferris Bueller in this post and do a little Twist and Shout on the float with the Bavarian beer maidens. I’m getting there.

You can’t go!
All the plants are gonna die!

– John Winger

Back in April I was approached by a nearby competitor. It doesn’t matter who it was, some of you know and I’m sure the rest of you can guess. I interviewed with them and was extended an offer. It was a fair offer to work with a great team on a fun product. I hadn’t really set out to look for a new job, but the idea was enticing. A healthy company, good environment, smart people, fun products. The choice ahead of me was pretty obvious. So obvious that I threw caution to the wind, declined the offer and stayed at Yahoo!. Why? In the end, I know that Yahoo! is still a great place. Fantastic people (like you, JR) make coming to work every day worthwhile. Hell, I enjoy the place so much that I uprooted and moved back to the Bay Area just so I could be in the office more often.

I got something to tell you
I got something to say
I’m gonna to put this dream in motion
Never let nothing stand in my way
When the going gets tough
The tough get going

– Billy Ocean

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s rough going right now. We get smacked around by the media. It’s been a while since we had a really big, notable win. I think morale at the company is low, the future uncertain and the food still sucks (although, I’ve had worse). But despite that, we had a record turnout for our last internal hack day. We had so many people with ideas that we had to completely change the format of the event because the campus could no longer scale to meet our demands. There is still plenty fight in this company and we have no shortage of asses to kick. So lace up all you Yahoo!’s…the ass won’t kick itself.

Things have been a bit rough lately. I’ve been lethargic, out of tune and generally a great big lump of flesh with little to no energy to do things. Sometime during this week it hit me: I’m bored…really bored. Like, “get that man a fucking hobby” bored. I’m not sure when it started, but this general feeling of dreariness has been floating over my head for a while now. Curious, I set out to do some research on the causes and effects of boredom.

Wikipedia, of course, seems to show up no matter what I search for.

Far from being a minor annoyance, boredom can have major negative impacts on people. Perhaps more importantly, boredom is often a symptom of deeper problems, such as depression, ineffective classroom teaching, or ineffective management in the workplace.

Some people eat when they are bored which can make boredom a problem.

No shit, Sherlock. That would explain why I’m decimating the leftover chicken wings from our Labor Day get together.

I ran across another article on I-resign.com with a section titled The Wider Effects of Boredom.

Boredom has been linked to illness and depression. “[It] is the major component in what we call world underload, an unhealthy state characterized by low job demand. When you experience underload, the result is usually anxiety, which can eventually lead to illness”, says Dr. Michael J. Smith, Ph.D., research psychologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati.

This hints at a deeper truth for humans - if you find yourself bored you are probably in a situation where your behaviour has been artificially restrained and your potential limited. Boredom is a biological alarm bell that you should be doing something else and if you don’t, the damage may be permanent.

I can definitely vouch for the negative effects on health caused by boredom. I don’t feel as healthy as I did several months ago. I feel less motivated to get out and exercise. When I’m at home, I’m more apt to sit in front of the television than I am to read a book, play a game or do something useful.

Personally, I think it’s a breakdown in the positive feedback loop. Without challenge there is no accomplishment. Without accomplishment there is no accolade. Without accolade you’re less likely to seek out greater challenges. I need that challenge. I don’t necessarily care what form it comes in, I just need something to get me rolling again. Something to break up the monotony. In the past two years, that’s been my job…but lately my job hasn’t been supplying that challenge.

How do you deal with boredom? How do you set your own challenges?

After two and a half years working on webmail for Yahoo!, it’s time to move on to something else. I’m not leaving Yahoo!, just the world of mail. Over the past two months I’ve been working on a new project (that I can’t really talk about) that has taken me away from mail into something entirely different. I’m not sure if I like it yet, time will tell. On the one hand, it’s nice to work on something else. On the other hand, webmail is something I have done for so long that it’s part of who I am. I walk around Yahoo! and people know me as “the mail guy”. I drop in on the Y-Mail Yahoo! Group and everybody knows me as “the Yahoo! Mail engineer”. The sad thing is, that only scratches the surface of how much webmail has been a part of my life.

I started college as a Physics major. Eventually, I changed majors to chemistry and biochemistry. While working in the Chemistry Studio Classroom, I took over webmaster duties of the chemweb.calpoly.edu website. I had been hooked by the web when I started college, so I loved putting the web together with my chemistry background. While taking summer classes in 1998, I started working on my first CGI scripts. They were simple and poorly written AppleScript programs that allowed students to take an assessment exam on the web, submit their answers and have their grade on the exam returned to them. The exam results were dumped into an Excel spreadsheet (later a FileMaker database) for the teachers to examine later. While playing with the web server software, I became interested in an accompanying mail server. The mail server stored messages in a file, making it easy to read using AppleScript. Hours later, my first webmail application was born.

From there I was hooked. I started taking computer science classes in an effort to change majors (yet again). The science department put me on academic probation for not making progress towards my degree. The engineering department informed me that I’d have to significantly raise my GPA for consideration. I pulled through and a few quarters later, I was officially a computer science major.

In October 1999, I attended the on campus job fair. I wasn’t looking too seriously, I still had 8 months until graduation. But one company stood out: Excite (I think this was shortly before the “@Home” was appended). I talked to an alumni who was there recruiting with his boss (who was sitting behind the table with a cold). We talked for a while, reminisced about a teacher we had both taken a particularly difficult class with. I interviewed with him the next day and was eventually flown to Redwood City in December for another round of interviews.

When the dust settled, I was 6 months from graduation with offers from two teams. One did user registration and the other…webmail. The choice was clear and in April I started working part-time from school on Excite Inbox. I didn’t get much work done, but I did manage to learn most of the codebase, some of the environment and I had made enough part-time pay to buy a new car. I started full time in June 2000 with 6.5 million worldwide users. Excite was a great environment and I was working on my pet project while being paid (well) to do it. Everything was going great…and then the bubble burst. Excite@Home filed bankruptcy in December 2001, webmail was sold to iWon, my friends were laid off and I was put on simple tasks helping to dismantle what was left of the company for sale.

My (then) girlfriend and I fled to Folsom, a small town east of Sacramento. I had found work with a contracting company in Sacramento, doing website work for the Saturn Car Company and Genentech. The work was decent, the experience was nice and I was working with a friend (the one who interviewed me in college). We were living close to my wife’s family and had managed to afford a house. But something was still missing. I missed working for an internet company on things that mattered.

In May 2003 an old product manager from Excite hit me up to let me know that EarthLink was hiring a webmail engineer. I interviewed badly, but convinced the hiring manager (over email) that I wasn’t the idiot I sounded like during the phone interview. I joined EarthLink and set to work on rewriting their webmail system. They didn’t have a lot of users, but the engineer I worked with was smart and entertaining and it was, after all, webmail again. I wrote a spiffy spell check for webmail (something I was supposed to do at Excite but never got prioritized), cursed IMAP servers, worked with close friends from Excite and college and generally had a good time. Eventually, when the app was mostly done, I transfered to another project that was eventually canceled.

Around October 2004, my old boss from Excite came calling. He was managing mail, address book and calendar at Yahoo! and he wanted me to come interview. I had been pushing him off for some time, but once EarthLink ran out of things for me to do it was hard to say “no”. He pitched me on writing (another) mail web service for him (I maintained one and wrote another from scratch at Excite) so they could pair the Oddpost frontend with the Yahoo! Mail backend. It seemed like a sweet gig and they offered to significantly raise my salary, so I (of course) said “yes”. Two and a half years, 250 million users, two web service rewrites, one web service public launch, one talk at the Sunnyvale Open Hack Day, one talk at the London Open Hack Day and one stint as the Yahoo! Mail Beta Evangelist later and here we are.

It’s going to be hard for a little while. Not working on webmail anymore feels a bit like having my identity stripped from me. I hope my stock as a hacker, developer, dragon slayer and generally good guy is enough for a while while I start building up my credibility in a new domain. In the meantime, it’s back to work for me, starting from scratch (although thankfully not in AppleScript this time). Who knows, maybe I’ll find the next thing to identify myself by in this project.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ian shortly after I joined Yahoo!. Ian and his team were working on the Yahoo! Music Engine (now called Yahoo! Music Jukebox). I was doing a bunch of testing of the internal builds before it had been released to the larger world. One morning, I got an IM from Matt New telling me to come down to URLs to see what he and Ian had whipped up on the latest version of YME. I went down and hung with Matt and Ian for a bit, Ian showed me all the cool stuff they were working on. In that short time sitting with Ian, you could tell he was totally into it. Music, Yahoo!, everything. It was cool, like meeting a celebrity and having them not let you down.

Today I read Ian’s “Happy Birthday” to his little girl. While the note is sweet and touching, the pictures blow me away. On the one hand, it’s incredible to see how close they are. On the other, it’s sad to think how close my father and I used to be.

Since moving in late June (for the second time in nine months), I’ve embarked on a bit of a self-improvement program. I’ve been on this kind of kick before in the past, sometimes with positive results while other times were total busts (Did I say 30 by 30? I meant to say 30 during 30).

It’s become abundantly clear to me over the past year that I’m quite mortal. Shin splints once again caused me to shut down my ambitions for a 30 mile run. Shingles sidelined me during the holidays. I also had a nasty bout of sinusitis around the same time that resulted in me passing out in the kitchen. In short, the last 12 months have been among the least healthy of my life. I’ve been riddled with stress, broken down by injuries and worn down by illness.

When this latest move came up in June, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to start over. It began simply enough. In my new place I’m just 5 miles from the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus. I walk 1.5 miles to light rail every morning and ride that to a station near Yahoo!. I get off and walk the final half mile. On a good week, like last week, I clear 16 miles of walking (some nights I get a ride home from work to go somewhere else, like softball). The walking has been great. Sure I show up to work a little sweaty, but it’s worth it. I know I’m doing something good for my body. More importantly, it’s been fantastic for my mental health. I get around 40 minutes of time each way to think about stuff. A lot of the time I think about work, venting any frustrations (I yell at people who aren’t actually there…it helps more than you think) and thinking through any issues. Getting that all out of the way during my walk probably makes me a more pleasant person in the office and at home.

I’ve also started eating much better. No more binging on terrible food. I eat three moderate meals and (usually) three snacks each day. On the weekends I’ll splurge a little…a nice reward for walking 10+ miles during the weekdays. I’ve stayed almost entirely away from soda, minus the six pack of Weinhard’s Root Beer I spread out over the week. Now that we’re back in a real house again, we’ve been having more home cooked meals as well (Lisa’s done all the cooking so far…I can’t take credit, yet).

One of the biggest changes I’ve made has been my sleeping pattern. It used to be that I would stay up until 1-2am and not wake up until 7am or later. I always felt like I was playing catchup on sleep during the weekend. Waking up the morning left me feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Since we moved, I’ve been waking up at 6am, getting myself into bed between 10pm and 12am (usually closer to 10pm). I’ve been doing a bit of reading up on sleeping patterns (this article on waking up without an alarm clock is pretty good) and incorporating that lately and it’s really helped me to wake up in the morning without feeling like my head is full of rocks.

Lastly, I’ve started doing a three day a week boot camp class at the company gym. Our instructor Russell takes it as a personal challenge to maximize damage to my body. I’ve done three days so far and I can tell that if this class doesn’t kill me, it will surely make me stronger. Every day is a massive endurance challenge with various mixtures of cardiovascular and resistance training. This is the diluted yuppie version of boot camp too…this isn’t even the hard core boot camp where some guy screams at you until you give him 500 good pushups and then your squad mates beat you with socks full of soap bars because you screwed the pooch for everyone.

In the end, it’s all for the greater good. Today, while walking home, was one of the first times in a long time that I felt REALLY good, mentally and physically (yes, I’m sore…but it’s the good sore). I’ve been at this for the past 4 weeks now and it’s finally showing signs of paying off. Sing it Michael.

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change, yey
Na na na, na na na, na na na na oh ho

Photo by Laughing Squid

A few weeks back I received email from Toni Schneider. As is commonly the case with people emailing me out of the blue, he had a problem with his Yahoo! Mail account. Anyway, during the course of getting him and his BlackBerry squared away, we got to talking about catching up. So today I popped up to San Francisco and met up with him for lunch.

Toni invited Matt Mullenweg, which was cool. Matt has responded to my past posts on Akismet, which I think is great. For the longest time I tried to keep up with every blog post about Yahoo! Mail, trying desperately to keep up with the stuff people were writing and even more desperately to try to respond to everything in the comments. It’s exhausting, but rewarding work. It’s difficult to find people with the passion to do that.

It was fun talking with them, listening to some of the stuff they have to deal with on WordPress.com. Many of the issues parallel what we have to deal with in the mail world. Storage, abuse, spam and so on. The usage patterns are different, but at the same time there are many parallels.

It was fun. I got to talk old times with Toni and I got to talk shop with Matt. I really found during the London hack day that I enjoy the more social end of the job now. Hanging out with generally smart people, having a good time, talking about whatever interesting topics come up. Now that I’ve moved back to the Bay Area I’m basically surrounded by smart people with similar interests. Hopefully this is just the start.

After the September hack day in Sunnyvale, I wrote a wrapup of the event. It was one of those Doogie Howser moments where you’re caught up in what has just happened and you need to make sure you write it down somewhere. Hack day hasn’t been around for that long but it’s impact on my life has been immeasurable. The excitement of my first internal hack day, the recognition of my peers in my second internal hack day, the pride of releasing my hard work to the public at the first open hack day and finally the epic events of the unforgettable London hack day. Hack day is a special thing. If you attend a hack day, internal or external, and come away from it unchanged then you clearly weren’t at a Yahoo! hack day. The London hack day will be talked about for years to come because we were struck by lightning. Nobody will forget that event, even if you didn’t attend. And while that was impressive and memorable, that’s not what I’ll remember from hack day.

I’ll remember being out until 3am in London pubs with members of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Such a great bunch of people…incredibly smart, wonderfully friendly and wickedly entertaining. I can’t imagine a better team to hang out with both at work and away from it. YDN super intern AJ Arora blogged that interning for the developer network was his dream job. Working for that team is everyone’s dream job, whether they know it or not. You’ll not find a more passionate group of individuals anywhere and I’m proud to have a close affiliation with them in the work I do for Yahoo! Mail.

I’ll remember the joint Yahoo! UK/US beanbag line during the Friday setup. On this trip I met a bunch of fantastic people who work in the London office. People like Anil Patel who organized a massive group of volunteers and kept hack day running smoothly despite the hiccups. These are people I never would have met without hack day and we all work for the same company. Hack day didn’t just unite hackers from all over, it united Yahoo!’s from all over.

I’ll remember Ash, once again, wrecking my demo during my talk. Not because he wrecked it, but because he was there. From the very top of the organization Yahoo! has embraced hack day. That couldn’t be any clearer with Ash and Filo spending so much time at both the Sunnyvale and London hack days. In Sunnyvale, Ash and Filo popped into classroom 6, where I had set up shop, at 2 in the morning to see what was going on. London was no different…they came to the pre-party on Friday, showed up early for the talks on Saturday, stayed late into the night hanging out, showed up early Sunday to check out the progress and sat through 73 hack demos to judge them and award prizes afterwards. It’s tremendous that an event that means so much to those of us who work on the event gets so much support from the major decision makers in the company.

Photo courtesy of ChameleonGreen.

I’ll remember people from the BBC, like Matt Cashmore and Ian Forrester. They were fantastic co-hosts for the event, we really couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to team up with. Matt was a man possessed, constantly in motion taking care of something. I bet he slept really well after the event. He’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Ian likewise…together we hacked a WiFi adapter to get the Nabaztag bunnies on the network. I’m incredibly impressed by the BBC people and I can’t wait to get together with them again the next time I’m in London (or the next time they’re in Sunnyvale…hint, hint, nudge, nudge).

Photo courtesy of Bahi P.

At the end of the event I’m taking away the connections I made with other people. The Sunnyvale hack day was a major step in my professional life, giving me a sense of pride and accomplishment that will last forever. The London hack day was a huge step in my social life, building friendships that (I hope) will last forever. Who knows what I’ll take away from the next hack day? Every hack day is different and that’s what is so wonderful about hack day. Expect the unexpected and you’ll never be disappointed.

I’ve been waiting for a while to announce that I’ll be traveling to London in June for the next Yahoo! Open Hack Day!

The last Open Hack Day was epic. I had way too much fun giving my talk, helping out developers and getting my hands dirty. This Open Hack Day promises to be twice as epic simply because of the location (London, which I’ve always wanted to visit) and the setting (Alexandra Palace). I’ve been asked, once again, to come and give a talk about the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. Last time I gave an overview of the API, which was nice since the web service was entirely new at the time. But now that it’s officially released, I think I’m going to come loaded up with some sample applications that show the power of the platform.

I’m also heading to London early. I’m thinking about working a day or two in the Yahoo! London office and then taking a couple of days before Open Hack Day to check out London since I’ve never been. If you have recommendations of places to check out and things to do, lay them on me. If you’re in London and want to hook up, let me know. If you’re thinking about coming to Open Hack Day and need a spare programmer, I’d love to make my services available (especially if you want to hack on Yahoo! Mail!!!).

Anyway, it’s going to be awesome, so get your arse there. The sign up form is at the usual place.

Flickr image by Dan Harrod.

I’ll be attending the O’Reilly ETech Conference next week in San Diego. Along with checking out some of the sessions, I’ll also be helping out at the Yahoo! Developer Network booth. I’ll be doing the 10:15-11:30am sessions on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Swing on by and introduce yourself (or say hello if we’ve already met) if you’re there.

I’m looking forward to it. I had to back out of the Boston Mashup Camp in January because I was having some health issues. On average, I haven’t been very healthy since early November (shingles, food poisoning, sinusitis, …). But I’m feeling pretty good now, so I’m excited to be hitting the road again.

I’m a little bummed that I’ll be missing our internal Hack Day on Monday/Tuesday. I missed the December Hack Day because I had shingles. The Hack Day before that I took my Technically Sweet Award, so I was looking forward to participating again. If I can make some time this weekend, I might do a little hack and then submit a screencast for people to check out while I’m in San Diego.

Anyway, like I said…if you’re down at ETech, feel free to look me up. Drop me a comment here or shoot me mail (rckenned AT yahoo.com). Also, if there are any talks at ETech that you highly recommend, feel free to make suggestions. I’m just starting to look over the talks now that I know my schedule a little better. I’ll be catching Chad’s talk for sure (and so should you), but outside of that I’m up for anything.

For the last couple of years I’ve been wanting to learn a new language. There’s really nothing in my life pushing me to learn a new language, it’s just something I’ve wanted to do. I took 3 years of French in high school but really took the opportunity for granted. I really saw it as something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do. As a result, I remember very little French. I think the most I could probably convey to a French speaking person is that I don’t know much French.

Lately I’ve been checking out Rosetta Stone. They have a very impressive client list of companies and organizations that use their software for training in foreign languages. I think I’ve decided that I’ll use their software rather than enroll in a junior college class. The software is nice because I’d be able to learn at my own pace and I don’t have to worry as much about being able to fit a class schedule in with my work schedule.

So now I have to pick a language. I could go back to French, which might be interesting from the standpoint of seeing how much I can remember. On the other hand, I live in California…making Spanish a good, logical choice. Neither language is particularly exotic from a location, standpoint, though. Rosetta Stone offers languages like Arabic, Hindi, Japanese and Russian. I’m not certain I’d really use those languages much in life, though…so there’s some question of practicability.

What do you think? If you were going to learn a new language, what would you learn and why? If you know another language, would you recommend it and why?

For any of my readers (all 211 of you, according to Feed Burner) who know Shawn Grunberger, you may not know that he went in yesterday for heart surgery. He has a blog that chronicles everything going on.

Anyway, during a meeting yesterday, we got the call that Shawn came out of surgery great and that they didn’t have to replace his aortic valve. Such awesome news, more can be found here.

For those of my readers who use Yahoo! Mail Beta, realize that every time you use it you touch some piece of code Shawn wrote. Shawn is by far one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with and I’m very thankful that he came through surgery successfully.

In August 1992, Dean Karnazes ran 30 miles on his 30th birthday. I can’t say I will exactly duplicate his effort (Dean was drunk and wearing only a t-shirt, underwear and running shoes), however I’ve made a 30 mile run my goal for my 30th birthday. It might sound like insanity, but one thing I didn’t mention in my Five things you (probably) didn’t know about me post is that I ran cross country in junior high and high school.

The question inevitably becomes, “why would you do that?” The short answer is, I don’t know. I don’t feel any really compelling reason to do it…I just want to. In the past, I’ve always been up for all sorts of hair-brained ideas. The problem is, I’ve never really followed through on them. In some cases I get bored, others frustrated and often times that’s all it takes to turn me from determined to disinterested.

In a recent Wired article. Dean gave 12 pieces of advice. Here’s how I plan to apply that advice to my endeavor.

1. BE AUDACIOUS: Nothing says audacious to me like starting the year an out of shape computer programmer and finishing it having completed a 30 mile run. I’m overweight, out of conditioning and I let my job dominate my life. If the training alone can’t kill me, surely the event itself might. On the other hand, if I come through it successful, who knows…
2. GO LACELESS: Buy new running shoes…check. My last pair were due for replacement anyway. Of course, if I’m going to be training for this, I’m guessing I’ll go through several pairs of shoes between now and my birthday.
3. FLIRT WITH DISASTER: Given my current conditioning, I’m guessing disaster will be my mistress for the next couple of months. You want some more potential for disaster? My birthday is in August. Nothing like trying a 30 mile run at the height of summer. Thankfully, I don’t live in Sacramento anymore.
4. EAT JUNK – LOTS OF IT: The only thing more audacious than running 30 miles is ordering a pizza to be delivered to you during said 30 mile run. If you see some guy running on the mean streets of the Silicon Valley on August 5th, pull up alongside and hand him a bag of doughnut holes or something.
5. CUT BACK ON SLEEP: Way ahead of you, man.
6. SHOW YOUR BODY WHO’S BOSS: There’s a quote in the Wired article that I love. “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!” I think I can accommodate the “used up” and “worn out” part of that after the run. The loud proclaiming will probably come after I finally get to use a restroom (or perhaps during its use).
7. GET A COOL WATCH: Dude, I had a cool watch over a year ago. What I’ll really want is a cool cell phone. My current phone (Sony Ericsson S710a) is ass. What I really want is something that can run ZoneTag. I think it would be a nice way of chronicling the event if I can live blog it from the road, complete with geotagged photos of my sweaty self. Plus, when I get run over by a car I’ll have a photo of the license plate, a timestamp and precise location of the event.
8. LEARN TO LOVE KRAZY GLUE: I’ve never had a huge problem with blisters, but I’ve also never run this far. What I do run into is chafing problems and for that I swear by Body Glide. Attention fat/overweight runners or runners with abnormally muscular thighs that rub together. If you run long distance…get yourself some Body Glide. The stuff’s seriously amazing. I’ve also never had a problem with bloody nipples, but I might consider some NipGuards. Nothing says, “oh my god, what’s wrong with that guy” like a couple of bloody nipples.
9. GET USED TO IT: “Eventually, when he grew accustomed to the pain, it stopped hurting.” Sounds kind of like life as a Windows user. I’m prepared for some pain, but I’m hoping to avoid my usual downfall during my running training…shin splints. Those have shut down my last several attempts to get back into running. I could probably work through the pain, but knowing in the back of my head that I could be doing some rather serious damage to my body will probably detour me a bit.
10. PROMOTE THE HELL OUT OF YOURSELF: Public blog…hellooooooo.
11. BREAK IT DOWN: I’m sure there will be a certain amount of “breaking down”. As for breaking it down, I’m trying to do that in my training. I’m focusing what I call “phase 1″ on losing some weight and getting into a regular pattern of exercise. Losing weight will help with the running. I never had shin splints when I was 170-175 pounds. Now that I’m around 220 pounds, I can’t imagine the extra 50 pounds of body weight crashing down on my legs is helping. I’ve already started eating better and I’ve been in the gym several days in the past week, lifting weights and hitting the treadmill.
12. AVOID KRYPTONITE: My kryptonites are eating and laziness. Eating can be rough because sometimes I’ll just gouge myself. I’ve really been focusing this month on portion control and cutting out all of the snacking. As for laziness, well…if I don’t feel like going to the gym, I don’t go. I’ve been trying to fight that by pairing up with my wife and a friend. We hit the gym together, which makes it feel like more of a social event and less like penance.

That’s it, I’ll post here periodically on my progress. I have until August 5th to get ready for this thing. Some things that are unsolved that I need to work out between now and then:

• A route. I’ll be looking for something that’s safe (no high traffic roads) and relatively interrupt free (if I can avoid a ton of stoplights, that would be good). At the same time, some scenery would be nice. If it’s going to be summer, it might also be good to have some areas with shade.
• Provisions. It’ll no doubt take me several hours to finish this. A very conservative estimate would be to say 15 minute miles. That puts me around 7 and a half hours. I’m going to need food and water along the way.
• Deposits. Again, 7 and a half hours plus lots of water and a decent amount of food equals stops to go to the bathroom. Dean Karnazes may have taught himself how to pee while he runs, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to run around in cities where I know people smelling like urine. If it were a race, I’d consider it. But since I’m not in a hurry, I might as well plot a route with gas stations or something.
• Technology. I mentioned that I’ve got the watch already, but I still need that ZoneTag lovin’ phone. Additionally, something so I can listen to music would be awesome. I’d like to think that some people might keep me company for a mile or so at a time during my run, but inbetween it would be good to have some tunes to keep me chugging.

I’m sure there’s more that will come up, but that’s what I’ve got so far. If you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

I did this last year as well and it turned out to be informative.

• Topping the list this year…food. That includes all trips to the grocery store. Not bad considering last year tops was Best Buy (yes…it stood alone at the top, even above more general categories).
• Electronics came in a very close second. This included purchases at Best Buy and Fry’s, among other stores. I’m guessing this number is high because I, once again, bought a laptop this year.
• My vehicular expenses came in third this year. That includes things like gas and routine maintenance. I expect to see this category of expenses plummet in 2007 given how much I’ve been riding (and enjoying) the train since I moved.
• Expense number four is my “home” category. This number should have been higher, but I only tallied up the expenses on my personal Visa card. We actually spent a lot more on the house (before selling it) that wasn’t accounted for in my audit. These expenses included trips to Home Depot, a down payment on our new La-Z-Boy furniture.
• Jumping down the list, my ISP tallied in at number nine on the list, down from number six last year (although I’ll admit I didn’t use the same categorizations). Internet access was more expensive this year and that number doesn’t include the few months I was using Comcast (in addition to my DSL) before moving.
• My cell phone, once again, robbed me of about $1,000 last year. Comcast, consistent as ever, also robbed me of about $1,000.
• A new category I tracked was “work food”. That’s basically how much money I put on my work badge to pay for breakfast/lunch/etc. while I’m at work. I managed to pump $800 into that. I’m not sure if that’s high or not. I’ll have to track it again next year and see.
• My TiVo, which I’m not even using at the moment, pulled down about $150 out of my pocket.

Anyway, another interesting yet unsurprising year financially for me.

I’m a little backed up on…well, life at the moment. Everywhere I look it seems like I’m behind on something. Anyway, one place I’m perpetually behind on is catching up on my feeds in Bloglines.

I’m currently subscribed to 215 feeds. Some of those are one-a-day type feeds, things like webcomics. Others are utilities like my co.mments feed or the comments feed on my personal blog (I subscribe so I know when Akismet has let spam through or when there’s something I may want to respond to). That being said, I’m still tracking too much “stuff”.

What I’m struck by is how unhelpful the tools, like Bloglines, are at helping me deal with this cruft. For instance, I know there are dormant and uninteresting feeds in my list. The problem is, it’s difficult to know what’s dormant or uninteresting at any given point in time. What I need is some sort of view that says, “the following feeds haven’t updated in over a month” or another view that says, “the following feeds haven’t posted anything you’ve found interesting in over a month.” I bet that feature would allow me to quickly eliminate as much as 25% of my subscriptions.

Even worse are my search feeds. I have search feeds on Technorati and Yahoo! News Search. I have several searches set up with both to look for people talking about Yahoo! Mail. I use that to find out what people are saying about us. Unfortunately, both Technorati and Yahoo! News Search prove to be extremely noisy channels. I get a ton of results that have nothing to do with Yahoo! Mail, mostly because it finds blogs where people post by sending email to their blog software from Yahoo! Mail…the tagline on the message trips up the search engines. Even worse, I’ll log into Bloglines and get 20 new items…if I come back shortly afterwards, I’ll have 20 “new” items again that really turn out to be the same 20 I saw earlier. I’m not sure if that’s a problem with the feed or with Bloglines. Either way, it’s a ton of wasted time. I was recently reading Scoble’s “The ‘RSS Tap’” article. I don’t see how he manages to call his a “tap”. Mine always seems to be more like a fire hose.

The worst search feeds are, admittedly, the text searches. I also have tag searches set up in Technorati and Ice Rocket, but that requires people to tag the posts in order for them to be found. I have both text and tag searches for Yahoo! Mail in Technorati. The text search frequently turns up valid hits that the tag searches don’t. That tells me that a tag search alone isn’t enough. So I’m stuck with the text searches, which (as I mentioned) get tripped up by the Yahoo! Mail taglines that show up in many blog posts (although I bet it does wonders for the SEO of Yahoo! properties that get promoted in the Yahoo! Mail taglines). You can check out this example to see what I mean. The post has nothing to do with Yahoo! Mail, but it still turned up in my “yahoo mail” search on Technorati.

Anyway, I’m on the hunt for better tools and methodologies for handling these issues. If you have suggestions, I’m all ears. While I do enjoy web tools over desktop applications, at this point I’d be willing to entertain switching to a desktop tool if I thought it would outweigh the benefits of web applications (centralized data, available anywhere I have a browser, etc). I could always build my own tools, but that gets back to the whole “behind on everything” problem I mentioned at the beginning of the post.