ryan kennedy’s blog

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.

Damnit, Chad. There I am, minding my own business. Reading my blogs. Checking some mail. Now I’ve got to go and think about things people don’t know about me. Oh well, mustn’t break the chain letter (this is so a chain letter), so here goes nothing.

1. I went to Space Camp as a kid. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger, so when I was in elementary school my mom took me to Florida during spring break and I attended Space Camp. It was cool, I got to build a model rocket (two stage, baby), fly a simulated shuttle mission (got my EVA on) and I shook hands with Alan Shepard. I also saw one of the shuttles flown in on the back of a 747.
2. I was only grounded once as a kid. I took a model rocket engine, strapped it into a vice and ignited it in my garage because I thought it would be cool (it was, of course, awesome). This played well with two of my passions: space stuff and fire. My mom didn’t think it was quite as awesome as I did. Like it’s my fault…I never would have gotten into model rockets if she hadn’t taken me to Space Camp (see #1 above). Of course, it probably didn’t seem awesome to her because the fire end of the engine was pointing at the gas water heater. Seriously, what’s the worst that could have happened?
3. Some people know this already, so file this under something you probably didn’t know about me. I drank liquid nitrogen in college. No, that’s not a name of an alcoholic beverage. I was a chemistry major for about 2 years. During that time, I was a teacher’s assistant in a special lab. That lab afforded me the opportunity to get my hands on some liquid nitrogen. Well, when you’ve got super cool liquid at your disposal, what do you do with it? In my case, I turn on a video camera and video tape it. I assure you, I didn’t freeze my mouth or any other part of my body (although I did spit out icy bits of saliva a couple of times). I never actually swallowed the liquid (for an explanation of why not to do that, read this). I poured it into my mouth and let it sit there a moment or two before expelling the gaseous nitrogen, making it look like white smoke was pouring out of my mouth. I don’t have the video, if anyone at Cal Poly happens to have it (I’m not certain all of the teachers were amused), I’d love to get a copy. Anyway, for an explanation of why this didn’t freeze/kill me, read up on the Leidenfrost Effect. The short version is that the temperature difference is so great that the liquid next to the skin instantly vaporizes, forming a thin layer of nitrogen gas between my skin and the liquid. Gas isn’t a good conductor of heat, so the liquid wasn’t able to easily extract heat from my skin. I had a teacher in college who actually swallowed the stuff. He’s lucky he isn’t dead, but it did make for one amazing burp (it was so long, I swear he was about to black out). There’s a video of some teacher drinking liquid nitrogen on You Tube, but it’s terrible. Gives you the gist of it, though.
4. I crank paged my college roommate with his ex-girlfriend’s phone number while he was drunk. He was annoying me, so I slipped away and found his address book and looked up her number. I went back to where everyone was sitting, hid the phone behind my back and dialed (I wanted to be in the room with him so he wouldn’t suspect me). They hadn’t been on good terms since the breakup, so I was hoping a late night, drunk call from him would be worth a lot of amusement. He didn’t recognize the number when he got the page, which was basically the best case scenario. That way he wasn’t going to be able to back out once he knew who it was. So he calls her. He ends up taking the phone outside and talks to her for like an hour. I didn’t get the fireworks I wanted, but I did get him out of the room. Good times.
5. In my senior year of high school, I was beaten out during varsity baseball tryouts by a future #1 Major League Baseball draft pick (Pat Burrell). He got the position, but I got the last laugh. I’m now an engineer with Yahoo! Mail and all he’s got is his 6 year, $50M contract. Yeah buddy, see you at the next reunion. We’ll swap stories. I’ll tell you about that last, nasty bug I fixed in Yahoo! Mail and you can tell me how much your bobblehead is selling for on eBay. And make sure your Ferrari doesn’t leave any door dings on my Toyota.

Well, now you know everything.

As I wind down my second month of evangelism for Yahoo! Mail Beta, I’m coming to the realization that evangelism is exhausting work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying the work. But I think I was deluding myself when I said I could spare an hour a day to work on it. I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking I’d have an hour a day available. I’ve definitely been able to make that much time available for evangelism work. I was deluding myself into thinking I’d only do it for an hour a day.

I spent the better part of this week building my most recent post to the ymailupdates.com blog. It started with getting a dump of the code changes from source control. I can’t get into the details, but suffice it to say the dump was gi-normous. I then went change by change, building up a macro-picture of what those micro-changes meant. Once I had my list, it was time to start writing the post. I had to figure out what types of updates I was dealing with. I had some bug fixes, some new features, some performance enhancements and so on. From there I started building a framework for the post. It’s difficult to talk about certain things and have them make sense, so I also had to get some screen shots. Once I had those, they had to be fitted into the document so they didn’t look silly (something I’m not 100% certain I was successful in, but I tried).

Once the post is done, I had to (of course) read over it a billion times proof reading for typos, checking that everything made sense and looking to see if anything I wrote sounded odd (I have a tendency, at times, to use words multiple times in the same sentence, making for a strange reading experience). Then I post it and reload the blog in my browser to make sure the update took, being sure to test with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, I’m done at that point…right?

No, not so much. The ymailupdates.com blog isn’t hugely visible yet. We’ve been posting to it without doing a lot of promotion for it, so whatever readership we have right now is purely word of mouth. That means getting the word out. So I link to it from my personal blog because people used to come there first for news regarding Yahoo! Mail Beta updates. Then I post to the Y-Mail Group because that set of users loves being the first to hear when we do anything new. Then, I do something I haven’t done before. I put the word out to other bloggers. I take a list of bloggers who have talked about Yahoo! Mail Beta in the past and let them know that we’ve pushed out a new update. Perhaps that will help to generate a little more buzz for us since their readership is far larger and more diverse.

So is that all I do, blogging? If only. I sift through a bunch of mail every day. Most of it comes from the Y-Mail group but I also get a decent amount that’s sent directly to me by the users. I imagine many engineers would mind being contacted directly like that, I don’t. That’s why I haven’t been afraid to put my email address into past posts (something David Utter thinks I did on accident). Anyway, I try to respond to everything, although I can’t get to all of it immediately.

Once I’ve finished all that, I have to keep an eye on what everybody else is saying about us. I have several trackers set up with Technorati and Yahoo! News Search. Those are fairly noisy channels, so I really have to scan them carefully to pick out the useful nuggets. Depending on what I find, I may submit a comment to a particular post. Depends on whether or not I feel like I can be of use. Sometimes I post just to say, “hey, Yahoo! hears you.” It’s amazing to see the reactions of people when I submit comments. Particularly when their posts are harsh. It’s amazing what people will say about you if they think you aren’t listening.

So I’m formally committed to 5 hours per week of this. I’d say I easily exceed that by 2-3x in a given week. But that’s okay, I don’t do it because I have to. I do it because I enjoy it. I don’t think you can be a good evangelist unless you enjoy it. But now I can see why someone like Robert Scoble made it their full-time job (back when he was doing it for Microsoft).

I had a lovely weekend with a brilliant outbreak of some sort of rash on my torso. Yeah, you probably didn’t need to know that, but trust me…this is going somewhere. It wasn’t really getting better today, but I’ve been suffering through it figuring it would clear up soon on its own.

Then my wife stumbled on an article about shingles. Pay dirt, every symptom lined up pretty well with everything I was experiencing. So I went to my doctor to get checked out. She had me lift up my shirt and asked, “what do you think it is?” I told her I suspected it was shingles and she told me I was right.

So she sent me to the pharmacy to pick up some meds. In this case, Valtrex. You may have seen it marketed on television…for herpes. Let me just say, there’s nothing quite like going to a pharmacy to pick up your herpes meds. I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but the pharmacist came over to give me a consult on the medication and said, “this is for…well you know what it’s for.” It was very accusatory, I felt like I ought to be heading to the confessional. “Excuse me father for I have sinned. I’m taking herpes meds for my…herpes, which were in no way sexually transmitted.” Awkward.

Anyway, I’m hoping that the Valtrex clears things up soonish. The doctor told me that I’d be spared a good bit of pain since I’m young, but just the same, it’s pretty uncomfortable. It starts below my left pectoral and runs around the side to my back. The bit on my back makes it uncomfortable to sit back against a chair.

Anyway, if you’re curious, I recommend reading the wikipedia article I linked above on shingles. It’s good to know what the symptoms are because the sooner you can start treatment the better off you are. I went 4-5 days before seeing a doctor and they prefer more like 3. It’s also interesting to see what it is (it’s basically the old chicken pox virus waking up), what causes it (stress, in some cases) and it’s spreadability (basically don’t touch my blisters if you haven’t had chicken pox before, unless you’d like chicken pox). My doctor tells me that I’m not at risk to spread chicken pox as long as I wash my hands and don’t hug people.

One of those common arguments you hear (at least in movies and television shows) against marriage is the whole, “do you want to have the same cereal for breakfast for the rest of your life?” argument. Thursday (Thanksgiving) marked 10 years together with Lisa (just over two of them married).

For those who don’t know the history, Lisa and I met in college. During our second year we lived next door to one another in the dorms. Little did we know when we met that we were destined to spend a long time together. College together was great, but everything since has been even better. We had an awesome wedding with plenty of friends and family on hand and followed that up with one of the best road trips of all time.

Amazingly enough, we’re both not even 30 years old yet. We’ve done so much together and yet there’s still so much left to be done. The first 10 years of Cheerios have been good, here’s to the next 10.

Being so far away from home, I almost let myself forget that today’s an important anniversary for me. No, not the kind where I have to go buy my wife something (although, oddly enough, I did buy her stuff just the other day). Today marks two years at Yahoo!. I still remember starting at Yahoo!. And I remember my first year at Yahoo!. What’s amazing is, while I did a lot in my first year at Yahoo!, the second year has been epicly (is that a word?) insane.

I’ve taken on additional responsibilities, I’ve been recognized for my accomplishments. I have personal job satisfaction, I’m enjoying the work I do (even if I am feeling totally overwhelmed at the moment) and I’m very happy to be a part of a great company. Even though it feels like I’ve done a lot in two years, I can’t help but feel that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I think there’s much more ahead of me and that keeps me excited every day I come into the office.

Damn it STILL feels good to be a Yahoo!.

I’ve always posted a lot here about Yahoo! Mail. Well, people have taken notice and as of today I am officially a Yahoo! Mail Beta evangelist. That means I’ll still post about Yahoo! Mail related things, but most of that will now happen on the ymailupdates.com blog. I’m very excited about this. I’ve always had a fascination with customer involvement. It’s only magnified by the number of customers we have.

So head over to the blog, give it a read. If you need me, I’ll be evangelizing.

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I’m heading to Bangalore. So this week I had to go and get myself some travel immunizations: Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B, Tetanus, Typhoid and Malaria. I’m not really anticipating any problems, but better safe than…sick.

The trip is coming fast, I leave a week from Friday (November 10th). I am looking forward to the trip, although the timing could be a little better. I’ve just finished up two extremely busy months, Thanksgiving is the week after I get back and, oh yeah, I’m in the middle of selling my house. But I’ll survive.

Anyway, if you’re in Bangalore between November 13 and November 17 (I’ll only be there a week) and want to talk about the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, let me know (just leave a comment and I’ll get in touch with you).

Following up my Technically Sweet performance at our internal hack day, I’ve been awarded the “Dragon Slayer” award by our larger group: Communications, Communities and Front Doors, run by SVP Brad Garlinghouse. I won the award for my efforts in getting the Yahoo! Mail Web Service ready for it’s debut at Open Hack Day. It’s great to get recognition for something like that. I put a lot of effort in during the weeks leading up to Open Hack Day: coding, testing, documenting and putting together a quick SDK. The experience alone made it worth the effort, but the recognition is icing on the cake. It’s nice to know that everything I did was appreciated, not that I didn’t already know that since Ash Patel (Chief Product Officer) dropped by after my talk at Open Hack Day to shake hands and talk for a bit.

It’s been an awesome, but exhausting, two months. September was all about the web service and Open Hack Day. October has been all about the move from Folsom to the Bay Area. I bet you’d think I’m going to take it easy in November? Fat chance, I start off November with a week long trip to Bangalore to visit the Yahoo! offices there.

I haven’t posted much since Open Hack Day and for good reason. My wife and I have been orchestrating a move from Folsom back to the Bay Area. We’ve actually been planning to move back for a little while now, but now we’ve finally done it.

“Why?”, you ask. Well, several reasons. I’ve been doing a backbreaking commute for over three years now (1+ year with EarthLink and almost 2 years now with Yahoo!). That’s been awful on many levels. Only seeing my wife a couple of days per week. Only being in the office a couple of days per week. Paying for gas in a V6 truck (somewhere between $40 and $50 per week from the commute alone).

What does this mean? Well, I’ve started taking the train to work. That’s been awesome. I pick up the train in San Carlos and ride to Mountain View where a Yahoo! shuttle picks me up and takes me to the Sunnyvale campus. In the evening, I do the reverse. I think my truck is starting to feel neglected. I also get to spend more time with friends. Most of my friends are in the Bay Area. Now I actually get to see them more than once a month.

It also means I’m in the office more, which is awesome. I get to go to more lunches, attend more tech talks and talk face-to-face with coworkers more often. More importantly, it helps out with my increased responsibilities at work (more about that in a later post).

In short, it’s been hard uprooting from Folsom, but in the long run it will pay off. Big time. Higher quality of life and all, you know. So if you find yourself in the Bay Area, look me up. I’m living in San Carlos and working in Sunnyvale. We’ll do lunch/dinner/whatever. We can talk about geeky things. Or bowl (if you’ve got the guts).

So, I’m always needing 2 browsers. I have two Yahoo! accounts: one for work and one for personal use. Why? Well, my work Y! account has all of my work mail. My personal account has my personal mail, my MyWeb links and so on. During the day, I find it necessary to be logged in to both accounts.

Unfortunately, I can’t do that with Firefox alone. I need a second browser to be able to be logged in to a second account simultaneously. When I was on my PC, I used Internet Explorer. I used to think IE was the worst browser ever, until I bought my Mac. Lately I’ve been using Safari as my second browser. As it turns out, Safari is the worst browser I have ever used. I don’t even care about the fact that so many whizzy sites don’t work with Safari. I’m more concerned about the fact that it crashes if I so much as breathe on it.

So, Safari is fired (I removed the launch icon from my dock)…now what? I tried Flock a while back when it first came out. At the time it looked neat how it was hooked into everything. Unfortunately, I was too invested in Firefox. But now it just might fit the bill…so I downloaded it.

It’s okay. It’s Firefox under the hood, so much of it is familiar. It has some neat tricks. For instance, I’m writing this blog post using Flock’s blog editor. I tried seeing what the Flock aggregator would make of my massive OPML file…it choked. It choked hard. Unfortunately, it also sucks with bookmarks in the toolbar. I have a few folders set up in my Firefox bookmark toolbar. That gives me quick access to my most visited sites without having a really cluttered bookmark toolbar. Plus I use the “Open in tabs” feature of Firefox’s bookmarks folder to have a “Good Morning” folder in my toolbar. Well, as it turns out, Flock won’t let you have a folder in your toolbar. It won’t let you have a folder in any folder at all. That…sucks. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it certainly is annoying.

Anyway, I’ll continue giving Flock a try. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn to get past the bookmark thing and maybe the aggregator will some day get up to full speed.

Now, the real question is, when I click the “Publish” button…what’s going to happen?

technorati tags:browsers

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been considering getting a Mac for a long time. I actually had one for a little while…call it my Excite@Home severance package (it has since moved on to a better place). This weekend I took the plunge and bought myself a MacBook Pro. There was a lot of thought and pondering put into the decision, it went something like this:

• Rational Ryan (RR): I already have a laptop, what do I need another one for?
• Compulsive Ryan (CR): It’s shiny.
• RR: My other laptop works just fine. I can browse the web, I can play my music, I can SSH into my development environments.
• CR: The MacBook can browse the web, can play some music, can SSH into your development environments…oh, and it’s shiny.
• RR: I’m supposed to be a responsible adult by now. That’s $2,500 I don’t need to be spending.
• CR: Try to think of it as doing some user research, you have no idea what the Mac population thinks of your software.
• RR: I write services, Mac users never see my software.
• CR: Neither do PC users and you own a couple of those, don’t you?
• RR: But I won’t be able to listen to my Yahoo! Music Unlimited tunes anymore!
• CR: Are you sure your name is “Rational Ryan” and not “I whine like a bitch Ryan”?

Anyway, I’ll save you the verbal assault that happened after that and sum it up by saying that the MacBook Pro is, indeed, shiny. It’s fast, faster than my desktop machine by far. It’s also hot as hell (I’m guessing, I’ve never been there). It does get uncomfortable in my lap unless I put something between the twins and what I’m guessing is the nuclear power supply running the thing.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to playing with it more. I’m hoping to actually write some software for this one. I had that aspiration with the Tablet PC as well and it didn’t work out. But I’m sure this time will be different. I’ve heard that Xcode is kind of a pain, but at least it’s free. Sure, MS is offering the express versions of their studio products for free now…but seriously, I hate them.

Anyway, if you’re a Mac user and have some recommendations for software that I should check out, let me know. I’m completely new to this, so I only know a couple of names of applications that I ought to be interested in. And if you’re interested, here’s a list of reasons why I finally switched:

• My Tablet PC is underpowered. The Pentium M in it just can’t hang and the GeForce doesn’t do WoW any justice. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, has power to spare with a dual core Intel CPU and a PCI-Express video card.
• Windows consistently pisses me off. Little things like hanging on startup just because the router doesn’t seem to want to give out a DHCP lease have pushed my buttons one too many times (this has happened a few times in the past week).
• A true UNIX environment. I was considering installing Linux on my PC, but I’ve always felt like a 3rd class citizen on Linux with regard to my hardware. Nothing seems to work 100%. MacOS X has a true UNIX environment and all of the hardware in the system always works with the Mac.
• It just looks more fun. I see the things people do with their Macs and they just look to be having a more fun time. Contrast that with my aforementioned kicking and screaming with PCs.

And the things I’ll miss the most with my switch:

• Two button mice. We’ll see how much this actually ends up bothering me.
• The Yahoo! Music Engine. I think the Yahoo! subscription model for music is far superior to the iTunes per track/album model. I think this will be the largest void created by giving up Windows, but I hope to fill it with DRM-free replacements like free music streams and podcasts.

How sad, I only came up with 2 things I’ll miss and one (the mouse) I’ll probably forget about in a couple of days.

As Mother’s Day comes to an end, I’ll share a story about my mother. If you know me or my mother, you’ve already heard this story a thousand times (we really never get tired of it).

It happened in the summer when I was 12 years old. I made the all star team in little league. We totally crushed the other all star teams, but that’s beside the point. At the end of the season we had a big team picnic with all the players families. As inevitably happens, a friendly game of the kids vs. the parents broke out on the nearby baseball diamond. The parents all wanted to play with a softball, the kids all wanted to play with a hardball…the kids won. Several of the parents had never played with a hard ball, my mother included. But they played anyway.

I was playing first base, my friend Rich was pitching (underhand soft toss). Up strolls my mother to the plate. Rich turns to the rest of us playing the field, gets a stupid look on his face and starts to chuckle. “It’s a girl…I’m gonna strike her out.” Now, I knew what was up. My mother was not a typical “girl”. My aunts all learned how to cook and sew. My mother didn’t. All she did was coach her co-ed softball teams at work and teach me the intricacies of bowling. I told Rich not to go easy on her, that she had played before. He didn’t listen.

Rich lobbed up the fatest, tastiest pitch he could…and my mother crushed it…250+ feet over the left field fence. Not some wimpy pop fly ball either, a towering blast that cleared the fence by a good 50 feet. She rounded the bases, Rich hung his head in embarrassment and I told him, “I told you so.”
So, what’s the point?

1. Don’t bring that weak stuff with my mom. I bet she can still turn on that inside fastball.
2. My mom can beat your mom in a homerun derby…maybe your dad too.
3. Strong women are there to remind you that women around the world are to be respected under any condition (because the minute you don’t respect them, they homer off you and strip you of your manhood).

I’m a little slow posting this, but I had a pretty nice weekend. Here’s a quick recap:

Friday

Worked, as usual. Lisa and I had tickets to see game 3 of the Kings/Spurs playoff series. We didn’t have our usual seats, instead we were down in the last row of section 116. Not great seats, but we were in the building. That turned out to be key because Sacramento pulled out their first win in the series, with a last minute defensive stop (steal by Bibby) and a nice layup to beat the buzzer at the other end by Sacramento’s new playoff legend, Kevin Martin.

Highlight of the game was definitely sitting next to some of Mike Bibby’s pals for a couple of minutes early in the game (turns out they didn’t actually have the tickets for those seats, they were just squatting). Anyway, the guy right next to Lisa gave her a nice, big smile and showed off his crunk teeth. Freakin’ awesome. Lisa got a better look at them than I did. She says they had dollar signs on them. Got to get me some of those.

Saturday

We didn’t have much time to recover from the playoff game before having to get up early the next morning. We joined Lisa’s sister, her boyfriend and their father for the March of Dimes walk in Sacramento. It was a nice walk, almost 6 miles. The weather was good, but I think we got a little too much sun because we were basically destroyed for the rest of the day.

Sunday

We were back at Arco Arena for game 4 of the Kings/Spurs playoff series. This time we were back in our usual seats in section 219. I told Lisa before the game that we still owed the Spurs an ass whoopin’ (they beat us by 30+ in the first game). Sure enough, the home team didn’t disappoint, evening up the series at 2 games apiece.

I really don’t have anything to talk about, I just figured I’d post something to let people know I’m still alive. What have I been up to? Well…

I did some more hacking with maps and GPS data. I managed to come up with a system that plots the minimum number of points to get the route plotted. It drops any points that are all along the same line. Basically it takes three points, determines 2 headings from them and figures out if it’s in the middle of a turn (if the headings differ by more than X degrees, it’s in a turn). It actually works pretty well. If I get some time, I’ll document what I did here.

I also hacked a bit with the Yahoo! Music Engine. I really wanted to listen to my music out on my television, so I used Winamp with the Shoutcast DSP plugin to make a Shoutcast stream of my Yahoo! Music Unlimited music. Once I had that working, it was a snap to get my TiVo to stream the music. That’s good and fine, but I can’t control the playback in the music engine from my TiVo, so I started playing around with PHP COM support to write a remote. That worked alright, but I was hoping to build something a bit easier to distribute for others to use (although I suppose I could build an all-in-one package containing PHP and a suitable web server). So I started playing with PythonCOM. I got the basics working from Python, I just need to expose it as a network API (HTTP of some sort, I’m guessing) that the TiVo HME application I write can talk to. I suppose I could figure out how to get Java to talk COM, but this way I get to play with more things.

Work-wise, I’ve spent WAY more time in ktrace than is really adviseable. It’s pretty neat to watch your application in ktrace, but you can really work your way into a very deep, dark hole. Before too long you’re asking yourself, “are all these stat() calls really necessary?”

I’ve also started an apartment search. I’m looking around Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. If you know of any one bedroom places available for $500-$600/month, I’m all ears. I know, that’s pretty cheap, but I’m only in Sunnyvale two or three nights a week. So it has to be cheap enough to compete with just staying at a hotel (the nearby Sundowner Inn would run me about $140/week). I’m not looking to rent a room from anybody, I want to have my own place.

That’s about it. No concerts since the last one. No Yahoo! Mail Beta updates (if I had anything to share, I would…I promise). Work is keeping me really busy, life is proceeding ever forward.

To close…some random facts you may not have known about Ryan:

1. I went to college in San Luis Obispo.
2. Computer Science was my fourth major in college (the first three were Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry).
3. I collect spores, molds and fungus.
4. I memorize movie quotes (see #3 above).
5. I’ve watched Space Camp.
6. I’ve been to Space Camp.
7. I was scared of E.T. as a child (and my wife loved him).
8. I hate bananas.
9. I am an only child (like that needs any explanation).
10. I’ve lived in California my entire life.
11. As a child, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.
12. I got busted for horsing around in high school by my French teacher.
13. I got out of it by buying a $1 candy bar for his son’s soccer team.
14. I bought at least $5 worth of chocolate from him that year.
15. I’m a chronic procrastinator.
16. I’ve broken two bones in my body, both in my left leg (25 years apart).
17. I need a haircut.
18. When Chuck Norris goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Ryan Kennedy.
19. I wore a pair of flannel sheets as a kilt for Halloween one year (and a friend’s scarf as a loincloth…but that’s another story).
20. If I played by the rules right now I’d be in gym.

Okay, that’s enough fun for one night.

For those of you who don’t know me very well, I’m totally fascinated with numbers. Whether it be sports statistics, software performance metrics or money, I love to play with and look at numbers. After my recent focal review at work, I was reminded that I hadn’t really been paying attention to my finances. I used to update a spreadsheet weekly to tell me how much money I had, how well my retirement accounts were performing and how much debt I had in loans and credit cards.

So today I popped onto my MBNA account and downloaded all of my statements from 2005 in CSV format. I threw them into a database and did a little SQL-fu on them and learned some interesting things:

• I really don’t want to talk about my Best Buy habit (holy crap…#1 ?!?!?). Update: Oh yeah…I bought a laptop last year so the Best Buy numbers are inflated.
• Chevron was high (#2) on my list in terms of total money spent on the year. I gassed up 92 times and spent almost $3,000 on gas last year. That’s 1.77 trips to the gas station every week. Each trip cost over $32 on average. That says I probably need a better commute vehicle. I’d say I should take the train more, but that costs more than gas does. $44 round trip just to get from Sacramento to Santa Clara. I still need to get from Santa Clara to San Jose.
• I spent over $1,700 at Toyota dealerships. That’s probably lower than it should be, actually. I think I skimped on some oil changes during the year. Regardless, that means I spent over $4,700 on my truck during the year (gas and maintenance combined).
• Payee #4 on my list was a grocery store (Bel Air). I made 37 trips and spent over $2,200 (my wife probably picked up several other trips since we usually go once a week). That’s roughly $60 per trip.
• My ISP was #6 on the payee list, sucking down a whopping $1,300. If I were to drop my bandwidth (go from 6.0/768 down to 1.5/384) I could cut my bill in half.
• Coming in at #9 was good-old Comcast, bleeding me of $1,000.
• Cingular came in at #10, also bleeding me of roughly $1,000. Shame I pay so much for something I use so little. I ought to look into some sort of prepaid phone or something.
• My hosting provider (the people who host this blog) took me for $200. It would have been higher, but I did get some kickback from them because of some referral work I did.

That’s just a quick sampling of the data. I just did a group by on the names of the stores that I did purchases at. I want to lump each purchase into a category and then look at the categories. It will also be interesting to merge this information with my wife’s statements to see how we did as a whole. She handles all the utilities (gas, electricity, garbage, etc). I could also merge in how much we spent on our mortgage, insurance and taxes. But that might just depress me.

Anyway, it feels good knowing where my money is going, even if I’m not completely happy to see some of the numbers. At least now I know what needs addressing.

I’m always correcting people when I first meet them. As it turns out, when I say “Ryan” people hear “Brian”. I don’t know if I have some odd speech impediment or what, but it always seems to happen. I’ve often sat in a quiet room saying my first name over and over, trying to figure out if I have some odd lisp that causes a slight “buh” to form at the beginning of my name. Please, if I say “Ryan” and it sounds like I’m saying “Brian”…let me know.

Now…while “Brian” and all derivatives (”Bryan”, “Brien”, etc) are understandable, I’m always being called far less understanding things. For instance, on Saturday I was called Rich Kennedy. While I do wish that I was indeed a rich Kennedy, my name is not Rich. Just yesterday I was called “Rick” during an IM session. I’m not sure what brought on this wave of getting my name wrong all at once.

Unfortunately, the story would end there if this was the worst name offense I’d ever experienced. For that we have to pay a visit to Rubio’s at Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara, CA. I checked my receipt after ordering (they put your name on it) and it said something along the lines of “ZYRQ”. I should have suspected something was up because the lady at the register had to ask me about 5 times for my name.

It’s getting close to the end of the year once again. For managers around Yahoo! that means it’s time to start working on focal reviews. For employees, that means it’s time to do your self assessment to help your manager remember what you were up to for the past year. In my case, it’s also an opportunity to let my new manager know what I did before he acquired me.

So I spent a bit of time this morning thinking about what I’ve been up to in the 11 months I’ve been at Yahoo! (yes, it’s really already been that long). Fortunately, I keep all of my weekly status reports tucked away in Yahoo! Notepad. That allowed me to go back through 46 status reports to relive my life (so far) as a Yahoo!. So…what exactly have I been doing?

• The biggest amount of my time has been dedicated to implementing the web service that makes the Yahoo! Mail Beta possible. Countless months of building, testing, profiling and optimizing.
• While not exactly a part of my job, I volunteered some of my time and built an SDK for the Yahoo! Developer Network.
• I had an amazing time at Yahoo!’s 10 year party and I’m looking forward to being around for the 20 year party.
• I met a ton of very smart, passionate people who reminded me what it’s like to love your job.

So that’s all well and good, but there’s another half of the assessment that looks toward the future. Unfortunately for me, this is a bit like picking your college major in high school…I really don’t have a strong sense of what I want (I changed majors 3 times in college). For the most part, I just want to be paid good money to work on fun projects that will have some measurable impact on someone’s life. That can’t be too much to ask, right?

Starting Monday, yours truly will be official property of Yahoo!

We’ve just gotten back from our 2 week long honeymoon. Lots and lots of flying and driving. I’m so out of it right now in terms of what time it is, much less what day it is. I think I’ll go pass out now.