a picture of the author drinking from a coffee mug with a picture of himself drinking from a coffee mug with a picture of himself drinking from a coffee mug. This joke has gone on for far too long, but he shows no signs of ceasing to make more mugs.
Nerd. Proponent of: Work from anywhere, coffee, beer, my face on coffee mugs, improv comedy. Not a fan of dongles.

Find me at

Keep Peddling

My four year old son has his first bike. I’ve been spending my evenings teaching him how to ride - he’s catching on fast. One area he’s struggling in is the turns. He’s not confident, or not focused, and he tips over in the turns. I was jogging after him, shouting advice, when I realized my advice has implications far beyond beginners cycling - keep peddling and look where you want to be.

The Customer Isn't Always Right

A few weeks ago I participated in a round of interviews for an open position on our Customer Success Team. I conducted my portion of the interview with my teammate Bill. I always like listening to Bill - he has wonderful insights, and asks great questions. I truly appreciated one question he asked in the interview: “Is the customer always right?” Fortunately, not one of the candidates answered “Yes.”

Songza Adds Context to Google Play Music

Hey, did you hear that Google is buying music curated music app Songza? I’m very excited about this acquisition. Songza is a bit different than other streaming music apps, in that their playlists are carefully curated around context - What time of day are you listening? What’s your mood? What activity are you participating in? - and then plays music based on that context. And I hope that Google will integrate this context directly into their own streaming music app.

Cold Brewed Benchmarks

Last week I read an article on Lifehacker about a less messy way to cold brew coffee. As a fan of cold brewed coffee, wanted to try this. Cold brewing is very easy, but it does leave a bit of a mess. I needed to be able to brew my coffee quickly, easily and with as little mess as possible. The Lifehacker article describes what appears to be a very simple, no cleanup version of the cold brewing process with little to no filtering needed.

Hello World

The part where I welcome you to version X.Y of my blog. Where “X” and “Y” are numbers larger than I would like to admit. Let’s just call it iteration number ten. I’ve built this blog on the Pelican Framework, with a large dose of help from Justin Phelp’s two guides to blog automation with Pelican. Why Pelican? I wanted to build a simple, static site that I can post directly as HTML - either through my own server, or on a Rackspace Cloud Files Container.

404 Page Not Stached

Whoops! The page you’re looking for isn’t ‘stached here. (see what I did there?) Did it work? How about now? Now? I think I fixed it. Apparently not. Duh.