Patxi's Pizza

Patxi's Chicago Pizza is located in Hayes Valley in San Francisco.
This has been one of my wife's cravings since she's been pregnant.
Not bad at all.

The J Stinks

It's packed, slow and terrible. At least the air-conditioning works
today.

Movie Dummy

Someone is shooting a movie outside our office. It looks like there
was an accident, but it was actually a dummy.

Good Kinds of Arguments

In general, I don't like arguments. However, there are good types of arguments in a startup. Things like which feature should we build next. Or should we add a feature or improve what we have. Should we change our Terms of Service. Should we remove a feature. Should we hire this person or get a contractor. What's a bigger opportunity for the business. Should we raise money, should we sell.

These are important discussions to have. If your startup is debating these issues. Good for you. You're developing healthy habits and having good arguments.

On the flip side. Be worried if nobody cares or if everybody just takes your word.

Tartine for Breakfast

Taking the girls to the bakery for breakfast. Yum!

Decorating Tonight

Georgia and I are playing with stamps and pens. The end, a
beautifully decorated sheet of paper.

Mitchells Ice Cream Run

I love Mitchells. But, could they scoop ice cream any slower.
Anyway. I'm waiting for my shake.

Rough Day

With several calls today, a new partner going live and several action
items from yesterday's board meeting, my computer gets a virus.
Mgrs.exe is a nasty sucker. It makes your computer unusable. I tried
cleaning it with spy hunter. No luck. Mcafee next. No luck and $100
spent. Damn. Finally. I rolled back to a two day old check point.
Back in business. James and I ate sushi. Now. Back to work.

Kill the Snake

I was reading Brad's blog about his wife finding a rattlesnake on their patio. I'm deathly afraid of snakes. I know it's not rational. I once caught a Kenya Sand Boa in Santa Clara. Apparently, they live there now. I thought, I'm going to get over this fear of snakes. I bought it a cage, a heat rock, and water dish. I brought it home and tried to go to sleep. But. I coudn't sleep. I was so damn afraid that the snake was going to escape and bite me. After several days of bad dreams and soaking my sheets in sweat. I gave the snake away.

I'd have to kill the snake. Just to sleep. No doubt I'm going to have nightmares tonight about getting bit by a rattlesnake

George Washington

I've been listening to an audio book of His Excellency: George Washington on my iPhone. It's very good and worth a read/listen. I love audio books.

Oso Flaco Lake

Just south of Arroyo Grande, off of Highway 1, you can find Oso Flaco
Lake. It's one of the jewels of the central coast. Just follow the
very nice path across the lake, through the dunes, and end up at the
beach. Great bird watching in an ecological wonder. Beautiful.

Rope Swing

My mom picked up two used kid swings for $5. I tied them up to an oak
tree in their backyard. Julia loved it.

Swimming

I'm going to take the girls swimming this afternoon at my folk's place.

Swinging Bridge

If you ever come to Arroyo Grande, go see the swinging bridge and eat
dinner at Ginas.

The Things Kids Say

Georgia looks at my mom and says, "Do the cracks in your face mean
you're old?"

Refinished Hardwood Floors

We replaced the carpet by having the hardwood floors refinished. I
think it will save us money in the long run. The floors turned out
great. I hope our new tenants like them.

Driving to SLO

We drove to San Luis Obispo last night. Traffic was fine, accept for
the small fire on the side of the road. See the picture. We ate
lousy Mexican food in Salinas and made it in about 11 am. Now back to
work on my board package.

Who Taught Julia

Julia loves to play with my phone. She knows how to activate the
screen, unlock it, and dial. I want to know, who taught her how to do
it?

Startup Energy

When you have a startup it takes an enormous effort to get it going at
a velocity to make it in a market.

I've had to learn to avoid the energy sucker. Worry. Nothing does
less for yourself or your company.

Note to self. Apply all energy to opportunity and progress.

(waiting for the J)

Exchange Push Email with iPhone

The iPhone is missing push email integration with Exchange for the business user BIG time. If it had this, I'd really, really like my iPhone. Until then, it's a good consumer device, but not ready for the business all-in-one user.

Believe the Hype at HypeFly.com

This is a little plug for my brothers style blog. HypeFly rocks. I'm the first to admit, I'm not the coolest guy around, but they have twice nailed just what I was looking for. I got tired of being told that my fashion faux pas of a crew neck under a dress shirt, so I was in the market for some V necks.

Also, I was just thinking, I need some new loafers. Mine are a bit worn out.

Thinking Time

Riding the J muni is a good place to think and blog. Today, I'm
listening to "His Excellency" the biography of George Washington on my
iPhone and thinking about the best way to allocate our resources at
HubPages for our near term objectives.

And wondering where we'll find our next engineer to hire.

Parental Help

My wife is eight weeks pregnant and a bit tired. So we called in my
folks to come help us out for the week as Robin gets through the
morning sickness period.

What a tremendous help!

Startup Planning

One of the advantages of a startup is speed. When it comes to
planning and specs, they can take valuable time from development. So
we opt for broad work-items, and rely on the lead engineer to figure
out the details. This optimizes for speed.

I have also learned to put fewer items in the next release. My
suggestion is to try and shoot for monthly releases. If it takes a bit
longer, you're still OK.

Summary: Plan the strategic work at a high level. Trust engineers
to do a good job and constrain development cycles to a month.

HubPages Designer

My little brother, James, has come to intern this summer at HubPages.
I'm hoping he'll get the opportunity to improve the usability of some
of our features.

HubPages Fights Poor Content

HubPages has had to develop lots of technology to slow spam down (GigaOM). I left a similar comment on Jason's blog that if you want to prevent SEO spam, then the best thing to do is to stop the benefits. In SEO language, noindex the page (prevents google, yahoo, msn and other search bots from including the page in their index) and nofollow outbound links. SEO guys love link juice. They want a high quality link and any traffic is just a bonus.

HubPages uses a scoring system called HubScore to apply this type of system to the content. The scoring system includes direct inputs (thumbs up/thumbs down and others) and many algorithmic inputs as well. It's improving all the time, but it still represents a challenging question for open publishing systems on the best way to be open, fair, and accept the differences in the wide range of content that people want to publish.

HubPages allows all types of content to be published. Mature content is much less visible and all of the content is marked with nofollow meta tags. We also don't display mature content on all the interlinked pages that have correlated tags (you may have to browse HubPages to understand this - click one of the green tag links), but you can find it in search if you are looking for it. We thought this was the right user experience. Since we implemented it, we received many positive comments from the HubPages community.

When Squidoo allows a spam page to be visible to search engines they are allowing the search engine to decide if the page should or should not rank for search terms. If the domain becomes too polluted, the risk is that Google or any other search engine will simply stop ranking pages from the domain so all traffic is effectively cut off.

Paul Edmondson
HubPages
CEO

No Parking Sign

I think I understand what coach Durant meant when he said, "There are
football players and there are football players, and he is a football
player," after I saw a no parking sign today.

In similar words of coach Durant "There are no parking signs and there
are no parking signs, and this is a no parking sign."

I'm never going to stop telling on you

Today my daughter let me know, "I'm never going to stop telling on
you, even when I'm a grown-up." Somehow, I believe her.

Hayes Valley Patricia's Green

Wakeup Call

Who needs a 6 am wakeup call, when you have one of these?

iPhone Box

I bought an IPhone

My blackberry was having a bit of trouble so I bought an IPhone
Sent from my iPhone

Al Gore 2008

I keep thinking Gore will join the election in 2008. I hope he does. But if you caught him on Larry King, it seems unlikely.