Memories: The Leonard Speiser Mask & GoldenPalace.com

A couple weeks ago, there was a great reunion party for many eBay Product Managers & User Experience Designers from the past decade.  I didn’t get an exact count, but at least 70 people were there, including many of the early Product Managers from before I joined the company in 2003.
I was happily reminded of [...]

Beyond Cool: Striped 120GB SSD RAID in a Macbook Pro

From time to time, I post the technical exploits of my friend Eric here.  I remember the attention he got a while back for hacking his MacBook Pro to support a RAID configuration.
Well, Eric has managed to extend that experimentation to a pair of new OCZ 120GB Solid State Drives (SSD).

Two OCZ Core Series v2 [...]

John Lilly, Mozilla Organization Talk at Stanford

John gave a great presentation today at Stanford about Mozilla.  He’s graciously shared it on Slideshare, so I’m sharing it here as well.

A few bullets to think about:

How distributed is the decision making in your organization, really?  How much do you empower small, cross-functional teams to execute?
How much does your organization really encourage active discussion, [...]

Congratulations to Mike Schroepfer & Facebook

If you missed the 39 articles currently on Google News on the topic, Mike Schroepfer announced today that he has accepted an engineering leadership position at Facebook.   Mike is the current VP of Engineering at Mozilla, and has been there for about three years.
Here are Mike’s comments, direct from his Mozilla blog.
In my opinion, of [...]

To Know Elliot is to Love Elliot

We just got through an amazing launch last night at LinkedIn.  New homepage, new site-wide navigation, new Status feature, and countless other small enhancements.
This is a very funny blooper reel that Elliot & Mario recorded while trying to film the video to launch the new Homepage.  It was so funny, they played it for the [...]

LinkedIn As A Source of Record…

Very interesting article Friday on the former Miasolé CEO:
GreentechMedia: Former Miasolé CEO Joins New Thin-Film Team
Short synopsis, from the article:
Dave Pearce, former CEO of Miasolé, has apparently joined a new company called Nuvosun, according to CNET.The company is trying to develop a film that will prevent moisture from penetrating — and [...]

Memories: Apple ATG Summer Picnic, 1997

Thursday night, Carolyn & I went out with a number of close friends to celebrate her birthday.  Eric Cheng brought a very nice little present for us – a snapshot from the Apple Advanced Technology Group (ATG) Summer Picnic in 1997.

This snapshot is now the earliest known couple photo Carolyn & I have.  Friday, August [...]

A Far-From-Anonymous Birthday

So, today is/was my birthday, and as usual I celebrated it with my close family.
What was interesting this year is that this may have been my first “Social Networking” birthday.
Normally, I’d expect to get 10-20 notes, email and cards, from the subset of close friends and family who decided to take the time to do [...]

Did You Miss the Lunar Eclipse? Gorgeous Photos from Eric.

I was feeling really bad on Tuesday.
A gorgeous lunar eclipse took place that was visible from most of Asia-Pacific, and even stretched to full visibility over California.  But with peak viewing at just past 3:30am, I just couldn’t make it.  One of the liabilities of having two kids under 3 and a full-time gig at [...]

6 Terabytes (TB) of Storage in a Mac Pro. Jealous Much?

Not sure what to say here but wow.
My friend Eric has done it again.  You may remember my last post here about his efforts to get a 320GB Raid 0 array into a MacBook Pro.
Well, he recently ran out of storage on his Mac Pro, and upgraded it with six (6) 1 TB drives, for [...]

Life with a 320GB Raid 0 Striped Array in a MacBook Pro

I couldn’t help but provide a link to this great article by my friend Eric on his experience tricking out his MacBook Pro laptop with two 160GB hard drives, and configuring the machine as a 320GB Raid 0 Striped Array.

I’ve posted here about Eric before. He is a professional photographer, with a specialty in [...]

Mike Schroepfer, 40th Most Important Person on the Web

Congratulations to Mike! Here is the glowing snippet from PC World:

40. Mike Schroepfer
Vice president of engineering, MozillaIn the ongoing browser war, Mike Schroepfer is a five-star general who leads a massive but decentralized open-source army of staff and volunteer engineers. Its mission: to improve what is right now the best Web browser on the [...]

A Kindred Spirit: Amy Jo Kim at USC on Game Mechanics

Many thanks to Will Hsu for his post today for pointing me in this direction.
Please check out this summary write-up on the O’Reilly site on the philosophy and theories of Amy Jo Kim, PhD, based on her discussion of Game Mechanics and Online Communities at ETech.
Kim discussed five key mechanics of game design, why they [...]

Sarah Culberson Has a Blog, Too!

With all due credit to Preston Smalley, for officially outing Sarah’s new blog recently.
Sarah Culberson is an interaction designer at eBay.  Although she doesn’t hang out with me as much any more, now that we work in separate buildings, she has always been extremely patient as I walk her through my latest set of baby [...]

Mobile Search: What are People Looking For?

I feel like I’m perpetually behind with my blog lately.  This tidbit is from a few days ago, but I think interesting enough to still warrant a post.
JumpTap has a nice chart out on their breakdown of search queries from mobile phones.  Turns out 12% of the queries can be classified as “adult” in nature.

A [...]