aaron bird's blog

Moving my blog to tumblr

Here is my first post on tumblr, I’ll set up dns for aaronbird.net and hopefully import my old posts soon.

Google Integrating Local Results in Main SERP

It looks like Google is experimenting with integrating the local results interspersed with non-local results in main SERP page. See an example below, with a comparison to the previous version of keeping local results on top.

This should have a very interesting impact on local SEO if these changes are made everywhere.

Perspective from Class of 2014

Every year the administrators at Wisconsin’s Beloit College put together a list of information about incoming freshmen to explain the perspective of the new class, here are some highlights:
- Rarely use email as it’s too slow
- Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.
- Never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day
- Never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone
- There have always been “hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch

From AdCenter to Windows Azure

Yesterday was my first day working in Windows Azure. I’m really excited to be building the platform that will enable the next generation of online services. More soon on the exciting stuff we are working on…

Subsidized Wages Rather Than Unemployment

My first observation in this post is that sites like eLance and the lower wage, on-demand workers they provide are critical to boostrapped startups these days. I’ve used eLance a ton over the past year and a half and I can say for sure that The Accountant Guide wouldn’t be were it is today with that source of labor. So, my first premise is that low wage on-demand labor significantly helps foster startups in the early stages when capital, revenue, and earnings are sparse.

Washington (DC) has been giving a lot of unemployment benefits lately. The argument is that we need to in order to help rebound the economy. Here is my proposal: Instead of giving someone unemployment benefits, create a market for labor in which the demand is met by small companies and startups and the government matches the pay of the employer. So, for instance if I normally make 40/hr, the government will match a startups 20/hr on this market. The benefit is that we help startups get off the ground (which is critical to a rebound in the economy), get people back to work, and the government’s money incentivizes working rather than “looking for a job”. In short, the government’s money helps create jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, people get to work rather than sit at home, and startups are created that otherwise would not have been able to get off the ground.

Thoughts?

Starbucks Startups

I’m taking 2 weeks off, during which time I’ve been doing some work for 2 startups I’m helping with (www.seattleaccountantguide.com and www.resourcefitness.net) and I’ve been doing a lot of it from coffee shops. This is a familiar situation for me as I was involved in a startup in the past, and the 4 of us would meet in coffee shops in Santa Barbara and work for hours on end from them. I love this idea, that coffee shops across the country are the home for startups and entrepreneurs fuelled by $3 coffee and free wifi. There is really something empowering and American about this idea. All you need to start the next Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, or Google is a laptop, a local coffee shop, a dream, and most importantly the belief that you can. HP and Apple were started in (now famous) garages in Silicon Valley. In the current world of the internet, free wifi, and the ever present local coffee shop, the resource requirements to start the next billion dollar company, have fallen below even the need for a garage. I believe the next generation of startups will likely be started out of coffee shops across the country, and I’m doing my best to prove this.

Entrepreneurship and the “Math Isn’t There”

I was meeting with Adam last week and he was talking about the early days of TheGreenMicroGym – when it was nothing more than a concept on paper, when he pitched the idea to people, he often got the feedback on the business model that, “the math isn’t there”. The truth is, those people were right, given the current paradigm, the math isn’t there. Adam didn’t see the math, and he didn’t care about the current paradigm. Because even though he may not have articulated it to the VCs and potential investors, his idea wasn’t about the math being there for the current paradigm of gyms, it was about changing the paradigm to a world where the math was there.
This is the foundation of entrepreneurship. The definition of entrepreneurship is to take the same set of resources (land, labor, capital, energy) and create more value than was created by those resources before you. The only way to do this, is to change the paradigm. If you look at the problem the same way everyone else is looking at it, you will draw the same conclusions as everyone else. You will all agree on when the math ads up and when it doesn’t. The key to innovation and entrepreneurship is to change the way you look at the problem.
Adam believes that people will be inspired by a gym that does more than help you burn calories and believes in more than getting you to %8 body fat. 24hr fitness, LA Fitness, Precor, and Life Fitness don’t believe this. Adam has a different paradigm and we’ll see if it’s the right one.

Continuous Deployment at Digg

Interesting article on continuous deployment. I like some of the concepts but I’m not convinced this would work for an online system like AdCenter that operates a service people actually pay for. It would be interesting to know the number of bugs found in production, mean time to detection, and mean time to a fix with this system as compared to a more traditional release cycle.

Get Distance Between 2 Cities in Ruby

I had to find the distance between 2 cities using Ruby, here is my code. Note that you can find out about the Yahoo REST API and the geocoder.us service by following those links. You will need to sign up for a Yahoo developer key (it’s free and a quick form). I’ve included the default Yahoo API key below so the sample will work.

I know, I’m not parsing the XML response the right way, but it works, I needed to hack something together for my Seattle Accountant Site and I didn’t want to deal with XML parsing.

You will also notice that I added a retry for the HTTP request. I need this as this script is run many times in a row and occasionally the request fails. So much for TCP being a “reliable” protocol.




def get_url2(url)
  retry_count = 0
  while true    
    begin
      return resp = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url))
    rescue
      retry_count+=1
      puts "retrying " + retry_count.to_s() + ":" + url
    end
  end
end

def get_city_distance(city1, state1, city2, state2)
  url = "http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=BswRHq7V34F6vFQJHH_PH29zDy9AkdHq7TGuUk8jPYCPq9QfILVzoZIOi1Mu7Bp_hQ--&city=" + city1.gsub(' ','+') + "&state=" + state1
  resp = get_url2(url)
  long1 = resp.body.split('<Longitude>')[1].split('</Longitude>')[0]
  lat1 = resp.body.split('<Latitude>')[1].split('</Latitude>')[0]

  url = "http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=BswRHq7V34F6vFQJHH_PH29zDy9AkdHq7TGuUk8jPYCPq9QfILVzoZIOi1Mu7Bp_hQ--&city=" + city2.gsub(' ','+') + "&state=" + state2
  resp = get_url2(url)
  long2 = resp.body.split('<Longitude>')[1].split('</Longitude>')[0]
  lat2 = resp.body.split('<Latitude>')[1].split('</Latitude>')[0]

  url = "http://geocoder.us/service/distance?lat1=" + lat1 + "&lat2=" + lat2 + "&lng1=" + long1 + "&lng2=" + long2
  resp = get_url2(url)

  distance = resp.body.split("=")[1].split('miles')[0].strip.to_f

  #puts lat1 + "," + long1 + "," + lat1 + "," +lat2 + ": '" + distance.to_s + "'"

  return distance
end

Hello CondoInternet.net, Later Comcast

I just signed up for internet from CondoInternet.net and it rocks. When I first read about it getting 100 mbs, I was VERY skeptical. However, after doing some research and realizing that their primary business is commercial internet for companies in downtown Seattle (like Real Networks) I realized that they may actually live up to the promise.

I’ve been dying for a Comcast alternative, and this was it. I totally got rid of TV/internet from Comcast, and I’m now on internet from CondoInternet.net, I use Boxee and Hulu for internet TV and Amazon and Netflix for internet movies. Getting rid of the ancient, monopolistic cable company felt good.

So, how fast is it? I did a speed test and here are the results. Summary: Fucking Fast! So fast in fact, that my wireless router can’t keep up (not even when I’m hardwired into the LAN). So I have to buy a new wireless router.

Download: 104 mbs
Upload: 44 mbs
Ping: 6 ms


Comcast:


CondoInternet.net (no router in the picture):