This is the ranch where we went on vacation last week.
Archive for the ‘Culture’ category
How I spent my winter vacation
February 22nd, 2010Goodbye, Yahoo! Tech
February 9th, 2010Note: see “Disclaimer” in the sidebar. This does not represent an official statement by Yahoo!, but merely my personal reflections and memories.
Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Tech will be closing on March 11, 2010. This has a very personal resonance for me, because I was the lead engineer for the construction of Yahoo! Tech.
Yahoo! Tech represented an important milestone, not only in my personal career, but also in the history of Yahoo! At the time it was launched (April, 2006), it was the first new property launched by the Yahoo! Media group in over five years. It was one of Yahoo!’s first forays into original content, and one of the first Yahoo! sites where video (the online show Hook Me Up) was a primary factor. It was one of the first, if not the first, sites at Yahoo! to rely primarily upon original content (bloggers) rather than aggregating content that was created elsewhere. And, it was considered very “cutting edge” in its design and frontend features—the rounded corners and bold colors (green and orange? seriously?) were very much in vogue at the time (an early review called it “an explosion in the web 2.0 factory”) and a wild change from the traditional Yahoo! designs. See the Wikipedia article for more details.
From a web technology standpoint, Yahoo! Tech was also groundbreaking. It was the first site at Yahoo! to be built entirely on a service-oriented architecture, meaning that all of the content for the site was accessed via web services (mostly REST-style HTTP requests) instead of older, more traditional methods. The front-end was rendered entirely using XSLT; another cutting-edge technology that had been little-used in Yahoo! before then (and little used afterwards, too, I might add).
California
January 26th, 2010This is “Symphonic Composition no. 1.”
Channeling Philip Glass
January 23rd, 2010This is my Symphonic Composition no. 2 “Channeling Philip Glass.”
Let me try that again
January 22nd, 2010
The response to my decision on Wednesday night to close my FriendFeed account has been, to say the least, rather interesting (and somewhat overwhelming). Responses have ranged from shock and outrage to anger to mere flippancy. Most people have been overwhelmingly kind and generous, and a few have said, in essence, that I need to grow a backbone and learn how to deal with it.
All these responses are probably valid, in some way or another, and I’m not going to try to argue against any of the charges made. But, in response to the statement, “this is all too abstract for me,” I’ll try to clarify the particular issue:
People behave far worse online than they ever would in person.
