Bill Watt’s Blog

Finally.

I bought the book, “The no asshole rule” and expect to see several of my characteristics present. I’m going to try and work on those and I’ve been trying to watch what I say but it has been a really rough week. I try to be nice every day but people provoke me. I swear… they do.

All that said, I’m going to make fun of someone now. Deal with it. I should say that the person I’m about to mock is a friend of a friend and he’s supposed to be a pretty good developer. This starts with a post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch on the startup PowerSet. Here’s an excerpt of his post but you should really click over and watch the video:

The company had a party in San Francisco this last weekend to celebrate their venture funding. Sarah Meyers, who regularly crashes parties with a cameraman to videotape what’s going on (including ours), was there to talk to Pell and other employees. The video is embedded below. Pell talks at a high level about the product, not really saying much more than we’ve already heard. At around the 2:47 mark, though, some poor soul gets caught on camera and answers Meyer’s question about what exactly Powerset is. His answer: “We have a demo where you can, like, search web pages and get results, like, like, books by children versus books for children…and that’s what we claim we can do…we’ll see in a year.” Not exactly confidence-inducing stuff.

Seriously- watch this video. Jump to 2 miutes and 40 seconds to avoid all the blah blah that doesn’t apply.  

I would say he’s being kind. If you know me you know I’m a little salesy and the guy in the video is pretty close to my worst nightmare. He’s an engineer, he’s been drinking, and the product is a year or so away from launch. Perfect storm anyone?

It does remind me that the people who build the products we use and love are not always the best suited to be sales people because they (in my experience) want to be honest.

When I was at FairMarket and we were like 20 people we had a call with GeoCities about powering auctions for them. It was 7PM EST or so and we all huddle in the conf room for the big call. We were a little surprised that none of the big wigs we expected were on the call but figured it was a tech call so they weren’t that interested. At one point one of their people asked one of our engineers how far we could scale the application and our engineer (one of the nicest guys i’ve ever met) answered, “Well, I have some concerns about how far we can scale (this one piece of the application).”

You could have heard a pin drop.

Turns out it didn’t matter… the reason none of the important GeoCities folks were on the call with us is because they were on a different call with Yahoo closing the deal to be bought. That deal was announced the next day and we never moved forward with GeoCities.

I think the title describes it all. They look so happy. :-)  

I’ve used my Slingbox from a few places outside my house but my friends that just moved to Luxembourg are using it today to watch a PGA event and then the Superbowl. They used to live 4 doors down from us and while it wasn’t the same as watching a TV, it got the job done. They report that it looks the same from their new place as it did when they were just down teh street. Pretty cool!

I heard this commercial for some new housing development this week. Problem was the background music is the same as what we use for our hold music at work so I automatically zoned out upon hearing it and now can’t tell you anything else about the commercial.

Is what I’d say to Danny if I were 16 and playing Warcraft… but I’m not so I’ll leave it alone.

For the first time ever I got some spam posts as comments (and I’m not talking about the comments from Danny). Who knew I’d eventually get to the level of noteriety where I’d get a .RU domain posting fake comments on my blog? I’ve clearly arrived.