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The reload animation from Deepleap, shuttered 10 years ago last week.
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Perspective
This morning, I woke up at 7:45. I got up by myself and walked the dogs around the block. I mowed the back yard. At 8:45, I ate a yogurt for breakfast and turned on last week’s Rachel Maddow show for some morning newsertainment. At 9:30, Katie and I had our Monday morning checkin, and then I wrote some code. We’ll go to yoga at noon, and this afternoon we hope to sign a lease on (another) new office space. For dinner, leftover quinoa!
I tell you this as a preface to what follows: an excerpt from an entry I posted to benbrown.com in August of 2000. I was 22. Please keep in mind that most of this did not actually happen.
A few weeks ago, my tiny baby internet startup experienced crib death and the fear that all my coding would yet again die without reaching market stopped being a fear and became a reality. I wake up in the morning and my dead little baby is there, dead. Dead. Dead baby. My baby is dead. Dead babies everywhere. Hey look, I have 500 cards with pictures of my DEAD BABY ON THEM.
This sort of thinking, it doesn’t motivate me to do much.
I light a cigarette. I light another cigarette. I light a whole pack of cigarettes and then have to go buy another just so that I can keep doing something with my hands, so that I can keep myself from wandering about Austin, stalking my ex-coworkers, stalking, threatening, killing.
This is what I’m thinking: I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure.
My father calls up one morning. My father, he says You’re a failure! I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen in a towel, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. I haven’t left the house in three days. There’s a small pile of ash on the floor where I’ve been putting cigarettes, and a cockroach is swimming in it.
Oh, my little baby. My poor dead baby. The big angry German VC nanny shook my little baby until it’s soft little head just rolled off.
Two weeks after I had no job, which happens to be 8 weeks after the last time I actually got paid, my father and my brothers and my best friend show up on my doorstep.
This is an intervention, they say.
I shake my head.
We’re going to clean you up, they say.
A single tear wells up out of that little corner-bit of my eye and trickles down my cheek. Bryan’s words echo in my mind — I’m going to cry you a river … that’s infested with piranha.
My father and my brothers and my best friend Tim, they pick me up and carry me into the bathroom and pull the towel, which is now sticking to my skin due to a thin layer of malt liquor and ash, off of my body, and lower me, slowly, into the bathtub. Tim, his normally jovial face twisted into a look of sadness/disgust/pity, scrubs the grime off of my body with a toothbrush. Oh Tim, look what I have become! I was once a powerful vice president at a peppy little internet startup, and now, now I have fallen from grace. Look at this poor wretch I have become! OH TIM!
Tim puts a washcloth in my mouth. It would seem not everyone has the patience or the time to pity me as much as I pity myself.
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Click on: Announcing SendTab
In addition to kicking ass for our clients, we’ve been hard at work for the last couple of weeks on a new tool that we are launching today. I am very proud of this launch because this is the first thing XOXCO has done with our new intern Damien, and in our new office space.
Of course, we’re getting kicked out of our new office space today too, but that’s another story.
The new product is called SendTab. It’s for people like us who have a dedicated entertainment computer attached to their TV. In short, it lets you beam links from your laptop or phone or ipad to the big screen. No more searching for the wireless keyboard, no more screen sharing. Just tap SendTab and BOOM, it’s there.
Learn more and download SendTab here, or read our official announcement here, or check out Katie’s awesome photo of me using SendTab to send Sendtab from my ipad to my TV.
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I just launched some pretty new stuff for Helsinki Design Lab: Dossiers. These are flexible, version-able collections of information about specific questions that HDL has posed. As data is added, new “crystalizations” of the collection are published. You can then scroll back and forth between versions to see how the project has evolved.
Behind the scenes, these are powered by a crazy drag-and-drop layout tool that allows Bryan to build these beasts. I am going to shoot a screencast this week, because I am super duper proud of my work on it.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch these dossiers grow and evolve as the work on these projects continues. I wish I had someone to track information about all the stuff I do so I could watch it evolve into a LEGO rainbow of data!
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What’s the difference between the Google/Verizon network proposal and a joint proposal from a fox and a rat on henhouse regulation?
One is from bloodthirsty predators you can’t trust and the other is a figment of your fucking imagination.
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Two years ago today on 8/8/8, Katie and I became BROWNCE and vowed to always be awesome.
So far, so good!
Happy anniversary, Katie! I love you!!!!!!1!
(photo by Schlomo Rabinowitz, who hosted our reception at the dearly departed House of Shields)
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“ Though acute social withdrawal in Japan affect both genders, impossibly high expectations for males from middle- and upper-middle-class families has led many sons, typically the eldest, to refuse to leave home. The trigger for this complete withdrawal from social interaction is often one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure. That is, the inability to meet standards of conduct and success that can no longer be met in diminished-opportunity Japan
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