The two of us at Ridge Winery just after arriving.

As a young child in Ohio, I had this Midwestern notion of California, one shaped by countless episodes of CHiPs and Knight Rider.  To me, California was palm trees, fast cars, and beaches.  As I grew older, I started to dream of Silicon Valley, the place that Zorin tried to destroy in A View to a Kill, and where 20525 Mariani Avenue was located.  As I embraced my inner nerd and made technology my career, I always thought that California was too expensive, too elitist, and too far away for me to ever call it my home.

This past week marks five years in this great state, and I can hardly believe it’s been that long.  5 years is a long time- longer than high school, college, and enough for an infant to learn how to read.  I’ve lived in California longer than anywhere except for Ohio, and it’s been an amazing ride so far.

In the summer of 2005, I was a business analyst at Ford, exploring my interest in the automotive industry by jumping in head-first.  I had just had a conversation with a very senior product guy telling me what I needed to hear- that chances were slim that I would ever get a shot in the product planning org, because I hadn’t joined straight out of college, nor did I have the right degree from the right school.

It was a difficult conversation, but a catalyst for what was to come.  I got in touch with my good friend Don at Yahoo!, who, in a stroke of wild luck, was working in the same group as one of my best friends from high school, Stephen.  I had no product management experience but I did have two things- empathy for people unlike myself, and an intense curiosity about just about anything worth learning about.  Neither of those talents were particularly obvious from my resume, but enthusiastic endorsements from both Stephen and Don secured me my gig at Yahoo!, working for Don as a PM for Search Shortcuts.

I built cool stuff at Yahoo! Search- those little shortcuts that appeared at the top of the results when you typed something like “Twilight” into a browser and got a list of showtimes in your area, making millions of people every day at least two percent happier.  Yahoo! was also an amazing place to work back then- full of energy, hope, and the piss and vinegar to think they could take on Google in the search game.  The end of that story is all but written now, but I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish with such a small team- Yahoo! was much larger than Google in those days, but we had far fewer people on search than Google did.

At Yahoo!, I also worked on Answers and del.icio.us.  On Answers, I saw a huge and vibrant community get destroyed by an even bigger deluge of new users.  On del.icio.us, I learned from Joshua that social software is best when it has some personal utility, because self-interest is a powerful incentive to use any product. I had the privilege of launching the del.icio.us Firefox extension with a small but dedicated team of engineers,  who spent as much time as I did talking to our community of users and making the best possible thing that we knew how to make.

We did screw up occasionally, but any complaints were drowned by a chorus of understanding- because we learned that being up front with users and reacting quickly to their complaints is a great way to build goodwill.  I have fond memories of begging Shaver to review our add-on, not knowing of his greatness then and now.  I also got to meet Chris Beard, Alex Faaborg, and Dan Mills back in 2007 when they were talking about building some sort of sync feature into Firefox 3, which eventually became Firefox Sync.

I left Yahoo! in May of 2008, and at Raptr, a social network for gamers, I was a cheerleader, a project manager, a waterboy, a metrics guy, and a crappy front end developer at varying times during those months, but by the end we had target personas, specs for every major feature, and we ended up releasing on time(ish) in September.  It was a great experience, but it was an exhausting one, where I learned a lot in exchange for my 7 day work week and frequent forays into the early AM in the office.

These were exciting times, and I wasn’t looking to go anywhere- until Mozilla called.  I remember vividly that call I got from Bret when he asked me if I wanted to interview for the add-ons gig.  I wasn’t looking for a job, but this was a job that I felt I was uniquely qualified to do, with a company that valued what I valued, and with smart and inspirational people to boot!  The interviews were a bit wild- from the first interview with Chris Beard, where I felt like I understood about 20% of what was said, to the slightly awkward conversations with Mike Morgan and Fligtar, both some of my favorite people today.

Mozilla’s been everything I could have hoped for and more- and the mission of preserving the Internet as a source of innovation and opportunity for everyone is one that makes it easy to come to work each day.  It’s hard to believe that I’ve only known some of my very best friends for less than two years, but the people at Mozilla are all ferociously special- the sorts of people who are generous with their time and knowledge, young enough to not know what’s impossible, and great enough to be fun to spend lots of time around.

Personal stuff happened too! Bridget and I married on September 1, 2006,  right before my 30th birthday- at the San Francisco City Hall.  We had no actual wedding, just immediate family on hand, and we had a marvelous weekend of dining and exploring San Francisco with our families.  The best $80 we will ever spend, and in 2007, we bought our amazingly original and retromodern 50-year-old Eichler home in San Jose.  We’ve been fixing it up these past few years, with Bridget handling the heavy duty stuff like redoing walls and building garden boxes, while I do the electrical work and plumbing.  Bridget is a person who seems to be able to do anything she puts her mind to, whether it’s restoring a 120 year old letterpress, training and doing a triathlon, or scoring a gig at flickr just because she loves the product.

These have been a great five years- I’ve made lifelong friends, and I’ve been involved in things that I wouldn’t have believed possible before I moved here.  I can’t wait to see what the next five years will bring.

AMO is a great site for finding and sharing your favorite Firefox add-ons, but as we like to say, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.  While we made meaningful improvements for the millions of loyal add-ons fanatics out there, it was clear that the tens of thousands of available add-ons were overwhelming for many users new to add-ons.  Enter Rock Your Firefox- a blog we launched last month that tells folks about the great add-ons out there.

Some of you may know Rock Your Firefox as a Facebook application, originaly created by Justin Scott to help add-ons users share their add-ons on Facebook.  While the original Rock Your Firefox has been retired with fond memories, we decided to resurrect and reinvigorate the brand for the new Rock Your Firefox- where we shine the spotlight on a single add-on while telling a compelling story about how an add-on can make your life better.  We’ve made an effort to try and make these stories fun as well; and we’re actively looking for new guest bloggers to help us tell the story of great add-ons.

If you’re reading this, chance are you’re a big add-ons fan, and some of you have wondered about the reason for a new site.  Rest assured that AMO will continue to evolve in useful and delightful ways, and Rock Your Firefox is intended to complement AMO by offering a low impact and easy way to discover add-ons, whether you’re a new user or a seasoned veteran.  Also- since it’s a catchy URL- we hope that you’ll tell interested strangers to check it out, we’ll do the rest with our witty prose and slickly produced videos.

Editor’s note: Patricia Clausnitzer has translated this post into Belorussian!

To get started, install the new Jetpack Extension and restart the browser (this will be the only time you’ll need to restart when doing development).  When Jetpack installs, you’ll be taken to the about:jetpack page, which contains a couple of sample Jetpacks (the name for extensions created with the Jetpack API).

Install some demos and check them out!  For the time being, the experiment is limited to status bar widgets, but I was able to put together a Delicious Notifier Jetpack Feature in less than an hour using simple JQuery, CSS, and html. All I did was install the GMail Notifier widget and pasted it into Bespin, read the 20 lines of code that made it work, and started hacking away to get the information i wanted.  Since I didn’t have to restart and could inspect and debug via Firebug, development was painless.

If you have Jetpack installed, check out my Delicious Notifier, I find it incredibly useful when browsing the web, as the count of saves in Delicious is a great indicator of how interesting a particular page on the internet can be.

As with all experiments, there’s a lot of polishing to do with Jetpack, but we felt that it was true to Mozilla’s values to get this out early and involve the community in determining its future- please let us know what you think!

Seriously.  Think about this- addons.mozilla.org has over 6,000 add-ons and add-on developers.  Our add-ons are created by large corporations as well as people with day jobs.  Our number 1 add-on was created by a hobbyist in his spare time and has been downloaded 40 million times.  Our add-ons can turn Firefox into a kid-friendly browser or a Twitter application.  Like the Renegade Craft Fair, we’ve got an amazing array of stuff but we fall short in one key way- we’re not as fun.  We want to change that- we want to replicate the excitement of finding the unexpected so that our visitors always something they want, even if it’s not something they expect.  We want to make “serendipitous discovery” the way most people interact with AMO.  Any ideas?

The appeal of driving yourself boils down to personal space and freedom.  But nowadays we spent most of our driving going to one of two places, and portable devices allow you to create a personal space virtually anywhere.  While they don’t erect a physical barrier with the outside world, an iPod or Kindle allows its user to effectively shut out the outside world, even in the middle of a crowded train.

Technology has also diminished the significance of physical location; half of Mozilla’s employees are remote and they seem to have no trouble getting as much done as the rest of us.  How long will it be until commuting and travel become obsolete altogether?

For instance, comparing “blond” to “blonde”, it appears that the latter is far more popular:

Another interesting faceoff is “you” and “your” vs “u” and “ur”.   I predict some sort of apocalypse when “u” overtakes “you”.

Individual wall posts are basically throwaway messages, analogous to that whiteboard you had on the door of your dorm room.  Not terribly interesting, but being able to see this data in aggregate is much more interesting, especially since the throwaway nature of these posts means that people write in a way that is most natural to them.

I could imagine this being useful for SEO, creating online ad campaigns, or just general zeitgeist tracking.  For instance, looking at ‘obama’ and ‘mccain’ in Lexicon shows a real dropoff after the election, with McCain all but dying out and Obama maintaining a slow but steady trickle of wall posts.  I imagine we’ll see a spike as we approach the inauguration (yay!).

]]> http://osunick.com/2008/12/29/facebook-lexicon/feed/ 0 http://osunick.com/2008/09/29/no-on-prop-8/ http://osunick.com/2008/09/29/no-on-prop-8/#comments Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:58:52 +0000 osunick http://osunick.com/?p=45 As the election looms, there’s a proposition on the California ballot that’s getting a lot of attention.  Prop 8 is a proposed amendment to the California constitution that strictly defines marriage as between a man and a woman.  Clearly, there’s a lot of hysteria about this proposition but I think I can break down my “no on prop 8″  position.

What Changes:

• Same sex couples will be able to get legal marriage status in California
• Solemnizing authorities who wish to ordain same sex marriages will be allowed to do so
• Providing a legal framework for marriage encourages monogamous long term relationships, which (aside from the public health concerns) is good in terms of providing financially stable households.
• Gay couples win dignity by averting another “Jim Crow” separate-but-equal civil union situation
• Less fraud with partner benefits as California companies can use a state marriage license as proof of eligibility
• Potential economic benefits from offering a limited and in demand resources.  Gay weddings will be the new oil.

What doesn’t change

• Gay couples will continue to be able to adopt in California, but with less uncertainty around guardianship and greater incentives to build a stable household.
• Same sex couples will continue to have healthy, meaningful relationships and choose to live together as they wish.
• Churches will continue to be able to define marriage as they see fit

So for me, the rational argument is that marriage as defined by the state really is a civil union, with no pretext regarding romance between the actual parties.  It really is a declaration of sharing a single household for tax and legal purposes.  The reason why we can’t call it a civil union is because ‘separate but equal’ has never worked out well in reality.  (see Jim Crow for examples)  Even today, there are completely chaste marriages between opposite sex partners because of the benefits that marriage confers.

I have yet to see a rational argument in favor of Prop 8.  I’m not going to argue with you based on faith, but if you’re going to convince me that I’m wrong, you have to present a rational, secular argument for saying “yes”.  A glib argument like “I want to be a Groom, not Partner A” just won’t cut it, nor does the straw man of ‘the intent of marriage is procreation, therefore only people who are capable of reproducing should be able to marry’.  Tell that to the 20% of 40-44 year old married couples who are childless.

Put another way- just like any proposition,  think hard about the impact on yourself and others when deciding your vote.  Even if gay marriage makes you uneasy, does its existence really impact you very much if at all?  On the flip side, people who are already in committed relationships, and their CHILDREN, will be able to enjoy the benefits and incentives that married couples enjoy today.

The engine in all its glory... clicky for a set

Audis have a reputation for stellar design and materials quality, but a less good reputation for overall reliability.  A typical car manufacturer will stop working on an ancillary part like a window switch once the part has proven to be reliable. Not Audi. The 2nd generation Audi A4 had three separate window switch designs during its 3 year model run, to improve the haptic feel of each switch. With each redesign comes an opportunity for new and unseen failures.

We put up with this because when Audis work, the experience is fantastic, and all that work into the tactile aspect of driving really pays off. But don’t buy a used Audi unless you like reading forums and making minor and simple fixes yourself for things like a trunk release.

As our car broke the 65K mile barrier, it was time to think about doing the timing belt.  A timing belt is a toothed rubber belt that connects the top of an engine (the valves that let in air+fuel and let out exhaust) with the bottom (the pistons and crankshaft).  The belt has a finite service life- and if it fails, valves and pistons start trying to occupy the same place. The result would be disastrous and expensive.  Audi recommends the belt get replaced around the 75-85K mark, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Since an independent shop would charge around $1000 for the timing belt replacement, I decided to tackle this myself.  One post on the Audizine.com NorCal forum, and I received a response from a helpful forum member.  For $250 he would do the t-belt if I provided the parts (another $250) and I’d even be able to help out!  The opportunity to have an expert show me how to do a complex maintenance operation was simply too good to pass up, so I drove the 60 miles to Pleasant Hill to do the job.

The job took 5 hours and without the help of ActiveMonkey (who happens to also go by ‘Nick’), it would have been impossible. I also learned a few tricks for dealing with a timing belt- for instance, instead of rotating the engine to Top Dead Center, simply mark the old belt and gears with a sharpie, and transfer the marks to the exact same spots on the new belt.  This saves a step and adds an extra measure of assurance that things are aligned as they should be.

While we were in there, we changed some belts and replaced the water pump.  The car should be good now for another couple of years, and we got to check everything for leaks.  I actually think I could do the job myself now, though perhaps it is for the best that it won’t have to be done for another 70K miles…

We decided to do the garage door openers ourselves because no one wanted to attempt doing a job that would involve powering both doors.  There were a few obstacles endemic to all Eichlers, but nothing insurmountable.  The key is developing an attachment to the garage doors that takes the overlapping into account. This also means that you have to be extra careful to not operate the wrong door at the wrong time, as various parts will collide and possibly damage your setup.

The basic idea here is that we installed garage door openers in the front corners of our garage, with the rails and trolleys moving sideways and parallel to the path of the doors.  The rails themselves will be mounted to a piece of wood that spans the gap between beams.

We went with the cheapest garage door opener we could find, a Chamberlain from Lowes.  Because all we have to do is slide the door back and forth, a great deal of power isn’t needed.  If you’re feeling fancy, maybe a screw drive opener would be quieter, but there’s really no need to get anything more than the basics here.  The other you’ll need is a extension kit for your door.  A standard garage door opener is designed with 7 feet of travel.  Since the Eichler slider needs at least 7.5 feet to open fully, you’ll need this kit to ensure things open the entire way.  While you’re in the store, also pick up some hanger brackets for the garage door opener.  This resembles a long piece of flat steel, folded 90 degrees along its length and with lots of holes in it.

In addition to the garage door opener hardware, you will also need to measure the distance between the beams in the garage.  Get an 8×1 piece of pine that is high grade (without knots) and long enough to span the distance with a few inches to spare on both sides.  Mount this board with screws parallel to the door and centered on the beams, with the front edge about six inches away from the boards.  This distance doesn’t have to be exact, but we do need room for the garage door openers.  Here’s a picture of the board with both openers installed, so you can see what we did.

Buy four right angle brackets, Home Depot has some Strong-Tie A66 connectors which are the best I’ve seen so far.  Look in your lumber section near where the deck supplies are sold.  Also pick up some 1 inch lag screws with some washers, you’ll need 8 of them for the angle brackets and another 8 or so to mount the garage door opener hanger to the ceiling.  While you are picking up the angle brackets, get about 8 linear feet of 1×4 oak.

I’m going to assume that you or an electrician will install some grounded outlets on the ceiling boards within in the front corners of the garage.  This is a fairly straightforward job which shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.  You will want to ground your outlets- for us, the cold water pipe leading to the exterior hose faucet was an easy source of grounding.

The next step is to assemble the first garage door opener.  Start on the side of the garage with the outer door, which is the door that is closest to the front of the house.  This door should be on the side of the garage that has some space set back from the edge of the door.  This is important, because the bracket you will attach will require the garage door opener to sit back fairly far from the door.

Build a bracket like this, with the piece of oak attached to the angle brackets with lag screws.  I only used two lag screws even though there are holes for four, to allow for greater clearance for the bracket as it must pass above the other door when opening.  Also note that the bracket is attached just inboard of the hanging casters for the door.  This is critical as it will ensure that the bracket will not hit the other door’s casters as it opens.

Once this bracket is built and attached to the door, hang your garage door opener.  It should be fully assembled at this point so simply install the hang bracket in the ceiling of the garage and adjust it so that the opener is set back far enough to allow for the trolley to move back far enough to pull the door completely closed.  Attach the header bracket for your track to the pine board you attached between the beams.  The opener should be aligned so that the track is parallel to the door’s travel and as close as possible to the door itself.  Once the bracket is hung, assemble the arm and bracket for the trolley.

Connect the power and stand back as you enjoy seeing your garage door opener work.  If all goes well, the bracket you made should slide in the gap between the inner door and the track as the outer door moves open.  Of course, this also means that you should never try opening a door when the other door is open, as it may damage your door.   Be sure to set the force limiting settings to be as low as possible.  Also, the electric eye safety switch will not work, as the opener is set up in a ‘push to open, pull to close’ arrangement.  This means that when the door is closing, the opener ‘thinks’ it’s opening, and ignores the status of the electric eye.  I simply taped mine together.

The other door is much like the first, except we have to make a bracket that won’t interfere with the other door as it opens.  It looks like this:

You can see in this picture that the bracket is sightly different, and designed so that it will never interfere with the other door’s bracket.

Anyway, once you’re done you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy the satisfication of doing your own Eicher garage door openers.  Here’s a video to give you a preview of what you’ll have when you’re done!

Enjoy- and check out my Garage Door set on Flickr for more pics!