Midwest

Another trip to the midwest this week. This time to Champaign IL, home of the University of Illinois and the academic team that founded Nextumi. These guys were a lot of fun. I'm normally afraid of recommendation/personalization technology as they are difficult to productize and notoriously difficult to scale; typically requiring large non-segmentable indices. This stuff is different. I obviously can't let the algorithm out of the bag, but this approach lends itself to parallel index creation and distributed storage. F'ing rad.

Two things struck me on the 2+ hour drive from Chicago:
1) There is a lot of corn here.
2) Illinois uses a lot of i's.

Another thing... On the way in, I could have sworn I saw a 30 foot tall metal Abe Lincoln surrounded by a multitude of giant cranes. I didn't take a picture because it was on the other side of the highway. Unfortunately it had mysteriously disappeared (cranes and all) on the return trip the next day. Maybe the midwest is like the desert... where you get hallucinations, but of ginormous abe lincolns not an oasis. Who knows.

Rock

ok... a break from nextumi. u gotta make time 4 rock. mesmers.com for more pics and info.

Day 1

I made it into Columbus about 7pm last night. My trip was delayed thanks to a nasty eye infection (I'll refrain from posting a pic). The good news is I got an opportunity to try out the new VZNavigator service on my vx9800. This thing is amazing and might even help me overlook the fact that Verizon cripples bluetooth on it's phones. Anyway, most of the employees were already at the boss' house when I arrived. I loaded up on a few glasses of delightful Two Tone Merlot and sat down to a bitchen shish-q-bob dinner. Most of the conversation wasn't work related. Everyone was just trying to get to know each other.

The next morning @ 9 we met at the office to start an all day product meeting. The product folk have definitely been busy and even had flow diagrams prepared. I have to say I really dig their approach... very team focused with a strong bias for trust; refreshing.

me leaving aol

First Post

I just quit my job of 11 years; System Architect for America Online. I've had a lot of fun, met some great people and worked on some cool projects. I'm now working with a company called Nextumi that has a lot of potential. I'm writing this blog to record the activities of this startup.