About this time last year I was making arrangements to go to Korea to help with Yahoo! Korea’s internal Hack day. I ended up running the internal Hack team pretty much because I had nothing else to do.  I’d left working inside the business unit that owned my old product, Konfabulator, because I was frustrated by the lack of ability to lead something I was passionate about.  I was watching my product be run inappropriately, and had no power to change that – I was supposed to be a design lead, but there was nothing to lead.

My response was to jump ship without leaving the company since I still had some obligations relating to the acquisition of my company. As you can read a few posts below, it looked like I was going to be doing some pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately I got over there and within a few weeks I discovered that the folks I was brought on to help understand how to build a small company weren’t interested.  The Brickhouse folks and the APG folks weren’t interested… and to be honest, I wasn’t interested in trying.  None of the projects caught my eye as being worthwhile, and while I thought the overall idea for these groups was great (hell, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think so), nothing they were doing was.  To make it worse, I was so burnt out after my time dealing with stuff over in the other BU that I had no energy or passion to care about making something new.  Actually, that’s not true… I had a few ideas, but none I was willing to just give to Yahoo! in the event I was going to leave at some point.  This left me with nothing to do.  I consider myself a bit of a fixer, so when my manager offered me the ability to run the internal Hack group, I thought it would be fun to try and fix it.  I’d been in advertising, I’ve done great marketing for all my products, this was all about marketing and event planning, so it shouldn’t be too tough.

It wasn’t.  In fact is was so not tough, it wasn’t interesting at all.  There was an extremely bright couple of women who managed to run the whole thing with me doing very little.  We grew the size of the thing, which was the goal, but it wasn’t what I do best.  What I did get out of it was a sudden awareness that work wasn’t what my life was about.  For many months, and perhaps for the first time in my life I realized that work wasn’t the most important thing in my life, and when I went home, I didn’t need to think about work until I went into the office the next day. Something changed in my brain, and I’ve been grateful for that ever since.  It came at a perfect time too as I had met someone I really enjoyed being with, so that time from when work ended until it began again was well spent.

Well here’s the thing… I love creating and building products.  I love defining what they do, how they look, how they’ll behave… I love getting the team that’s working on them to work together efficiently and passionately.

I had to build something. 

I went back to my old BU with my tail between my legs.  More or less. I said I wanted to come back, but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do… I just knew I wanted to work on products, not events.  So in February of this year I went back to run Experience for my old product, Konfabulator.  There were going to be large changes in the group that would make it a tolerable place for me to be in again, and since it was my turn to run the show again, I was really excited about it.

I went back driven… so driven that I took a product that was almost a year into production and scrapped it, starting completely over.  I’m sure a lot of people were frustrated, but in the end we came together and started building something pretty damn amazing.  An open platform where people can develop applications that will run on TV.

It’s Konfabulator for TV, and it’s pretty damn cool.

Is it as open as the original version?  Yes.  Is it as easy to develop for?  More of less… it is, but we have more of a framework in place now to help make it more web like while retaining all of what makes the platform awesome.

Anyhow, something else happened, my three year mark at Yahoo!, and with it the only remaining reason I wanted to stay… so I began looking around… I wanted to see what was out there and what was interesting.  Astonishingly I discovered that I wasn’t impressed with anything out there.  At least nothing I was looking at.  Well, at least not as impressed with the project we were working on at Yahoo!.  So another switch happened in my brain… I went from “having to work at Yahoo!” to “wanting to work at Yahoo!” and that distinction makes a tremendous difference in one’s attitude. And yes, Yahoo! has a lot of issues right now… but the group I’m in doesn’t.  We’ve got an amazing team working on some really cool stuff, and it’s not web based, doesn’t require a browser, and will likely be on tens of millions of digital televisions by this time next year.  That’s all pretty cool, but the best part is that it’s all based on Konfabulator.

So yeah, it’s only October, but this time of year a year ago was when things started to change for me… I learned that life outside of work is important, I had a rich and rewarding relationship with someone (though we’re no longer together), I had a total change of heart about where I worked and why I worked there, and I went back to doing what I love doing… building cool stuff that tons of people are going to enjoy using. I wish a few things had turned out differently this year, but overall, it was pretty great.

Check out my Tumblr blog. Technology Hangover

It’s totally pointless crap I find day to day… and then some.

I got an awful lot of congratulations recently that were misdirected. My old product, Konfabulator, AKA Yahoo! Widgets, just shipped version 4.0. I’m sincerely proud of the fact that the team working on it went from two guys to this crew. The key thing to note is that myself and the original engineer aren’t in that picture. Why? We don’t work on it any more. The original Mac engineer has been gone for a while. He wasn’t happy with how life was at Yahoo! and left for hopefully greener pastures. Me, well… let’s just say there was an unresolvable personality conflict with someone who had a better relationship with the person calling the shots than I did. So I left the team to let them go off in their own direction.

Like any parent it’s tough to watch what you created does on its own. In my case I had planned for a vision of Konfabulator that took the core engine and put it in a web plug-in. This would have given Widgets created for it the ability to run inside Dashboard, as MS Gadgets, and more importantly as modules inside web pages like My Yahoo!. Instead they’re hoping that the solution will be to beef up the core of the engine to support more application-like development. So instead of having modules that you write once and run anywhere, you just have not-quite-applications that require a special run-time.

Two of my closest friends are on the Widgets team, so I hope it continues to be a fun and exciting project for years to come, and I’m excited to see what comes of it. It’s just weird not being the person defining that.

When I originally left the Widgets team I took on what sounded like a pretty cool role. I was the Product Design Architect for the overall group Widgets was in. The goal being to lead the creative efforts for the entire BU so we started to have a unified appearance for all our products. This contained Desktop, Mobile, Broadband, and Home Media (TV, Wii, customized home systems, etc). What ended up happening was I became an emergency production-monkey for projects that had weak design teams. Not fun, not what I sold my company to Yahoo! to be a part of, and a great way to crush one’s soul over the course of a year.

My solution was to completely shift gears at Yahoo!. Take my goal of fixing Yahoo! to be a better looking and more modern set of sites and products, throw that out the window, and come up with some new product instead. So starting tomorrow I’ll be part of the group that contains our advanced products group, our Berkeley research group, and Brickhouse.

To be honest, I have no clue what I’m going to be doing yet, but I like the idea of coming up with another product, even if it’s something webby.

Here’s to change. *clink*

Okay, here’s something I just found out.

Wisteria pods explode and pelt the surrounding area with slimy seeds.

I got home and thought there was something spazzing out in my attic. Nope, just lots of exploding pods. It’s an unusual sound that’s kind of unsettling even after you realize what it is. Mainly because it never comes from the exact same source, and a variety of things are getting hit with the seeds.

I just got home to find a message from someone saying that he saw this site and would like to talk to me about how I can have “money making opportunities” doing Widget technology.

I created this segment and sold the technology and my company, for which I was the CEO for three years, to Yahoo!. This is the second call like this I’ve gotten, though the other was to my work number (and had nothing to do with this guy).

I’m glad to see my baby has grown up to be such a big deal… and that I’m getting cold calls from people thinking I’m just some guy that makes Widget things.

After an emergency trip to the Hospital due to an extremely painful back issue, I had my first physical/checkup in a followup visit to my new doctor.

I should point out I’ve never had a checkup or physical ever… minus specific issues that caused me to get them checked up on, specifically post-op blebectomy and plural abrasion due to my lungs collapsing (not at the same time, thankfully, otherwise I’d be dead) when I was in my early 20s… yay.

So, this was a real treat. Not.

Anyway, I’m a bit heaver than I used to be, my cholesterol is high, as is my blood pressure. My blood pressure has always been high, so that wasn’t a surprise, but now I’m on a medication for it, and the cholesterol thing has forced me to completely change my diet.

So today, I begin my new diet. I hate this kind of crap, but my friend Rob went on one recently that had insanely positive results, so I’m hoping that it, with a few modifications since I’m not a heavy meat eater, will not only fix up my blood chemistry, but also get rid of the extra flab I have.

I’m also going to start using the StairMaster I have in the garage again… but it’s starting to get cold, so I may need to pick up a space heater for the garage. This may also be a good chance to finally get a newer plasma display so I can put the one I have in the garage to use for working out. Seems like a good reason to go get a 60″ 1080p Pioneer Elite right? Okay, maybe not. Ooooh… I know… if I lose 25 pounds, I’ll get the new TV (though probably not one that over-the-top). That sounds like a deal.

We’ll see. Good luck, myself.

There’s no way I could have pulled off NaBloPoMo. I wold have missed the first day!

I’m speaking at this thing on Monday.

And… in getting that link I see they’ve linked back to here, so there goes rambling about my thoughts on the conference. Ah well.

Man, that totally blows, I had such a long post planned.

Oh my my my… been awfully busy.

First off, go get yourself a copy Tony The Beat by The Sounds. Bonus points if you get the Rex The Dog remix of it.

Speaking of Rex The Dog, anyone who does this is ace in my book. Excellent. (Here’s the mini-mix that intro was for.)

In other news, for no good reason I started to redesign this site again. Not sure why, I have plenty of other work to. I’m using two un-released apps to make it, the goal to be to get it up and running before either of the apps are released. It’s not cheating if the text editor I’m using is a public beta, right?

I moved cubes twice in as many weeks at work. Wow, exciting. I went from having a view of hills and wetland, to a parking lot, and this morning I’ll see what I have out my new window. I think it’s just most of Yahoo!’s campus along with Lockheed… industrialtastic! At least the new cube will have mondo wall space for a big white board so I can scribble like a crazy-man for anyone who will sit patiently and watch.

Okay… gotta take the trash out to the curb and go to sleep, but before I do, I’m not going to participate in NaBloPoMo because I know I’ll never post once a day… but… I’m going to do my darndest to try.

I tweaked a few things on the site. Looks a little better now… a little more complete. I added a big version of the sidebar logo. Repetitive, sure, but it looks a lot more balanced now. I also added unique little icons on the sidebar (for those of you that can actually see them).

In other news, I stopped the ants thanks to some great stuff called Terro my friend Rob recommended.

“Hey Arlo, what’s up with the bathroom? Where’s the pictures?”

Yeah yeah… it still not completely done. All I can tell you is never ever get any concrete work done by Mark Concrete. They managed to set me back a few weeks by bashing up my wall trying to get a counter top in that didn’t fit, and had to come out twice to get it set in at actual right angles. It ended up looking like I tried to make it on my spare time thanks to them cutting it on-site to adjust its size (and in the process spilling sealer on my deck… thanks jack-asses). Moral of the story is never use unknowns like those guys when you can get well known folks to do it, even if it takes ‘em longer.

Oh, in the process of fixing the wiped out wall, my otherwise on-the-ball contractor managed to screw up the top of the counter, do the worst grouting job I’ve ever seen, painted over sand from the grout mix leaving parts of my wall looking like sandpaper, forgot to sand the plaster where he did the wall repair before painting it, and even managed to grout the bottom of a light switch and a corner of a drawer. Ugh.

Minus the counter disasters, the bathroom is awesome.

Now, to find some dark gray bath mats that fit in there, and I’ll be set. And, um… then I’ll post some pictures of it.

Growing up in Northern California you pretty much come to accept the presence of a summer home invader called the Odorous House Ant.

When I was a kid, we had pets, and the pet food would attract ‘em. When I moved out on my own, I did dishes once every-other week as most single young men do so the food in the sink would attract ‘em. When I was older and less prone to a mess I lived in a well landscaped place surrounded by ivy, wood and mounds of dirt and flowers, and that would attract ‘em. The last place I lived, though… which I was in for about a year and a half, never had a single one of the little buggers. It was a breath of fresh air.

The last place I lived was in a neighborhood where cockroaches were in the sewers though, so I found enough of them scurrying around in the garage to make up for it. Gross.

And now I’m here. My first house that I own. The house that when I was a kid and had been told “Arlo, you will own a house that cost over a million dollars!” I’d have assumed it was a castle in the sky with a teleporter to get me to and from the ground and all the fixtures were made of platinum. Well, at least the last part ended up being true.

Anyway… the point of this is that there I was, in the dark, vegging out on the PSP for a few minutes before going to get groceries, shoes off because of the laughable heat, and there it was…

*bite*

The familiar chomp between my toes of a tiny little black son-of-a-bitch of an ant.

There goes the neighborhood.

Lights went on, much searching took place, and they were scattered here and there all over the living room. Luckily there’s no massive marching line of them, but it looks like they’re sneaking through the sliding door moulding.

Ugh.

I hope I can nip this in the bud fast, because I hate ants. I really, really hate them.