Rear-ended on the way to work this morning. Google, I'd really appreciate if everyone could get a self driving car ASAP.

May 25, 2012 2:59 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@Jvesci

Jaclyn Vesci

Pittsburgh tech blogger Jaclyn V (@Jvesci) was in a car wreck this AM and the twitter post she made about it above struck me as interesting.  Just a few days ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine (who’s not much older than Jaclyn) where he explained how much LESS safe he’d feel if Google was driving his car.  It points to a really interesting difference between people.  Maybe it’s circumstance and experience that causes some people to trust technology and some not.  Maybe it’s just a natual tendency.  Either way, every personal tech company that wants to have mass market appeal will have to find a way to not only appeal to the Jaclyn’s of the world, but also my less trusting friend.

BONUS: I’ll buy you a cup of coffee if you can name the pop culture reason why I picked Queen’s News of the World album for a post on being afraid of technology.

Where I get called egotistical its usually for being uncompromising when I am right or when something I do is good.  Don’t look for that to ever change from me, ever.  I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong, but you usually have to convince me of it.  If I think I’m going in the right direction don’t ask me to slow down because you’re older, you’re uncomfortable, you’re tired, or worse yet “just because.”  I am good at most of what I do, and I won’t make any apologies for it.  If you show me that you can respect that and that you are good at some things to, we won’t have any problems.  If you want me to slow down for you, you’ll walk away thinking I’m egotistical and I won’t worry about it much.

I’m speaking about myself, but it’s also the way I suggest anyone approach life.  If it’s the way you approach it, let’s be friends or, better yet, colleagues.

Update: If you read this post the day it was originally published 5/23, you got to see one of my weaknesses in action… the word “competent” was misspelled in the title.

Typically your Sauerkraut Sunday posts are prepared by hitting up Google and searching what’s new in the world of Sauerkraut.  This involves checking the regular web search, the news, the images, sometimes even the shopping parts of Google.  In the future there’s a new place for me to search, the recipes.  Apparently Google started indexing recipes differently back in February.  I’m not sure if they did it just for me, but it should help.

On to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Pittsburgh AND Startups/Social Media

Great feature about a great company: Shoefitr. http://t.co/kWVy8GB0

May 18, 2012 5:33 pm via LinkedInReplyRetweetFavorite

@MikeCaps

Mike Capsambelis

ModCloth raises $25 million, hiring 84 in Pittsburgh http://t.co/wOjBZscm

May 16, 2012 3:28 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Jvesci

Jaclyn Vesci

RT @theebayk1d: The @Pirates - Bucco Tweetup is in only 12 days... http://t.co/JuKYRFe4 << I've already got tix, will stop by the tailgate.

May 14, 2012 4:32 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

I'm downloading the MySQL Admin and one of the mirrors is @pairnetworks. What do you think they'd do if I showed up with a blank CD?

May 8, 2012 9:21 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Business

This @cdixon quote is the perfect way to think about facebooks valuation... http://t.co/GjzhPGSm

May 17, 2012 4:32 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

GM Announces that they'll pull ads from Facebook 3 days before IPO... that's a little bit dick. http://t.co/lIv1CF8z

May 16, 2012 1:26 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Cloud and Enterprise IT

Take a quick tour of IBM SmartCloud Monitoring (whitepaper) - http://t.co/LCpDraKc #IBMcloud

May 17, 2012 3:55 pm via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@mirv_pgh

Megan Irvine

Me

Dropping down to the river to see the sky scrapers is a great way to jump start the motivation on a lazy Sunday. http://t.co/4JSVa4kU

May 20, 2012 3:59 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Every year there are a few people that post happy birthday to my facebook wall that make me go, "really? I thought you hated me?"

May 16, 2012 2:10 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Got my first Birthday present... a 4:30am invite for a conference call. Awesome.

May 15, 2012 5:43 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

I really want this condo, too bad I put my condo shopping asside for a year or two. http://t.co/z6VjwLxt

May 14, 2012 4:27 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Ahhhh, capitalism. http://t.co/CihDyAOV

May 9, 2012 9:08 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Pittsburgh

As much as I miss NY this is the city that will always have my heart #Pittsburgh http://t.co/Ydt5DpqQ

May 19, 2012 1:16 am via InstagramReplyRetweetFavorite

@hollyrose_HAYYY

Holly

Crews ready site for new #PNC tower Downtown http://t.co/TwiWpMkB #construction #Pittsburgh

May 16, 2012 7:33 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@PittsburghPG

Pittsburgh news now

Pittsburgh has the second highest percentage of people living alone: http://t.co/u58AMhqr

May 10, 2012 7:26 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Social Media

Facebook has a Chief Privacy Officer... there's an easy job, "You get none, I'm going to go take a nap under my desk."

May 15, 2012 1:17 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Sports

Throw back Jerseys for tonights game. a few guys may get a McDonalds sponsorship after the color combination for tonights game. Haha.

May 19, 2012 1:46 pm via UberSocial for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@GrillCheese49

Jason Grilli

Great @whygavs post: Want to score more runs? STOP GIVING AWAY OUTS! http://t.co/K8hwS3Ab

May 15, 2012 11:54 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

RT @cwpress: ZOLTAN - http://t.co/kMchUscm << @cwpress has THE shirt for the bucco bandwagon this year.

May 14, 2012 4:53 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

How fast is @TheCUTCH22? He scored from #BUCN second base on a #BUCN grounder to the #BUCN Short Stop. #ReadItOutLoud

May 10, 2012 7:38 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Because of rain and flights, the Altoona Curve (#Pirates AA) will play a 7 inning game today. #LittleLeague

May 9, 2012 12:11 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Big Ben graduated with a degree in Education, something tells me it'd be hard for him to find a teaching gig. http://t.co/t6ZhhLR9

May 7, 2012 4:29 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Startups

RT @levie Mom: you're my only investor that chose to take hugs instead of equity. U might not make a good VC, but u make a great mother

May 13, 2012 11:39 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Didn't see this @fredwilson quote before, but love it: “scarcity is a shitty business model” - welcome to the #postscarcity

May 8, 2012 1:00 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@NickPinkston

Nick Pinkston

Other

30 years ago the government had the best technology. 20 years ago, enterprises. 10 years ago, consumers. Now it's 4-year-olds.

May 20, 2012 1:05 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@levie

Aaron Levie

Siri, why don't animals get to vote?

May 18, 2012 3:30 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@ZooeySiri

Zooey Asks Siri

Remember when meetings were with real people in real rooms and you didn't hear "Who Joined?" every 14 seconds in the cube farm?

May 9, 2012 7:02 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

RT @TheOnion: Inaugural Paula Deen .05K Walk For Diabetes Research Course Map http://t.co/LJYsYVZN << I love that the Onion is always so PC

May 7, 2012 3:19 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Unsolicited Advice

Great post on why you shouldn't learn to code... unless you REALLY want to: http://t.co/pM6elYIi

May 15, 2012 12:58 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

In my opinion, if you blog, learning (as explained by @cdixon http://t.co/2rqHZ5EQ) should be at least one of your goals (if not your only)

May 11, 2012 12:50 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

The wise, respected leader has been consistently wise for long enough to be respected. Fight the temptation to be stupid for a headline.

May 9, 2012 2:57 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Posts From This Blog

Blog Post: A Thought on the occasion of my 29th Birthday. http://t.co/aM0IiOnX

May 16, 2012 2:01 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: Apparently the best girls for me are in Massachusetts, come on Pittsburgh girls. http://t.co/hpStCZma

May 14, 2012 4:30 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: I'll bet http://t.co/yF3zMW2i could provide a bunch of answers with their questions. http://t.co/hpStCZma

May 14, 2012 1:23 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: The Way I'm Seeing the "Talent War" for Tech Talent in the Burgh http://t.co/TjvbYsNg

May 10, 2012 3:48 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: I had two reflections on Zynga's #Interop presentation about the virtues of their Hybrid Cloud: http://t.co/9CGJw5PQ

May 9, 2012 2:49 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: Been thinking for a while about how to compare Amazon to both PaaS and IaaS vendors, the answer's in food: http://t.co/vudgKra4

May 7, 2012 4:30 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Last year I lead my birthday post off with the same quote I cited above and spoke of striving to retain the spirit that no dragon is unslayable.  29 has struck me with a bit of urgency and this year I’d like to reflect on action.

The “appetite for adventure over the life of ease” is the most romantic way to put that need for action.  The reality is that if your adventures are in the world of business and entrepreneurship it’s an appetite for sleep deprivation and stress that will be prevailing over that life of ease.

It’s only by accepting that life of adventure (and stress) that the dragon becomes ACTUALLY slayable.  Last year’s post missed this point and could be read as encouraging a life of believing you could slay a dragon without actually taking one on.

So look for me to grab my sword and put in a lot of extra hours this year.  It’s time I met one of these dragons.

P.S.  I wrote this entire post sitting up on my hotel bed while taking a break from my side project.  I then did a search for images with “Knight” in the title and LOOK what I found.  Is that not the perfect image for this post?

I’m not planning to invest in Facebook, but if I were, I would be hoping he sticks to his guns and wears the sweatshirt.  Better yet, I’d hope that he pulls some stunt, maybe something like a wool suit-like two button hooded sweatshirt.  If it were my company going public this morning, I’d be strutting to the bell (yes, I would fly there instead of doing it from California) in a brand new, hand-tailored, $10,000 suit that I’d probably never wear again.  I’m not Zuck though (closes his eyes and day dreams for a moment), Mark Zuckerberg has craftily built his sweatshirt in to a brand.  It’s a brand that’s worth a lot with developers.  The fact that he’s both a capable CEO and an extraordinary developer with developer cred, is a ridiculously valuable asset for Facebook.  In a world where top developers are worth millions per year, the last thing an investor (even a dapper dan wall street investment banker) should want is for Mark to do something to sacrifice his brand in the tech community.

I have spoken before about the potential for, and profitability of, dating sites.  Over the weekend I spent a little time fooling around with OKCupid and I came away pretty impressed.  I suppose the world may always need Match.coms for simplicity, but OKCupid does something very interesting with questions.  They ask you a ton of them and then use those to match you with other people.  They’re questions about how you like to date, the kinds of jokes you like to tell, the lifestyle you lead, even how you like your sex.  They also have a pretty brilliant way of getting you to answer the questions; you can see if someone you’re interested in has answered a question, but you can only see their answer if you also answer that question.  Great Ideas.

Also, after a day or so of being a member and answering maybe 60 questions, I got an email with the charts above.  I’ll bet they could create some pretty interesting correlation charts with the kind of data that produced those.

1. There’s a shortage of quality programmers and technologists nationwide.
2. In Pittsburgh there is a shortage of big companies doing sophisticated projects.
3. Pittsburgh’s tech startup scene, while healthy for a city our size, is lacking in funding.
4. The economy, while recovering, is cautious at the moment.  Most companies have seen a turn around in earnings, but are still trying to reduce costs.

1. In the hype about cloud it’s easily to lose track of just how immature we are so far.  The fact that with all the cloud options out there in the world, a company as new as Zynga would choose to leave some of its processing internal is worth noting.  It’s not that what older companies do doesn’t matter, but I think the new companies are the ones to watch.  They’re not burdened by legacy computers, datacenter leases, employees, etc… They make their decisions based on what technologies are best/cheapest and apparently Zynga does not yet believe that that is public cloud.
2. We’re all used to the security concerns associated with public cloud, but Zynga (who, as a gaming company, doesn’t have quite the security concerns of a bank or a company with lots of IP) has a different reason to prefer internal cloud sometimes, “Zynga dissected how its game logic ran in the public cloud before designing its zCloud data centers and found many ways to eliminate bottlenecks and improve performance, he said.” and “Zynga also is able to order arrays of servers that are designed to perform particular functions in Zynga’s data centers. The company’s ability to order hardware optimized as Web servers, data base servers, and application servers allows it to operate with a higher degree of efficiency in its own data centers than it could on Amazon servers.”  To me both of those problems are solvable, and it’s probably only a matter of time before PaaS and IaaS companies mature with specialties in web or gaming.

In conversations the past couple weeks this point has really been hardened for me, but I’ve found a more useful analogy then the toolkit one.  I’ve found it’s easiest to look at deploying your workload in the cloud as a meal.  You can get differing levels of help with your meal, but at the end of the day you can eat no matter what:

1. If you’re developing and deploying your own software in your own datacenters you could think of yourself as a farmer.  You don’t have dependencies on the outside world (nor the security exposures and counter-party risks associated with them), but you also have to plant, harvest and cook just to get your meals.
2. IaaS is more like shopping at a farmers market.  There’s still quite a bit of work involved to turn the raw ingredients you pick up in to a meal, but at least you’re not farming.  In this step though, if the farmers at your market don’t raise the cows the way you’d like, you’re going to be stuck with a crumby steak.
3. What Amazon has created is a supermarket.  You can just buy the beef, the pasta, and the tomatoes if you want, but you can also buy hamburger helper, a bottle of Ragu or even a frozen lasagna.  There’s still some work involved on your end with all of these options, but less then there was before.  You increase your risk because if the grocery store accidentally breaks every bottle of your favorite Ragu (or worse yet stops carrying it) you may have to adapt quickly to an inferior solution.
4. True platform as a service is like eating at a restaurant.  You can pick your restaurant, but once you’re there you are stuck with what’s on the menu.  There’s always a risk that meal will be horrible and if it is, all you can do is send it back.  You can’t add more oregano or try again next week with the same ingredients, if the restaurant you selected makes awful ravioli, you’ll eat awful ravioli, nothing at all, or pay for dinner twice.  On the other hand, there’s very little work on your part and often the costs are quite low compared with buying all the ingredients and investing all the labor to cook.  Also, while there is some risk that the restaurant won’t have what you like, how many of us are skilled enough cooks that we are less likely to burn our dinner then a guy who has sat in that kitchen and made the same entrees every day for the last 6 months?

On to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Me

Fireworks night after a great game! (@ PNC Park w/ 131 others) [pic]: http://t.co/ZTpz4BbC

May 6, 2012 2:13 am via foursquareReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

One upside to working outside Pittsburgh is that the second I get off the plane the bullshit is over. http://t.co/ms2IafbU

May 4, 2012 7:42 pm via foursquareReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Walking through lower Manhattan is a trip tonight with the occupiers. Cops, helicopters, road blocks, crazy

May 2, 2012 12:10 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Pittsburgh

Highmark, UPMC reach agreement until 2015 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette http://t.co/uEUYt9Bg via @pittsburghpg

May 2, 2012 7:36 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Sara_pittPG

Sara_pittPG

Social Media

Thrilled and honored to be presenting at this year's #WDS event on the state and opportunities of indie/self publishing!

May 3, 2012 11:30 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@MattGartland

Matt Gartland

Tech News

Three high profile litigations involving Oracle. What are they doing over there? No more companies to buy so sue the rest?

May 3, 2012 12:27 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@cyreynolds

Chuck Reynolds

Other

'Those who conceive, develop,& understand software are the new masters of the universe' @medriscoll http://t.co/CkghywcG the new reality

May 6, 2012 2:18 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@VanessaAlvarez1

Vanessa Alvarez

Blog Posts From This Blog

Blog Post: Why am I excited to get on an earlier flight home from NYC? The Pirates of course... http://t.co/qm6QKXnG

May 4, 2012 5:41 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: http://t.co/2cNgGaV5 is releasing APIs... could be a bigger deal than when Facebook became a platform: http://t.co/pNd5rz1A

May 1, 2012 10:19 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: In the world of 2 year / $1B Instagram sales, @Vivisimo_Inc's sale shows that patience also pays. http://t.co/SlHBB2Rk&#8230;

May 1, 2012 4:30 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell