damontorgerson.com

Last Saturday morning, I hooked up with Brooke and her crew to go surfing. As I get in the back seat of her truck, I recognize one of the "crew" but can't place him. It was either undergrad or from wildland firefighting. He's a pretty big guy and would not look out of place on a unit crew. He introduces himself as Adam and his friend in the front seat, Amy. I realize the odds are minimal but I can't shake the feeling that I know Adam. He offers that he used to wrestle so maybe I saw him on TV. I grew up in Valemount and the only wrestling other than the WWF was Stampede Wrestling...and I don't really remember Stampede Wrestling at all. But it's not possible that I'm in the back seat of a truck in Nicaragua about to go surfing with someone that was in the WWF. I mean, what are the odds? I slowly ask, "Are you the Edge's brother?" Maybe the Edge's brother was in Stampede Wrestling??? He did kind of look like Edge after all. "No, I was Edge," he says smiling. It was pretty funny. I don't think he'd been mistaken for a look alike of himself. Turns out that he and Amy - aka Lita, I had to ask - are just on vacation and relaxing in Nicaragua.

Now some disclosure. In the late 90's and early 00's, there was more than one occasion where I'd find myself watching Monday Night Raw with a few friends. One guy in particular was a huge fan and I'm pretty sure he would have lost his mind if our places were switched on Saturday. In addition to the likes of the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin, there was a group of popular tag teams that can only be described as bat shit crazy. They would do 20' somersaults off of ladders and slam each other through tables. Each match seemed more extreme than the next. In that group was the team of Edge & Christian. Their characters were the "fast talking pretty boys" and they really went over the top. One of the most entertaining things about them were their finishing moves: the unprettier and the con-chair-to. In the unprettier you slam your opponent's face into the mat thereby "unprettying" him and with the con-chair-to you slam your opponent's head between two chairs: concerto! So, while I didn't immediately recognize them, I was certainly familiar with Adam and Amy's work.

We get to the beach and Brooke, Amy, and I go surfing. Turns out that making a career of jumping off of ladders takes it's toll and getting pounded by waves isn't in Adam's immediate future. I, on the other hand, can take a beating and take a beating I did. After about 90 minutes of getting pounded by waves far beyond my skill level, I decided that I had experienced enough time in the washing machine for one day. My timing was good as Amy also had enough and Brooke had broken her board. The sea was angry that day my friends.

We rinse off and head back to town. As we're bouncing along, Adam turns to me and says, "Catch the score from last night?" It had to happen eventually. You can't put two traveling Canadians in a confined space for long without hockey coming up. So for the rest of the drive I'm sitting in the back seat talking hockey with "Edge." He had a funny story about having a match against a Canadian moments after the Golden Goal. We also covered about why the Stanley Cup is the most awesome trophy in sports. The arguments were very compelling. I mean, how stupid would it be if after winning the playoffs you won a puck on a triangle? Really stupid. Amy was somewhat less enthusiastic about the topic but we didn't hold it against her. Oh, he's a Canucks fan.

Other than seeing that construction had started on our casita, this was the highlight of my trip. Meeting Amy and Adam brought back a flood of memories of hanging out with the boys after dinner on Monday night and laughing as Denton brought everyone in the room up to speed on why the wrestlers were behaving the way they were and what we might expect in and out of the ring. I chatted with Devin later that night and "unprettier" was mentioned a few times. We both had a good laugh. Amy and Adam are extremely down to earth, genuinely nice people. If you didn't know anything about wrestling, you'd never guess that they were kind of a big deal. It's nice to see good people have success and it was a real pleasure meeting them. I hope they really enjoy the rest of their time in Nicaragua.

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How not to keep a low profile

Sun, 29 May 2011 10:39:00 -0700

Boy, the police are sure corrupt here and really have it out for whitey...and by "whitey" I mean jackasses

On Thursday, we arrived at Montecristo and down to our casita site. Jorge Estrada and the crew were there working. There was about two weeks of work (North American timing) accomplished since we were last there. They had a bit more of the foundation completed and had the beginnings of a water system established. I figure this probably took two months to achieve. They're constructing much of the casita off site (metal work) and the hope is that it will be done in 5 months. My guess is closer to 9 months. But progress is progress. We stayed in a model of our casita and it's very nice. It can sleep six and the soaking pool is great. No scorpions or crocodiles although we did see what looked like a garter snake: "Hmmmm...is that a snake that we should be worried about???"

The next day we take off for San Juan del Sur. As we're leaving we drive through a few mud puddles and since we're in a rental, Chris thinks we should drive like we're in the Race to Pike's Peak. Needless to say, there are a lot of pot holes and we're bouncing along like someone just gave us a free car and a time machine because we're driving like we're 16 again. As we're bouncing along a guy walks out in the middle of the road attempts to wave us down.

Chris: "We're not stopping right?"

Damon: "Uhhh, <expletive> no! That's how people get into trouble"

So we swerve around this guy doing 80km/h on a road that you should really be doing 30km/h and the posted limit is 40km/h. About 200 yards down the road we notice a police truck.

"Hey, look at that police truck! It's call sign is "DIE". That's funny."

"Yeah, that's funny."

About 10 minutes later, we hear sirens and the guy we swerved around is pulling us over. Oh, and his driver is packing an AK-47.

Here's a fun game to play. When you're in a country where you don't speak the language...try to answer the questions they ask anyway. And point a lot...at your friend. After discovering beer in the car, he either asked "How many beers do you have?" or "How many beers have you had?" Turns out 10 is not the correct answer. Back to the "pointing at your friend" part. After we clear up that we haven't been drinking - we're just naturally this smart - he says something and Chris points at me. Turns out he asked "Who's going to pay me the 'get out of here tax'?" I finally figure out what he wants and so I ask him in my best Spanish "How much?" And this is where he demurs...because a police officer asking for a bribe would be wrong...immoral even...how could I even imply such a notion. Holding your passports and your friend outside at the end of an AK-47 is neither wrong nor immoral...but quantifying how much makes this all go away...would be in bad taste. So we settled on a $25 donation, which I would later learn is about twice the going rate.

We get out of there and we're both laughing and talking about how $25 is a good price for this story. We get about 25 miles down the road and get pulled over again. This is getting a little irritating. We don't know how many more $25's we have. This is a little more formal looking officer and stop. He points at our lights and we think he's saying "Your lights are on." We've turned them on to help other drivers see us as we think it best if we take that extra step to be safe. After he determines that we don't speak Spanish, he chuckles, shakes his head, and sends us on our way. We get pulled over two more times and needless to say there's lots of talk about how corrupt, inept, and generally unsafe things are in Nicaragua.

We finally arrive in San Juan del Sur glad that we won't have to deal with police officers anymore. I get out to stretch my legs. I turn around and it becomes clear why we were repeatedly pulled over.

No visible license plate, no headlights, and two gringos driving like they're on the run. How could that possibly draw attention?

Tomorrow's story involves me surfing with a professional wrestler from Toronto. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried!

p.s., there was a little embellishment in the story...at no point in the day were we in any real danger Mom

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Lincoln Stoll — Compass with Rails 3 on Heroku

Mon, 09 May 2011 19:19:00 -0700

Compass with Rails 3 on Heroku

I’ve noticed plenty of posts around the net on how to get this to work, but none of them worked as is for me on a Rails 3 Beta 3 app using Compass and the Compass 960 plugin
Here’s my cobbled together solution - it’s also a little simpler than some, as it doesn’t try and do things different for heroku and local dev - it keeps it the same, and seems to work OK.
1) Make sure you are using the latest gems
gem 'compass', '0.10.2'
gem 'compass-960-plugin', :require => 'ninesixty'
gem 'haml', '3.0.10'
view raw Gemfile This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
2) Make sure config/compass.rb has any plugins referenced, and set it’s css_dir to tmp/stylesheets - this is writable on heroku.
# Adapted from
# http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/issues/issue/130
# and other posts.
# Create the dir
require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p(Rails.root.join("tmp", "stylesheets"))
Sass::Plugin.on_updating_stylesheet do |template, css|
  puts "Compiling #{template} to #{css}"
end
Rails.configuration.middleware.insert_before('Rack::Sendfile', 'Rack::Static',
                                             :urls => ['/stylesheets'],
                                             :root => "#{Rails.root}/tmp")
view raw config/initializers/stylesheets.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
# This configuration file works with both the Compass command line tool and within Rails.
# Require any additional compass plugins here.
require 'ninesixty'
project_type = :rails
project_path = RAILS_ROOT if defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
# Set this to the root of your project when deployed:
http_path = "/"
css_dir = "tmp/stylesheets"
sass_dir = "app/stylesheets"
environment = Compass::AppIntegration::Rails.env
# To enable relative paths to assets via compass helper functions. Uncomment:
# relative_assets = true
view raw config/compass.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
gem 'compass', '0.10.2'
gem 'compass-960-plugin', :require => 'ninesixty'
gem 'haml', '3.0.10'
view raw Gemfile This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
3) Create a initializer in config/initializers/stylesheets.rb , and set it to serve the generated stylesheets from tmp/stylesheets under /stylesheets . This has to be loaded before the Rack::Sendfile middleware, otherwise it will try to X-Sendfile the CSS file which doesn’t work on Heroku, rather than just rendering it’s contents.
# Adapted from
# http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/issues/issue/130
# and other posts.

# Create the dir
require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p(Rails.root.join("tmp", "stylesheets"))

Sass::Plugin.on_updating_stylesheet do |template, css|
  puts "Compiling #{template} to #{css}"
end

Rails.configuration.middleware.insert_before('Rack::Sendfile', 'Rack::Static',
                                             :urls => ['/stylesheets'],
                                             :root => "#{Rails.root}/tmp")
view raw config/initializers/stylesheets.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
# This configuration file works with both the Compass command line tool and within Rails.
# Require any additional compass plugins here.
require 'ninesixty'
project_type = :rails
project_path = RAILS_ROOT if defined?(RAILS_ROOT)
# Set this to the root of your project when deployed:
http_path = "/"
css_dir = "tmp/stylesheets"
sass_dir = "app/stylesheets"
environment = Compass::AppIntegration::Rails.env
# To enable relative paths to assets via compass helper functions. Uncomment:
# relative_assets = true
view raw config/compass.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
gem 'compass', '0.10.2'
gem 'compass-960-plugin', :require => 'ninesixty'
gem 'haml', '3.0.10'

view raw Gemfile This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

via lds.li

Having difficulty with Compass, SASS, and Heroku? This post will get you there.

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Bringing Transparency to Europe's Farm Subsidies

Fri, 06 May 2011 15:06:00 -0700

via rfahey.org

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Customer Development: Past, Present, Future « Steve Blank

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:16:00 -0700

via steveblank.com

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Bring the Jets home

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:16:00 -0700

via tsn.ca

Bettman's fun little experiment in the desert failed. It's time for the Jets to come home.

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How Big is the Opportunity?

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:38:00 -0700

One of the benefits of working at a successful, software company is the access to great market research tools. When I'm done building reports that we hope will change corporate behaviour - we've been pretty damn successful - and when I'm taking a break from trying to increase the velocity of our project, I check out the library for research material.

To that end, I got some great market size research material. Here's my first, very rough market opportunity information.

Here's some really rough - extremely rough - market sizing estimates. The point of this information is to establish a little bit of a guess to determine if the size of the market is worth pursuing. I haven't done too much analysis on the numbers yet because I don't know if there's a legitimate need; market size where a legitimate need doesn't exist is pretty much the same as zero. So I'm not spending too much time worrying about total available market just yet but the information I have does give me an appreciation for the context that these businesses operate in.

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Guesses and Tests

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:48:46 -0700

This week was challenging. I found so many reasons not to work on my appointment reminder. The problem I had was with get out of the building. It's been a long time since I put my ideas out there and it's a little frightening. It's that kind of thinking that that Procrastination preys upon.

It's not that I accomplished nothing, I did get the easy consultant-y stuff done. I have my first business model canvas completed. I set up my first interview with a customer. But if I'm honest, I didn't put in the effort I could have. I didn't put in the effort I should have. I did the easy stuff. Sometimes, it's easy to be the consultant.

This week I am testing my Customer Segment hypothesis (guess) that the appointment reminder is something that small, service based businesses provide value to. I'll also want to start understanding what my MVP will be. It's been really hard for me to not start coding up a great Tropo, Ruby on Rails appointment reminder that solves the problem I think chiropractors have with missed appointments. It would be so easy to turn inward and code. But I did that last time and it didn't work so on Tuesday I'm meeting with Matt Nash of Nash Chiropractic to see how/if an appointment reminder bring value to his business. In addition to interviewing Matt, I'll be cold calling from my list of 50 customers. So, at the end of this week I'll have hit my cold car target and hopefully have 3 - 5 interviews done.

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Goal for week 1: Write down guesses and tests

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 17:18:55 -0700

After my last dentist appointment, I had a thought, “Why are they calling and sending postcards to remind me of my appointment?” I understand why but with email and mobile phones, why not just send me a text or drop me an email? As I was driving home, I thought of the costs incurred with their current approach. Napkins aside, it had to be at least $20 per day for the postcards alone. Then there’s the labour. Couldn’t the labour be redirected more effectively? Really, paying someone to dial a phone? Now, $20 a day is small money compared to the revenue lost for a missed appointment so it makes sense to have some kind of reminder. My chiropractor also calls me to remind me of appointments. My hair stylist too. A quick google showed a few incumbents. Looking at their employment pages signaled a costly business model, relative to what I guess I can do. For example, Smile Reminder has a $399 setup and a $299 monthly contract. They have a lot of features and appear to cater to physicians offices but with 60 employees for 10,000 customers it appears…. A quick google also showed a guy in Japan that went through almost the exact same thought process I did. The idea’s at least worth talking to some potential customers.

Since I put UncleRoss down – there must be a better way of saying that – there’s been a lot of talk about lean startups. So much so that pivot is now a cliche. Even though lean has gone mainstream, the principles really resonate with my experience with TDD/BDD: write your tests and work to make your code business green. I also really like Steve Blank’s advice to get out of the building, which was a major failure on UncleRoss. I think the overuse is by those not really practicing it so much as being rewarded for movement rather than progress. Reminds me of engineering groups that say they’re agile when they really mean undisciplined.

This week, I’m going to put the business model in my head onto paper and figure out how I can test each guess. I’ll write out who I think the customers are, what I think the MVP is, and how I’m going to sell. For customers, I’m not going write out the segments and establish a local list of folks I can interview. This is part of establishing the test but I’m being explicit because not working with customers was an incredibly costly mistake last time. Finally, I’m going to take my first shot at sizing the market and seeing if the idea is worth pursuing.

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