Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

There’s a great post on Michael.net about Sysinternals - Michael has listed each one with a brief description about what they do. It saves you a couple of hundred clicks on Microsoft’s site. These are a collection of utilities (that were acquired by Microsoft) that let you really see what’s going on in your computer. I use Autoruns & ProcExplorer regularly.

Autoruns let’s you see what loads at startup and let’s you check or uncheck specific items to allow or prevent them from running. I used it to turn off some horrendous AOL port controller that I couldn’t uninstall.

Procexplorer let’s you not only see what’s running, but see which files they are using and the paths for those files. Great for troubleshooting if you’re concerned you might have a spyware infection or if something is hogging memory or CPU cycles.

These two utilities are great - you just unzip and doubleclick - no installers, no restart. All software should work this way.

Fred Wilson has a post up called “A Return to Royalty?” in which he talks about the fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, then the past four Presidents will have come from just two families. To tell the truth, I don’t find this surprising at all. I think in any endeavor, success is always clustered. VCs tend to work with entrepreneurs who work with other successful executives and they tend to succeed over and over again. Families who succeed publicly tend to have a certain definition of success and this gets imprinted on their children. Relationships matter all over the world.

I came across an amazing story in the UK’s Daily Mail which was making the rounds on the front page of Reddit. It was about a British Airways flight that flew through the dust cloud from a volcanic eruption near Indonesia in 1982 and lost all four engines.

With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.

Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.’

The crew didn’t panic as all four engines failed and the jumbo became the world’s largest glider. They knew how their plane handled with no power and how much time they had aloft. As oxygen masks deployed, the captain realized that not all of them worked. In order to keep his passengers alive, he traded 6,000 ft of altitude (sort of important when you have no power) so they could breathe. Amazingly, as he flew into denser air, three out of four engines were able to restart and he was able to get his plane on the ground in one piece in spite of no instruments and a damaged windshield.

It’s moments like this when you really appreciate what pilots do. On routine flights, autopilots and ILS systems can handle the workload, but when things go wrong, you want someone who knows what to do in charge. The amount of training that airline crews go through is what makes it possible to make good decisions under pressure.

I’ve had a long standing love affair with planes and flying so this story may not mean much to you, but it got me thinking so I thought I’d share. While most of us will never be in a position where our decisions directly affect this many lives, the general lesson here still holds. You have to practice your craft and stay ready so when the time comes, you can act with confidence and achieve your objective. This lesson applies throughout life - in sports, in school, at work.

Note: Image and quote from The Story of BA flight 009 and the words every passenger dreads… by Zoe Brennan

It’s far more powerful if a system or website can let a user register, fill out a profile and then tell them who they should consider connecting to. This way, the system generates immediate me-value for the user. As soon as the profile is filled out, there’s a payoff. LinkedIn does a great job with this. You put in the companies you’ve worked at and it presents you with a list of people that worked there as well.

If you’re on a site and put in where you live, what you do, which sports team you support, the system should instantly let you know who else shares those interests. The next evolution of this should be a system that doesn’t ask you to fill out a profile, but rather watches what you read, what you click on, what you bookmark and uses that to make decisions about helping you discover connections that would be of interest.

Relevance discovery is clearly a hard problem, but it should be solvable. I think if you can pull it off, you’d have a site that would delight users because it would present them with information that would surprise and delight them.

If you are a dog owner in Seattle, you owe it to your four-legged friend to take him or her to Magnusson Park at 65th & Sand Point Way. It’s a huge off-leash park with areas to play fetch in, a secure beach to swim from and even a separate park for ’small and shy dogs.’ I was there with Macy today and she had an absolute blast.

Magnusson was an old Navy base and on one stretch, you can see turbine blades from decommissioned submarines driven into the ground as a sculpture. It’s a great spot to take your dog. We’ll be there again tomorrow.

We just released grocery coupons on Judy’s Book. It’s a click-to-print model via a partner which isn’t the best user experience, but it’s something. I’m not a couponer myself, but these are a great way to save on regular purchases. They are product, not store-specific so can be used wherever you shop regularly. You can browse them at the site, or use the coupon finder to search by product or category.

There’s a hilarious post by Eric Sink about setting secure passwords and fingerprint sensors that you have to read. It’s very reminiscent of the old “I’ll put this in a safe place” at which point of course, you promptly proceed to forget it.

Jason Yip has a great post at Martin Fowler.com about making sure the ‘daily scrum’ is productive. One of the key concepts in his post centers around focusing on three things:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What are my obstacles?
• What do I intend on accomplishing today?

Another key concept focuses on the need to build shared commitment. All these items make a ton of sense, but the hard part is implementing them consistently. We had tried to do this at Judy’s Book, but had let them lapse. His post inspired me to try and start them up again. We’re in a critical phase of our business and need to make sure we are executing as efficiently as possible. I think implementing some of these ideas will help us achieve that.

The Salmon Princess (my girlfriend Alison - it’s a long story for another day) and I were having a discussion about laptops in bed. This is a little long, but bear with me. Like any self-respecting geek, I spend a lot of time casually reading on my laptop. Early in our relationship (before she got her MacBook Pro), she warned me to never bring my laptop to bed. As soon as she got her machine, she was the first person to blow this rule out of the water, but that’s neither here nor there. Today, I got an email from her which read, “Laptops in bed - I’ve found a loophole.” She then sent me a link to the ErgoPod 500:

For only $3995, you too can become the biggest geek on earth. You will have great posture though.

As someone new to the blogging world, seeing the wealth of stat-related tools out here has been eye-opening. I find myself wishing my Google Analytics and Feedburner statistics updated more frequently so I could see in real-time what was happening on my blog. There are lessons here that should be applied to user generated content. Showing people how often their content gets looked at, bookmarked, clicked on etc can only help drive user engagement. In addition, most people act to optimize any metric they look at regularly. If you can line up the stats with the behavior you hope to encourage, you have a built-in incentive for your users to continue to do the things you want them to do.