Nov 23

So I tried out for ABC’s The Bachelor TV show and apparently made it to the final cut but ultimately lost out to the guy you will see next season. What’s funny is this “alchemist theme” that I’ve experienced before is yet again confirmed in this situation and that is:

that the end destination of the intended journey is not nearly as important as the act of the pilgrimage itself

I’ve found that when you’re in a rut, socially, mentally, emotionally, physically – whatever – the best course of action is to pick a landmark and move towards it. Even if you don’t really know where you are going and never actually wind up reaching that mark, the mere act of working towards a goal catalyzes movement, change, and progress. For me, the process of filming the Bachelor audition video (which against my better judgement is viewable below) released me from two separate ruts- it freed me from an aversive living situation and put me back in touch with an old friend that I’m now dating. Oddly enough, even if the ABC people were to call me up as a replacement for the show, at this point I would have to decline as I’m no longer eligible.

Rut #1 came as a complete shock when I found some creepy footage of the contents of my room being silently filmed by my ex-roommate. Borrowing his camera and finding that footage led to my decision to move and now I’m in a house in Tempe 3min from the office and in a much better situation.

Rut #2 (and the reason for trying out for the Bachelor in the first place) was purely one of being frustrated with my social life. I never did get over this girl I dated a year ago and found myself constantly unable to stop comparing every girl I tried to date afterwards to her. This was an unhealthy yet involuntary behavior on my part; a “record-skipping” mental hang-up on a situation that unfortunately left a gaping hole emotionally and never saw any closure.

Well, two months ago I get an email from a lady saying she found me through LinkedIn and wanted me to try out for the Bachelor on ABC. I blew it off as a practical joke from my friend Matt. There were a few more emails and eventually she called and said “you only have three days left and we really want you to try out, I don’t know why you’re ignoring us.” After speaking with her on the phone I determined it was legit. That weekend I decided at the very least the video filming would be a fun exercise in learning iMovie on the Mac – I filmed a few minutes of video, spliced it together and sent it in. A month later I find out that I actually made it to the final cut but didn’t end up getting the role. I’m no Firestone or Prince so I wasn’t expecting much going into it and was totally flattered to get to the finals. What’s interesting is through the process of filming the testimonials I got back in touch with two friends I hadn’t seen in awhile. One of them ended up putting me up at her place while I sorted out the living situation and the other one basically broke through these blinders I have had on that denied the possibility of ever thinking about her on that level. Having known here for seven years but seeing her in a new way, she is the first girl that makes me forget about Tracy and realize there are other stars in the sky.

Anyways, this is more personal post than I would typically want to share on the blog but hey, it’s Thanksgiving and I think today you get a free license to be sappy about what you are thankful for. I’m grateful for the way things have turned around in the past few months both in the personal and business spheres. I haven’t written a lot lately because things have been moving at a breakneck pace with launching JumpBox but there’s a ton of interesting stuff going on to share and hopefully the holiday weekend will afford a little writing time to do a long-overdue kernel dump for the past few months on things I’ve learned or run across. Happy Turkey Day everybody (and Cold Turkey Day tomorrow ;-). And now here’s Sean being stupid and giving away free blackmail material to his friends with the silly audition video that fortunately didn’t pan out:

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Nov 22

I just helped my friends Youtube the video trailer they’re doing for a movie about their trip to Europe for the World Cup this year. The opening is “once upon a time, nine men conquered all of Europe one beer at a time… this is their story.” Their mission was to represent USA at the World Cup. It’s about 5min long and hilarous. Business always seems to shut down about 3pm the day before Thanksgiving- watch this when things start to get slow.

Among the things I’m thankful for today: the fact that I have such crazy friends for one. Check it:

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Nov 21

Note to self: HIPAA is broken in a big way. I went for a medical procedure yesterday and beforehand I had to sign a 2-page privacy form. Read the highlighted part at the beginning and tell me if you would even bother reading the rest. It basically says the provider has the right to change anything about its policy at any time without consent of the patient and have it apply retroactively to any patient information they’ve gathered in the past.

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Hrmmmm… so lemme get this straight: it’s mandatory that we agree to a contract that says the other party can change anything at will with no consent from us, no repercussions and have it all apply retroactively to what was agreed upon prior? What’s the point in reading the rest of the agreement after that clause if they can change it to anything after the fact on a whim? That’s the equivalent of a car dealer selling you a car and putting a clause in the contract that he can change the price at his discretion after you drive off the lot and you are responsible to pay it. And not only that, but this arrangement now applies to every car he’s ever sold in the past! Would anyone ever do business with such a dealer if they had other options?

I’ve decided that HIPAA is worthless. We had to implement HIPAA-compliant security measures on an extranet project we did for a mental health provider last year but now I realize that all the technical security you put in place is pointless if the policies themselves that dictate how the information gets used (abused) can be changed at random.

It seems to me the way to fix this idiocy is not through consolidating things further by piling up more convoluted governmental policy for all medical providers but instead by purposefully fragmenting the data and eradicating the existing policies to give people choices as to who they can deal with. People will vote with their wallets as to which policies are reasonable. As it stands now you have no option- you are bound by these ridiculous policies and you are dealing with a faceless monster.  And worst of all it’s not even the providers’ fault nor within their power to make things better. The bigger picture here of insurance and governmental bloat is disturbing really. Free market forces will take care of this type of nonsense if they are allowed to work on their own. The role of this country’s administration should be to ensure that free market forces are allowed to do their thing unencumbered, not to legislate and enforce laws about what can be done with information.

There are no less than ten other nonsensical clauses in this swiss-cheese-of-a-privacy policy. This document would simply not fly in a consumer-facing, unregulated business. You can read the whole ridiculous medical privacy policy here if you feel so inclined. Sorry for the rant but this really is just idiocy plain and simple.

Nov 17

We just posted the audio from all the sessions at the first ever Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference last Wednesday. There’s a total of 800MB and 14hrs of information. It was mostly panels and interactive discussions facilitated by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from Arizona who have first-hand experience of what works and what doesn’t in business. We released this audio via the Grid7 Venturecast podcast consistent with our goal of advancing entrepreneurship in AZ. In spite of a few technical glitches that diminished the quality it came out surprisingly decent given the situation. Big thanks to Francine Hardaway and her crew for making it happen.

Nov 07

jumpBoxlogo.pngIt’s not every day you get the privilege to announce the birth a new technology that alters the rules of an industry. I present to you JumpBox, the easiest way to deploy complex server applications. Essentially, we’ve done the tedious part of laying all the plumbing and foundational work so you can deploy any non-windows-based server application on any of the three major virtualization platforms (Xen, VMware and Parallels) in a single file. Companies are waking up to virtualization as a deployment option but are realizing that there are a slew of issues to be solved in order to effectively distribute a virtual appliance and not just a virtual disk image. Rather than everyone expend internal resources to reinvent the wheel, we figured we’d solve it and let the vendors focus that time on building better features in their products.
Ruby on Rails with MySQL? No prob.
PHP with Postgres? Yep.
Python with DB-XML? Indeed.
Java with Fyracle? Sí Señor
Is there anything that can’t be deployed on JumpBox? Well, for now Windows (until MS sorts out their licensing, activation and sprawl of registry entries and other MS freakishness).

I won’t rehash the concept and value of JumpBox here. Watch the 5min flash intro on the site to get an idea of what this is all about. We just pulled into Phx from a roadtrip to VMworld 2006 in LA where we lit up the site. We’ll be demo’ing the technology at Refresh Phoenix tomorrow night and then presenting briefly 8am Wed morning at the AZ Entrepreneurship Conference.

To our engineering team- I am extremely proud of you guys. You are proof that a small group of people passionate about an idea, working together sans beauracracy for four months can truly change the world. You guys rule. This is the first of many great things we will build together.
-sean

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Nov 01

This year Cold Turkey dressed up as the guy from V for Vendetta in those crazy Guy Fawkes masks.We played a fun show at a Halloween house party (thanks Josh). I posted some pics to flickr here. If you have photos from that night, tag them “HalloweenMonsterJam2006.”

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I dug through some old photos and found some pretty ridiculous past costumes.

Here’s the “One Nightstand” from 2001 when it was still an original idea

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…then you have the classic “Cereal Killer”…

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and my favorite (not to mention winner of the scariest costume contest in 2004 at the party we were at):

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and here’s our “Turk ‘o lantern”

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yep, Halloween is a great holiday indeed – a chance where you have a license to be ridiculous and it’s perfectly acceptable. I was at the bank yesterday and asked the teller what their policy is on letting people in with masks on Halloween. No dice – makes sense to me…

So what were you for Halloween?

UPDATE 10/31/07: pretty awesome costume from this year:


More pics from that night here.

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