diego's weblog

Nothing like some breaking news to awake you from a blog slumber. Russ announced on his blog the end of Mowser.

Sad news, and I sympathize. Russ and Mike are buddies so I've followed the travails of Mowser closer than, well, almost anybody, so this also is a bit more personal for me. I've been there. My previous startup, clevercactus, also ran out of money after having put everything I had into it, and I experienced something similar (although a bit less drastic) in terms of financial impact. A lot of us are used to abundance and generally have absolutely no idea how stressful it is (to put it mildly) to have to choose what food to buy to avoid breaking the bank.

The good news in all this is that failure is a HUGE learning opportunity, something that isn't said enough. Throughout the process you're consumed by trying to make it work, but once it's done you can look back and find a lot of things to do differently in the future. Yes, in the future -- I don't believe that you can really say that you'd 'do things differently' since generally we make the best decisions we can with the information we have available at the time. Additionally, the next step (after a period of recovery) after having put everything into something that didn't work can actually be very refreshing and lead to amazing opportunities, like it did with me.

There is also some solace to be found in the online response. When you work with a team of a few people or more you can help each other, but when you work on your own or with a partner it's a harder situation, and the online response helps a lot. In the case of mowser, it's been at the top of techmeme for a while now and it's been covered and discussed all over the place, in part because of Russ' statement that 'the mobile web is dead.' (More on that later), but also due to comments of support.

As for Mowser, it's online for the time being and as Mike says they're looking to sell the site or code, which is in my mind a very possible outcome. It would be cool to see it live on in some form.

Great day today, outside for a while which was possible thanks to non-freezing weather. Days are already getting a bit longer and the speed of life is picking up, even if imperceptibly. I've not been blogging much since I took a vacation last November (and it was much needed rest) but that shouldn't last long. One rule, at least: blogging in new year's is (somehow) good medicine, even if you don't say much. :-)

Have a great 2008!

Mike is leaving AdMob, which means he's looking for the next cool mobile thing to do. Emphasis on cool. And mobile. In both cases, he knows what he's talking about. Just call him up. But hurry, there's only one of him! :-)

As I come out of my self-imposed electronic ban, Happy 40th to Erik! Have a great day!

Last night I got up at 3:30 am for a little while to watch the lunar eclipse as it unfolded. It was really something! From what I've read people all over the US did that too. I didn't see anyone around the neighborhood, but I'm sure that in this geek-heavy area there were more than in most other places. :) Something to remember too, definitely will be watching the next one.

So, apparently one can't procrastinate in peace and is constantly (if ever so gently) goaded into posting. First up in this distributed conversation system that we call the blogsphere is a response to Mike and his tagging me for 8 random things. Unlike Russ, I can't come up with an entertaining misdirection like his so I'll just do it straight. I don't generally talk about myself, so this will be good, um, exercise.

We start with the rules:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. Not that many people know that I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My native language is Spanish, and I didn't really speak significant amounts of English until I moved to the US. However, a few years before that I had started devouring books in English. The first novel I ever read in English was Stephen King's Needful Things.
2. I have written seven novels, none published (no, I haven't tried, they're not ready yet). Three are kind of terrible. Four of them I like, and I'm quite fond of one in particular, and I'm revising it at the moment. I'll release it ... any day now. (Update: 4 are in English, 3 in Spanish. And no, I'm not counting Plan B which is also waiting to be completed...)
3. The fiction books that have influenced me the most are, in no particular order: Neuromancer, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Diamond Age and Gravity's Rainbow.
4. Throughout my life, I lived at least more than two years in various places, that include three countries (Argentina, Ireland, and the US) but four different timezones.
5. For some reason I find #4 above immensely entertaining. Yeah. Don't ask me why.
6. I wrote and presented the first course on Java ever done in Argentina, in May 1995, when it was still at version 1.0a2 (See? Sun has always been weird about numbering releases!). The first day, everyone at the lab I worked in back then was confused about what private protected really meant for scoping. Good thing we got that doozie out of the language early.
7. For a while I became quite the U2 bootleg collector. I have something like 15 GB of U2 bootlegs from concerts and all sorts of special recordings they've made, some of them not officially released. U2 is cool with this, btw, which makes them enlightened in this area. Not surprising, especially since I've also bought all their albums and many singles.
8. Contrary to popular opinion among those who know me personally (and especially those who have worked with me) I do sleep. Just not that much. Never have, even as a kid. Six hours is uncommon. More than 8 means I'm really, really exhausted.

Now, for the tagging phase, I'll start by going around the office (yeah, I'm lazy) in the order in which their URLs come to mind :-)

• Brian
• Martin
• Tom
• Kyle
• Paul
• Jon
• Tom
• David

A new thing I'm trying are what I'm calling miniposts. These are entries that generally don't even have title and are just a quick comment on something I see that is interesting but is not -- or hasn't yet -- developed into a full post. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and now that I am it is as liberating as I thought.

This is of course not new at all -- people have been doing it one way or another since the start of blogging itself, most recently in the form of Twitter and related things. MT, with its structure of title and big boxes that seem to beg for a lot of text creates a strong pull into creating long posts, at least for me. And that sometimes can cramp my style. :)

There are three feeds -- one for all entries+miniposts, one for entries, and one for miniposts only. Take your pick! We'll see where this goes. :)

I started blogging on July 11, 2002. Back then, I had two weblogs -- one for tech stuff (called "Abort, Retry, Fail?") and one for other stuff (called "no comment"). Eventually I decided that it was nuts to have two separate weblogs and I consolidated them into d2r.

Five years and over 2,000 posts later, I decided it was time to reboot. Reboots are good every once in a while, and not just for computers. :)

So now to dream it all up again.

From scratch.

Here.

We.

Go!