walls.corpus

Krispy Kreme Challenge 2009: Recap, photos and links

Saturday, 7 February, 2009 — misc business photography

Kreme Challenge 2009: Recap, photos and links

5,038 people got up this morning for the first nice day in about a week and decided it would be fun to run two miles, eat a dozen glazed doughnuts and then run another two miles. Oh, and try to finish in an hour or less. @5x5 and I were not two of those people. We paid someone to run for us.

As you can see from the numbers above, about 60,456 doughnuts should have been consumed by the registered runners. But let’s allow that not every runner ate his or her full dozen. So, I’ll knock it down to a nice round 60,000. The run benefits charity and this year raised $35,000 for the North Caroine Children’s Hospital. Kick ass, everybody!

This was also the first event that Rex Luther Corporation sponsored a participant at. Rick, our local running entomologist, ran, ate his dozen and returned in under 45 minutes. Certainly a better pace than I’d manage. Overall winner Cameron Dorn finished in 29 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, if you’re chipped and running for an official time, they make sure your doughnut box is empty before leaving Krispy Kreme.

So, what did @5x5 and I do, other than wear the same t-shirt Rick was wearing? Photograph! My photo set is over on Flickr. @5x5’s is up, too. It’s also a gave us a great reason to have a sale. Get 10 percent off during the month of February at CrazyLikeThat.com when you use discount code “kkc” at checkout.

It was especially cool seeing several people in costume. Superman, Flash, Wonder Woman and Homer Simpson (of course), among others. Sure, you could be running for a serious time (as Rick was), but damn, what a way to show some personality. I love events like this, and I’m happy to live in a city that has them.

What else is out on the web from the Krispy Kreme Challenge? Check it out:

• Tweet coverage at search.twitter.com
• There’s also the tag that @5x5 was using for a bit, accidentally.
• Krispy Kreme Challenge photos on Flickr. Covers not only this year, but the last couple years, too.
• Find out how the Krispy Kreme Challenge started
• The Triangle Tweeple team put together a training blog

Now, how did it feel, keeping a fresh dozen down while running? As @landin_t put it: “If u puke, you’re only cheating yourself”

Beer with us

Thursday, 29 January, 2009 — business

A little while after watching David Heinemeier Hansson’s Startup School presentation, 5x5 and I knew we wanted to start businesses. Eventually, we came around to both starting a site she’d had ideas about for years. Roughly six months after we seriously dove into technical development, product creation, filing incorporation paperwork, tax paperwork, sacrificing a tofurkey and so on, we flipped switches and launched our website CrazyLikeThat.com last night.

We fulfilled “Phase 2.” We’re bootstrapping a business. Regardless of what the site does from here, we’ve accomplished something we’re pretty proud of. Moreover, it’s the first of several ideas we have. So, raise a glass with us, join us in celebrating and help us grow.

Thank you.

Make locally

Saturday, 24 January, 2009 — business bootstrap

I know Obama’s inaugural address wasn’t filled with fireworks. I know some coworkers I have a great deal of respect for didn’t hear anything of substance they felt they could buy into.

But there was something in the speech I found particularly appealing as both a software developer and a photographer:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation we understand that greatness is never a given.  It must be earned.  Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less.  It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.  Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. 

I take as a charge to move beyond thinking and do. But there’s more than just bootstrapping a business, posting photographs and writing. There’s a community of makers. Other photographers, other software developers. But it’s bigger than that.

My wife, Robin, and I went to see Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins at Durham’s Common Ground Theatre. A wonderful two act, two person play. Set aside the irony of me talking about making with regard to a play for someone who made, uh, interesting music. Instead, consider a local acting company. Actors, production crew. A space for them. They’re making something, in the Triangle. They put on a play for two hours, change into street clothes and go back out into the night and blend in.

When making, it’s easy to fall into the trap of not following through, of putting something off until tomorrow. Creation is exposition and exposure, and it’s as thrilling as it is frightening. But there’s support for your own creation in seeing others create. There’s also a symbiosis of the creators seeing you.

Get out, meet other makers and support their creations. A hack night, a house concert, something. Meet other people who create and remind yourself of the power of your own creative energy. Collaborate. Learn.

Maybe you’re into theatre. If you are, there’s one more performance of Souvenir, and they’d love to have a sell out tonight. Go.

Chipotle, focus and happier pigs

Saturday, 24 January, 2009 — misc business

Chipotle was one of my favorite lunch stops in Sacramento. It was a decent walk from my old office at 21st and Q Streets as part of the sacbee staff. When I moved to North Carolina in 2002, I missed seeing them. Other fast food burrito chains aren’t nearly as good.

I saw Rafe tweet this morning about not knowing that McDonald’s no longer owned Chipotle. I sent on a link I found through the Chipotle Wikipedia entry that talked about the company’s founding, McDonald’s investment then divesture from Chipotle.

It’s a neat story about doing the things you might not see in a business but things that have a big impact.

Did McDonald’s pressure [founder Steve] Ells to expand and cheapen the menu?

“They probably did give me grief,” Ells said. When McDonald’s suggested adding coffee or cookies, Ells said: “We wouldn’t do it better than anyone else. And I don’t want anything to be part of Chipotle that wouldn’t be the very best.”

And this tidbit that I particularly love and support:

“Until you see factory farming, it’s not part of your thinking,” he said. “As soon as I was exposed to that, I knew I didn’t want to be a part of that. And I certainly didn’t want my success to be part of that exploitation.

"And the pork tastes so much better.”

Ells moved to using naturally raised pork exclusively. Yes, the carnitas burrito now costs $1 more, but the company sells twice as many. And every Chipotle that opens now allows another farmer to join the Niman Ranch collective.

It’s amazing how doing good things in your business can help other people do good things. Chipotle’s been in Raleigh for a little while now, and while I’ve been a few times, I need to make a point of supporting them more with my dining dollar.

Amazon Web Services, EC2 and Windows browser testing

Monday, 19 January, 2009 — business testing web-development

My wife and I are launching a website in the near future. As part of the ongoing development process, we’d been talking about testing alternate browsers. We’re able to test Internet Explorer 6 on our machines using Darwine and ie4osx. Still, that left us without a great option to do IE7 testing.

As it happens, we have an older MacBook Pro 2.33 that fell off of Craigslist. We’d like to sell it, but Robin brought up using it as a Windows machine. I figured with Boot Camp and a Windows license, sure, we could be in business. However, with Windows XP or Vista licenses running between $120 and $300, I was eager to find an alternate solution. Bootstrapping a business means funneling money into product, not blowing the budget on something we’ll use infrequently. The tool can be essential, but infrequently used and thus, too expensive.

I remembered at work, one of our sysadmins set-up up some virtual machines to allow Linux and Mac OS X users to test on Windows XP. So, my thought was to use Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) running Windows Server 2003. Handily, the machine images already use IE7. I fired up EC2 instances about four different times. At $0.125 per instance/hour and a little bit extra for Amazon S3 usage to load the image, our tests wound up at a whopping $0.52.

How I went about this:

• Sign up for and Amazon Web Services account
• Sign up for Amazon EC2 and S3
• Install the Elasticfox Firefox extension
• Downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac
• Download and read the Elasticfox Getting Started Guide. I followed the initial tutorial steps through page 17, with the exception of using the Remote Desktop client in place of connecting via Elasticfox, strictly out of familiarity.

There are other places I can take this, building a machine image with other browsers installed and storing the image on S3. In fact, that’ll probably making sense for us later this week.

There are other, largely unexplored options, mentioned here for future reference:

• Browsershots A service that screen shots a site in several browsers.
• litmus Free testing up to 50 times/month in FF2 and IE7. Or spend $24 for a day pass or get a month for $49. The tests give you screen shots and HTML and CSS validity reports. They do email testing, too.
• CrossBrowserTesting.com

Screen shot services aren’t as useful because while you see what the page renders as, you don’t get a sense of what quirks a user will run into if, say, a JavaScript action fires differently. That’s the situation we’re in. The pages look fine, but don’t act like they should.