Dan Mayer's Blog

I am traveling around to clear my head before our new project this summer. I travel far to much for someone with out a real job according to one friend, which is probably true, but a part of life when doing the long distance relationship thing.

Sadly my other dog (really my brothers dog) was put to sleep after she couldn't stand up or walk anymore. We will miss you Ginger! I guess that means I am petless.

I am in NYC and so far we have...

Hit an art museum (The Met)
Met up with Dave and ate at supposedly the best Korean food in Manhattan (weird but good)
Seen a broadway show (In the Hieghts)
Walked 4+ miles with a cart to get and bring groceries home
Had some random angry woman follow us around while threatening to kill us
BBQed in Erin's awesome NYC backyard
Seen a TV show filmed (The Daily Show)
Had dinner in Hell's Kitchen
Walked the dog around bunch and taken Spot to the Dog park
Ride the Subway all over the place
Enjoyed a nice evening on the Hudson river having some drinks
Went shopping on fashion avenue, although I didn't buy anything.

I think the plan is to hit one more museum before I go... Good times.

I haven't been blogging as much lately. I have been pretty busy. So I changed up the side bar a bit, it now has my delicious links. I have been adding a bunch of cool links to that fairly often so you can check that out to find out what interesting things I am looking at on the web. Anyways, just wanted to point it out for those that are wondering what I am up to.

I just passed 600 miles on my silly glider and I love it!

For those that know me, they know I have developed some sort of irrational love of my glider. Perhaps it is because it was one of the first things I built on my own that I actually used. Perhaps because I got it with a goal to loose weight and partly because of my glider I now weight less than my goal weight. Perhaps, because it has moved house to house with me since I left college. Perhaps, because everyone seems to mock it for how crappy it is, falling apart, that it counts miles to quickly, and that it is now held together with duck tape. Finally maybe I like it because when I am on it, I think of my grandfather who every day for over 20 decades would ride his stationary bicycle for 10 miles or so to keep in shape. Who knows why, but I had a great dream in my mind of eventually crossing 1000 miles on that thing before it fell apart. It hasn't completely fell apart, but I am now moving somewhere far to small to keep it around and it really doesn't make sense to transport it again as I doubt it could really survive another move. But I knew I had to make one last milestone before we left, so I started setting my sites on 600 miles a few weeks ago, and today I accomplished my goal with my glider partner. Yes to all those out there that hate my glider, I know my 600 miles wasn't real miles, and that I didn't burn near the calories that it would lovingly lie to me about burning, but it still felt pretty good to glide past that last mile.

I am moving to Boulder in 2 days, almost everything I own is in boxes and I am starting to clean everything. Today we donated a bunch of books to the Denver Library and a bunch of random stuff to the Salvation Army. It was great to do some good, while really clearing out the house.

Yeah the flobots are making it huge. They released their album nationally on the 20th, and it seems like they are doing really well. So I figured I would post their new music video and their recent Carson Daly appearance!

The new Handlebars video

It is cool to see that Joe got to come back and play with them on the show!

Nice, well keep on rocking out and I look forward to your upcoming Leno appearance as well. Give it up for Jesse Walker on the bass guitar!

Since I am seeing the new Indy movie today I thought I should catch up with the old indy movies really quick!

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Temple of Doom

The Last Crusade

Top 10 Indy moments

The new Indy was subpar!

I still think it was better than Temple of Doom, but I wasn't really impressed. I don't want to share any spoilers, so I won't really write up a review... I just think George Lucas probably shouldn't be allowed to be involved in any projects of any type anymore... OK that might be a little over the line, but another great series brought to a sad end. Oh well!

My good buddy Dom ran the Boulder Boulder today... Awesome congrats for him, he also did it with an extra 1.4 mile walk on the front and the back getting to and from the start line and the finish line. So he rocks! We also got to play some Starcraft which was awesome!

Dom is also getting ready to move to LA, which is pretty cool. I don't think I would be really into LA, but I am really jealous that he will be getting out to CA. I still have a dream of getting a chance to live in CA sometime! Along with getting ready to move to LA and looking for jobs in LA, Dom started a new blog, my move to LA. Hopefully it will help others thinking about moving to LA, or CA. He is researching little towns and places to live, so it might give others some good ideas on the area as well. I just hope after he moves he updates it some more with the results of the move. The Job, the neighborhood, the activities and things to do in the area...

Tomorrow is a big day, for those in the know...

I have added the Lijit widget to my blog to try out. I know some people for Lijit, and it is always good to help support the local Boulder Startups. So check it out on the right side, and click suprise me to find some random stuff I have put up on the web at one point or another. To bad I don't have a bunch of feeds of the old wastedbrains content so I don't think any of that is really indexed by Lijit, but most of that stuff is really old and if you are reading htis blog you have likely already seen it.

I always liked computer visualization. I think it is fun and interesting, and drawing Mandelbrot for the first time brought a smile to my face. I always thought I understood sorting, AI, search, and other algorithms best when you could really see them in action. I always enjoyed little videos or applets of a bunch of different sorting algorithms comparing their differences and speeds. I don't really have time right now to do a whole bunch, but when I saw processing ported to javascript I thought I really would have to write a visualization for at least one sort just for the fun of playing around with a cool project.

So here is a link to my Quicksort in Processing.js, it will only work in the very newest browsers (FF3, Opera 9.5, and other beta browsers... feel free to try it out on anything worst thing that will happen is just an empty box... but it will not likely do anything on older browsers). Anyways, just some fun coding to play around with... If anyone can figure out how to make the double buffering / frame rate look good I would love a fix to make the animation run smoothly.

We are going to get the last car loads of stuff from our Denver place. We will be turning in the keys and heading out of Denver. I guess it is kind of odd not knowing when I will next be in Denver, I guess I have little reason to head to Denver very often anymore.

Things have started moving pretty fast the first week at TechStars. We have been in a bunch of meetings, and talking with advisors. We have a ton of work that we need to try to get done tomorrow. Hopefully we will have a really strong and productive week.

It is exciting, and I am happy about the direction things are going for our project right now.