Dan Mayer's Blog

Mark and Liz's Wedding

2008-07-01T07:40:20Z

Erin and I had a great time getting to hang out and see each other at Mark and Liz's wedding, and here is a awesome photo from the ceremony.

Bike to work day

2008-06-26T06:03:50Z

Today was bike to work day. We walk to work almost everyday, but to show our support we biked over to a meeting, and then to our office later. Luckily it wasn't bike to work and home day. After working in the office all day we forgot that we biked to work, and we walked home, hence leaving our forgotten about bikes at the office. Awesome! Oh well good times, I just fixed one of the four major problems that came to my attention today, arggg... I am thinking we better rock it this weekend.

I have less than 100 emails to deal with

2008-06-16T04:25:38Z

I have been trying to get better at a habbit of archive old conversations that are no longer needed, and starting emails that need to be dealt with in a day or two. I did this awhile ago and cleared my emails down to just the newest and most important, but I started slacking and it quickly grew to a mess of over 1500 emails. I am now down to less than 100, some of which are recent / active email threads, and some are starred emails I have to deal with. Either way I am hoping to slowly go through these last few starred emails and then I will finally be set up right to be on top of my email situation. Rock on, so hopefully that means I will less often ignore and fail to respond to people who write me emails, so if you feel like I missed over you last letter or never got back to you or anything like that, shoot me an email now, cause I should be all over it.

Where I am writing

2008-06-13T04:09:35Z

I don't have a lot of free time to be writing currently. So the things I am writing tend not to be for this blog. If you want to read about what I am up to, check out our new company blog, The Devver Blog. We are also running on WordPress for the first time instead of MovableType, which is kind of cool. It just gives me a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Yeah it is a little less of my personal life, but I do actually reread what I write there. So you will see far fewer typos, grammatical errors, etc... So far things are going well with the new company and project.

Number of US men who will die in 2008

2008-06-07T18:18:21Z

I thought this was interesting. It is funny how you see the laws align around really weird and unlikely deaths that happen to really upset the public... Fireworks for example... Number of US men who will die in 2008

Apple Service Screwed Up

2008-06-06T21:59:55Z

Apple is known for pretty good costumer service (source), so when I was having a minor issue with my mactop (Macbook laptop), I thought I would bring it in for repairs. I will share my really crappy experience with Apple customer service that followed. I had about 45 days left on my warrant. I had purchase one of the small 13 inch refurbished laptops from Apple. Apple refurbished laptops come with a 1 year warranty. My laptop had been pretty awesome, it had one slightly annoying problem that was happening more and more often. The backlight would flicker a bunch and sometime flicker entirely off for a moment or two. I figured it was just a matter of time before it flicker off and never returned. I decided that it was worth having the service before my warranty ran out. I brought it in, and apple said it would take 3 to 5 days and they would ship it back to me, but I was about to leave on vacation so I decided to bring it in when I returned. I attempted to drop by the apple store so they could mail it in for repairs. I was told I would have to get an appointment to drop my laptop off. They checked online and they were out of appointments for the rest of the day. I brought it back the next day. My laptop was then shipped off right before Memorial Day weekend, after which I started a new job on Tuesday and figured I wouldn’t have my laptop in time. Tuesday morning, amazingly my laptop was at the door. I excitedly rip it open plug it in and power it on. It comes up for about 30 seconds before making this scary image, and it refuses to ever boot again. Apple had just shipped me back a broken laptop, it was a new case, it had my hard drive, but it didn’t work. It wouldn’t even make a boot sound. I ship the mactop back to apple for a second attempt at it being fixed. Friday afternoon I get a call while at the office, I am told my laptop is in Boulder, but it had an incomplete address. So it returned to the Boulder Fedex service center and they would try again Monday, or I could pick it up. So I leave work early Friday after spending my first week at a new job with out a laptop, to pick it up about 15 minutes away or so. Now that I have the package I check the incomplete address. Apple mailed my computer to: Dan Mayer Apt #23 Boulder, CO 80304 There was no street address, and everything previous with apple had my full and correct address. I checked online and apple has my full and correct address in my online account as well. Through out all of this I had probably spent an hour and a half on the phone with apple between the various repairs / disrepairs. So I open the box, plug it in, power it up… and it works thank god it works! It now makes a weird humming sound when the screen is open at random… My laptop mouse key now sticks and doesn’t respond well to double clicking. So after all the ordeal my laptop is back and basically in worse shape then when I originally sent it in. I will say that the screen doesn’t flicker anymore, which is good, but the mouse key is driving me nuts, and I don’t really trust sending it in to Apple again.

Goodbye Denver

2008-05-31T22:28:59Z

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.

Quicksort in Processing.js

2008-05-29T04:45:53Z

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.

Lijit

2008-05-28T16:57:08Z

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.

Hooray for Dom

2008-05-27T03:44:02Z

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...

Indian Jones and the not very satisfying movie

2008-05-26T00:55:46Z

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!

Catching up with Indian Jones

2008-05-25T19:36:46Z

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

Another Flobots making it big post

2008-05-23T16:30:54Z

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!

Goodbye Glider, passing 600 miles

2008-05-14T02:35:55Z

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.

bloggy blog blog

2008-05-13T00:18:46Z

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.