It being the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it appropriate to be a little thankful.
I have a lot to be thankful for: wonderful wife, http://danielacorte.com, two wonderful kids. And we are all warm, dry, well fed, employed, and happy. That in itself isn’t too shabby these days.
But this Thanksgiving, I’d like to sing the praises of my mother-in-law, Linda
My wife and I have always been able to take a kid-less holiday or gracefully take care of a work emergency. We’ve never had to worry about my daughter or son having a moment of discomfort because we can always rely on Linda.
My wife has infinite faith because she has a lifetime of evidence. I have infinite faith because the worst that could happen is that Linda will turn my kids into copies of my wife. And, frankly, I spend some part of each day hoping she will.
My kids loooooove their grand-mother. They think she walks on water. Not because she gives them more ice cream than we do (she does). Not because she lets them watch TV more than we do (she does). But, because they never doubt for a second that she would walk into a burning house for them (she would). And because she is firm, fair, thoughtful, just, patient, funny, fun, helpful, smart, and omniscient.
And my kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. If I need a dinner reservation, I first mention my wife and if that doesn’t work I drop my mother-in-law’s name. Really… everyone loves Linda and they should.
Recently, one my engineers went away for his first kid-less night away with his wife in five years. He and his wife seem to have a great relationship. And, certainly, they were doing just fine with the previous 1,825 kid-filled days.
But, wow did it sound like they had a great time on their night away.
And here is the thing…
These days, life is extremely complicated and balance seems to be a luxury. It is a luxury to have time off alone with your wife. It is a luxury to be able to concentrate on your new business in the midst of daily chaos. It is a luxury to spend time playing with your kids. I don’t take these luxuries for granted. And I attribute our ability to juggle all this and find some sort of balance to Linda.
And my Thanksgiving day wish is that you all find your own Lindas and the balance that she brings.
You know it’s been a tough day when one of your engineers quotes Zawinski’s law of software development:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
And yes I did point out that we (http://sanebox.com) **are** the in the email business, but in the end he was correct to Zawinski me and that is why I LOVE my engineers!
ronarad asked: Hi Stuart, I am too a big believer in data visualization. I found your insight very useful one hand and very discouraging on the other. I tried to find your platform on GitHub and couldn't. Can you help? Thank you, Ron
Hi Ron,
Sorry. SaneBox has gotten an insane amount of traffic so I haven’t had the time to upload it. Adobe just announced yesterday that they weren’t going to support flash on mobile devices anymore so it is just a matter of time before flash goes the way of the dodo. Our front end graphics creator was written in flash so that really limits it’s long term usefulness. The backend part is still very powerful. At this point, I don’t know when I will have time to upload the code.
Sorry,
Stuart
[video]
I have a friend who has lost the ability to raise his arms through the ravaging effects of Lyme disease. He has been actively treating it for last year and after 6 months he started getting better. But the progress is slow, painful, soul-crushing.
That would be awful enough, but he had medical insurance and sought medical advice and was told for years previous to his effective diagnosis and treatment of Lyme that he had an ordinary bug bite (cortisone cream), tremors in his hands (drugs to treat the symptom) and then as his symptoms progressed that he had ALS and all they could do was make him comfortable and wait for the end.
I was there when the big expert at MGH said that to him. My friend didn’t even argue with the doctor. He had already plugged into the Lyme-aware doctor network and was simply going through the main-stream medical steps.
He lives in the suburbs of Boston. Deer ticks are everywhere.
Now that he knows the symptoms, he has realized that his 17yo daughter who has been having neck pains for a year and is being treated with Percocet by her PCP might have the early signs of Lyme. He sent her to have the tests and sure enough they came back positive. His Lyme expert MD prescribed her a course of treatment.
Now for the really awful part… the PCP doesn’t want her to take the treatment and has convinced her to stop. I assume because anti-biotics have side effects - you could develop colitis.
He is now in the awful position where he has to argue with his daughter about treating a disease that almost killed him because he was so late in getting diagnosed. She obviously would much rather believe the PCP and take the Percocet. Who would want to acknowledge a life threatening disease when they can be stoned on Percocet?
Do you live in the suburbs? Or visit them? Or walk thru sand dunes?
Go read about the symptoms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Signs_and_symptoms
Treat it early on and you will be fine. Delay treatment and you run the risk of years of nerve problems, loss of motor control, and soul-crushingly slow progress.
Main-stream medicine has failed us in the identification of this disease and it’s treatment. Don’t put yourself on the treadmill to the ALS ward at the MGH where they will make you comfortable until the end. Be your own advocate. Get treated.
Some of you may remember my previous business, Verifiable.com, which was a cloud service that enabled users to upload data and turn it into pictures.
Verifiable.com has been running in read-only mode since I pivoted the business in February of 2010 to start SaneBox. My theory was that so long as the data on Verifable was useful and didn’t require support staff, I would leave it. And remarkably the system has run unattended for all this time; answering questions about unemployment, housing, pollution, prices, concrete production, etc…
For those interested in why I chose to pivot the business - here is my original write up on the mistakes made in that passionate car crash.
Well… in that time I have gotten 2 nibbles for the software. Both required documentation and staff to close and I couldn’t see allocating scarce infrastructure to that **small** sale when those resources were better served building SaneBox. Ahhh the joy of a small team and a laser beam focus.
But, the water shed moment has arrived.
Today, I put a ticket into our system to close down http://verifiable.com except for the homepage. We are updating all software instances to the latest version of Ubuntu and it is just too hard to worry about Verifiable anymore. Updating unique gems and such is simply a distraction that we can’t afford right now.
I’m sad. Creating Verifiable required a **lot** of passion and money and time and effort. But, it wasn’t as good an idea as SaneBox ( a pay service that saves you time by filtering your email). For the record, pivoting was the right thing to do, having a business that has lots of active users who pay for the service is way more fun.
Everyone is now talking about big data, big data, big data. So, my timing might have been a little early. But, I still don’t see the insightful visualizations that would make big data meaningful to the universe. And it was those visualizations that we wanted to bring to the universe. And those visualizations still require more skill and more experience and better tools than most people have. Each NYTimes graphic is still being generated as a one-off by highly, highly, highly skilled professionals with access to extremely expensive and proprietary data that has been laboriously cleaned.
And finally, in a world where most major Republican presidential candidates are running successfully against “science”, I find it hard to believe that the tide has changed in favor of big data or little data in any kind of mass market way.
I will try to find a quiet couple of hours to upload the Verifiable software to github. I’m not sure that anyone will find it useful, but if you want a turn-key, graphic generating, data massaging engine you will find it there.
And here is my last verifiable.com wish, that all of you within the sound of my keystrokes go and find the actual data behind some societal issue and develop a scientific opinion on it. Especially those who would vote for a presidential candidate that doesn’t believe in climate change and doesn’t believe in evolution.
And run don’t walk to http://sanebox.com - we save the average user 2 hours per week. Don’t you have something better to do than spend all that time on your email?
I just sat in on the firing of my fashion designer wife Daniela Corte’s latest sales/assistant this morning. Yes, it was an awful experience.
I’ve worked at companies where no one ever got fired. That was pretty awful too. Everyone knew who the bad people were and tried to avoid having them on their projects. Sometimes you got stuck and you made the best of it. But it always felt wrong. And the really great people always left because the situation was simply too frustrating.
Fast forward to today. My wife has been trying to fill a sales/assistant slot for years. She has tried
Nothing has seemed to work. In the end, it always seems as if it is easier and better to have no one sitting in that chair than the person she has hired. Which is seriously not a great option. Of course, the process does force you to streamline and automate if only to get through the day.
But, what is my wife doing wrong?
There have been 5 of them over the last 6 years. Each person lasts between 1-3 months.
What was wrong with them?
You get the idea.
My wife has other employees that are great and have been with her forever. But this one position appears to be Murphy Brown personal assistant doomed.
And here is the new awful twist. My 4yo son and 6yo daughter spend a bunch of time in our offices. They become friends with the soon-to-be-fired employees who are regardless of their professional failings actually nice, well-meaning people. And oddly they are all good with kids.
So we now have these conversations at the dinner table. Mommy what does it mean to fire someone? Was so-and-so doing a bad job? Why? What did they do wrong?
Sigh…
Seriously, I have to put more money in my kids therapy fund. Frankly I probably have to put more in ours too. And frankly, I hope the employees have a therapy fund too.
In the end, firing someone, while a better idea than leaving a bad person in place to drag down morale, is still a failing of management. It is a sign of a broken hiring process or a broken on-boarding process, or a broken training process. But it is a failing of management and an expensive one at that.
The next candidate starts in a couple of weeks. She seems great. And every firing forces you to look yourself in the mirror and change something, fix something. I’m sure this one will be the keeper.
In my experience, we are all different enough that someone out there hates us for that difference. My wife is latino. I’m a jew. Our best friends are gay. You get the idea.
But, for me, I have never personally had anyone shout at me or physically attack me for being jewish. I know it happens. I have read about it. But, it is always somewhere else to someone else.
Today, one of my closest friends had to face this. And I am absolutely furious.
He dropped off his husband at work and went to park the car. They have been married for as long as you can be gay and married in Massachusetts. A lot longer than most hetero married couples I know. And with a lot more positive energy and a lot less drama than most of the hetro married couples I know.
I’m sure they briefly kissed goodbye. I’ve seen the drop off. The kiss is a reassuring peck. Sometimes accompaigned by a short hug. I do the same thing with my wife. She can be leaving for the morning or a week or a minute and I get the quick kiss goodbye. I’m sure you all do the kiss goodbye. And none of us think much of it.
But, that kiss must have caught the attention of 2 guys that proceeded to follow my friend to where he was parking and start screaming “faggot” at him. This is Newbury Street in Boston at 9:30AM in the morning. It should have been safe to park a car and walk down the street. It should have been safe to drop your spouse at work.
My friend walked quickly away. I can’t imagine what that feels like.
Then, a loud crash. They had smashed the glass in his car with a bat. They sped away. They did all these things.
Life is complicated. There are the bills and the kids and the family and the friends and the job and all the other random concerns that make up adult life. But, somehow they found the time to scream “faggot” at the kindest man I know and smash the glass on his car and run off.
The Boston Police came. They took down the information. They were helpful, concerned, actively anxious to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I have no doubt they will try to catch these guys.
But, if they catch them or not, I am furious. You should be too.
background: in this story my wife is putting my 5yo daughter to sleep. My daughter shares a room with my 3yo son. They have a bunk bed.
Daughter: Mommy you should stay and sleep with me
Son (from lower bunk): She can’t. She has to sleep with daddy because they are married. You sleep with me because we are married.
Daughter: Brothers and sisters can’t get married
Son: Why? Will the police come and get us?
<!— seriously. you can’t make this stuff up —>
My company Sanebox is a tiny operation. There are four full time employees. Three of the Four work from home in states that are far away: JD/Michigan, Kris/Colorado, Peter/North Carolina. I work in the world wide headquarters in Boston, MA.
Each of the guys has small children and lots of important personal distractions. And this week Peter and Kris are moving. On the stress-o-meter, moving is I think top 5. Everything you need and/or hold dear is in flux. That includes spouse, children, pets, really everything. Kris is actually driving his wife and the dogs to their new home as I type this.
Here is the amazing thing. They all have stayed focused on their work until the last minute. JD and I did a software release this morning. A software release full of amazing new stuff: affiliate program, first step in social networking, fixes and speedups for the exchange version of SaneBox. And it all got done perfectly in the midst of complete personal chaos.
So, here is a slow, dramatic clap for all three of my guys. I try not to take them for granted, but seriously it is hard to avoid. They all seem too good to be true.
Sounds like time to give them a bonus.
I wrote this post in the hopes that all those employers out there will look around and see what remarkable and brilliant work is taking place in the midst of personal difficulties and give their own people the slow, dramatic clap they deserve and often don’t get.
Since it is just JD and me at the moment. I gotta go :-)