gdp's Comments

Ed Schipul : Adding eBook epub and mobi downloads to Wordpress

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 02:23:28 +0000

@orangeblowfish1 - I wish I could give you more advice. A lot of time has gone by so i'm going to have to leave it to you or my other readers to solve that one. Please do post the solution if you find it!

Ed Schipul : one vote by one vote

Thu, 1 Nov 2012 13:03:26 +0000

Raissa - I suppose it is a weird message from me in that as a political science major and a student of PR, including reading all of the early works of Edward Bernays and studying everyone from Ivy Lee to PT Barnum to Wilson's "Four Minute Men", I am wildly optimistic about the Millennial generation. Many of them work for me and I have had employees come in so jaded thinking I was an idiot. But I saw potential and some of those very people I later promoted to be managers. Watching how fast they can learn and grow is amazing and energizing. My hope is that they vote. Well, let me rephrase that. I don't hope they will vote. They WILL vote. It's just a question of when. My hope is that they vote sooner rather than later. As I posted a while ago, there are three very good reasons to be optimistic about our future as a country and this generation is one of those reasons. Although I'm not gonna say that I don't enjoy poking them a bit every once in a while. I have tried for 15 years to get 100% voting by all eligible voters in our company and have never achieved that goal. Never. 35 to 40 employees and I can't get 100% voting. Yes really. And I most definitely do NOT tell or ask who they voted for. I'm Independent and the whole point is for them to think for themselves. Although I do say things like "straight line party voters scare me" ... because they do. That's just dumb. See this post (linked below) where I am a bit more optimistic in tone. Yet I stand by my comments above that they need to get over the pity party of "receiving too many trophies" and "we know we're not special because you keep telling us that" and take the helm. They can and will lead our country much better than the baby boomers. The division between groups like the Bush's and the Clinton's, no matter your politics, are simply too great to bridge. We need a new group of leaders, new officers at the helm, who will focus on national issues instead of MTs. Here is my previous post expressing why I think they will succeed. And forgive my harsh words intended to provoke to get them to VOTE! http://eschipul.com/2011/06/boomers-and-millennia...

Ed Schipul : Installing iPython Notebook on a Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 22:29:24 +0000

Are you sure you have virtualenv installed properly? http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/lates... Another possibility is that I am not sure you have two (2) dashes in front of "--distribute" in your first line. mkvirtualenv ipythonvm -distribute If you copied and pasted it you don't. It's a double dash as in a "-" followed by a "-" followed by "distribute". Also the latest version doesn't automatically switch you into the virtual. So be sure to do a "workon myEnv" or whatever you named it. A few more lines to help from my bash profile (learned from so many other programmers so I can't take credit, just sharing.) # virtualenvwrapper and pip settings export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenv source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh # autoenv simulator for virtual environments activates .env files when you cd into them source ~/.autoenv/activate.sh export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME export PIP_RESPECT_VIRTUALENV=true Also consider using the following github package as more and more of the cloud based sites move towards the use of .ENV files which are by default (or should be) blocked by .gitignore. https://github.com/kennethreitz/autoenv Think of it as "signal" or "trigger" depending on your background, but basically an autoexecute on access. I find that autoenv does a nice job of simulating the ENV vars from Heroku which is one of our main deployment platforms (although definitely not the cheapest!

Ed Schipul : on suicide and entrepreneurship

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:37:47 +0000

Thank you. It needed to be said. And I appreciate the comment.

Ed Schipul : I get why people are so angry

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:22:29 +0000

airborn again. and photo ready. all good.

Schipul Blog : Thanks, Schipul. It's Been a Blessing!

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:21:01 +0000

Albert - you will be missed. And I have a bunch of other stuff to say, all good, but I said it to you in person and I wish you much success! ~ Ed

Schipul Blog : Let's see the world together, comment to win Houston iFest tickets!

Thu, 5 May 2011 11:59:35 +0000

Actually a lot of the photos in that set, perhaps the majority, are by me. But it is interesting to note the two you picked for this blog post are both by Broden Schipul. That kid is passing me up already. Darn teenagers.

Ed Schipul : radiation + north pacific gyre = bad

Tue, 5 Apr 2011 17:45:48 +0000

Thank you for the comment! I'd still pin this one on mankind personally. A few reasons right off the bat: 1) They are rod reactors, not pebble bed reactors. Thus they radiate the water when we have newer technology that does not. 2) They should have been decommissioned a long time ago. It was planned. But they still needed them so they didn't. 3) Because we can't agree on where to store spent-fuel-rods they are stored in the same facility instead of another safer location (it was the spent fuel rods that were exposed first.) I believe the same thing is done in the US. 4) Yes they had generators in case of a loss of power, but those went underwater and then the backup battery died. So yes this is 2 levels of backup, but clearly that wasn't enough. 5) After those levels failed the backup plan was dumping water from helicopters. Thus there were no nearby storage tanks of additional water if needed. If I were designing the nuclear power plants back in the 1960s I'd have probably designed the same thing. Or worse. What nature did point out to us is that our planning was not enough. Hence I call it the folly of man. (And I am guilty of it too!)

Ed Schipul : i just want to be your friend

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 12:42:36 +0000

I think you call it "root cause analysis" Eloy. Getting to the root cause is very logical. It fixes things "once for all time for all users." #heh

Ed Schipul : i just want to be your friend

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:47:46 +0000

You're welcome.

Ed Schipul : inspiration comes and goes apparently

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:42:53 +0000

Thank you Bonnie. You make a great point. I have been writing like crazy. Most stuck in the purgatory of "draft" status. Some because they are satire and those always get me in trouble when people don't get the humor, or quote it out of context. I am at a wall on photography, mostly leaving my camera at the office and I'm not sure if the battery is charged (the status of the battery being something I am usually acutely aware of). Will keep trucking. It will come back. And thank you for the comment.

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:40:29 +0000

A further follow up to this part of Marc's comment: Marc said --> "instead of sending much of your staff all over the place for conferences - hold an internal one in the style of a hackday or startupweekend which would help your staff get to know each other's style in the context of building interesting things for your existing customers." A few issues with this. First - I have a bunch of Millennial employees. God love them, but frequently they won't believe what management says until it is confirmed by an outside source. So when they go see Garyvee talk and he emphasizes the same points I do on "just shut up and do it" or "everything is crap until a customer wants to pay for it" they believe him while I am the opera singer from their home town. So there is GREAT value to having third-party validation. And that is worth the cost of a 5k conference to me. Yes really. Example: agile development is a code word for what programmers have done forever. Quit talking but hyper-communicate. Work in small iterations. Prototype faster. Get the product in the user's hands. But if you put the "agile" moniker on it buy-in goes through the roof. I don't care - I just need the results. Call it green, purple, red or agile; i truly don't care. And if having outside sources express this works best, I'm cool with that. What I do know is that real programming brings in real money. Period. Otherwise it is called "a hobby." (Not that there is anything wrong with having a hobby.) For internal hack-days - internal brain storming is great and we have weekly internal "Schipul University" classes every Monday. These are done completely independent of me and were in fact CREATED independent of me too. They are part of our "Knowledge Sharing" company value. Someone had the idea and just did it. I now see the results so I stay out of the way and let the people do their thing.

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:26:10 +0000

I believe in ideas like Plato's cave. I just differentiate between ideas and business. This is a problem of the confluence of ideas and business and resources. That said, your point on identifying "open doors with resources available" is well taken. There just aren't that many of those in small-biz or startup-land IMHO.

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:24:21 +0000

And Marc gets the award for MOST ACTIONABLE COMMENT. Reading these next: http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-d... and http://steveblank.com/2010/02/25/customer-develop... Any other suggested links Marc? Also, you mentioned Vision which I addressed in another comment. THANK YOU!

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:22:17 +0000

A couple thoughts. First google does allow the 10% employee directed. But it isn't as free for all as people think. You do have to propose and report back for accountability based on what people have told me. I could be wrong. And again, something I should look into further. But that isn't the biggest issue... A lot of the ideas involve creations or skills that the given employee does not have. So by definition it would consume a resource other than their time. This would be as if only developers could have ideas as they are the only ones who could program it. (yes, someone could wire-frame, but you get my point). An example of a big idea - what if Zappos had throught of the buy-one-give-one thing first? With their infrastructure and a story as good as Blake's story at Tom's Shoes the potential would have been huge! That is a non-tech idea that could easily have been prototyped. I'd hate to miss out on those!

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:18:32 +0000

At some point yes. Right now we can't fund R&D. Well, I guess we are now that I type this as we started working on new products on January 22, 2009 and we are still working on it. T5 is out there, but not profitable yet. (it will be, just not yet) Anyway, I'll have to learn more about a dedicated R&D function.

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:16:22 +0000

Kenan - before talking about business and web marketing, I spoke on Knowledge Management for years. And as many companies are seeing, it is very hard to monetize ideas. Or attention. The attention economy led to interesting products like youData, but I'm not sure how we would monetize it. Software is a good business. If it is software as a service or enterprise software, it is proven. Sure Google has monetized search, but I view that as more of a pass through where a searcher says "I am now interested in X" and google gets a cut as the searcher passes through to give someone real cash for a real lawn mower. As for "knowledge shared is knowledge squared" - I guess I need a better editor because right now it is more "knowledge shared creates so much noise that the signal is lost and it sounds like industrial machinery."

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:11:36 +0000

Thank you all for the comments. A few people have mentioned that we should be driven by our VISION and MISSION. (I know people tend to say "Mission and Vision" but primacy belongs to vision so I like to list that one first.) I am a big believer in having a written Vision statement and ours is to "Connect and Organize the World's People. Do Good." - I'd like to think that I consistently reinforce this and use it to guide the company. Most of the ideas employees share are aligned with this vision. Similarly our mission statement is very specific down to actual dollar figures and a year target date. All employees have a printed plastic card with these and the company VALUES. Many of the ideas I am inundated with are not new product lines. Rather they are more mundane things like "we should organize a meetup around xyz" or "there is potential in city x. lets fly a few people out and network" or "have you thought about trying xyz (referring to a company process) or "lets remove these fields from this module and add them back as clients request them to simplify the product" or "we should switch from technology x to technology y to accomplish task z." The thing about all of those ideas is that they MIGHT be correct. It is the fire-hose of them all at once that makes it so hard to prioritize and allocate resources. A couple of direct responses in next comment. Pending....

Ed Schipul : Managing The Fire-Hose of Ideas

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 15:08:12 +0000

And THAT Glen is a truly excellent point. Hmmm.

Ed Schipul : OVO by Cirque de Soleil opening in Houston

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:26:26 +0000

Ron - the lens isn't that great. The consumer 70-300. This was shot at f/4 80mm at 6400iso. Which of course is the Canon 5D Mii. That and the ones that came out the best were the ones where the performers froze for a sec. Full xif at http://www.flickr.com/photos/eschipul/5516182442/...