My Life

Google Owns about 13% of my Life

Feb 06

I just posted what I thought was a pretty darn interesting post about Google’s dominance in my life. By my count (and, with RescueTime, my count is pretty damn accurate), 13% of the time I spend in front of my computer is taken up by Google products.

Note that this is COMPUTER time– not just my online time.

Check out the post!

I lost 36 sticks of butter in 3 weeks

Jan 26

I don’t imagine too many people who read this blog would be terribly interested in this, but I have to crow about it anyway. Joe (cofounder and roomie) and I figured that the move to Silicon Valley was an ideal time to adjust our diet and shave off a few pounds.

Since arriving (Jan 4), I’ve lost just over 9 pounds or (as I like to think of it) 36 sticks of butter. This is all with only nominal excercise and eating just about as much as I want. Joe (always the showoff) has lost 15 pounds.

36sticks

If anyone cares, this was done with a “lazy” South Beach diet. Lots of veggies, plenty of lean meat/fish, and functionally zero sugar/simple carbs.

Arrived in Silicon Valley

Jan 06

Joe, Brian and I have arrived in Silicon Valley unscathed, despite the monsterous storm blanketing the region. The trip was rainy, but thankfully the snow was fairly painless except for about a 10 mile stretch at the Oregon border.

We’ve settled into our furnished apartment and have shuffled it around to be dramatically more office-centric.

Not a lot of people know this, but RescueTime was built in a part-time way– generally evenings and some weekends from time to time, on top of day jobs and/or consulting gigs. It’s a testement to technologies like Ruby on Rails and MySQL that we could pull this off. I am incredibly excited to see what we can pull off now that we’re working full-time on this thing with zero distractions. The good news is that we’ve literally had thousands of feedback emails from our users– so we’ve got a pretty good sense of where to go.

Stay Tuned!

Sometimes, Redeye is a Good Thing

Dec 09

Been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been absolutely slammed and had a few scheduled trips smack dab in the middle of some of the busiest work time I’ve ever experienced.

Today I’m organizing a batch of pictures for a Flickr upload session and found a gem from Halloween. I was attending a Murder Mystery Dinner (something I was fairly skeptical about, but we had a great time!)– Alex was an insane dentist and I was the “Prince of Dimness” (the Prince of Darknesses dim-witted little brother).

Big News for Me and RescueTime (see you in Silicon Valley)

Nov 15

I’ve posted a lot more detail and accompanying thoughts over at the RescueTime blog… To summarize:

RescueTime has been funded by YCombinator, one of the most prestigious seed-funding outfits that’s out there (in geek circles, anyways). If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a bit of info. YC was founded by Paul Graham (startup guy, writer, and crazed Lisp advocate) and have been funding very-very-early-stage startups for just a few years. Since they spun up, they’ve funded dozens of great companies including Xobni, Loopt, Reddit, Justin.TV, Scribd, TextPayMe and more (scroll down for a list).
Part of the YC program is that the founders must relocate to Silicon Valley for a period of 3 months (starting Jan 08). During the three months, there are weekly dinners with assorted Valley luminaries. At the end of the three months is Demo day (now, by popular demand, spread to 2 Demo days), where you pitch what you’ve built to a big room full of early-stage investors.
The financial part of the funding is such that we’re still effectively bootstrapping. So please don’t call trying to sell me expensive services of any kind.
We just got coverage on TechCrunch. Neat!

I can’t express how excited I am about the opportunity. RescueTime started as a hobby project to “scratch an itch” that we had. With incredible enthusiasm from our users and a handful of advisers, we’ve been happily dragged into taking RescueTime to the next level.