eriksmartt.com/blog

How to become a genius

“You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.”

Citation from: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm.

Introducing Mr. and Mrs. Erik Smartt

I hope your holiday weekend was as memorable as ours!

We want to wish a special Thank You to all our friends and family who were able to join us for the occasion. It was a wonderful evening, and we’re happy that so many people were there to share it with us.

First day in the new office (take two)

Well, it turns out that bird-flu zombies didn’t take the Capital, so today was our first day in the new office!

It was a long and busy day, so I didn’t have time for a lengthly post, but I did have my Nokia N73 on me, so how about a few pictures instead:

Last week’s construction:

Inside. It’s still a bit empty, and we’re not exactly sure how we’re going to layout the desks, but it’s off to a great start!

The building from the outside (and no, we’re not the first floor tenant ;-):

Our view onto Congress Ave:

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2007!

Merry Christmas

I hope you’re having a wonderful and relaxing holiday season!

First week on the new job

Yup — a new job. It’s a strange feeling after nearly five years with my previous employer, but the time had come to take on some new challenges and change things up a bit. I’ve joined a company called Optaros, based out of Boston, although I’ll be working from the Austin office scheduled to open in 2007.

Optaros is an “international consulting and systems integration firm” specializing in “Next Generation Internet” development, with a strong focus on leveraging (and participating in) Open Source software. That last bit was particularly import for me, and thankfully, the Open Source and Agile Development memes run strong in the company. In fact, the culture of the company is probably the number one reason I decided to join, though it doesn’t hurt that I’ve worked with some of these folks before (and was happy to be working with them again.)

I hoped up to Boston for my first few days, which was warmer or colder then Texas, depending on who you ask. The difference, of course, is that Boston had snow Monday morning, which was a welcome novelty for me. My time in Boston was spent getting to know people, getting plugged-in to the company, and wiping my new laptop to install linux (Ubuntu Edgy, to be specific, which is what I run at home on my non-OS X machines.)

It’s an exciting change, and hopefully I’ll be able to share more details once I’ve had a few more weeks to get settled in.

FYI, I have a new mobile phone number

Of course, I’m not going to post it to my blog; But if you had my previous mobile number and haven’t received a message from me yet with my new number, you might want to drop me an email or something to get my new digits. The old number (which is on my business cards) will be disabled soon.

On a related note, if you happen to be in Austin and need a T-Mobile store, I’ve been twice now to the one at 4700 Guadalupe (at the Triangle.) There’s a guy there named Andrew who’s been extremely cool — excellent service. (Good enough to mention in a blog post!)

Cat in a tree…

Here’s an obscure link, but if you happen to have a cat, you might want to click over and have a read just in case you need the info: “How to Get a Cat Out of a Tree.”

This comes up because I had a cat up a tree over the weekend — WAY up a tree. Happened after a poorly trained neighborhood dog got loose and ran into the yard toward one of my cats. She climbed up a good 15-20ft at first, but didn’t find a good perch, so she continued to climb up to about 30ft. In classic TV shows, this is where you call the Fire Department, but I’m pretty sure they actually only help attractive women, so I didn’t bother. Instead, and being the nerd I am, I busted out the PowerBook and started googling.

I found a few blog posts and the eHow article from above, and the common theme was that the cat will eventually climb down once she no longer feels threatened. Sure enough, about 45 minutes later (while I was busy constructing a make-shift bridge/ladder to run from the roof of the house to the tree), she started climbing down. I stayed under her (ready to catch) just in case, but she made it down just fine (and had no complaints about staying inside the rest of the day.)

The picture below didn’t come out very well (the sun was setting), but I added a red arrow to show how high she was: