I moved my personal life over to tumblr.adamgotterer.com. Feel free to follow my life by the minute. This site will now only be related to tech posts and my ventures.

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about who she would want to meet given the opportunity. She of course, like most people listed off a handful of A, B and C list celebrities. I have put some thought into it since that conversation and realized the only two “celebrities” I would want to meet are Larry David and Steven Wright. I feel like I can really relate to both of their senses of humor. Also if I didn’t know who my real father was, I would assume it was Larry David.

In actuality my list of meets consisted of a bunch of geeks and business moguls. Heres my list, in no particular order…

Larry Page & Sergey Brin - Founders of Google. Enough said.

Zed Shaw - Creator of Mongrel, a web server for Ruby applications. While I’m not a ruby developer (I have dabbled), this guy is the most opinionated stright up guy on the web. He doesn’t sugar coat anything, says it like it is. I think we would have a great time debating geeky topics.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee - This guy pretty much created the world wide web.

Richard Branson - I just want to check out his island, drink some beers and jet ski with this guy.

Markus Frind - Creator of plentyoffish.com. This guy runs one of the largest dating sites on the internet single handed. He makes millions.

Barry Diller - CEO of InterActiveCorp. Ruthless, brilliant business man. Seems to have a knack for picking winners.

John Malone - If I’m going to meet Barry Diller, I dont want John to feel left out.

Paul Buchheit - Creator of gmail… So cool!

Kevin Rose - Creator of digg.com and revision 3, probably has the biggest “geek” fan boy following and definitely knows how to hold his liquor. Might as well throw Jay Adelson in there as well, current CEO of digg, founder of revision 3 and Equinix.

Steve Jobs - Why not, the guy is brilliant. Maybe he will hook me up with a free iphone.

Steve Wozniak - Now we are talking brilliant. More or less created the personal computer.

37 Signals Team - While I don’t agree with all of their practices, these guys are pretty smart and I would love to pick their brains.

Guido van Rossum - Creator of python. I really need to start using it a bit more.

Bill Gates - Needs no introduction.

Gary Dahl - Creator of the pet rock. If this guy can get people to buy a rock for $3.95, he can sell just about anything and I would love to know how.

Dave Hyatt & Blake Ross - Creators of Firefox.

Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux and the poster boy for hackers everywhere.

In the past three weeks at least five people have asked me if I knew anyone looking for full time web development work. Without doing much research it seems that even with the poor economy the tech industry is still hiring. Unfortunately for the people looking I don’t know anyone searching for a job. I’m getting close to starting a recruiting agency though =) But until then… One of the people asked if I could compile a list of websites for posting technology related jobs. What I sent her is below. Don’t forget College Humor is hiring for a number of positions as well!

http://www.crunchboard.com/crunch.html - Found my current job here!
http://jobs.slashdot.org/
http://jobs.37signals.com/
http://market.mashable.com/
http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/
http://startupers.com/
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/
http://venturebeat.personforce.com/jobboard.php
http://jobs.paidcontent.org/
http://nextny.jobthread.com/
http://jobs.43folders.com/
http://www.cybercoders.com/
http://jobs.ajaxian.com/
http://www.odesk.com/jobs/
http://www.dice.com/

More generic job posting sites…

http://www.craigslist.com
http://www.monster.com
http://www.jobster.com/
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/

It just occurred to me that being wrong 50% or more of the time at any other job would get you fired.

This site attracts a decent amount of JavaScript folks so I thought this would be relevant and maybe even helpful. I read news.ycombinator.com everyday (or several times a day). If you are into the startup world, you should as well. It has by far the best startup news and a great community. The feedback and questions posted on there are generally informative and trolling is at a bare minimum. It’s what reddit used to be. Regardless, I came across a job posting at Weebly for a web developer position. The job description came with a little JavaScript puzzle. I had no intention of actually applying for the job, but when ever I find these puzzles I like to do them. I’m not going to post the results, because thats not cool. If you want to check your answer email me your best guess. But it entertained me for about 20 minutes. So if you’re bored or actually looking for a job check it out at http://www.weebly.com/jobs.html.

This is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. Chad is one of the designers from Vimeo. Watch and be amazed.

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

The 21″ x 13″ print can be purchased at my new store! store.thebigpugh.com

This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.

My life has changed a lot since i started this, so I thought it appropriate to include my friends, family and loved ones since they all were on my mind throughout the creative process. Enjoy!

I went to the final Mets opening day at Shea stadium today versus the Phillies. The place was mobbed! The radio said it was the largest opening day in Mets history at 56,000 people. I sat in the same box as Boomer Esiason and the Governor and Mayor of New York. I have to question how a blind man can enjoy a baseball game? I guess it’s more of a public appearance and networking thing anyhow. Those guys roll around with some serious body guards. The Mets lost the game 2-5. Hopefully that the last loss for the season. We need to leave Shea victorious once again!

I Almost caught a foul ball, but my brother literally snatched it out of my hands, elbowed me in the face, and we both came crashing down on my mother. The things people will do for a free baseball. He ended up giving the ball away to a little kid.

The new stadium looks incredible. It almost appears to be in the outfield. I’m impressed with how much they have done since this time last year when it was a nothing more then a big metal frame. The new stadium cant be more then 20 feet from the current stadium. I hear at the end of the season they are raffling off just about everything in the old stadium. Seat included. Can you imagine buying a box and watching the game in your living room? Your wife would probably love that! Now all you need is a beer cart and you’re set!

Gmail
Gmail is almost unbearable for me to use on Firefox at work or at home. At home I get authentication popups every 10 - 15 seconds. Most clicks then become unresponsive. At work, closing gmail locks up my browser for about 8 seconds and just runs horribly slow. As of today clicking the reply button makes the reply box disappear on both machines. So I decided I would check my email in Internet Explorer instead. I got a JavaScript error while it loaded, rendering it useless. I had to settle with leaving an opera browser open all day to get email. My patience for gmail is slowly dwindling away. I noticed these problems only started when google upgraded to the newest version of gmail. Unfortunately its not easy to switch email services, everyone already has my email address and theres just no better alternative.

Wordpress
This wonderful blog is powered by wordpress. I think one of the reasons I don’t post as often as I would like is because of how fed up I am with this platform. To begin, tinyMCE is horrendous. We ended up using it at CollegeHumor for our article writer. We had to hack so much of the code up to get it to play nice with user input. Most of the problems came from copy and pasting from miscellaneous word/notepad applications. tinyMCE is now disabled on this blog, which solved a small portion of my problems. I have thought about switching to tumblr, but I’m too lazy to set that up and import everything here over. I also find their platform to be over simplified and lacking functionality.

Time Warner
My cable TV works 50% of the time, it skips, it freezes and it drops packets. In order to use on demand you have to unplug the box, wait 5 minutes for it to reboot and then order a video. The internet isn’t actually that bad. I get decent speeds (nothing compared to Optimum when I lived on Long Island) and its reliable for the most part. But they did something the other day they pissed me off. They high jacked the not found web addresses with a suggestion page full of text ads. How are these huge companies not getting the hint that this pisses customers off? Did no one learn anything when verisign did this? Fortunately I was able to change my preferences to prevent this from happening, but this should have been opt-in from the beginning. Did I mention I pay $130 a month for cable and internet? The only alternative is New York City is RCN, which raised their price $30 a month and caused me switch to Time Warner in the first place, but lets be honest RCN wasn’t much better.

Let preface this by saying I actually do love facebook and check it a few times a day. I have followed them as a company from the moment my school was listed, several years ago. There were even thoughts in the past of applying for a job there.

Now to my little rant… These applications are getting out of hand. Mainly the invites and notifications, but most of the applications them self suck as well. This isn’t facebook’s fault, I blame the developers. I get all excited when I login and have a bunch of new notifications. Maybe I got tagged in a new picture? Maybe a new wall post? 9 out of 10 times it was a notification from an application about some nonsense. I have since removed every application except one.

For weeks I have been collecting invite requests. Only recently facebook added a clear all button, but I want to see how many I can rack up. At the time of writing I have 106 application invites. Most of these invites come from people I never speak to or most likely ever will again (not because of the invites). The whole invite process leads me to believe that they are sent out automaticly or are simply part of a “click here to get to the damn application”, in which case they have automatically selected a few people and by the user clicking, it sends to the first 10 or so selected people. My name starts with an “A”. I most likely appear near the top of all of my friend’s lists. I am a prime candidate for application invite hell.

I wont even get into how pointless most of these applications are right now. The only application that I am running is SnowTick, which gives me updates on how much snow the mountains I ride at have gotten. Theres a great development mantra that facebook application developers refuse to follow. MAKE THINGS PEOPLE WANT!

Click the invite thumbnail to see the full list!