May 2012
2 posts
Experimenting with Spotify (Redux)
Few things are as personal as music. It defines moments and becomes wrapped up in our memories. People’s music streams are a window into their lives. I can look at a friend’s Spotify stream and infer so much about him: his mood, his location, the weather, his plans for the evening, who he’s with or planning to be with, and more.
Given how personal music is, the music...
April 2012
3 posts
“I think the secret is really observation. If you observe what’s going on,...”
– Sam Cooke on success in music.
Syncing Quirk in Dropbox for Windows
I stumbled upon a frustrating Dropbox quirk yesterday when I couldn’t find a shared folder created by a friend. The filename of the folder ended with a period, which is a no go for Windows files. This meant that the folder was visible in the Dropbox web app but not in the desktop app.
Web App
Desktop App
Dropbox has helpful instructions and a bad files check script for diagnosing...
Charisma in the classroom
One of my favorite professors from Williams passed away last week. He was brilliant, intense, and charismatic. I still have my papers and exams from his class on jazz history and spent a few hours re-reading them over the weekend. I tend to look back at previous work and minimize it with thoughts of “wish I had tried harder” or “should have spent more time on it,” but...
January 2012
2 posts
fred-wilson:
The Weight - Mavis Staples, Nick...
“I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first...”
– Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
December 2011
2 posts
12/22: Scenes from New York
Walked west on 10th Street this morning and caught lots of beautiful little NYC moments:
Hip NYU kids with no shoes on sitting outside their dining hall looking rebellious but decidedly well-off enough to afford shoes.
Laborers in faded white merchant vans inching past parked cars and moving trucks on their way from one job to another.
Turning the corner and heading north on 6th Ave and...
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Experimenting with Spotify
I’ve been using Spotify Premium and nothing else to play music on my phone for the last three weeks. It’s great having unlimited access to such a comprehensive catalogue of music, but there’s something psychologically meaningful about actually purchasing music that I miss. It puts a stake in the ground that reminds you and anyone else that this band or this album means something to you. I...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
The Culture and the Problem
Until recently, I didn’t realize how much time the founders of growing startups spend on recruiting. Talented Google-caliber engineers are few and far between, even in a city like NYC that’s admittedly crushing it of late. I’ve sat in on a number of interviews at Hyperpublic over the past few weeks and the two topics that come up most in initial conversations with engineers are...
May 2011
2 posts
1 tag
2 tags
First week at Hyperpublic and Lerer Ventures
…or “My Internship Pt. 1 — I have some idea what I’m doing.”
Last week was my first as a summer associate with Hyperpublic, a startup that’s building an open platform of rich local data, and Lerer Ventures, a venture capital fund that’s investing primarily in consumer web and media startups. I’ll be with HP and LV for the better part of the next three...
April 2011
1 post
“Good luck, have a good life, and if you run across a sure fire deal with a...”
– Final exam instructions from a UNC professor/VC.
March 2011
2 posts
February 2011
2 posts
January 2011
3 posts
Less can be more in online networks
Sam Lessin (founder of drop.io; now with Facebook) described traditional social media sites as “uploading something and then pushing it across a network or making it searchable.” With drop.io, Lessin created a service that did the opposite; instead of making things public, individuals and businesses used drop.io to pull information online, secure it in a private place, and share that “exact...
Hiring a Virtual Assistant
Everyone I know is busy. Whether it’s work or school or an overbooked personal life, no one has the time to accomplish everything that he or she wants to.
I spent the long weekend in NYC and got back to Chapel Hill last night. As I unpacked, I realized I had no idea what was going on this week. I hate not being organized, but I also hate wasting time leafing through class syllabi and...
November 2010
2 posts
June 2010
1 post
“To succeed in a spectacular fashion you have to be spectacularly unusual.”
– Michael Lewis; The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
May 2010
2 posts
Outside Magazine's Best Places to Work
Outside Magazine has selected its 50 best places to work this year. While the criteria for the picks — things like fitness benefits, dedication to volunteerism and green initiatives, and unique employee-friendly management principles — may not jive with everyone, these companies are doing pretty extraordinary things for their employees and creating fantastic products at the same...
April 2010
1 post
Brave Heart by James Mackay
I’m reading a great biography of William Wallace by James Mackay. I had no idea how badly the Mel Gibson movie botched some of the key parts of Wallace’s life. For one, Wallace was probably as tall as Scottie Pippen (6’7”) at a time when most folks were 5 ft. Mel Gibson can’t be taller than 5’8”.
Even more impressive, Wallace was barely out of his...
March 2010
1 post
February 2010
2 posts
December 2009
5 posts
Christmas Time Is Here/Samantha Farrell
Last week, I had the pleasure of recording a version of the classic holiday song “Christmas Time Is Here” with the lovely Samantha Farrell. The idea was as spontaneous as they come; we had two hours to learn, rewrite and record the song. Here’s what we came up with:
Audio (to download the song, right click the link and save the linked file)
Video (directed by Christopher...
WatchMore Jeff Buckley: an old 60-minute documentary, including interviews with Brad Pitt and a clip of Jeff covering Rush and his father, Tim Buckley.
Jeff Buckley singing "Dido's Lament"
The first bit of opera I really connected with is a piece dubbed “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I first heard it in an introductory music history class during my freshman year at Williams. Even then, I loved the piece for its simplicity and the evocative melody that carries it.
For whatever reason, Jeff Buckley decided to perform...
Covers Friday: The Beatles playing The...
WatchVH1 (@VH1) covered last weekend’s Beatles Festival and produced a good one-minute recap.
November 2009
3 posts
“I’ve always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content...”
– J. Buckley
