A couple hours ago @donalddesantis posted an awesome post about What being hopelessly single taught him about pitching tech Celebs on Geekwire. It’s really useful if you need that kick in the arse to just go meet people. Seriously, what are you doing standing around at a tech/entrepreneur conference not having epic chats with cool people? Don’t be silly.

Image via Wikipedia

He ties the advice with his experience of picking up cute women in public situations. The basic premise is just do it. But I think he’s wrong about girls.

The rest of this post is completely my personal experience as a geek and a nerd who finds public situations to be draining and just plain difficult, but does it anyway. Your mileage may vary.

Donald  says his revelation came when he suddenly realized that his “game” of standing around at bars, waiting for women to start talking to him wasn’t working at all. Here’s the thing though, if you go to a bar and just sort of stand around … girls will come talk to you. In fact this will happen more than once a night.

Especially if you look like you’re having fun on your own and are totally content with yourself. I think it irks them that there is this guy who isn’t paying attention to their “come talk to me” vibes. So they come talk to you instead.

Further on Donald lists three traits guys think they need to get girls:

Be a great dancer (tech corollary: slick demo/pitch)

Surround yourself with a coterie of other attractive women (tech corollary: a coterie of other investors or “cool kids”)

Have charm like Hugh Grant, with a face like Jude Law (tech corollary: Have charm like Hugh Grant, with a face like Jude Law)

Honestly, you don’t need to know how to dance. If you just go out there and dance like nobody’s watching. Girls will come dance with you. Tried and proven. You don’t even have to know what you’re doing, you just have to be comfortable with yourself.

Surrounding yourself with girls, unfortunately, does not work at all. I’m often out with a group of female friends and, without fault, on those nights not a single girl comes talk to me. They usually just assume I’m taken or otherwise reserved for the night.

Don’t do that.

Being charming like Hugh Grant or sexy like Jude Law definitely helps with being a heart-throb, but girls look for average (evolution etc.). You know how hotties look intimidating to you and like you could never get them since they’re way out of your league? Yeah, that’s how girls feel about Jude Law.

Not a good strategy at all. Just be charming enough not to step on too many toes and remember to smile. It works wonders … especially once you cross a line or ten. Smiling and being nice about it smooths everything over.

Donald also says that getting girls’ numbers is apparently Hard Business ™:

I didn’t get the first phone number I asked for, nor the second. In fact, the first number probably came somewhere between tries five and ten. But with each rejection, beliefs #1 and #2 became less false. I also become much more comfortable at getting a conversation rolling. Mastery through repetition.

I don’t know about you, but I have so far gotten every single phone number I actually asked for. Turns out people find it really really difficult to turn down polite requests. If you ask for something nicely, you will get it almost without fault.

Just be nice, don’t look creepy and never ask for a number right off the cuff. Chances are the girl won’t think twice about giving it to you. Why would she? Here’s a nice guy making a polite request, she has no reason to turn you down. Especially if you promise to call her about something friendly … had a cool conversation about something she’s good at? Get her number in case you ever need an expert on hand.

Works every time.

But it’s very very important that you actually ask. Being a geek and a nerd I usually forget this part. Hell, I’ve had people chasing after me because I will just wander off in the middle of a cool conversation without asking for a phone number. It’s unfortunate when that happens with a hottie (and it does happen, except they don’t chase after you but stand there baffled and confused).

Mostly the whole thing is really easy. Relax, talk like you’re talking to a long lost friend, give them a way to help you, be nice and avoid being generic like it’s the plague.

PS: before you think I’m super successful with the ladies, I’m not, I usually end up friendzoning them because I forget that they might like me. There were even occasions where I had a girl in my room and the thought she might like me never even crossed my mind.

PPS: the standing around minding your own business play works so well girls will sometimes ask you for your number.

Related articles

• What being hopelessly single taught me about pitching tech Celebs (geekwire.com)
• Being Wrong (katiebman.wordpress.com)
• The Best Pickup Line Ever. (tbseblog.com)

You know how most programmers find functional coding to be ever so slightly mind bending and how it’s somewhat difficult to wrap one’s head around working with variables whose state you cannot change and lazy evaluations and all manner of odd things?

Image via Wikipedia

The thing I’ve had most trouble with and still do actually, is coding in a functionally clean manner, using more recursion, cleaner abstractions and so on. Just as I thought I was almost starting to get kind of good at this, a bunch of people proved me wrong when I crowdsourced some elegance.

Yeah, some people are really good at this functional stuff.

And then one day ml-class introduced me to mathematical programming with Octave. Sure, I’ve done some Octave before at school, but that was just enough to get my feet wet – basic syntax and stuff. Or maybe I just paying enough attention to really grasp the awesome things I was being shown.

Either way, I feel as if over the past two weeks, doing machine learning homework in Octave has opened a whole new world of striving for elegance and purity in my code. If I thought functional was mindbending, this stuff is ripping my face off.

Apparently when you take a naive loop and make it into something beautiful it’s called vectorization in this field. The interesting bit here is that all you really need to perform optimization of epic proportions is some math fu, no translating the problem into something else, no looking at it from five different perspectives … just maths and then some.

Using the gradient descent algorithm for logistic regression as an example, in particular calculating the cost function:

Professor Ng explaining the cost function

Although I think this might have been exactly the perfect example for the code below … it’s difficult to search through videos for this stuff.

The naive approach could be something like this (didn’t actually run the code):

J = 0;
for i = 1:m
  J += =y(i)*log(sigmoid(theta*X(i,:))-(1-y(i)*log(1-sigmoid(theta*X(i,:));
end
 
J = J/m;
 
for j = 1:size(theta)
   grad(j) = 0;
   for i = 1:m
      grad(j) += (sigmoid(theta*X(i,:))-y(i))*X(i,j);
   end
   grad(j) = grad(j)/m;
end

But all those lops aren’t really necessary, all they are basically doing is matrix multiplication, which gives us a nice way to vectorize the whole thing:

J = (1/m)*sum(-y'*log(sigmoid(X*theta))-(1-y')*log(1-sigmoid(X*theta)));
 
grad = (1/m)*(sigmoid(X*theta)-y)'*X;

The difference in elegance absolutely blows my mind and I can’t wait to see what other wonders I discover through this Octave thing in the course of this semester.

Pretty much all my octave can be found in the ml-class-homework repository. But I’m sure I’ll end up modeling more algorithms in this thing.

Related articles

• 12 steps to running gradient descent in Octave (flowingmotion.jojordan.org)
• Machine Learning Ex4 – Logistic Regression (r-bloggers.com)
• Machine Learning Ex 5.2 – Regularized Logistic Regression (r-bloggers.com)

Puts you to bed nicely

Waging war with sleep is very tiring business and I’ve been doing it pretty much as long as I can remember. My daily 750words are littered with battle reports, my twitter stream gets constantly barraged with updates from the war effort and I think it’s pretty safe to say that I may have tried more different things than most people to stave off the foe.

Some things I’ve tried so far:

• drinking tea like it was water
• eating caffeine pills before going to bed
• drinking energy drinks by the gallon
• phone alarms
• computer alarms that force me to get out of bed to turn them off
• cluster alarms – even five in 20 minute intervals
• meditation (polyphasic sleep of sorts?)
• going to bed early

Nothing works.

No matter how hard I try to sync my circadian rhythms with something even remotely appropriate by society’s standards I will eventually always slip back into my habit of going to bed at 3am and waking up at 9am at the earliest.

Sometimes it drifts even farther and it becomes practically impossible to wake up before 11am … and no, going to bed early doesn’t help; I just don’t fall asleep and why waste the time just lying in bed like that?

Shiny graphs and analytics

But! I think I may finally have found a solution – an iPhone app that’s a bit smart about handling sleep.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep Cycle is the best alarm clock I have ever used. Not only do I get to snuggle with my iphone when I’m sleeping, it also tracks my movements over night to figure out when is the best time to give waking me up a shot.

Plus there are statistics of how I’m sleeping. Scoar!

And it actually works even for heavy sleeprs living in their own timezone like myself. Even going to bed at 5am and trying to be up by 6am works. Ever tried waking up after an hour of sleep? It’s practically impossible.

Some might think it a bit strange to sleep with an iphone in their bed, but I’ve been doing that forever anyway – otherwise there’s no chance of hearing the alarm.

But not all is perfect.

Super polite when it wakes you up

What often ends up happening is that I will wake up when the alarm sounds (it’s a veyr polite alarm too, all it takes to snooze is smacking it a bit), then be unable to crawl out of bed and eventually I just fall back asleep for another hour or two.

But I’m sure I’ll figure that one out eventually … trying really really hard to actually go to bed at sensible hours might work. Of course there is a website for that called sleepyti.me.

That is, if  I can get myself to even fall asleep before 2am.

Related articles

• Bedtime Calculator (presurfer.blogspot.com)
• Choosing the right sleep schedule to maximize time and keep you healthy (lemikegao.com)
• Be Smart About Sleep (everydayhealth.com)
• Sleep Stages (everydayhealth.com)

Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr

A couple of days ago I started refactoring some code to handle timezones better. The problem manifests as a single time appearing at different times in different parts of the application.

Granted, a lot of it is more of a UX problem along the lines of my rant on why computers don’t handle timezones intuitively. But there’s a deeper issue with the fact that the codebase is handling timezones rather naively.

Until a week ago I would have done it exactly the same way.

Naive approach

Usually when people first implement timing in an application they (or rather we) don’t really care about timezones. You just take a timestamp and store it in a database. This suffices for most use cases … sure the times are in whatever timezone your server is set to but as long as you’re using the same server for everything and you’re only using times for timestamps when objects were inserted into the database and for logging …

It’s just not a problem.

Then you are faced with a distributed environment and suddenly all those timestamps start acting funny, or maybe you have users in different timezones and you want to display times to them.

Still an easy problem to solve; just handle all times as UTC internally and translate to the proper timezone when producing outputs. Easy as pie right?

And then you notice strange things happen around daylight savings. Suddenly 3am happens twice on the 31st of October in Slovenia … but the same thing only happens a week later in the US. And some states in the US don’t even observe DST and now what do you do?

pyTZ

Those ambiguous periods are the main thing pytz takes care of.

To be perfectly honest I never even considered this problem before reading the documentation and having my mind blown. There’s just so much intricacies over keeping up to date on what each timezone is doing and what particular timezone a user is in right now … it’s insane!

Even though pytz claims they don’t take care of ambiguous periods like Poland rewinding their clocks half an hour in 1915 to start using CET, they’re still pretty vital for everything else.

Of course you’ll still want to handle all times internally as UTC otherwise doing time arithmetic can get quite hairy, although pytz can supposedly handle that too … but at least now it should be possible to correctly get the UTC time out of user input and then correctly display the result.

An example:

from datetime import datetime
from pytz import *
 
eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
loc_dt = eastern.localize(datetime(2011, 11, 2, 7, 27, 0))
print loc_dt
# 2011-11-02 07:27:00-04:00
 
ljubljana = timezone("Europe/Ljubljana")
print loc_dt.astimezone(ljubljana)
# 2011-11-02 12:27:00+01:00

Conclusion

Turns out there’s much more to timezones than one might think. Just goes to show why all those other coders are spending so much time on trivial stuff … nothing is really trivial. Nothing.

And let’s not even get into leap seconds.

Related articles

• Dealing with Timezones in Python (lucumr.pocoo.org)
• Timestamps and timezones… (thebloggingpath.com)
• Just Say No to Online Calendars… (sebastianmarshall.com)
• What every programmer should know about time (unix4lyfe.org)

The first postcard is said to have appeared in 1840 – it was a hand painted design on a piece of thick paper, sent with a penny black stamp to the writer Theodore Hook.

First postcard

Since then not much has changed, the stock image postcards appeared in1848 as part of some sort of advertising. The modern postcard was born around 1870 when Camp Conlie started offering stock postcards with photos of the place to send home as a memory.

tl;dr -> postme.me is making postcards cool again

And that pretty much cemented the fate of the postcard. For the past 140 years they have mostly been seen as a way to send a picture of where you were for vacation back home to family or friends. The most variance happens in the form of holiday greeting cards, sometimes you’ll see a postcard with a cheesy joke as well … I think I’ve seen all 10 already. And they’re the kind of joke your dad finds funny.

That’s it. That is a five billion dollar industry. Or so I’ve heard … either way, something as lame as that is big business.

How nobody has gone and poked in this hive before is beyond belief.

Then suddenly, in early 2011, disruptors start popping up. Suddenly everyone thinks you should be able to send postcards electronically and easily. Just take a photo with your iphone or something, click a few buttons, and voila, some hapless victim gets a nice postcard.

Now you can go on vacation and send back home what you actually see. A beautiful picture, filtered to the 70′s, and everybody is happy. Sincerely even got a 3 million dollar investment last week for doing just that – letting people send boring postcards more easily. There’s also picplum, which lets people mail gorgeously printed photos and was funded by YC this summer.

Boring.

A huge 140 year old industry and the best disruption we can come up with is making it marginally easier to use? What the hell is wrong with everyone!?

There is a whole generation of people coming out of college and into the working world right now who have grown up with the internet. A generation of people who don’t really care about holiday greetings or sending memories of their travels to family.

But we share so many pictures every freaking day. Imgur is booming right now, it’s the 4chan for the everyman and it is absolutely brimming with silly pictures … often seasonal and very meaningful pictures.

When my friend had a birthday two weeks ago she didn’t get a single greeting card. She got ten silly pictures on facebook and somebody even made her a custom rage comic. That’s right, a rage comic just to wish her a happy birthday.

But that comic will be gone in the millions of other pictures within months. Or maybe she downloaded it and it will be gone in 5 years when her hard drive fails. Perhaps 10 years if she’s really careful with backups. (not to mention the thousands other pictures vying for the same sliver of attention on that hard drive)

What  if instead she got that rage comic as a postcard, delivered to her address in all its glory, ready to be pinned on a wall?

I think it would be much awesomer.

What about Christmas? I haven’t gotten or sent a christmas card in so long I can hardly remember the tradition existing. But every year I see hundreds of funny pictures on the topic of Christmas donning the internets.

I think it would be superb if some of those made it onto postcards to my friends.

When I started postme.me I didn’t have a vision, I just wanted to make something fun. But I think there is an underlying reason why everyone likes the idea so much, young people don’t care about boring, we want fun postcards.

Related articles

• Postcards From The Edge (firstchoice.co.uk)
• Postcard Posers – February (blogs.ancestry.com)
• I sent the “man with a restless spirit” a postcard (gemakarolina.wordpress.com)
• Create & Send A Real Postcard With Your Phone Using Postcard On The Run (makeuseof.com)
• Vintage Halloween: Haunted Postcards from the 1910s (brainpickings.org)

Image by libraryman via Flickr

A quick note for everyone who can grow a beard or at least a little bit of fluff on their face … if you’re a girl please oh please disregard this post even if you can grow something … it’s a note that Beardvember is starting and today is the last day you have to shave!

Then you have a valid excuse not to shave for a whole month!

Nagging girlfriends and wives be damned, Beardvember is a time for us dudes to celebrate how awesome we are!

For anyone not familiar with the beardvember/noshember movement, here is a choice quote explaining it in detail:

It is our mission to unify and beautify men through the common objective of obtaining a full beard throughout the month of November.

For one month, we shall let our facial hair grow as it was intended to. It is not a contest, but a celebration of the privilege we have received. A membership to this brotherhood of men is a commitment to excellence in the field of beard growing.

On October 31st, we engage in the sacred Shaveabration ritual. For the month after that, no razors will touch our faces, only our magnificent hairs.

Modern society tries to neuter us with a constant barrage of images of shaved, womanly men. For one month, real men shall band together in defiance of the unnatural social obligation of routine shaving. Some females, brainwashed by anti-male mass media, will tell you they do not like beards. These are not real women. There are only two types of women: women who love men with beards and lesbians. Never succumb to devious female tactics to make you shave. We are here to support you. Our strength lies in our solidarity.

So what can you do to further the cause? Most importantly, wear your beard proudly. Tell all of your friends. Put up posters around your city or campus. Share this site or give it a Digg up. Join the Facebook group. Tell your dad. Tell your sons. Together, we shall overcome beardlessness.

No Shave, No Vember.

Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. – Leviticus 19:27

Some of you might have heard of a fake movement called Movember. Do not heed that movement! They are heathens and are trying to convince you to shave in november  and keep a moustache. A well kept, well groomed moustache!

That is not what Beardvember is for! Celebrate your masculinity dude! (also you probably look ridiculous with a ‘stache)

And a note for all of us who can’t grow a really good beard

Remember, shaving is manual labor.

Related articles

• Why does God love beards? (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• Jake Gyllenhall Debuts an Even Bigger Beard – Sorta Sexy or Shave It Now? (popsugar.com)
• Canada rugby’s Adam Kleeberger fundraises for Chch (3news.co.nz)
• Man wins weird beard gong for Pirates of the Caribbean Davy Jones tribute (mirror.co.uk)
• How To Shave Your Pubic Area For Men (mademan.com)

This is a guest post by @ponywithhiccups, a cool gal who sometimes makes epic nerdy cakes.

It was a simple deal: Swizec would make a cake for me and I would make a cake for him. After many many not so subtle hints I got exactly what I wanted.

He wanted this in a cake form –>

this: a möbius gear

Ignoring the gears I was eager to make the complicated cake, how hard could it be?

I’ve heard of möbius architecture so it wasn’t like I was the first person making a 3D mobius strip able to stand on its own. A quick google search and there it was: a nice picture of a 3D model. Yay, I could actually do this!

Möbius arhitecture

It looked simple enough at first, just cut a hole in cake dough, then cut it in half and bend it a little – voila done! But then I started thinking and soon realised you can’t just bend a cake. The cake dough is not a bendy material; it is actually very brittle and sensitive and not cooperative at all! And what would happen tho the fill if the layers were vertical and not horizontal and how the heck do you cut a cake like that? Nope, the layers have to be horizontal. And there was my first big problem – the cake layers were not simple shapes anymore.

First sketch

3D modeling to the rescue!

Just looking at the pretty picture of möbius arhitecture didn’t tell me how to cut. I had to figure that bit out on my own. Since I’m too lazy to do things by hand I did it on a computer.

After some trial and error and a lot of clumsy modeling things started making sense. It turns out a 3D möbius structure is just two möbius strips intertwined or a square making half a rotation along a circular path.

One of the two strips making the cake

Rotated squares

A fat cake

All I needed to do now was to cut the virtual cake in layers.

And the layers look weiiiiird ... like deformed toilet seats

Now that I knew what the layers would look like all I could think was “I wish I could 3d print cake!”

The cakeday

I was making a yummy chocolate cake with sour cherries in the middle! So even if it turned out horribly deformed it would still be tasty, just look at the ingredients!

The tasty ingredients

It all started pretty normal: heating, mixing, cooling, etc. and then came the time to cut the bisquit, the moment I did not look forward to. With the help of a ruler, a compass and colorful pencils I soon had a cutting template.

This is not normal, but on math it is

And there I was: a sharp knife in my right and a paper template in my left, ready to make a mess.

That was easy!

And it got messy fast, the bisquit is very crumbly. Not my favourite material at all!

First layer

It was during the process of cutting the first layer when I had the what-the-hell-am-i-even-doing moment. The first layer looked like a giant crooked eye and it almost fell apart when i moved it. And it wasn’t getting any better.

Am I making a giant nut cake?

Nearly gave up at this stage

The chocolate fill was almost liquid, the cherries decided it was time to run away, the cake did not look like a mobius cake at all! I opened the windows to make the whole kitchen a giant cooler and hoped for the best.

Then I just kept adding a metric fuckton of chocolate.

I did it!

And i did it!

It was not pretty, it was not elegant, not even slightly symetric, but it was a möbius cake!

And I still had a lot of leftover material, so I made a tiny surprise gear cake

It's not a möbius gear cake, but a mobius + gear cake

Note from Swizec: It was fucking delicious!

Related articles

• Möbius Cake (neatorama.com)
• an epic cake disaster (cathweber.blogspot.com)
• “MOBIUS,” a Stop-Motion Sculpture by ENESS (core77.com)
• Moebius Noodles Photo Game (letsplaymath.net)

Notebook

Ever since I was a wee lad I thought I might one day write an epic book that at least two people will read. I realize now it’s difficult to write a book when you’re coding all the time.

The internet doesn’t help either.

However something good did come out of this obsession with writing – at some point in high school I realized it would be incredibly useful to always keep a notebook on hand to jot down any idea that might pop up  at an unexpected time.

And so the notebook fetishism began.

My first pocket notebook looked more like a collection of post-it notes inside a cardboard case thing. Of course it proved unwieldy to keep in my pocket and needless to say it eventually broke down so much it seems I’ve thrown it out … can’t find it anywhere.

Here’s all the notebooks that survived through the years, ordered roughly in chronologically. The right-most three I’m using right now (the big one and two under it) … ok, actually the totally rightmost one is still waiting to begin its career. There’s also a fake moleskine in there; that first black notebook from the left.

Notebooks! About 4 missing due to utter death

It’s taken me years to discover the wonder that is Moleskine. Now sure, some might say it’s an overpriced notebook designed to take money away from hapless hipsters.

But I think Moleskine is really the Apple of notebooks, which again will say to most people that it’s an overpriced piece of kit designed to take money away from hapless hipsters. Their latest PR blunder aside, I have to say I really love these things – probably won’t be buying any other brand in the foreseeable future.

At least not for the ones I like to keep in my pocket. That big moleskine right there? Yeah, that was kind of stupid, sure I love it to bits, but 17 euro for a notebook with ~200 pages that for some reason isn’t even hardcover? O.o

Moleskine just seems to care more about details than most other notebooks I’ve tried. Where else does each notebook come with a tracking number and a note that should there be anything funky, you should just report that particular notebook and the particular quality assurance person in charge of that particular notebook will be thwapped over the nose?

I’m sure the marketing story coming with each notebook is bullshit, but it feels nice that they even care enough to include it.

However, the ultimate test came when I started using the ultra skinny ones. You know, the one you can actually keep in your backpocket at all times so you literally never find yourself without a notebook as long as you aren’t naked.

Two months in the backpocket

Kept it there, nice and cosy next to my arse, for two months every day. Sat on it, sweated on it when it was hot and I was in a hurry, did unspeakably horrible things to it … nothing happened. Sure it looks battered and the covers are bent and crinkley. But not a single paper fell out, the stitching is still perfect … the cover didn’t even start layering!

Any other notebook I’ve had felt like it was about to die after a week of staying in my pocket … papers starting to fall out, the back breaking … things like that.

Anyone else a fan of notebooks that just work?

Related articles

• Notably Cute Notebooks (fabsugar.com)
• Mini Review: Rhodia 5×5 Grid Pad No. 10 (nopenintended.wordpress.com)
• A Little House Notebook (practicalpages.wordpress.com)
• Moleskine Alternatives For GTD Hacking (newcommbiz.com)
• Notes on notebooks (guardian.co.uk)

A year ago, to the day, I was sitting in Om Malik‘s office in San Francisco. We were discussing a possible writeup about Preona/LazyReadr on GigaOM.

postme.me 2nd batch

I know it was exactly a year ago because I remember saying something like “Oh I’m 23 … wait, I’m 23 TODAY!” when he asked how old I was.

About a year before I set out on a voyage that would cement my decision to do startups. With the help of some ultra early investorvisers (adviser+investor) I founded my first company and plunged off the deep end; fully expecting to build the plane before my head smashed into the jagged rocks below.

I’d been working practically full time on Twitulater beforehand, but this was different, this evolved out of that original nugget and I remember thinking to myself “Shit just got real brah!”

And it did, it did get real! I was ready to face anything anyone would throw at me. People were saying it’s not all fun and games, that startup life is more like a roller coaster. Sure, it was difficult, there were hard times building a product, getting our first government grant … rebuilding the product again from scratch over that summer because the iPad came out and completely changed the landscape …

Those two weeks last October – looking for funding in the US, mingling with the YC crowd, going to awesome conferences … I felt like I was on top of the world! “Everything I touch turns into gold!”, I thought. Hell, out of all the seasoned veterans in that first Brezmejnik batch we got the furthest with investors. Us, the young grasshoppers who but a month earlier looked like they wouldn’t even have anything to pitch, we got to a verbal “yes” to participate in a round if we can pull it together.

A lot has changed since then …

We did not, in fact, manage to pull together a round. The fact I hadn’t been making any money (full time startup plus a full time student, yeah, it doesn’t work) eventually caught up with me. Around December the first rat fled the ship. Just up and stopped responding to emails.

Image via Wikipedia

Then the fighting between cofounders started. It wouldn’t even be that bad if there was actual fighting. It was one of those quiet disputes that smack you when you aren’t looking.

At some point we stopped talking for three weeks.

“The product will save us!”, I thought, “I need to make the fucking product! I’ll finish it myself if I have to!”

And I did try, for that month, month and a half, I was doing all the frontend and backend programming and trying to figure out where we could muster some money. Instead, I should be acting like a CEO and hiring people. Actually finding money. Realising the product cannot be finished before our negative runway becomes more than @skatey can keep up with doing consulting.

Around February Skatey and our investorvisers decided that the shit has gone far enough. Swizec is an idiot, he can’t code for shit, he sucks at getting money, why do we even need him? Plus he isn’t paying off that debt arising from company expenses he owed to Skatey.

How could I? I was pulling 80+ hour workweeks trying to keep up with all the coding and the exam season was upon me. I had that pesky school to finish!

They kicked me out.

I was able to negotiate the nullification of my debt to Skatey, but this still left me about 2000 euro in debt.

2000 euro may not sound like a lot, but out of all the work the previous year I think about 800 euro made it into my pocket – I bought a phone and some clothes. Everything else went into the startup either directly or by keeping me from dying of starvation.

What’s more, the debt was due in four months … I was practically bankrupt. If it wasn’t for the pasta investment from my parents I’d be forced to live on the street.

Here I was, 23, bankrupt, startup up in flames, the shredded remains of a guy who once thought he could take on the world and win.

I was fed up with my life and myself. I was just about ready to pretty much check out … if not literally then at least figuratively, kill this blog, kill my twitter account, everything, just get away from the world. I did the next best thing and broke up with my girlfriend of three years. In fact I cheated on her and then broke up with her.

Not the proudest moment of my life.

It got better

Around that time I also launched HipsterVision … a fun little project to put me in a better mood. It even got a decent amount of traffic and if I remember correctly at some point got picked up by the BBC on a show about hot new tools online.

But I had no energy to sustain growth. No ideas on how to get more traffic. No brainpower left to even contemplate making anything serious out of that project. Most of all, I simply couldn’t afford to work on anything other than quickly getting some job that will enable me to pay off my debts by June, the deadline.

It was April.

Image by Matt Niemi via Flickr

I did in fact manage to find such a job. But I was miserable, there was nothing about Slovenia that could cheer me up, I had to get away somehow, anyhow, whatever way possible. I wanted to go to the US over the summer, if push comes to shove, I’ll go there without money and find a freelancing gig.

A month later the offer from DoubleRecall came that I can join them in Palo Alto during their YC experience.

I ditched my job. Just stopped responding to emails.

Another not very proud moment in my life. It was a soul sucking lucrative job with a bad culture fit. But ditching them like that wasn’t a very nice thing to do.

But I paid off my debt by June. Nobody would come knocking at the door to take my socks!

It is now October.

I’m not quite at the same heights I was a year ago. The exam fiasco that was September didn’t do much for my mood, but at least I’m not in too much shit financially. Two weeks ago I launched Postme.me, which has so far brought in infinitely more profits straight from users than all my previous projects combined. The Startup included.

Actually I think I’m doing pretty great right now.

Postme.me is doing well and getting better, this blog is getting increasingly more traffic, I have two freelancing offers from cool startups in San Francisco on my plate (gonna have to pick), and I’m well set to graduate by next September and free myself geographically.

Definitely the hardest year of my life, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Related articles

• I couldn’t get into YC so I joined a startup that did (swizec.com)
• There are so many options now for fledgling startups now for seed investment and advice – YCombinators, Tech Stars, 500 Startups, etc. Should one pursue them all? Is one better than the rest? Does geography of where one is matter? Thanks in advance for (bijansabet.com)
• The Previously Strong Startup Employee That Is No Longer Effective (davidcummings.org)
• Doing a startup taught me the value of staying in school (swizec.com)

When was the last time you tried to put something digital onto a piece of paper?

It’s not very difficult right? As it shouldn’t be, we live in the future! Take a document, click print and voila, the magical elves in a plastic box do their magic and you get a lovely piece of paper with some crap on it.

Image by JimYounkin via Flickr

If you don’t have a box of elves of your own, you take it to the nearest person who does, pay them the price of a tenth of gum and they do it for you.

But sometimes you want to do this in a more sophisticated manner. Perhaps your target paper size isn’t A4, perhaps you’re doing something that can’t just be whisked up in your favourite Word clone. Maybe, just maybe, you aren’t producing the content, maybe you have a form somewhere on the interwebs that people can fill out.

As I found out last night and this morning, that bit isn’t too simple.

Last night I set out on the monumental task of preparing the second batch of Postme.me’s for printing. I was once told that everybody in the world uses something called InDesign to do this, hell, I used it to set up the first batch.

But it was 18 cards this time, that’s a bit much to do by hand isn’t it? I’m a lazy programmer after all and my kind cowers before menial tasks like nobody’s business!

I will automate this!, I thought.

The fuck I will.

After spending five minutes getting the database to export as a shiny XML I spent upwards of two hours trying to figure out how to convince InDesign to import said XML. Yes, it does haz the capabilities, no they don’t help … or maybe I just can’t think like a designer and that’s why nothing made sense.

I mean come on, you tag all the fields, you get all the data to import and be properly tagged … but it just does not want to fill the template. It could at least help with the menial tasks. Nope, Fuck you! I will reset all your fonts and colours to a magical default. Problem?

InDesign was trolling me on purpose, I swear!

Oh but what’s this, browsers have a shiny print to PDF feature don’t they? Maybe I can just export as nice HTML and get a browser to print it into a PDF and be done with it.

Yeah, fuck that too. Turns out no matter how hard I tried it is virtually impossible to convince any browser to print without margins. Even setting up a custom paper size that explicitly defines zero margins … nope. The closest browser to come to cracking the problem was Chromium on Linux … things only got screwy around page 15 … and only got worse henceforth.

Chromium on Mac indeed has an actual working marginless feature. But it only supports A4 directly, use the OS’s print screen and the marginless feature magically vanishes, but you do get different paper sizes.

And it only gets worse.

Tried a number of different programs and libraries to export a piece of nicely formatted modern-ish HTML to PDF and nothing worked. Either the paper sizes were off (but the margins were alright) or the font didn’t render correctly.

In the end, after at least five hours of trying different things, I broke down and did it by hand. Copy pasted all the images and all the text into an InDesign file …

… it took 20 minutes.

Hat’s off to all the designers of the world who do this stuff on a daily basis.

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