I am 28, and live in Tribeca, NYC. I am the founder of perpetually.com, run the tech community JellyNYC and help with New Work City.
In November, 2008, I invested in Frogmetrics, the customer feedback and analytics startup.
I used to work for a statarb hedge fund in New York City until resigning in search of new and more fulfilling challenges.
I take photos, say things, and occasionally use Facebook. Also, I like email.
Google App Engine is becoming super exciting! The team recently released “Task Queues”, a utility that allows you to run a slow process independent of web requests, which must always be fast. This is the same basic functionality as Amazon’s Simple Queue Service, but Google’s implementation carries none of the overhead of setting up or scaling large queues of tasks, as SQS does. With SQS, one has to write a custom daemon to read from the queue, and scale that daemon on new EC2 instances as your queue length grows. In GAE, all this administrative work is handled for you.
Google’s approach is fundamentally far superior to Amazon’s and will prove a no-brainer once the technology becomes more mature, unless Amazon changes direction. I can’t wait for Google to loosen up some of their usage restrictions, such as support for long-running tasks, big data storage, and more flexible python libraries.
Until then, I’m sticking with Amazon’s alphabet soup (AWS, EC2, S3, SQS) and looking for ways to make migration to GAE as easy as possible when it becomes viable.
New Hampshire has just become the sixth state to allow marriage equality. The lion’s share of debate in N.H., as I understand it, was over whether religious institutions (churches, ministers, etc.) would be obligated under the law to perform and recognize same-sex marriages.
I can only imagine how imposing it must be for a religious institution that honestly doesn’t approve of same-sex marriage to be forced to recognize and perform them. I find it hard to respect the same-sex couple that would force a church into being an unwilling participant in this deeply personal and shared ceremony. In fact, I believe such a couple doesn’t actually exist.
As this NYTimes article points out, there are those who believe that the
language adopted by New Hampshire and several other states does not go far enough because it protects only religious groups and their employees. New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage bill does not exempt photographers or florists, for example, from having to provide services at gay weddings.
No one will use their wedding day as an opportunity to pay, offend and then aggravate a photographer who will inevitably under-perform at this important job. In fact, the wedding industry is almost unanimously excited about the increase in business they’ll see. But fundamentally this stuff really isn’t what’s important here. Everyone involved in this debate needs to take a deep breadth. We need to take a minute to understand the personal feelings of our opponents, and create laws that codify this respect.
From an ab-sol-ute-ly-hi-lar-io-us WSJ article on marketing and understanding the upcoming European Parliament elections:
“We wanted somebody youth could relate to,” says Ans Persoons, who directed the initiative. “So we picked an American rapper, but we wanted him to be European, so we hung a big gold euro sign around his neck.”
Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”
This WNYC interview with Stephen, David, James & myself came out pretty well, I think. I’ve been getting some great feedback from people so far; would love to hear more.
New York is close (but not close enough) to passing a marriage equality bill that will make gay marriage legal in the state, due in no small part to Gov. Paterson and state Assemblyman Larry O’Donnell. I’m proud to have added my small voice to the debate, though I wish I understood more of what opponents think.
Please find and contact your state Senator to express your views! Broadwayimpact.org has a great tool to make this super easy.
From an AP story about some sort of lame-o Donald Trump controversy:
Miss California USA can retain her crown after questions arose about semi-nude photographs taken of her as a teenager…
”We’ve reviewed the pictures carefully,” Trump said at a packed news conference at Trump Plaza in New York City.
The other half of this story is much more interesting. One of the celebrity judges says Miss California would have won the competition if not for her stance on same-sex marriage:
Trump also defended the answer Prejean gave at the April 19 Miss USA pageant. She was asked her view of marriage by blogger Perez Hilton. Prejean said she believes marriage is between a man and a woman.
”It’s the same answer the president of the United States gave,” Trump said. ”It’s the same answer many people gave. She gave an honorable answer. She gave an answer from her heart, and I think for that she has to be commended.”
I’m excited today to follow up a post of mine from a few months ago. In it I point out how a new set of startups say they are helping retail investors make better decisions, but are in fact basically encouraging bad advice. However, just yesterday TechCrunch reviewed MarketRiders, which, while early, could be everything I hoped for. The site encourages simple, low turnover asset allocation strategies based on your investment details.
They’ve got issues right now that need to be addressed, like security of the financial details I give them and the advice they give me. They also have other ideas that could prove disastrous, like making deals with brokers. This kind of thing could be a trust-killer.
We’ll see how they come out with this stuff, but here’s hoping!
Don’t mind this post. I’m just marking it as the day Obama officially made “hedge funds” and “speculators” into four letter words. Way too broad a brush, but not without reason. From his announcement of Chrysler’s chapter 11 filing:
Now, while many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you, some did not. In particular, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.
They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices and they would have to make none. Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting.
I don’t stand with them. I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers, and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars.
I don’t stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.
…
it was unacceptable to let a small group of speculators endanger Chrysler’s future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else.
Update 5/7: Bill Gross makes the same point, though better and, you know, waaaaaay more listened to than little old me:
2009 is a similar demarcation point because it represents the beginning of government policy counterpunching, a period when the public with government as its proxy decided that private market, laissez-faire, free market capitalism was history and that a “private/public” partnership yet to gestate and evolve would be the model for years to come. If one had any doubts, a quick, even cursory summary of President Obama’s comments announcing Chrysler’s bankruptcy filing would suffice.
…
If the cannons fired at Ft. Sumter marked the beginning of the war against the Union, then clearly these words marked the beginning of a war against publically perceived financial terror.
