Coach Thrasher

jipCam for sale?

I was asked a very interesting question this week about jipCam that totally caught me off guard: Why did you give this away by open sourcing it?

The answer is that it wasn't thought to be the core competency of the company that created it. It wasn't the technology that we were driving for. jipCam was just code-roadkill on the way to delivering video search. So, with limited value to the company, and the potential to get many more people involved in testing it, it was released to the community. But today I met the CEO of a very interesting media company (actually I met several), and while reminiscing about the internet in the late 1990's remembered what a success Hotmail was and how it came about.

Hotmail was an artifact of a non-email related project. It was being used to communicate with people in an email-ish way. After all, who would use web based email when you had Eudora or Outlook? Then some investors viewed a presentation by it's creators in which Hotmail was just a "gee-whiz", and the investors lit up when the saw this little web-based email feature.

I wonder how many road-kill artifacts are created to solve larger rocket-science problems that, taken alone, are sufficiently valuable themselves to release as products? It must be a huge number.

Posted at 11:00PM Aug 18, 2007 by jason in General  | 

BarCamp Wikiality

At BarCampBase now... I'm noting on the Wikiality session. This is the first time I've been exposed to the business argument for wikis... conveniently thought through by Social Text and presented by Ross Mayfield. I had a good idea about this previously but Ross' arguments blow me away.

I'm having a Web 2.0 Moment (tm): I'm wikiing the session for the group, blogging, and SMS texting people in other sessions. Cool, but when will this make me money?

Hum... just added the word "refactoring" to my MS Word dictionary.

Update: Here are my wiki notes from Ross Mayfield's session.

Posted at 11:53AM Aug 18, 2007 by jason in General  | 

BarCampBlock

What do people in the tech republic do to party? Apparently they attend BarCampBlock. It's tomorrow, and it should be interesting...

Posted at 10:06PM Aug 17, 2007 by jason in General  | 

Milking the Kid and Improving Your Products

Bridget and I are working on getting enough sleep with the arrival of Noah Thrasher, now 14 days old. He's quite a handful, and I'm not able to devote as much time to coding software as I need to.

To replace that "function" of myself, I've started coming up with product ideas for a new application of mine and I've been bouncing these ideas off of Bridget. She responded today with the family quote of the day, when asked what's a wife for:

"Milking the Kid and Improving Your Products."
-Bridget

Ah, and what a wonderful wife and son I have. I'm feeling very lucky these days.

Posted at 05:15PM Jun 29, 2007 by jason in General  | 

RSS Feed Syndication Test

Testing syndicated feed from Captured Speed Productions.

The future: an embedded widget world! Step right up and get your widgets here! :P

Posted at 05:56PM Jun 08, 2007 by jason in General  | 

Growth Mind-Set

I found a great article on "Growth Mind-Set", which I'm going to incorporate into my coaching. There are many ideas like this that resonate with improving performance in sport, and life.

The article's message reminds me of Jim Thompson's book "The Double-Goal Coach" where the concept of "Honoring the Game" is the focus, over the outcome of the sporting event. The performance-based outcome is actually put on the back burner in Thompson's book, which is the opposite message that I think we get about sports in American culture.

With junior athletes I've found that the best actual performance is nearly always had when the focus is on improving skills, and not on event outcomes. Recently, our 1x had a fantastic first race, and there was zero expectation on the outcome. Last season at our local championship regatta, I coached our MV4+ on performance goals, and they ended up having a stressful and tense race that didn't really show what they are capable of. The lesson was learned - by me!

One of the reasons I enjoy coaching at the junior level so much is that the athletes are willing to open up and learn something new, by facing new challenges. Maybe our cultural definition of not being an adult is that you have something left to learn before being labeled an adult. As an adult in the workforce, the hardest management or team issues I've come across are situations where an adult has a fixed mind-set about their ability or the abilities of others. I think that attitude tears at the performance potential of any organization.

Posted at 11:22AM Mar 24, 2007 by jason in General  | 

PARC Baby Shower

Bridget and I were treated to a baby shower today hosted by Lynn Gardner and Carol Platner, at Lynn's house. Many Palo Alto Rowing Club parents and athletes were there to munch on food, tell us baby stories, and bring us gifts! We are very thankful to be a part of such a giving community. All of the gifts will go a very long way to getting Baby Thrasher #1 off with his life journey. We took several pictures of the event. Thanks everyone!

Posted at 04:40PM Mar 17, 2007 by jason in General  | 

Pay Attention!

The WSJ has a really interesting article about How Thinking Can Change the Brain. With the standout quote:

If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention.
-WSJ

When I think of this in terms of a skill I'm trying to perfect, does this mean practicing it to the point that I don't have to think about it becomes practicing to the point of complacency? We refer to some skills people have as "second nature" because people seem to perform them without thought. It makes sense, as the article says, that if we "pay attention" to what we're doing, even if it's performed at a high level of expertise, that we can possibly further perfect the skill.

Of course, I have to mention rowing here. I've always thought that it took three years for anyone to really start to row well. It's very defeating to tell a novice that it'll take three years for them to be any good at the sport. There are people who join and make the varsity boat in their first year, but it's not the norm. For people that have been doing it for 10 years or more, did we ever learn anything past those first three years?

At what point did it become second nature, and was that the end of the learning (perfecting)? I'd like to think that it's not. But it makes me think it's time to refocus and pay attention more.

Posted at 04:54AM Jan 20, 2007 by jason in General  |  Comments[1]

Google: hire my Wife!

Google's got some interesting hiring practices, and I really found this article (brought to my attention by Slashdot) interesting: Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm. I've always looked at the Goog's much publicized hiring practices as a marketing scheme to make you think of their company as you might think of Stanford, or any Ivy. The message being: Google is the Ivy of companies.

I would have actually not made it past their previous, GPA based, hiring practices. I just never did my homework, but I could take a test and ace it by reading the appropriate chapters myself the night before, or sometimes just by attending and listening to lectures. So, my grades suffered from homework. As a result, I easily passed, but Google would frown.

My wife on the other hand is much different... with any academic pursuit. Not only does she do her homework, she aces nearly everything on both homework and on tests.

Google: hire my Wife!

Bridget has started two companies, in software consulting, and in wine sales. She was voted her high school's "most likely to succeed". She's a Caltech alumni. She's got 3 master's degrees: Earth Science, IT, and Engineering. She has passed her QE for her Ph.D., while taking supplemental classes in related subjects outside of the university. She volunteers for Team in Training to support the Lukemia and Lymphoma Society. She has raised over $5000 for charity. She motivates other people to succeed. She's a Notary Public who handles mortgage signings (her third independent business). And, the kicker: she has a dog.

The only thing she's not good at is trumpeting her own horn.

Google: hire my Wife! (try: jobs[a]coachthrasher[.]com)

Oddly, it seems Google is changing their hiring ways, so maybe there's hope for the rest of us. They are asking questions like: "Did you start a club in high school?" because it's a sign of strong leadership. What? I started two engineering clubs in high school. Google never called! I also tried to start a bicycle racing club with a petition (the school's administration was opposed to it). And I published one edition of an underground newspaper. Maybe there is hope, and one day I'll get a job at an Ivy. (Hopefully they will be buying my company for $1.65 Billion, and I won't even have to interview.)

Posted at 10:35PM Jan 05, 2007 by jason in General  | 

Cycling is the new Golf

There have been several articles lately proclaiming that "cycling is the new golf". Today the New York Times has an article titled You Paid How Much for That Bike? Last year the New York Times also reported on cycling in Silicon Valley, quoting well-known VC Randy Komisar, in Wheels and Deals in Silicon Valley. I think it's really interesting that references to "work ethic" (especially in Silicon Valley) to are being tied to "work out ethic", and that people are seeing a corollary between each.

Recently a parent of a rower explained how excited she was that her daughter was going to try rowing. The parent's motivation for encouraging her daughter to get up at 4:30 am for practice was the anticipated effect this would have on her grades. Wow, that's really interesting! To my knowledge there has never been a rowing-marketing campaign that pushed the sport as a grade-increaser. The key to the parent’s reasoning was that the scheduling required to be successful at the sport would spill over into scheduling the rest of the student’s life, including academics, and therefore the student would make plans to be successful in all endeavors.

Taking the two NYT articles into account, is it because of the uniqueness of these sports, the required hard work, or the "extreme-ness", that lets people perform in an all-around higher capacity in life while participating?

As a dedicated rower, I'd like to say to the cyclists: if you think you work hard, try rowing. Now that my flamebait is planted...

This is all quite interesting to me in relation to comments from parents of rowers that tell me their children's grades have improved since joining crew. In my experience as a coach, this sport/academic relation doesn't seem to exist for all sports. When I coached rowing at West Potomac High School in Virginia, the rowing program had the highest GPA of all sport teams at the school… not because of me, but because of the kinds of people that were attracted to the sport. (Incidentally, the football program had the lowest GPA, and the highest arrest rate at the time... yet they were state champions.)

Is it the accessibility of the sport that defines it's extreme-ness, and thereby implies the notion that these are special activities? Cycling and rowing aren't nearly as accessible to people as running, swimming, soccer, or baseball. The equipment is expensive for both. Rowable water can be difficult to find, as are traffic-free streets. These factors should filter-out a significant part of the population by accessibility alone. These sports are also less culturally ingrained in the United States, especially compared to something like baseball.

Back to the subject, “Cycling is the new Golf”, it’s fascinating that high profile business people are beginning to recognize the sport this way. This seems to be the same motivator for getting students into rowing.

Posted at 11:07AM Nov 09, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[2]

The Team is Sick

Starting last week, 3 members of PARC came down with a cold. This has pretty much devastated the lineups for water practice. PARC is still a small program, and only has 10 varsity rowers. The whole experience reminds me of missing people from a project in a work environment: it's time to reset expectations with leadership (parents) as we approach our project milestones (regattas).

With three missing, we can't row an eight, so we've been breaking into small boats, 1x, 2x, and 4+, for last week and this week. With the first regatta in two weeks, we won't have enough time to prepare an 8, so some people won't get to row due to the limited number of small boats.

Posted at 08:51PM Oct 22, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[1]

Death by Wikipedia? NOT!

There's an article in Sunday's Washington Post panning Wikipedia as a source for news. I was quite surprised at the author's comments on his expectations of Wikipedia as a news source for information on the death of Enron's Ken Lay.

The author closes with "I'm a fan of Wikipedia and Wiki notions, such as "citizen journalism." I just want them to be better." But he pans wiki pretty badly. I think he has missed the point of what wiki wants to be. Because Wikipedia has tried to market itself as "like the encyclopedia" the author expects the same experience with fact-checked articles, etc.

In reality, Wikipedia has used the encyclopedia analogy to educate users about what kind of content it has to offer. The fact that users can add/edit content at will throws a novel wrench into the mix that people are still learning to deal with. It's not the same as an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia analogy educates users as to what it does though.

IMHO it's much better than the encyclopedia. People can democratically change the content. Of course, content will be changed to suit the times! That adds value to the whole Wiki process! The examples of updating the Ken Lay content, flipping from "suicide" to "natural heart attack" and back within minutes, only goes to show that people have the power to change the content rapidly. Once the consensus is reached on what the facts are, it will be updated. And THAT is the beauty of the system. The Encyclopedia Britannica isn't nearly as dynamic: errors live forever in each edition. As it was, Wikipedia was not the right source for information on the cause of Ken Lay's death in the first place... to assume so is to use Wikipedia incorrectly.

Thinking in terms of systems workflow the WP author, Frank Ahrens, may want to use a workflow system to "vote up" wiki content that has been fact checked and is ready for world-wide distribution. Maybe wiki could be the seeding grounds for new content, and a fact-checking system based on user's consensus (like voting) would percolate "fact" type wiki postings to a Wikifact.com holding location. Only fact-checked, or consensus-driven, content would be promoted to Wikifact. That way the fact-driven content would be used and marketed as, well fact, and the wiki content would retain it's organic-information growth that keeps it strong. The Slashdot news voting system could be used to promote content from Wikipedia to Wikifact. Humm.... startup?

Posted at 11:45AM Jul 10, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[0]

Deal or No Deal as a model for Company Acquisitions

There's a great post and mp3 audio-cast at the VentureBlog that models company aquisitions, or acceptance of the "deal", as the gameshow Deal or No Deal does. It's a good listen.

Posted at 12:26AM Jun 14, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[2]

Muir Woods Hike

My sister Cath and her friend Christina just graduated from the University of Virginia and are escaping the oppressive heat back home by visiting CA for a week. We went up to Muir Woods to see the Redwoods and the amazing views. After completing the first half of the "1.5 hour" hike in about 25 minutes, we decided to take a much longer route nearly down to the ocean and back.

Posted at 02:55PM May 28, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[0]

Guest Coaching Adds Depth

Today we had Richard Edwards as a guest coach for the varsity men. Richard rowed at the elite level in England, and has coached several men's eights. I wanted to get a different perspective on the state of our current rowing, so Richard came to us as somewhat of a "finishing" coach to give us some excellent pointers and to add additional depth to our understanding of technique as we approach Championships.

He spoke of using hand speed to increase stroke rate and power, rather than push raw power with the legs. I think this was a really great point. It's not that the legs are less engaged, rather the focus moves to moving the hands (and oar) faster.

He also added an excellent relaxation drill: smiling! I thought this was cool because it's so simple. Smiling helps us to relax and gain confidence in the boat.

Richard discussed several other items as well, and the guys asked good follow up questions in discussion after practice. I really believe that having a different coach adds depth to a rower's "tools chest" of knowledge. Hopefully we can do it again sometime.

Posted at 09:01AM May 11, 2006 by jason in General  |  Comments[1]