go bold

I’ve never been good at exercising regularly, despite lots of reminders, from many different sources, in various formats, explaining just how necessary exercise is for your { mental well-being, life span, quality of life, focus, self-image }. The last period of time in which I exercised regularly involved several very regimented systems (From Couch to 5K, Hundred Push-ups, and Groupon-spurred bikram yoga) and lasted for a total of about six weeks. This was a year ago. Before that, the last time I got regular exercise was the summer of 2006, during which I was interning in another city, and living with people who had much better habits than I.

After beginning a startup and doing very little between working and sleeping, I’ve finally (about six months in) reached a point where my schedule has stabilized a bit, and I’ve found a routine / set of incentives that I feel like I’ll be able to stick to for awhile – at least, I’ve followed it for the last seven weeks (one week longer than my last attempt) and am still going strong. I’m tired of having the phrase “disgustingly sedentary” float up in my mind when people ask me how I’ve been, and I’m looking forward to maintaining my newfound awesomeness. Below, the usual excuses I use to avoid working out, and how I’ve managed to skirt around them.

Typical Excuse #1: My schedule’s too fluid, and I can’t find time to exercise at the gym

My schedule is a bit eccentric, but once I discovered that I have a 24 Hour Fitness one block away from my office, I’ve found that I tend to come to a natural stopping point at around 1am each night. With a 24 hour gym, I can rarely find a reason to skip the gym before heading home. Plus points: I hate working out around other people, and there are rarely more than 3-4 other people at the gym between 1 and 4am (sometimes, I have the place all to myself!)

Typical Excuse #2: Cardio bores the pants off of me

My most successful stint at exercising regularly (summer of 2006) involved reading lots of Ayn Rand on a stationary bike, also late at night. I realized recently that, by bumping up the font size on my Kindle, I could easily read while running on a treadmill – and can now run for a previously unimaginably long time without noticing. (And then go for another 20-minute jog because I need to know what happens next!)

Typical Excuse #3: I know exercise is good for me, but man it’s such a time sink

When you’re running a startup, you work. A lot. And one of the things that I’ve lost (or have been unable to justify) as a result is my time to read for pleasure. By combining something that’s good for me and feels productive (cardio/gym) with something that makes me really happy and that I always want to do more of (reading for pleasure), I genuinely look forward to going to the gym and will often spend way more time exercising than I planned.

I was surprised at first with how much happier I’ve been as a result. I’m not sure if it’s actually the endorphins, or the “badass”-ness I feel from coming back to the office at 3am and sitting down for another hour or two of work (I mentioned my schedule was nutty), or finally being able to move books off my reading queue, but I’ve noticed a definite uptick in my mood and body image as a result. I’ve run something like 75 miles over the last six weeks (I make it to the gym an average of three times a week), and I’m looking forward to my numbers (I love you, Runkeeper!) going ever upward.

I was at the SF MoMA this past weekend – and if you’ve ever been, you’ll (hopefully) know that in their standing collection is a set of art from a number of particularly interesting artists, one of whom (Duchamp) is known best for a work photographed here. This is Fountain:

It’s a urinal. It’s a run-of-the-mill, yes-he-really-did, urinal. Made into art (and thus deserving of a spot inside the MoMA) simply by declaring it as such.

Of course, some amount of reputation was required to pull that off, and some other, more traditionally respectable work had to be done to acquire said reputation, but in the end – he’s able to pull something someone else technically “made,” and enhance it for his own purposes.

In the software world, there are those who seem to find it unthinkable to use off-the-shelf products to help with the engineering process in-house. While this attitude has certainly led to plenty of innovation (thank you for Cassandra, BigTable, etc), these special cases seem to really only be the extreme of the “there’s nothing out there just for us” attitude. And, I suppose, to play devil’s advocate, in their situation, off-the-shelf tools probably aren’t quite right for their incredibly unique case. (Or maybe they just had too many engineers and not enough game-changing projects?)

In any case. One of the things I’m getting used to at Aardvark – and starting to really appreciate the wisdom of – is utilizing existing and established solutions when necessary. We need bug/ticket tracking? There’re tons of solutions out there – done! Better log analysis? Found, installed, done. System and cluster monitoring? Perhaps not entirely ideal, but good enough – done. It lets the team know what we need to know, and gets us free to focus on what we really need to get done – the core product and infrastructure.

I joined a conversation this past weekend with a couple of people just starting to get their startup off the ground, and they were embroiled in a CouchDB vs MySQL debate – are relational databases really outdated, or are document-based databases just overhyped? Which is the better to start with for their startup? My answer – whichever makes your actual job easier. There are lots of cool toys out there, but there’s a careful risk vs. reward tradeoff you have to make – and when you’re focused on startups, can you really afford an awkward risk down the line with your data or architecture?

I suppose this is a long, elaborate rephrasing of “Worse is Better.” Take shortcuts and the quick, easy, established route to change the world, first – then figure out how to make it happen better.

As heartbreaking as it is to push down the “pre-SxSW” entry, I may as well do it some time… and I’ll have a SxSW entry up soon enough!

So I finally updated and filled in most of the portfolio section — there are still a few projects I haven’t fully screenshot to their full glory, or provided enough of a description for, but for now this’ll suffice. Enjoy, poke around, and feedback (oh, right — adding to my list of TODO’s… I’ll add a feedback form somewhere soon enough) is always appreciated.

Cheers! Here’s to the second week of classes, may they be slightly more exciting than the first.

After spending solidly over 3 hours tonight uninstalling Apache 2.0, downloading, compiling, making, and installing Apache 2.2, trying to figure out why Apache 2.2 had no PHP support, trying to install PHP5, discovering all of PHP5′s dependencies and individually apt-getting those… I think I’m done messing with the server. For now.

Edit: two hours later, 5:58AM… Nope. Nope. Apache 2.2.3 and mod_auth_mysql… Thank you for making my life fifteen times more complicated.