High School is out, reading 4-Hour Work Week
I have a post that is coming regarding my time in High School, it is kind of long so I am taking my time writing it. Anyways, just wanted to give my readers an update on what I've been up to.
Summer has started out lazily for me; I've finally caught up on all the sleep that I missed out on during the last 3 months when I was working on ClassOwl for 15 hours a day. If you've called me before 11am these last few days, sorry for missing your calls. No, I wasn't on a conference call, I was definitely sleeeeping. So I am caught up on Z's, and am gearing up to start working non-stop on ClassOwl once again.
We moved into a newer, bigger, nicer house about a week before school was out. That was interesting. I learned a lot about moving, the #1 thing that I learned was "Less Is More". As we were clearing out the garage, I realized how much crap you can compile over the years. We should have taken a dump truck instead of a UHAUL for half the stuff too; if it's in your garage, it is probably never going to be used. The only thing in my garage that I wanted to keep were my skis, and I'm going to get a new pair this year anyways.
My parents bought a nice TV for the first time in my life; a 46" Sharp Aquos LCD. We also got cable for the first time in our lives too, DirecTV.
I'm currently finishing up 2 freelance jobs, and starting 1 other. These are the last freelance jobs that I will be having in a while, I just took them so I could make enough money to not worry about working for the rest of summer.
My love for Django has only increased since I took a break from the crazy amounts of Python I was writing on ClassOwl every night. It's hard for me to not recommend Django to someone looking for a beautiful web framework. Recently I've been writing custom Middleware classes just for fun.
I also picked up a book at Borders a few days ago, The 4-Hour Work Week, thanks to Scoble's recommendation. It is making me think a lot and re-evaluate the way I think about retiring. Why slave your whole life for 40-45 years and then retire at the end? He talks about how the "New Rich" are taking mini-retirements throughout their lives and enjoying the world a lot more than saving it all for the end. He also talks a lot about cutting all the BS; meetings that waste time, checking email too much, responding to everyone's whims, etc. There are very few real emergencies that ever happen, people just make everything out to be an "emergency".
It's cool because before reading this, I thought that always being available was the greatest thing. But making yourself unavailable to everyone will help you to be much more efficient and effective in whatever you do. I am almost about to stop reading my feeds in Google Reader, but that would be oh-so-hard to let go of!
So there's a little update of what has been going on. Check out my Facebook to see all the pictures because I document all my adventures now.
I must be out of touch with reality
I learned something today: email is the new snail mail for my generation. When I first built ClassOwl, I honestly thought that kids would check their email daily. It's just... logical to me to check my email every day. Even if I didn't have a BlackBerry with every email sent to it, I would still check my email 3-4 times a day (I did before I had the phone). But today, when a bunch of invitations were sent out, I got an intense reality check.
Kids don't check their email.
It is almost absurd to me how a human being could not check their email. I suppose something like MySpace or Facebook messages could be really replacing the "age-old" email, right? I would have to agree that the new Facebook Inbox could possibly replace all past electronic communication (save instant messaging) with your circle of friends. But beyond interacting with your friends, there is no purpose for the Facebook and MySpace messaging architecture. This is where you check your email.
And maybe that's where my reality check comes in. Teenagers obviously don't care about much beyond their circle of friends, and this is understandable. It also makes the 30.4% California High School dropout rate much more understandable to me (source). Teenagers spend more time trying to be "accepted" and making a large group of friends than ever before, thanks the Social Networking phenomona.
Understandable, yes. But is this right? Should the only thing teenagers care about in high school be their circle of friends? Maybe kids should start thinking about something more important.
Their future.
Thank You Amazon
I just wanted to write a little bit about the most amazing web service of all time. It enables startups scale from nothing to millions of users without ever having to worry about one of the biggest startup problems in the past - SERVERS. Yes, I am talking about the Amazon Simple Storage Service. With Amazon's S3 service, web applications can store an almost infinite amount of data that users upload.
Amazon, thank you. Jeff Bezos, you are truly a life/startup saver.
Just break it!!
I've had the greatest Alpha testers for ClassOwl so far -- my mom, Mr. Robbins, and Mr. Landeros. It's finally here, the revolution is about to begin...
I will never have a “job”
I love writing code too much. I really don't think I will ever consider it a real "job" beause it is so much fun to me. Well, only when I'm working on projects that are cool.
I'm reading Founders At Work right now, by Jessica Livingston from YCombinator, and one of the thing the book stresses is the importance of just working on cool things. Who cares if you fail, you get 10x the experience that you would at a job where a boss tells you what to do, how to do it, and all that other crap.
Anyways. It's 4:15 and I'm sort of tired. Sorry for not blogging much anymore, I've been working my really hard on ClassOwl. Go there and add your email so you can be there when we go Live!