I took the family last night to see Ellie Goulding at Oakland's Fox Theater. If you've never been to the Fox, the bottom level is standing room only, save for a few barstools. Knowing the theater can fill up, I scoped out a spot for my 5'2" daughter to be able to stand to watch the show without being blocked. The far left end of 2nd railing from front seemed to be a good choice, so I gathered everyone up and headed over to an empty area against the wall and about 8-9 feet wide across the railing.

As we strolled up, a shorter older woman who was standing to the right of this 'spot' announces to me that she's 'holding' the railing for two friends. Glancing at the space to the right of her and back at the giant space we were getting ready to claim I determined there was plenty of room for everyone, and maybe three or more to boot. So, in a calm yet assertive voice I said to her, "It's a railing. I mean, you can't reserve a railing for people who aren't here, right? We're here now." I then proceeded to claim my 'spot' on the railing next to the wall and remained silent on the matter. She didn't look very happy, but I dismissed it as a negotiation of resources and nothing more.

A few minutes later the woman's friends show up, and end up standing to the right of the lady where there was still plenty of space. Of course. Shortly after, the kids decided to leave and go wander around, which left quite a bit of room on both sides of my wife and I. As soon as the kids were out of earshot the woman leans in and announces to me, "I didn't want to say anything with your kids here, but you were a jerk to me earlier." Without skipping a beat my wife says to her, "You can't reserve a railing. It's standing room only. Stop being a bitch, clearly there's plenty of room for everyone."

Given we were dealing with someone who thought you could reserve a railing, I'm not surprised she said anything to me. I wasn't exactly warm and friendly to her either, but she might as well have said "go away" when we met. It was after this I thought to myself "I don't want to be bummed out about her. What can I do to take away something positive from this encounter?". I mulled on it a bit, considered a change in name calling tactics with my wife and then suddenly lighted on the real issue: Why did this lady assume she could save a swath of railing?

People save seats. Our society accepts "This seat is taken." without hesitation or retort. Seats, like spaces at railings, are a commodity in a busy market. Unlike railing however, seats are discrete. Exactly one ass goes in one seat at a time. Railings are, well, they're continuous. Run out of room on a railing? Squeeze in people! The more the merrier.

And that's when it hit me. The software application market today is just like a railing at the Fox. It's huge, continuous, and elastic. Sure there may be a handful of 'seats' which only a few companies can occupy, but the rest of the space is as wide open as the Wild West. There's plenty of room for companies to squeeze in! We have room (boom?) because the entry cost is so small and the opportunities are so numerous.

If you don't code, I encourage you to pick up a book and learn. Today. We're damn short of engineers out here in Silicon Valley. We could definitely stand to have more people on the railing with us.

Just don't tell me that little spot next to you is reserved. I'm taking it.

I use my own URL shortener at StackGeek to do most of my Tweets. The shortener has code to post to Twitter, but it lacks functionality for cross posting to my Google+ account. About a month ago I configured an IFTTT recipe to take my tweets and post them to my Google+ account which 'solved' this problem. Unfortunately IFTTT pulled Twitter inbound support last month, so I was left looking for another solution. Here's how I solved it.

Configure Google+ for SMS

You'll need a Google+ account which has a Google Voice account associated with it. You'll also need a phone number associated with your Google Voice account. Go take care of all that if you haven't already.

To turn on SMS posting, start by making sure Text Forwarding is turned on in your Google Voice account. Go to your Voice Settings page, then click on the checkbox next to forward text messages to email. Click save changes at the bottom. Now navigate to your Google Plus settings page. Under notification delivery, click on add phone number. Enter your number and then click send verification code. Enter the code when it shows up in your inbox on Google Voice.

Once your phone is added to your Google+ account, you'll see an option popup below called SMS Posts. Check the box next to allow posting by SMS. It'll save automatically.

Test posting by SMS works by clicking on the red text button on the left and sending a message to 33669. Wait a few seconds and then refresh your Google+ profile page to see the text you just sent over.

Setting Up IFTTT to Email Google+

Go check your email now. You should have an email from +133669 in your inbox saying your post was shared on Google+. Use the small pulldown next to to me to view the email details. The from field is important. You'll want to copy the portion of the email address after +133669. It should look something like this: 19252577777.33669.rBDHlnlc7Z@txt.voice.google.com. This email address can be used to post to Google+ by email. Try it now by emailing something to that address and verifying it shows up on your Google+ profile. Delete both test posts when you are done.

Head on over to IFTTT and create and/or login to your account. You'll need a Gmail channel, so click on channels at the top and then click on the Gmail Channel. Follow the instructions for setting up the Gmail account you use with your Google+ account. You'll need to authorize IFTTT's access to your account. Once you are done, navigate back to the main dashboard by clicking the IFTTT logo at the top left.

Now click on create a recipe and then click on the big this link. Click on the orange RSS feed channel. It should be positioned between the facebook pages and ffffound channel. Click on new feed item trigger.

Note: You can alternately click on the new feed item matches trigger and enter #googleplus (or whatever) to have your tweets selectively cross posted from Twitter. Up to you!

For the feed URL text box enter the following while substituting yourusername for your actual Twitter username:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=yourusername

Click create trigger and then click the massive that link. The chose action channel screen should appear. Click on the Gmail channel below, and then click on send an email (the only choice) in chose an action. The complete action fields step should appear. Enter the email address you extracted above for posting to Google+ in the to address field. Delete everything in the body field except for EntryContent. Add the tag '+public' to the front of the post to encourage Google+ to show this post to everyone. Click create action and then enter a description and click create recipe to save.

Using IT

There's really nothing much else to do. Use your favorite Twitter client and post to it. A few minutes later (worst case 5 minutes) you should see that same post showing up in your Google+ profile feed!

This is a repost from 6 years ago. Enjoy.

I'm currently reading Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. I picked it up in the investment section of the bookstore the other day, and have been reading it over the past week or so. The reason I picked it up was because I was writing a stock trading program in PyGene, and was looking for some good reference material. More on that later.

In simple terms, Nassim makes the assertion that all of us are making wild ass assumptions about the random stuff that happens in our life on a day to day basis.

I had a friend just tell me a story about an attorney friend that had a witness to a car crash fly into town to go out to the site and describe what happened. When the witness and the attorney got to the scene of the previous accident, the witness jumped out of the car and was immediately struck by an oncoming truck, killing him instantly. Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

What are the chances that this would happen to you? Just because it happened, does it mean that you "deserved" it, or that it was "fate", or that you were the direct cause of it? Unfortunately, most of us assume the answer to this question is a resounding "Yes!", when something as unlikely as this happens to us.

Nassim gives an example in the book of a lady that has won the powerball lottery twice. When asked, most people refuse to believe that this is actually possible without some type of external influence (like God for example), as it is a 1 in 4 billion chance that it would happen to themselves. However, when you run the statistics on the probability of it happening to anyone sometime in the last 30 years, it's about about 1 in 30 - a decent chance at the least, and not at all suspicious.

Now for the controversial bit.

I assert that most of the successes or acquisitions we see in the dotcom space are due primarily to raw, unadulterated luck. I'm not saying that you don't need a product to qualify you for entry into this arena, but I am maintaining that what comes after you enter is attributed to random chance.

Bill Gates' success should not be attributed to the fact that he's 100K times as smart as I am, or that he has come up with a better product than everyone else. It is attributed to the fact that he realized that he was on to something in the early days of Microsoft, and took action when adoption rates jumped. The fact that adoption jumped at all was just stupid luck. Ever hear of the Amiga?

Take MySpace for example. When Chris and Tom started MySpace, they made the assertion that people would like to have a social networking version of something akin to GeoCities. It was necessary that they develop the product and launch it, but past that, everything leading to the success of the product is attributed to being at the right place at the right time, and then executing on it after you realized you were actually in the right place. For MySpace's founders, nobody really knew if combining personal web pages with social networking would be appealing, it was just a lucky guess, and it turned out to be right.

Most site's measure of success hinges on adoption by large numbers of users - AKA The Masses. Much like the success or failure of submitted stories on Digg, the adoption rates by The Masses are analyzed after the fact, and bold claims are made about why a particular approach worked to get The Masses to adopt in the first place. Of course most of the people doing this analysis are investors, press and bloggers - all of which think they know what they are talking about. They don't, but they sound good with 20/20 hindsight vision at hand.

There are a ton of intelligent people in the world that are capable thinking up and executing on an Internet startup. However, there are only a few guys that actually make headlines with their successful exits on a day-to-day basis. These few people aren't necessarily smarter or better informed than the rest of us - they were just in the right place at the right time, and realized it when they got the inertia given to them by mass adoption.

To ensure one's own success, one needs to make assertions, execute on them, gather feedback, and then repeat until a movement is made in the right direction. With out the repetition, and awareness, you could find yourself doomed to failure before you even begin.

Of course it always helps to believe you are smarter than everyone else too.