Angus' Feed Bag

[Spilling my guts] The Last Four Labour Day Weekends

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 9:25:15 -0400

2007

• Wrote a novel and forgot how to drive.

2008

• Wrote a novel and cried a little bit.

2009

• Flew to Halifax, attempted to write a novel, failed, flirted with the cute young maid as she cleaned my hotel room, bought a sweater and came home

2010

• Hosted a CouchSurfer from Texas • showed a friend’s new roommate around • ate way too much pizza at a CouchSurfing party • saw The Navigators at The Rock House • met, danced and chick-watched with a lesbian • went to a dance club alone, ran into and danced with a number of friends • had coffee with some former co-workers about freelance work • helped a friend move into a supposedly-haunted house • ate at Folly (love their onion rings) • went to a Screech-in • hung out with a German, two folks from Ireland, and a Brit (and some Canadian travellers too) • saw The Pathological Lovers at The Ship • went to Starbucks and did some reading on my iPad • drank a milk-based beverage at Starbucks that didn’t sit very well • walked around Quidi Vidi Lake with a lady • posted two blog posts (1, 2) • ate at Folly again and had a drink called The Frozen Peacock • ran around Signal Hill, stopping to pick and eat blueberries • cooked and pigged out on ribs • went to a bonfire • watched a movie • and … didn’t write a novel.

[Spilling my guts] Pictures I took with my phone that didn't make it to Twitter

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:36:50 -0400

The longer the title, the less describing I have to do in the body.

First we have Natrix at Folly, explaining to me why his last girlfriend dumped him:

Then we have a mug that was at Winners. I have no idea what it could mean, unless you’re into drinking your own bodily liquids:

There once was a Wednesday where I had a few beers with a few friends and ended up climbing down a rock face on the battery and hanging out on the unstable deck of an old abandoned shack and then I took a picture of Eric and the view:

Nothing keeps people away from my beverage like writing this on the cup:

Lastly, I was in Calgary during the Stampede of the Gay Pink Gophers:

[Uploads from angusw] IMG_0288

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:27:12 -0400

angusw posted a photo:

[Uploads from angusw] IMG_0284

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:26:42 -0400

angusw posted a photo:

[Uploads from angusw] IMG_0267

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:26:28 -0400

angusw posted a photo:

[Uploads from angusw] IMG_0221

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:26:14 -0400

angusw posted a photo:

[Uploads from angusw] IMG_0182

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 6:26:02 -0400

angusw posted a photo:

[Google reader] Achieving Personal Goals

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:20:54 -0400

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough. On occasion some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” – they may not be smart enough to say “yes”.

– Keith Olbermann

Personal development books are full of recipes for goal achievement. You’ve got to get clear about what you want, become a “vibrational match” for the financial success you desire, make the decision that you will attain your goal at any cost, and by the way, here’s an anecdote about some guy you’ve never heard of, who followed every step of my Unlock Your Inner Genius Master Course (TM), and is now, like, super happy to have traded his $300,000/year job on Wall Street for the simple, hunter-gatherer life of a fisherman on a remote island in the South Pacific.

Hmmm…

Okay, okay, I am being a bit harsh. The goal of this post is not to rant against personal development books. Rather, I intend to talk about the actual process of achieving personal goals, using a recent example from my own life. And the first point I want to make is this: There is no secret and no system. There is no frequency that needs tuning into, and no visualization clear enough to guarantee that things will happen.

There is only hard work and hustle, uncertainty and despair, pressing forward when you have no clue where to start, and the inevitable criticism put forth by a seething, vocal minority of non-doers.

Of course, there are also all the upsides that come from giving everything you’ve got to hopefully, maybe, at least give yourself the chance to get exactly what you want. But I’ll talk about those more later.

The recipe for achieving personal goals that I am about to offer you is, in fact, not a recipe at all. It is just a story about one fairly major attempt I made at doing things on my own terms. In some ways it was amazingly successfully. In other ways, things didn’t go as expected. But either way, I’d do it all over again.

In fact, I am doing it all over again. More on that later too.

Moving to Vancouver

In the spring and summer of 2009 I was shopping around for a new place to live. Not just a new house, but a new city — maybe even a new country. I’d been living in Montreal for the last five years, and absolutely loved it, but I didn’t want to let that blind me to exploring other parts of the country and/or the world. In the worst case, if things really didn’t work out, I could always just move back.

After spending a few months in Europe, I ultimately decided — for reasons that would be too off-topic to get into just now — to return to Canada. I was itching to start a new project, wanted a place that would present as few obstacles as possible to building new things, and eventually selling said things, and ultimately decided to move to the West Coast. I ended up in Vancouver.

The Itch

I touched down in Vancouver on August 15, 2009. Before I’d even moved into my own place (I was still crashing on my buddy’s couch), I immediately set to work on coming up with a new project. Carpe diem, etc.

For me, there is a fine line between business and self-actualization. I see the former as a vehicle for the latter. I don’t tend to think of business ideas in terms of what’s hot and what’s trendy. Instead, I tend to think in terms of what’s missing. In the summer of last year, after a few months of being single, the biggest thing that was missing for me was a quality relationship.

Of course, I had no idea at first that the goal of finding a quality long-term relationship would result in an idea for a business. That’s where Twitter came in.

You Are What You Tweet

By last summer, I’d been using Twitter for a couple years. Indeed, I have a link to my Twitter account in the sidebar of this blog, since I think it offers a great way to interact with readers. I also use it to follow people who interest and inspire me.

As I used Twitter more and more, I started to see its potential in helping me achieve the goal of finding a mate. I say this even as someone who swore off dating sites, and for that matter, still does.

As a potential platform for online dating, I saw that Twitter provided a unique window into someone’s life. Unlike typical online dating profiles which are easy to fake, a user’s Twitter stream tells you a lot about who they really are: what kind of work they do, what their social life is like, whether they actually are into all kinds of sports, how influential they are, etc. Sure, you could make up everything about yourself in your tweets, but I personally have yet to see that happen with anyone I come into even vague contact with on Twitter.

As I thought more about the things Twitter is good at, I saw an opportunity to combine a personal goal with the itch I had to build something shiny and new. Since Twitter itself is really bad at being a dating service (and so it should be), why not build something for people who are interested in connecting with Twitter peeps beyond their 140 character limits?

People like, erm, me.

After running the idea by a few friends, there was no doubt that I had to get started on it as soon as possible. My personal goal of finding a great relationship had merged with my interest in the world of followers, at-messages, and tweets. I was going to build a platform on which Twitter users could take their interactions beyond single sentence exchanges and into feature-length conversations. I was going to build a Twitter dating website.

From Thought to Action

The distance between when I started thinking about this idea and when I started implementing it could be measured in hours. I knew that inspiration is perishable, and that if I didn’t act immediately, it just wouldn’t happen.

Because of the sale of my house earlier in the year, I had the bankroll to allow me to focus on building the site full-time, at least for a little while. From the moment I started working on it, I devoted every second of every day to it, seven days a week. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, no grand vision of the business model or the marketing strategy, so I just barfed out my ideas in code and gradually massaged them into something that sort of worked.

Within a couple weeks of starting, I convinced a buddy of mine to quit his job and join me on the project full-time. He’d previously founded and sold a network of Canadian classified ad sites, and I thought his experience would be a great asset moving forward.

In the mad rush of August and September 2009, we ate slept and breathed this project. We were maniacs on a mission and were fairly confident that world domination was imminent. Even though it wasn’t quite ready — hell, we weren’t quite ready — we launched the site on October 1st. We called it Plenty of Tweeps.

The Magic of Just Friggin’ Doing Stuff

Our initial version was pretty crappy. It was fairly stable and bug-free, but it was also somewhat feature-free too. And the user interface, while easy to use, was a little too Twittery in its look and feel.

But here’s the really cool thing about actually doing stuff, even when you have no clue what you’re doing or if it’ll work: people notice. People start talking about you. And people started talking about Plenty of Tweeps. I got interviewed by a popular local newspaper, Mark caught the eye of some of his investor friends, and even one of the founders of Twitter tweeted about us!

More recently, Plenty of Tweeps got mentioned on CNN and on one of the most popular social media blogs in the world, Mashable.

Even as I reflect on this now, I have no idea how this happened. I’m a decent programmer, but I’m no rock star. And while I have a keen interest in user interface design, I learned probably half of what I know from the building of Plenty of Tweeps itself.

And I haven’t even gotten to the really cool part yet.

Single? Use Twitter? Awesome.

There is another highly useful side effect of scratching your own itch: You get to actually use the thing when it’s done. And use it I did.

The product worked exactly like I hoped it would. Reading a person’s tweets gave me about as good a sense of them as you can get without actually meeting them in person. So I just went ahead and liked some profiles to see what would happen.

Surprisingly, people started joining. I exchanged messages with various girls on the site, and went on a couple dates. Going on a date with a girl you met from a dating site you built is a pretty trippy experience, to say the least.

A couple months after we launched, I met someone off the site that I really clicked with, @alicia_CHt. That’s her on the Plenty of Tweeps homepage. ;)

If You Build It…

When I say Alicia and I really hit it off, I mean it. She’s Australian and also lives in Vancouver. Just weeks after we met, she flew back to Australia for a month to spend the Christmas holidays with her family.

A few days after she left, we were chatting on Skype, and she was joking about how I should come over, “you’d have free accommodation!”, etc. I knew she was teasing, but I also knew that a month apart was a long time for two people that had just met. Not one to waste time, the next morning I booked a ticket, and a couple days later, I met her at the airport in Sydney.

Fast forward to today: We recently celebrated our nine month anniversary, six of which we’ve been living together. Building a dating site that I personally wanted to use turned out to be a pretty good idea after all.

The Present

Plenty of Tweeps continues to move forward, and while it hasn’t yet been a runaway commercial success, it continues to attract new signups every day. It’s obviously been a huge personal success, and a great addition to my consulting portfolio.

In the past several weeks, I’ve started doing the whole thing all over again with a new project called Quitfest, dedicated to the thousands of people who have commented on my post on quitting drinking. For the past few years, that community has been using a blog post to communicate with each other, and I think I can build something much easier and more fun to use for that purpose.

I spent all of this past weekend working on it, I’ll be on it all day today the second after I hit Publish on this post, and I’ve shifted back to an early riser schedule to help me finish my billable consulting hours early enough to allocate a few hours each day to Quitfest.

In the same way that I had no idea what I was doing with Plenty of Tweeps, I’m fumbling my way forward with Quitfest too. I can’t tell you if I’ve picked the right feature set, the right pricing model, or the right marketing strategy, or even the right idea for that matter, but I’ll find out soon enough.

But here’s what matters most, and here’s the entire reason why I wanted to share this story with you: I haven’t succeeded yet. I haven’t yet reached that glorious point where I can claim to support myself entirely from my own projects. Every fucking time I do anything, I get criticized for it. If you read the CNN link, you’ll see what I mean. Hell, I’ve gotten severely flamed on this blog for some of the things I’ve written. I’ve even gotten severely flamed for not writing for a while.

And that bit about meeting Alicia? Here’s one thing I left out: I liked 199 girls on Plenty of Tweeps. That is not a typo. One. Hundred. Ninety. Nine. While I exchanged messages with quite a few after that, I only actually went on two dates, the second of which was Alicia.

(I left that detail out because Alicia wanted me to. Sorry, baby! I love you. ;)

But one thing I can say for sure is this: I am trying my friggin’ heart out. I can’t think or do any harder. I can’t fall back on that whole well-I-know-if-I-really-put-my-mind-to-it crap. I have no excuses and no rationalizations. This is me running at full power.

And that, to me, is the most important part of achieving personal goals: Not wondering where to start — just starting. Not fearing the damage of rejection — going out and getting rejected. Not needing the advice of some “guru” to tell you what to do — giving yourself permission to live.

When in doubt, go for it. Good luck.

[Spilling my guts] I was hanging some pictures and I came across the The Sprout ad...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 7:55:35 -0400

I was hanging some pictures and I came across the The Sprout ad I posed for last year. That’s right: I was for 15 minutes, a model.

[Google reader] My friend Scott (of Scott’s Pizza Tours) was lamenting...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:50:00 -0400

My friend Scott (of Scott’s Pizza Tours) was lamenting how, for some reason, the Department of Health shut down a guy who was selling amazing lobster rolls out of his basement in Green Point. He went by Dr. Claw. I asked Scott how he ordered and he showed me the above text message conversation.

From the article in The Brooklyn Paper:

Customers could only get his fruits of the sea by friending Claw through Facebook, and if they passed a security check, they would be permitted to place an order for his lobster rolls. Claw would then roll up in a black SUV and drop off the order at a predetermined location or simply bring the sandwiches out to a customer parked around the corner.

[Spilling my guts] Online dating chat log excerpts, 3rd Ed.

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 9:11:44 -0400

If you’re new, find part one here, part two here, and the prologue here. If you’re old, ha ha!

After a couple of these, I’ve heard comments stating how the unnamed Her is my soulmate or how I should hurry up and date/do her. Well, sorry, but that isn’t going to happen. For reasons I promised Her I wouldn’t publish, we cannot do any such things. Actually, I never said anything about publishing, I just said I wouldn’t tell anyone. Though I still suspect she’d kill me if I put it in my blog. So maybe I’ll tell you in the last chat log post. Hmm.

Anyway, here’re this week’s.

Her: Psst

Me: Well if it isn’t ol’ ham panties

Her: Shhhh, don’t be scared. I’m not going to hurt you.

Me: I didn’t think pork underwear would make you dangerous

Her: If they’re undercooked, they can give you brain parasites.

Me: I think that only applies to ham hats

Her: I didn’t realise you were so into fashion.

Me: Not really, but I do read Gentlemen Quartering

Her: This doesn’t appeal to me, having never quartered a gentleman. Is that what you do for a living? You’re sick.

Me: No, no, that’s not my job. Just a hobby. Everyone’s gotta have a hobby

Her: I respect your lifestyle choices.

Me: I was in Quebec yesterday! Though the only French I used was “L’essence, pompe numero trois”

Her: L’essence. How poetic.

Me: Yeah, it basically means give me your soul or I’ll punch you three times

Her: Public nudity shouldn’t be a crime. Or fences should be cheaper. Why is everything the worst.

Me: You want to be nude in the backyard?

Her: Yes. I don’t understand why nudity is so objectionable. It’s just human bits. Everyone’s too stupid.

Me: They’re very distracting human bits. At least chicks can wear those pratically-naked bikinis and stuff. A guy in a speedo just ain’t the same level of acceptable

Her: Bikinis are not acceptable either. It’s so ridiculous. And then you have to get terrible tan lines as a memory. You can never take it off.

Me: Why aren’t they acceptable? You can undo it to avoid lines

Her: Only on the top.

AND!

Only in the back.

AND!!

You have to be laying down! Barf.

Me: True. Still, gotta do the best you can with what you got

Her: When I am old and rich from astronaut cheques, I will have a house 100 miles from anyone in every direction.

Me: You could just move somewhere where nudity is ok

Her: That’s what I would be doing, essentially. The trees don’t mind.

Me: They sure don’t. They’re already made of wood

Her: For shame.

Me: I’m a child.

Her: I forgive you.

Her: I wish that Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack was more like that song about baby back ribs.

Me: You mean awesome?

Her: Yes, and about ribs.

Me: I’m eatin’ baby back. Dem other ribs don’t come on a rack

Her: Angus Woodman. This is a good name.

Me: It suits me

Her: It does. Well done, parents.

Me: Are you trying out new ones in hope of a change?

Her: I don’t have that kind of time!

Me: I think you do

Her: Maybe I do. my friends aren’t that open to change, however. In another life, though: Catfood Merkins

Me: They’d just call you ‘cat’ for short. That wouldn’t seem so strange until you went to check in at an airline or something and had to give your full name

Her: I would insist to be called by my full name at all times.

Me: No, don’t be one of those people. “Call me Benjamin” — that’s too much work, dammit! What kind of selfish jerk insists on THREE syllables every time I reference him or her. I mean, really

Her: It’s easier to just communicate with grunts anyway.

Me: Yes, exactly. Finally someone who gets it

Her: Unh

Me: Ruh

[Google reader] Recycling books into a bookshelf

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 3:42:17 -0400

Well, that’s one way to use old books: make a bookshelf out of them! I kind of love this...

[Google reader] Vote-a-rama!

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 3:05:26 -0400

It's time again to pick the best people, places and things in the St. John's metro.

[Spilling my guts] Taking it easy by taking the bus, part one: the money

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:22:21 -0400

Where I used to wait for the bus back when I took the bus

Before I hand by brother a duffel bag filled with one dollar bills to buy me a new car, I’m weighing another option: not owning a car. Hmm.

It’s not a very good option, I thought, because I don’t live anywhere near work. There’s a couple indirect bussing options, but either way it’s about 45 minutes in each direction, some bussing, some walking. A waste of time, I thought at first. Otherwise, I live near a grocery store and the lake and downtown and everything else I could want to live near, and I always prefer to walk to those places when I can.

Saving money doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive, but what if I was being paid to take the bus? Economists would call me crazy for making a distinction and, as much I would like to go along with that, the human inside me still views them differently.

So, let’s see…

Note: The utility of car ownership is a complex thing, so for now we’ll just focus on the monetary difference.

It takes 15 mins to drive each direction, so bussing would add 60 minutes to each work day. How much would I be getting paid for this hour, and would it be similar to my job’s current hourly rate?

It’s costs me about $600/month (conservatively) to own the Mini, including payment, insurance, gas, blah blah blah. A bus pass is $70/mth, so $530 is the diffs, or $6360. (We will assume the car is an ongoing expense, because as long as I choose to own a car, I will probably keep buying new/different ones every 3-4 years. I get bored with things, but I’ve never gotten bored with getting bored with things.)

I work 232 days (+/- 1) per year (260, minus vacation time and stat holidays; I didn’t consider sick leave to stay on the conservative side.) So 232 hours extra travel hours per year.

$6360 / 232 = $27.4 per hour.

That’s actually way better than I was expecting. Even if you round down to a very conservative $20/hr to consider all the time spent bussing to non-work places, that’s pretty good. In reality, given the number of rides you’re likely to receive, and everything else I didn’t consider, I would put them number closer to the $27, perhaps even higher.

If someone offered me a part time job at $20-30/hr (no taxes, mind you) for five hours a week to walk and/or take the bus while listening to music, I would accept the hell out of that shit.

So it looks like financially, owning a car has nothing to do with the time saved. Next time, I’ll talk about the more important aspect: the utility.

(I probably should’ve been an economist…)

[Google reader] City Stench Face-Off

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 9:22:50 -0400

Some things are rotten in the City of Legends.

[Google reader] Conan Announces Name of New TBS Show!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:42:11 -0400

We've got a name for our new show that's coming to TBS in November... And Conan himself wanted to announce it! Here he is:

I was really pushing for "360 with Anderson Cooper featuring Conan O'Brien", but no one had my back. ;)

If you'd like to have a copy of the new show name from the video, here's a JPG you can download and print out and tape onto the front of your TV until November 8th arrives! BAM!

IT'S REALLY HAPPENING, GUYS. November can't come soon enough! What do you guys think of the name of our new show?!?

[Spilling my guts] Reading, and writing things to read

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 2:37:30 -0400

I was going to write a book review and blog it cause I’m cool like that. However two problems arose. One, I haven’t read any books lately, and two, no one cares what I think about any particular book.

So, I thought, how about a review of all books:

Books suck. I’ll take the movie please.

Done. Next up, I think I’m going to write a novel in November for NaNoWriMo. I didn’t do it last year for reasons I only alluded to. The reality: my hands were covered in honey for most of the month. I’ve run out of honey though and the grocery store is, like, far. So I think I should be free and clear this year.

Also, if I’m doing it, I want to live-blog it. Or daily-post it. Or whatever you call that. Every night before getting too little sleep I’ll post whatever nonsense I wrote that day and you, as my friend or family member or bored creepy stranger, will be forced to read it.

That’s right, FORCED. Chew on that.

I will, however, take suggestions on what to write. That’s right, I’m asking for your opinion. Don’t make me regret this, bitches.

(Also, as an aside, don’t write a blog post directly after reading 50 Cent’s Twitter feed, but definitely read 50 Cent’s Twitter feed)

So what kind of novel do you want me to write?

[Spilling my guts] My total fav SNL skit of last year.

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:41:48 -0400

My total fav SNL skit of last year.

[Spilling my guts] Online dating chat log excerpts, 2st Ed.

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 8:51:20 -0400

More online dating chat log excerpts? Why not! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the first bunch after you read the prologue.

Her: Did you go to the pride parade yesterday?

Me: I don’t have very much pride. Mostly because I’m straight, and a little because my father used to beat me. Did you?

Her: I watched it. And took pictures of people who looked like they shouldn’t be there. And laughed at the shocked old woman coming out of The Roses.

Me: Nice. I didn’t think there was any way to make a parade fun. Got any good photos?

Her: I was at a bad angle, mostly.

Me: Upside-down hanging from a rooftop?

Her: How’d you guess?

Me: That was my rooftop! You were blocking my view of the gays

Her: My apologies.

Me: No worries. Though next time put on some clothes

Her: Mind your own business.

Me: I’m pretty sure she who hangs from my roof is my business

Her: It’s my business. I was hovering.

Me: Hovering over MY frontage. Anyway, it’s not that I mind the hovering or the weird noise your hover-hat makes, just, you know, there’s a time and a place.

Her: I was raised by moonrocks. I don’t understand your customs. I’ll try real hard next time.

Me: Bah

Her: Tell me what’s wrong.

Me: I’m a sheep

Her: That is a problem.

Me: You’re tellin’ me

Me: Bun-ger, madam. And how are you this fine … I’m gonna go with ‘Sunday’?

Her: I am not very well! I have the flu, I think

Me: Did you get that flu by being bitten by those flu monkeys that are going around?

Her: Flu monkeys? That’s racist.

Me: What, they aren’t black monkeys

Her: Black monkeys? I can’t believe you right now.

Me: Sorry if I’m not as politically correct as you. But you don’t have to be with a species that doesn’t have politics

Her: Oh so now you’re better than me?! I see how it goes!

Me: Hate to break it to you, but a healthy person always trumps a flu-ed up person.

Her: I just sent my attack germs your way.

Me: Won’t work. I’ve already got my hazmat suit on

Her: Damn it, Angus! I can’t have anything. Did you know that the amount of ant biomass on the planet is roughly equal to the amount of people biomass?

Me: Did the ants tell you that?

Her: They tell me a lot of things. Mind your own business for a change.

Me: Please don’t tell me your allegiance has fallen in with the ants. I don’t want to have to report you

Her: Ahh, no. Nothing like that.

Her: No one ever calls spaghetti ‘spajedi’. I will start. People will probably just think I don’t know how to pronounce spaghetti.

Me: The spajedi are an ancient order of pasta who are in tune with the sauce

Her: See, you understand.

Me: Yeah, I met Obi-Wan Fusilli once

Her: The trees look very yellow today. Do you agree?

Me: Trees, like, outside?

Her: Of course.

Me: I see brown and green. How’s the flu today? Giving you yellow vision?

Her: Yellow fever, I think they call it.

Me: I thought that was when you had a thing for Asian chicks

Her: Isn’t that what we’re talking about?

Me: Wait, so when you said trees you meant chicks you find attractive?

Her: Yeah, what do you call them?! Retard.

Me: I just call them chicks. My tastes don’t discriminate

Her: I thought that’s where the expression “barking up the wrong tree” came from. Chicks are the tree and “barking up” means coming onto them. And everyone knows you can’t just do that to a lady.

——-

I’ll probably post more next week, assuming the Her in question doesn’t find out I’m posting these and beat me to death with her ankle socks.

[Google reader] Does Driving Cause Obesity?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 3:00:18 -0400

People are significantly fatter in countries, states, and cities where car use is more common. Mass transit use, on the other hand, is correlated with lower obesity. But there has been scant evidence that public transportation actually causes widespread weight loss -- until now.