evanculver.com

Announcing TellOnTheBoss.com

Premise

We’ve all seen it or been a part of it before: your superiors at work are just not seeing the big picture and you just want to tell them what you really think. Whether it be a critical business opportunity, terrible personal habits that the rest of the office takes offense to, or in an extreme case, that the entire workplace thinks they’re a joke–there’s really no denying that it’s sometimes a very hard thing to get across.

All of that truth should come out, but how? That’s where TellOnTheBoss.com comes in. TOTB is grossly simplified way for employees to leave feedback for their bosses, past or present and most importantly, anonymously. The goal of the site is for employees to have an outlet to say the things they would normally withhold. Hopefully, it can help the leaders out there become better at what they do.

Background

This idea came to me after being in a similar situation and not knowing what to do to get my point across. It eventually boiled over into a weekend project which is now what you see at TellOnTheBoss.com.

Please let me know what you think–It’s still very much a work in progress.

A New Start

The last year has been a fun one. I moved to California and began working as an engineer at Mahalo.com. A huge opportunity! During this last year, I’ve had the luxury of working with a series of great engineers as well as some of the most interesting new technologies in the web space. We were lucky enough to solve really interesting problems in scalability and efficiency and were able to constantly push out new products and features, almost on a bi-weekly basis.

It was a very exciting time in my life, and now, an even more exciting time exists.

I was recently given an opportunity to work with another great bunch of developers and right here in Santa Monica, barely a mile away from where I live. It is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. It has been made pretty clear from the various news outlets that my exit from Mahalo wasn’t on the best of terms, but I’d like to come out and say, that although it was a little rough, I wish all the best for Mahalo and it’s staff and I can’t thank them enough for such a great opportunity and learning experience. I will miss all the good times we had there, even if they were being had at 3am when product launch had gone awry. You guys are great.

But, I’m excited to be joining Yahoo! where I’ll be working mainly on Yahoo! Sports as a front end engineer. I’m pretty pumped to take on a role centered around UI engineering at a major internet company that just happens to own the largest sports site in the world. Here, I will hope to help inspire inovation, learn as much as possible from those around me, and build as many beautiful UIs as humanly possible.

I’m feeling pretty darn lucky right about now.

Cheers.

Tags: career, new-beginning, opportunity, personal

New place of employment err, home really

I think I may preface a lot of posts like this (or at least I did with my last blog), but I know, I know I haven’t posted in a while and what it boils down to is that I’m just not that great of a blogger, but hey, from time to time I do feel like writing on ye ‘ol blog.

Since my last update, soooo much has happened in my life. That’s really the topic of this post. To start, I got laid of from my job at Heart of America E-Commerce in Lawrence, Kansas and was thus thrust out into the great world of opportunity, aka, the unemployed. I can’t really complain, the Kansas state government treated me well in the three months I was unemployed, and I managed to take ahold of my free time and start a few side/freelance projects. One of which I hope to launch quite soon and I’m really excited about. More to come later, but to be brief, a couple of us former HOAEC folk teamed up to create a neat little experiment. We’ll see soon how it turns out.

Anyways, I sat and enjoyed my free time for a few months, applying at every job I could think of and really those jobs that I deemed almost unattainable. I had an interview in San Francisco with Weather Underground that went well, but due to the economic situation, so I’m told, they couldn’t pull the trigger, thus leaving me ever so unemployed . Then a miracle happened. The ever so charismatic personality Jason Calacanis retweeted out that Mahalo.com was looking for front-end developers and that there was a $2000 bounty on any referrals. I immediately replied to the craigslist ad and within hours I received an email stating “Our CTO would like to setup an phone interview.”

This is when my jaw hit the floor. I was absolutely exasperated, but in the spirit of not getting my hopes up, I decided I’d just take it in stride and just be myself. The interview rolled around, I felt comfortable, and that it went well. I crossed my fingers and hoped for a call back. Then another miracle happened. I received another email stating that the lead developer at Mahalo would like to setup a phone interview too! Well, “holy shit,” I thought. Could this really happen? Well, I talked Chris Miller later that week, he had me send him a bunch of code samples for the team to review and again, I crossed my fingers. Then… no, not another miracle, the opposite, I shit my pants. I got an email stating that Mahalo would like to have me sit down with none other than Jason Calacanis himself. Yep, shit my pants.

The rest is history really. I got the job, I moved to California and here I am: living a dream. The team I work with is awesome and I learn about a whole brain full of new stuff every day, plus I’m working on a product that matters and can serve to change the world as we know it. HOLY SHIT.

I guess the point of this post is to document this story so that my dumb ass doesn’t forget how lucky I am and to let everyone know that when life gives you an opportunity like this, you simply can’t think twice. It was scary, and at times I asked myself, “are you sure?” But, it feels great and I’m glad I did it. Onward and upward. Sky’s the limit.

Ok, I’m done, and yes, another 2312341234 months will pass before I post again. Ok, ok, I’ll try not to let that happen. I feel more motivated than ever plus, I have so many awesome things to share. I simply have to get around to it! Now, back to coding…

Tags: california, employment, move, personal

ubuntu 8.10 + triple monitor = noproblem.py

So, I thought I’d share my latest experience with setting up a triple monitor xorg config with Ubuntu 8.10 since every other time I’ve set it up, under whichever crazy flavor of linux, there has been at least some sizeable headaches whereas this time there were few. I’ll just go ahead and applaud the Ubuntu team once again on making another one of those little headaches go away.

For the record, my other linux box that serves as my house’s fileserver, my personal staging environment and general non-desktop related task doer had a video card take a dump, so I had to take one of my two nVidia 6600 GTs out of my desktop to replace it to get movie streaming and other things back up. It really doesn’t need this nice of a card, but or even as nice as the 7600 GS (culprit) that was in it, but it just so happens that that is the hardware I have laying around. Call me spoiled.

Anyways, my dad had an extra PCI express card laying around so he gave it to me to replace what I’ll just call the “turd” from now on (even though it probably won’t come up again). So, I’ve once again got both my 6600s back in my desktop.

I’ve got one 22″ monitor I run over DVI and two 19″ 4:3 monitors I run over VGA. Because I’ve played with Xinerama and know how much it totally blows, I decided to at least use two in TwinView. One downfall I knew I was already going to run into were problems with Compiz and Xinerama, it just doesn’t work. I settled on the idea that I’d rather have more screen real estate than have fun wobbly windows.

On to the good stuff. Once I got things to “just work” with TwinView on my first two monitors, it was as easy as going to System -> Administrator -> NVIDIA X Server Settings. This of course assumes that I had the nVidia drivers installed already (hint: System > Administration > Hardware Drivers). This is the only xorg.conf GUI I have ever seen work for a configuration that is somewhat complex like this. To be honest, I fired it up initially still expecting to have to hit up vim and having to do at least some googling. But this sucker just worked. The major things that aren’t detected by the OS or xorg or whatever is just in the display configuration, i.e. the “X Server Display Configuration”. I just had to enable TwinView for the two and then enable Xinerama across the third, set the positions (or just drag the screens) and voila! Well, I did have to save the config to my home directory first. I didn’t run the program as root, so obviously it can’t rewrite /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Once I had that copied in, I logged out, logged back in and everything was peachy. Here’s a link to my actual xorg.conf. By the way, there are a ton more possibilities this little configuration GUI can do which are cool, I’ll probably be playing with it more just for fun

This is a bit of a lengthy post and doesn’t cover a ton of the details, but I was so pleased with my experience, I had to share something. Ubuntu just does a great job at finding the drivers in the first place and then including this now “mature” NVIDIA X Server Settings GUI. A+ job. Two pats on the back.

Tags: nerdery, triple-monitor, ubuntu, xorg

been a while, I know

It’s been quite a while since I have actually published a post, I KNOW. I have a couple interesting posts that are still being tweeked, but nevertheless incomplete. I’ve been working hard at CoolProducts.com for the holiday season which has been a pain, but has recently slowed down quite a bit as projects have completed and feature freeze has come into place. I guess this means more free time for nerdery? Hopefully, I guess.

Also, some big changes are about to happen for me in the new year and I’m excited albeit a little depressed (economy and whatnot). More updates and content soon and perhaps even a little humor to boot. We’ll see, just wanted to put a little update out for the time being.

Tags: nonsense personal evan