jcole’s weblog

Brandi Carlile came to Yahoo! for one of our Thursday “Music on the Green” concerts (live bands outside the cafeteria at lunchtime). She’s really quite good! I bought her self-titled CD, which both Adrienne and I really like (that’s pretty rare).

It’s excellent music, so go buy the CD!

In our all-hands today, Terry Semel (CEO of Yahoo!) used the word “fucking” as in “fucking great” to describe Q2. Awesome.

It seems to be a California thing. I’ve never seen it happen so frequently anywhere else. I remember after first moving here, I wondered how it was that shopping carts get distributed all over town, so far from the stores. I figured it must have been homeless people… you often see homeless people with carts full of cans, bottles, etc.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed that what appear to be normal, sane people apparently walking to the store, buying more than they can carry, and taking the cart home with them. What .. the .. hell?

No, of course, they do not return them. I suspect that’s where the homeless people get them, not from the store, but from in front of people’s houses and apartments, where they left them. Maybe these people think there’s a cart pickup service? After all, when they leave the carts outside their front door, they disappear.

People are stupid.

Yahoo! Messenger’s IMvironments feature has to be the most useless feature I’ve ever seen. Not exactly heard over the cubicle wall, but over IM:

Eric Bergen: I highly doubt people are having long conversations inside the Dorritos IMvironment

I concur! Yeah, so a built-in Message Archive search is not important… but a useless ad-heavy ugly ugly skinning system is really important. Who uses these things?

Reasons to take the train to work:

1. It’s cheaper than driving.
2. It forces you to get to work and home at about the same time every day.
3. It’s environmentally friendly.
4. Twice a day, you can slip off into lala-land and pretend you’re touring Europe.
5. You can do real work while the train conductor drives for you.
6. You only have to get gas once every few weeks.
7. You meet nice and friendly people on the bus, train, and shuttle.
8. Your Caltrain monthly pass is also good for getting to bars nearby on weekdays, and in San Francisco on weekends.
9. You don’t have to circle the (full) parking lot looking for a spot.

Ahhhh yes.

Know MySQL? Wanna work at Yahoo? We’ve got lots of MySQL-related positions open, in lots of different groups. Yahoo is a great place to work. Let me know.

Full Disclosure: Yes, I get a referral bonus.

Is it just me, or does Caltrain smell faintly of Earl Grey tea?

It’s stronger in some cars than others, but it’s definitely there. I’m thinking it might be their air freshener that smells that way. I’m not sure. I don’t see too many people with tea, so I’m not sure if it could be because of many people having tea on the train.

It’s perplexing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming to speak at Yahoo! next week as part of our ongoing “Influential Speakers” program. Should be interesting… I can’t listen to Arnold speak for more than 30 seconds without giggling uncontrollably. Governator is right!

Watch: Arnold is coming! (quicktime)

No, they haven’t really added true calculated indexes, but you can use triggers to get pretty close. Read my article about how to do it!

Last night, Adrienne and I went to see War of the Worlds, which was pretty decent. What I really noticed, however, is that in the advertisements before the movie, there were two that caught my eye: “We’re Hiring” ads from Foundry Networks and eBay/Paypal. This had me confused. Is a theater, with all the high schoolers and such, really the best place to try to find the guy to design your next load balancer?

Isn’t there a better audience to be had? Even a single billboard, placed near the commute path to e.g. Juniper Networks would seem to be better focused. Adrienne says I “think too much”.