Big Win over OMBAC

This weekend we had a big, very important win over 2006 U.S. Super League champs OMBAC (based in San Diego).  The win is considered an “upset” (whatever that means,  in rugby it’s anybodys game - every game).  Right now that puts us 1 point behind Denver (9pts to 8 - they must have earned an extra bonus point along the way, both teams are 2-0) and more-or-less the same ranking nation-wide, as the Red Conference (ours.. ‘the west’) is typically the premier conference.

Next weekend we travel to St. Louis to face the Bombers, which hopefully will be a great opportunity to polish our skills and make a good one for the crowd, which should be electric.

The Internet Officially Has Everything

I knew someday it would happen.

Someone has compiled a list of seven places to check out if you ever go to Iowa — and somehow, some way, I haven’t been to ANY of them.  Granted, it’s a damn fine list.
How is that possible?  They must all be in northwestern Iowa.  Nothing out there but corn and meth.

That’s the Spirit!

From The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (via Hacker News):

“…it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness — they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching the parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a grey flannel suit.”

Very proud to love what I do for a living, to be 25 and being in a place where I am both very happy and also excited about the future gives me warm fuzzies sometimes.

Power Move begets Power Move

I’ve experienced it many times in my life - the phenomenon of productivity snowballing on itself. There’s the day that you wake up (or for me, the night that you lay there for hours and hours) and think “wow, in my infinite quest to ‘do big things’, I’ve become static.”

So what comes next? Say it with me now, “Power Move!”. The only way out of complacency is a nice solid power move. An instant, sizable change that can be measured. So you make your power move (for me it was heading down to Miami for the conference) and guess what happens next?

Another power move.

And another one.

And another one.

Productivity and ascent are viral. I’m just wrapping up one big thing and last night I started on something I’ve been wanting to do for (well, years) and made some great progress, which I will be sharing soon.

So what are you waiting for?

Seattle Gets Starbucked

Like that headline?

We whooped Seattle, a very non-reflective score of 18-16 for how the game felt to me on the field. Good night out with the boys after the game, I’m very lucky to have so many great friends in my life.

That is all for now.

Web browsers? Yeah, that was an Iowan.

Fact of the day:  Marc Andreessen, who was a co-founder of Netscape and is credited with creating the first widely-used web browser (called Mosaic) was (not suprisingly*) BORN IN IOWA.

*at least not to those of us who are loyalists

Season Opener: Seattle Comes to Town

So this weekend we play Old Puget Sound, which is in Seattle for all those people that didn’t pick it up from the headline. Should be a fun and successful game for us, they play a very forwards oriented game that we should have no trouble shutting down right from the first whistle. Our backline is INSANE this weekend so looking forward to a lopsided scorecard. Will be back with an update soon.

Also found a little profile of yours truly out on the internets. Check it out (scroll to find):

http://usarugbysuperleague.com/template2.php?sid=194⊂=357

For those not interested in scrolling:

“Born and raised in rural Iowa, Chris Kelley didn’t pick up a rugby ball until he was more than 20 years old. Kelley has represented the Southern California Griffins each of the last four seasons as a flanker and second row. Two seasons ago Kelley fractured his ankle, and while he preformed [sic] well last season, he has fully recovered from his injuries this season and looks to make a huge contribution on the field.”

Firefox 3 Memory Optimizations

A quick rundown of what changed and how they did it for the new beta of FF3:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

I wish the AE team would take a good look at this and realize the importance of small changes making huge differences. (ok semi-small, as the article mentions the memory allocator they switched to doubled size of codebase during development…)

How about instead of “Brainstorm”, maybe next time we can shoot for After Effects to have some more render stack optimizations.

If Celebs Lived in Oklahoma

Personally not a big celebrity kinda guy, but this is awesome:

http://www.wintrest.com/if-celebs-moved-to-oklahoma/

Kevin Hale on Genghis Khan

So last week at the conference, the second workshop I took was given by Kevin Hale of wufoo.com. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but Kevin seemed like a pretty intelligent guy and perhaps the topic was a little too broad. I’m not the type to one-off somebody, so I poked around online a little and saw he gave a talk once called “How to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan”, and I saw a photo of one of this slides… my interest was captured.

I poked around, and voila.

Slide Presentation for “How to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan”.

I love the interwebs.