You have to be cool to get it!

I was at a car dealer this weekend, my jalopy was never going to make it through another year, and now that I have a little extra cash I figured it was time to get a bargain with the downturn and all.

Swung by the VW dealer, basically the sales guy had his head stuck up his ass. Wanted to totally kill me on the interest rates and would not budge from the MRSP. So went to Scion dealer. Super sweet. First there was this cool Asian babe of a salesperson. Super helpful, knew the cars and what the deals were. Laid down the options and costs and bam! I was driving away in a Scion xB in flat olive green with a World War 2 US Army markings. Major deal and a sweet ride. I think Geek Babe will totally check me out in this ride!

Henry told a similar story this week at the company meeting. He said the critical thing is to sell our platform to the right people. He's turning down deals because they would take the company in the wrong direction in his view. He's also doing the same with American City Bank, they need to have features that we can sell again and again even if they paid for them. Totally makes sense, write once, sell many.

So lets turn down deals and the cash they bring and focus on those deals that will make Hank Commerce the next big internet story.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 185 lbs

No more drinking!

Henry dropped a bomb shell this week. We will all be in shock for sometime, especially Constantine and the management team. Henry basically said that if anybody drinks on site or has drunk and then connects to a production system they will be marched out, no severance, no anything. It was pretty harsh and I think we all got that he was serious when he said "I'm f**king serious guys, I love you all, but no f**king drinking". Henry has to be one of the biggest drinkers on the exec team, but if he said if he can do it then anybody can. I love that "can-do" spirit.

A couple of us went through the drawers, refrigerators and in the stock room to see the acres of beer, wine, scotch, tequila and Bourbon all being boxed up by the security team.

The rumors has it that it all went down after American City Bank came for a pre-launch visit. They had all the regular glad-handing that goes on, everybody was dressed up (i.e. no holes in jeans) and had showered that day. Nobody had told the Platform team who had a marathon drinking session during the day. Erik, one of the super tech leads on that team, had lost a bet that he could drink a dozen shots of tequila in an hour and keep his lunch down. He looked green, but had kept his Una Mass down, until he made it to the elevator.

The trouble was that he held the elevator for the American City Bank team and Henry. They were going to PK Changs that night in Palo Alto. Henry was trying to ignore Erik, who then said "You're those f**kers from American Shitty Bank" (we was slurring) and then threw up his Una Mass all over them.

The retribution has been pretty horrible. I think Henry thinks we don't work hard enough. No doubt that American City Bank gave him shit as well. So we all will suffer. Thanks Erik!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

HaHA gets renamed HoMo!

Did not mention that we have a new corporate architect, Dave. He's been pretty quite since he started in October. He turns up at meetings, design reviews etc. and says nothing. He then goes back to his desk, pulls a diet 7 Up and then writes more Twiki pages (we are so old school, we don't even use Media Wiki).

This week, he presented at the Tech-Sess. The presentation was called "Why we are changing from HaHa to HoMo and make more millions". HaHa is our review process, the Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment.

It certainly drew a big audience, even Lucy from recruiting was there. Dave's big idea was that the HaHA needs to be less democratic, we need to basically rubber stamp patterns that Ops feel they can deploy + support and stop engineers f**king up with some new crazy architecture or deployment requirement, like reliable messaging. The first step on this long process is to rename HaHa to HoMo, or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi.

Like what gives dude? I get the principal, but do you really think that just changing the name is going to make that huge a difference? I know that Henry always had a master plan for the naming of the company and that Hank Commerce was the final destination after visiting MyScrewdriver and TARDIS Corp. Apparently we have been in a law suite for years with the BBC over that last name.

So HoMo is the name, the process is new and the outcomes will be different, so says Dave. I'm looking forward to my first HoMo.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 20 (up 4 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Scritable systems sucks!

I love how we are changing the world, one customer at a time. But our platform is so friggin' tough to develop and then debug. I mean I love XML and XML Spy, you can do some wicked smart things. But developing an MVC application in XML, its pretty mind bending. The idea, and its pretty cool idea, is that we become a Platform As A Service. Something that Salesforce think they are doing, in reality they have just moved Oracle CRM onto the web and have a bunch of forms that allow you to customize it. Admittedly, its over the web which beats any Oracle technology by four or more years due to their release cycle. But its not as cool as the platform we are building, we call it "SkyNet" after the Terminator movies. We are that cool!

Here's what we are going to do, and its a killer plan. We are opening up the Platform for anybody to build any application. To demo this, a couple of the Product Managers built a Dinner Outsourcing Application (DOA), which allows you to pre-configure your selection for dinner, it then aggregates the days results and with the trends of the previous days, week and months then placed the order with the vendor (over Fax). Soemtimes it even gets the order right, but mostly orders pizza. It can then use the aggregation algorithms to either try a leveraged buy-out of the franchise we buy from most frequently or try to get a corporate rate established though Book-a-Table.

The application is wicked smart and they built in a couple of days. And they are Product Managers! Pity that during the time it took to develop, Henry stopped all the dinner orders. It could have been wicked cool application on our destination site. I think our engineers would have loved it.

So the plan is that anybody can build an application that can leverage our aggregation and broad range of services to create their own mash up. I'm thinking about building an application to examine the costs of flights between New York and Charlotte, NC and San Francisco and then recommend when Henry should travel. Its kiss ass, but he really needs to know who I am!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 16 (up 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs