on Traveling Abroad... alone?

David Weekly went to Buenos Aires and had a good time with steak, wine, and ice cream.

Also consider Italy.

Some resources

• sidestep.com
• couchsurfing.com
• hospitalityclub.org

Some examples

• Tunisia
• Stay in a hostel
• Jessica, Campus Minister, Merced

Steps to go

1. Passport
2. Flight
3. Place to stay
4. Go

Planning

• lonelyplanet.com for the area first
• Guidebooks for anywhere in the world - Amazon.com
• Roatan - Honduras - Caribbean - SCUBA - $1100
• Australians and New Zealanders on walkabout
• aborigines
  

David Weekly's plan for a new university. I agree with him.

How to run Invision Plus

• Take PayPal donations
• Make it clear I'm thinking about taking this more seriously (full-time)
• Premium offering
• Want to say "Thank You"
• Be more open with users
• Explain that I'm wrestling with whether or not to quit school and go full-time on this
• Get to know my users
• Get them on the phone, email, IM
• Email a few hundred of them
• Forum admins all need to all know who am
• Less important to connect with participants, but they can if they want (they might start their own forums soon)
• Problem, opportunity, audience - get to know my users and then I'll know what skills to learn and people to bring in
• Be clear on exactly what needs to be done on the site
• People are very excited when they can be used - people want a place in the world where they can be helpful
• So be clear about my needs
• Someone can very specifically provide for those needs
• We have ideas we'd like to implementI
• I'd like to get to know you and what you're doing with the service
  

Possible hosting option
Fremont
8anet.com, 1/2-U
$1500, 6 GB RAM

coloserve.com
Intel Core 2 Duos

How to scale up

• Since forums don't know other forums
• Horizontally partition the db
• 5 smaller servers instead of 1
• Faster and less expensive
• No forklift upgrade
• A-L one db server, M-Z to another server

if statement
connectDb ($server)

To do this while forums are active

• Put a forum into read-only mode
• Users are able to deal with downtime/failure/problems as long as I clearly and timely communicate with them
• Make sure they know what the outage/read-only time is for: to make the service faster and more scalable
• ignore_user_abort()
• memcached - storing cached queries

Finding cofounders and employees

• Hacker / geek friends @ college
• More technical and business friends
• Forum admins may be technical
• Recruited people from your userbase
• Incentive - their forums are hosted on my service

Thanks, David Weekly of pbwiki.com.

I was really worried for a minute...

I discovered that Google Desktop Search does not index inside of files with no file extension, even if the contents of those files are plain text.

This gave me a huge scare just now, as I was frantically searching for my Startup School 2007 notes, and couldn't find them no matter what I searched for.

I used to think Google Desktop Search indexed my entire computer... not so.

The file had no file extension because Programmer's Notepad doesn't automatically add any extension to the file. So it ended up being extension-less.

This is something to keep in mind... I should go through and rename all files with missing extensions to append .txt to them.

on Studying Abroad

Today I talked with Fefe Gong at EVK. She's going to be doing a lot of interesting things in the next few months. First, she's doing a summer internship with BP in Cerritos, near Johnny. She's from Texas, but she'll be staying around the LA area. Perhaps we can meet up sometime during the summer. She's working on energy trading... and she doesn't know about it yet, so she'll be learning about it shortly before beginning work.

Then, for the Fall semester, she's studying abroad in Italy. It was her second choice-- after Spain-- but it should be a lot of fun.

I would like to travel abroad, too. If I take the fall semester off, I should have plenty of time to spend a few weeks overseas. But where should I go? Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa?

I really want to just take a vacation. Escape for a while, maybe to the places that grace my computer desktop. I have a wallpaper cycler that shuffles through this collection of scenic photographs I downloaded. They're really alluring. Most show pictures of the ocean, far away from the worries and pressures of life. I want to sit on the beach and just lie there and just let my mind wander.... maybe with a friend or something. That would be nice. But I can do no such thing.

Instead I have to do my physics homework, do research for my job, finish programming for BoingBoing.net, write a detailed letter to the financial aid office, apply for scholarships, do research for a lengthy paper, find an internship, do the mound of work my parents' restaurant has for me...and more....

It's a really beautiful day outside. I wish I could go outside. But I have to stay here, and watch over my brother, who is ill. My parents are away, working, stressing, working, trying to clamber back on track from an enormous setback...

I don't have a lot of energy these days. I feel like napping all the time, to pass the day, to take refuge in my dreams. I wake up, and I'm always tired. My bones ache weary, and I don't feel like moving.

When I need to motivate myself to work, I feel a muted franticness surging through my mind. Muted, because sensation and feeling are dulled. But it's the feeling that if I don't keep on going I'll die. So I drag myself to do the work.

Henry Yuen's No Time to Think