Colevault.com

We found a huge scary spider in the rosemary bush in our front yard this afternoon and I went all Discovery Channel and laid out in the bush to get some close-up photos.  It’s quite amazing, probably 3 inches from toe to toe with the torso (thorax?) over an inch long.  It’s hard to tell from the photo but it’s sitting in a large intricate web, just hanging out waiting for bugs or small children to become ensnared.  Any spider-ologists out there who know what kind of spider this is?  Is it poisonous?  Does it shoot lasers out of its eyes?  Help me out here. 

A few months ago Susan nominated me for a “Green Lifestyle Award” that our garbage company was sponsoring. She saw the contest advertised in their quarterly newsletter (yes, my wife reads our garbage company’s newsletter, don’t ask) and the prize was a $50 gift card, not to mention the accompanying worldwide fame, so she wrote a short essay about how “green” I am. I’ve got a crew from CNN on the way to tape a segment about me but I do have a few minutes to share some of my “green” highlights.

Several years ago, at Susan’s urging, I built a compost bin in our back yard and we haven’t thrown away a single compostable food scrap since. And aside from generally being a religious recycler, during our remodeling project I directed our contractor to reuse as many of the old materials as possible. The original 50+ year old redwood framing studs were as good as new and we reused nearly every one to frame up the new walls. The old oak flooring was gently pried up and set aside. Any reusable building material or fixture from the demolition of the old structure that was not used in the new construction was given away (or, in some cases, sold) on Craig’s List or Freecycle. This included the aforementioned flooring, all the old windows and doors, blinds, lighting, ceiling fans, miscellaneous hardware, all the kitchen cabinets, sinks, the bathtub, shower door, and even the hideous old BROWN toilet from our bathroom. Everything was taken by someone. Often we were scratching our heads wondering who would possibly want this stuff, but that’s the great thing about Craig’s List, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Yes, it’s a pain to go through the trouble of posting on CL and subsequently dealing with the no-shows, flakes, and losers who back their truck down your steep driveway then roll backwards into your house when pulling out because they really don’t know how to drive a stick, yet they own one. (Not that that happened or anything.) But it’s more painful to have to move to Mars because the Earth has become one ginormous landfill.

Not only did we reuse or give away most of the materials but in many cases the “new” materials we used were actually reused materials. The chandelier and six sconce lights in the family room and dining room were purchased on Craig’s List from a woman who was remodeling her house in Orinda. (The house had just been remodeled before she bought it so the lights were nearly new, she just didn’t like them!) The laundry room faucet, kitchen pendant lights, bathroom vanity lights, and many other items were purchased used on Ebay. And finally, we tried to use environmentally friendly materials wherever possible: compact fluorescent lighting throughout the house, bamboo flooring in every room except the bathrooms and laundry room, and solid plastic HDPE lumber (made from recycled milk jugs!) for the lower deck are a few examples. We’re also seriously considering installing a solar power system once we’ve paid off a bit more of our home equity loan.

So obviously these things are important to us, and though Susan did not disclose everything above in her letter to the garbage company, I still won the award. (It was a hard fought campaign, rife with mudslinging, but clearly the best candidate won.) The funny thing is they wanted to present it to me in person and asked if I could come down to their offices somewhere near Martinez for the presentation, presumably so they could take a photo for their next newsletter. Susan asked them if they could just mail the award and the gift certificate, which they eventually did. We felt sort of ungrateful but a) I don’t have time to be driving out to Martinez to receive some silly certificate and b) I found it strange that a company sponsoring a “green lifestyle” award would encourage frivolous driving in order to receive said award. But this is the same company that didn’t offer auto bill pay until about a year ago and still doesn’t offer online paperless billing. But then I suppose if they did we wouldn’t have heard about the Green Lifestyle Award in the first place.

As a certain Mr. Twain once said, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Well, not my death of course, but the “death” of this blog. And not even death really, but a state of inactivity so profound as to closely resemble death. (I must admit to being a bit surprised that so many friends and family members actually complained about the lack of posts.) But fear not, gentle readers, Colevault is alive and kicking and coming at you live with what will hopefully be a torrent of updates over the next few weeks. You see, when I started this thing I knew there would often be long lapses between posts. A 16-month-old baby in the prime of his fun-ness, a job that openly scoffs at the idea of a 40 hour work week, and the massive ongoing remodel of the Colevault Mansion (not to be confused with the Sports Guy Mansion), these things have effectively banished the Artist Formerly Known as Free Time from my life. And when I do have some free time, my priority is to simply relax and enjoy life with family and friends, which I’ve managed to do recently and will be posting about shortly.

While none of the above will be changing any time soon, I recently hit a milestone at work which has momentarily freed up a bit of time for the luxury of writing. The project I’ve been working on non-stop for the past few months finally launched on June 29. Vacation Rentals is the latest category (or “vertical” as we like to call them) we’re tackling at Vast.com, the first new one since our initial launch of cars, jobs, and personals back in March. And this was kind of a big deal for me because I was the product manager for Vacation Rentals, meaning I was more or less responsible for coordinating the whole process, from the initial specs, to interface decisions, to marshalling the appropriate engineering resources, finding an endless array of bugs, removing spam, and on and on. And since this is an entirely new career direction for me the learning curve was pretty steep, which meant I needed to put in some serious hours just to keep my head above water. Thankfully we’ve got a fantastic team and they were able to knock it out in spite of the occasional misdirection of a rookie product manager!

But I do think Vacation Rentals turned out quite well. You can read the official launch announcement in my post on the Vast blog as well as this piece of good press we received. You can also check out this great article from Business 2.0. There are a couple of minor inaccuracies but overall it paints a good picture of our little startup, to be known henceforth as the The Mighty Micro-Multinational. It’s an apt moniker: Vacation Rentals actually went live while I was on a plane on my way back from Belgrade where I met our overseas team for the first time. In addition to 3/5 of our San Francisco office, our 1-man Irish team was also there, as well as several of our engineers from outside Belgrade, and lastly our new development manager, who’s commuting to SF from Austin, Texas but happened to be at a wedding in Northern Italy, just a short flight from Belgrade. (All we were missing is our lead engineer who’s in the Dominican Republic.)

But I digress. So… I highly recommend that you try out Vast the next time you’re planning a trip. (Or buying a car, or finding a job, or looking for a date!) You can find vacation rental listings in over 100 countries from thousands of different web sites, so wherever you’re going you’ll find a cool place to stay on our site.

So with vacation rentals out the door I theoretically should have some more time for blogging. But of course there’s plenty more work to do - no rest for the weary - so we’ll see how it goes. Realistically if I want to blog more I’ll have to sleep less. Which is what I’m doing right now. Does that clock really say 12:30?

Well, well, well. Looks like I had a bit of a false start with the blog! I put this together back in early February but wanted to flesh things out a little before officially “launching” it. I figured a week or so to get it ready, finish adding photos, tweak the layout, and finally send out an email to friends and family. Then start posting regularly. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Well, after that initial flurry of activity, several things conspired to suck up every spare hour of the last 7 or 8 weeks. First, the remodel of our master bedroom and bathroom really ramped up and I had to manage various pieces of that process daily for several weeks, from specifying baseboards and crown moulding, to telling the plumber where on the bath tub deck to place the faucet, to coordinating the installation of the shower door, and on and on. Then when all that was finshed, the paint dried, the floor installed, and the lights wired up, we actually had to move back into the bedroom from our temporary quarters in the dining room. And when we had everything moved back in, I had to order blinds, rugs, closet organization stuff, photo shelves, a new A/V cabinet, and finally… the new TV, which will have its own post shortly. Then I had to install all of the above. Plus towel rods, some light fixtures, the in-wall speakers, the wall mounted surround speakers, and the hardware for the pocket door into the bathroom. And organize all our crap. And move all our clothes into the new closet from various boxes and other closets. And THEN we had to completely vacate the family room and dining room, moving everything into the living room. The living room is now basically a huge storage unit, packed from floor to ceiling, with a small area carved out in the middle for an office. (I had to drill a hole through the floor to wire up the DSL, there was no phone jack in the living room).

So you can see I’ve been a bit busy. Oh, and let’s not forget that during this entire period at least one of the three of us was sick seemingly every day, and for about a week I think we were all sick. Thankfully, Justin fared the best out of all of us, but it hasn’t been a good winter for us health wise.

And through all this I somehow managed to go to work every day (well, some days were at home when I didn’t feel like inflicting my germs on my coworkers). And this is the other main reason the blog has been backburnered for almost 2 months. As most of my friends, family, and colleagues know Vast.com finally launched on March 13, late on that Monday night. The run-up to the launch was pretty hectic with a flurry of last-minute activity, and the pace has actually increased since then. If you’re curious about exactly what we’re up to you can read an excellent overview here.

So, it is now April and Susan and I are happily ensconced in our nice new , Vast is live, the remodel has been on hiatus for the last couple of weeks due to the ridiculously bad weather we’ve been having, and I think I’ll be able to find a couple of hours a week to devote to the blog, even if it’s just a few short posts.

So here we go, after a false start Colevault.com is now off and running. You might want to scroll to the bottom of the page and read the earlier posts, and don’t be afraid to comment. I’ll likely be adding some cool blog widgets over time, like the Radio Blog player which you see in the sidebar. This is where you’ll see a sampling of what’s on my iPod during any given week. Just click on a song and the rest will play in sequence, or click on the Zap! button to skip to the next song. If you want the player to run when/if you leave the site, just click on the “Popup” button at the bottom and the player will launch in a separate window. The rest of the Radio Blog features should be self-explanatory so crank it up!

That’s it for now. Welcome to Colevault!

Those who know me well know that I am a huge baseball fan, especially of the Oakland A’s, and one of the many things that intrigues me about baseball is its long history, and more specifically how its colorful jargon has crossed over into common English speech. Phrases like “out of left field” and “get to first base” obviously originated from baseball, but there are dozens of equally common phrases that we use every day without ever consciously thinking of their baseball etymology. “Ballpark figure,” “off base,” “touch base”, “dropped the ball” are so ingrained in our vocabulary that their connection to baseball has all but disappeared. And although “ground rules” doesn’t appear on that Wikipedia entry (perhaps I should add it?) it also has its origins in baseball. Since every ballpark has different dimensions, different fence heights, etc., there is a unique set of ground rules specific to each park. And that is my long-winded way of introducing the ground rules of this blog.

• The first rule of Colevault is, you do not talk about Colevault.
• OK, that’s not true. On the contrary I want everyone to talk about Colevault. And if you have an opinion on anything I’ve written, please leave a comment. Better make it witty though!
• I highly recommend using Firefox to view the blog. Not having done much web publishing prior to this blog I’ve been amazed by how non-standards-compliant IE is. I’ll make a simple change to the stylesheet and it’ll look correct on Firefox but will be screwed up on IE. I’ve read that IE7 is supposed to be a vast improvement but until then I’d stick with Firefox. You can download Firefox via the link at the bottom of the side menu bar.  Note: I haven’t got a clue what this thing looks like in Safari or Opera. 
• Any text you see in red is a link that will take you to a site that’s relevant to the content of that sentence or post. I have an addiction, and it’s called the Web, so you can be sure these posts will be chock full of links to interesting sites that you might not otherwise come across. I also have a reputation for tracking down good deals online, so reading this blog could save you money!
• Images within posts can be clicked on to show the image in its full size, usually 1024 x 768. The image border turns blue when you mouse over it, indicating that it’s a hyperlink. (The link simply points to the full size image in the gallery.) Posts will just have a few representative photos relating to the post topic, the gallery will have many more (too many?) photos from the same time frame or event.
• Right now I have two albums in the gallery, one called Justin and one called Remodel, both of which can be accessed via the links in the header bar below the banner image. I will be constantly adding photos to these albums, as well as adding new albums later. The newest photos will always be at the top of the album, however when viewing the photos as a slideshow you can choose to view them in reverse order, which is useful if you want to view the remodel photos from the beginning. If you have any questions about how to use the gallery, or anything else, just send me an email.
• To subsribe to the RSS feed of this blog, simply click on the RSS link on the right-hand sidebar. You’ll be taken to my feed page on Feedburner where you can quickly add me to most RSS readers, including My Yahoo and Google’s customizable home page.
• If you have a blog and want me to add it to my blog roll just ping me.
• The banner photo was taken in Tuscany in 2002 and is one of my favorite photos from that Europe trip. I am an avid photographer and you will see many examples of my photography in posts and of course in the gallery. One of my goals for this blog is to scan and publish a bunch of classic “analog” photos from back in the day. My high school friends should be very afraid. (Someone needs to come up with a little Flash or AJAX widget that would enable bloggers to embed a Hot or Not applet on their site. Although in the case of my high school friends it would just be called Not.)

A little background on the domain name. If you’ve never tried to pick a domain name then you may not realize that pretty much every decent name is either taken or has been parked by some squatter hoping to make a buck (or two) by selling it. So of course all my first choices were already taken: cole.com, pete.com, thecoles.com, colefamily.com, etc., and as you can see most of them are not even in use. Bastards! (And yes, it had to be a .com rather than a .org or .net. I can’t live without the ctrl-enter shortcut which automatically adds the http://www. and .com to any domain you type in your browser’s address bar, and being a terrible typist I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to more typing than is absolutely necessary.) I even contacted the owner of cole.com (some bond trader in New York) and tried to buy it from him but he wouldn’t sell, even though he’s not using the domain. This is the one time I wish I didn’t have such a short and common name. But then again, even zensius.com is taken, so I suppose it’s a lost cause. (Jon, you snooze you lose!)

So I had to get creative. What clever wordplays could I come up with using my name? Aha! colemine.com! (Taken.) hotcole.com (Taken.) And on and on it went. I spent days thinking about this. For some reason, having a form of my name in the title was really important to me. (Actually, the reason is not hard to figure out: putting out your own blog is fundamentally an act of ego stroking so it follows that I would want my name prominently involved in the title.) Looking back, I should have dropped that requirement and just tried to come up with a cool name. But just as I was beginning to get frustrated I came up with Colevault! It was perfect: it had my name in it, had a nice little rhyming thing going (pole vault), and the site would be a “vault” which would house my thoughts, photos, etc. (And perhaps the site will “vault” me into blogging prominence, be acquired by Gawker and allow me to make a living publishing random musings about what I had for lunch and where to get good deals on high-end plumbing fixtures.) And the best thing about Colevault? It was available, just like I was every Friday night in high school. Problem solved, the vault is now open.

Hello, good evening and welcome to nothing much.  This is Colevault.com, the pulpit from which I will attempt to provide you, my soon-to-be loyal readers, with wisdom, wit, humor, and, most importantly, an endless stream of photos of Justin.  Thanks to Al Gore any clown with a laptop and at least two fingers can stake out a little piece of internet real estate, wax poetic on any topic he chooses, and broadcast it (for free!) to between 2 and 6 people, depending on the size of his immediate family.  What could be better?  Now excuse me while I dust off my clown suit.