TooMuchNick

In college, where I majored in English, I thought I'd have an adventure and take a class in programming. They taught us C++. I never tried programming again.

Say I was foolish enough to try again on my own. Say I wanted to write my own version of Writeroom: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

What language would I want to learn, and is there a good beginner's guide?

(Context: I'm the cofounder of a pre-launch site called Boffery, a visual private diary of a user's sex life.)

Everyone tells me that, and everyone is right. There's one service I'd love to partner with if I ever got the chance. Hopefully you'll never need to use this, but inSPOT is getting popular in the Bay Area as a way to discreetly tell people you may have given them an STD: http://www.inspot.org/gateway.aspx

This is why it helps to have one or two colleagues you really respect, who really respect you. If you're confident that they're very good, then if they think you're good too, you must be good, right?

I find this satisfies my need for the approval of others, while being much safer than looking for the approval of a dozen, hundred, or ten thousand readers or users.

And so began the thread that everyone was a little afraid to post "hooray!" in.

No, you're right. They've only been stalked, threatened, had pictures taken of them every time they go to the beach, been the butt of jokes on TV every single night, sometimes been assaulted, kidnapped, or shot. But thankfully I can't remember any of them getting some saliva on them lately!

I'm not saying the life of a celebrity is a living hell. I'm just saying there are thousands of people who already deal with the downside of a huge audience, and tech reporters will have to learn how to do the same. That's a pain, we all wish it could be otherwise, but it's not like Michael Arrington has to put up with half the crap that anyone with a hit song or TV show goes through.

A million bucks to make Internet users nicer? I think Flickr got paid a lot more for that.

"This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word 'fucking' multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel."

I assume he means this hilarious Adobe UI gripe blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

If growing up means not appreciating that blog, then color me prepubescent.

So you're saying this is a bad job posting because Craigslist must die?

I could make a better cheeseburger than McDonald's but I'm damn well not gonna get billions and billions served.

Writing freelance from San Francisco is pretty satisfying for me when I have clients in New York. I can at least get a lot of the busywork of answering email out of the way by 9 AM.

Then watch the commenters divide into two camps:

1. "X affected me. The world is scary and random."

2. "X did not affect me. You should have voted for Ron Paul."

This just in: A lot of people in the tech industry have a harder time dealing with criticism (both fair and unfair) than their counterparts in the entertainment industry. When asked for help, Hollywood said "get over it, nerds."

Maybe he's tried referrals and sites like Match.com, which launched a free version, turned him down or paid too little because they want to take over the vertical too.

Has anyone ever examined how TED became so damn watchable? You could learn more by watching their free online videos than by watching the presentations of a dozen other conferences.

Po Bronson's book "The Nudist on the Late Shift" says that CitySearch cold-called all kinds of businesses in every city it launched in. Have you read enough articles about Yelp to see if they did the same?

Incidentally, how do you plan to win people over when they're already on Yelp? I'm confused about what value you add that they don't.

If I'm not already excited to join the site, would I be excited about volunteering for it?

About one in ten of my tech-industry friends (and because I edited Valleywag.com for a year I made a lot of them -- more enemies, but that's another story) have at some point told me they wanted a longterm cafe, something like a cozy shared office.

That's coworking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking

San Francisco coworking spaces include Citizen Space in SOMA near South Park: http://citizenspace.us/

And the Hat Factory in Potrero: http://hatfactory.net/

But these places have their limitations, and everyone thinks they can do one better. In fact, Digg founder Kevin Rose likes to say that when he cashes out, he'll start a teashop, but he once fantasized to me about starting a tech artists collective. I even encouraged him to try it, but I have a feeling it'll never happen.

Because to be honest, running a co-working space for people too cheap to find their own offices, going full-service without the high margins of a high-volume walk-in cafe, dealing with customers with serious entitlement issues, is not nearly as fun as all the other businesses a talented tech professional could start in SF or Silicon Valley.

Wow. You haven't rented a storefront or an office, have you. Or paid water bills, or gotten permits to serve food and drink for a profit, or dealt with a zoning board, or...

Yeah, I heard all about how laws killed P2P on the latest episode of Law & Order I torrented.

I'm a co-founder at a startup called Boffery, a visual diary for people's sex lives. (Think Geni.com for sex.)

The sex angle alone doesn't sound terribly important, but our long-term plan is to license the technology to other social networks -- or, and this is terribly unlikely but obviously tempting, become a large-scale general-interest social network on our own.

We have a spec, an early prototype built by our one developer, a forthcoming angel investment, a thousand people on our beta-tester waiting list, and a plan for getting to revenue (but not profit) by the end of the year. If you're interested, I can introduce you to our project manager. E-mail me at nick@toomuchnick.com.