thirty days ago on february 14, 2011, ottoneu.fangraphs.com went live. it’s been an up and down thirty days, but overall i would have to say it has been a successful launch. first, some basic stats

• over 500 paid users
• 120k pageviews
• 2 to 3 server meltdowns
• thousands of completed auctions

i guess the best way to discuss my experience is to go through a typical day as the solo employee at a startup with this much visibility (the fangraphs partnership has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unique impressions on my banner ad). my work day tends to start between 8:30am and 9:30am, whenever i roll out of bed. west coast living! every day, i think “i’ll just check my email real quick and then go get ready” – this never happens. the reality is that i wake up, open up Mail, go through my 3 ottoneu-related email addresses, and respond to every email i have unread. if i don’t have a quick response, i flag the email to get back to in a second pass. then i go ahead and complete my second pass through the emails and see if any of the flagged emails require code changes.

i’ll save the suspense – they often do.

the next thing i know, it’s 11:30am and jen is asking me what my plan is for the day. pre-launch, i didn’t have these emails to go through, so i was able to get up, get to the shared office space i have, and start coding. now that i have semi-urgent tasks, i’m going to need to start waking up at 7am to get to the office by 10:30 i think. anyway, i get through those bugs enhancements and then usually shower before lunch. usually.

the afternoon depends on what the main tasks of the day are. sometimes there are larger enhancements requested or that i have thought of that really deserve my time and attention. emails continue to come in, and sometimes i need to help out a user or three. and sometimes a post i have on fangraphs requires responding to comments, both good and bad.

if i remember, around 6:30 or 7pm, i’ll get dinner. if i’m lucky, someone will want to meet up for a beer or to shoot the shit. or for dinner.

the night ends with, as you might guess, Mail.app. double check twitter and my inbox to make sure nothing is broken and people are generally satisfied. if i’m not coded out from the day, i’ll add a couple more features or tweak something that has been bothering me – after all, i am not only the coder, i use the damn site daily. and finally, i’ll take a break and play some video games or read or whatever.

nothing pushes one to exercise more than this life choice, and the one main improvement i could make in my day would be to not check my email when i roll out of bed, but to go for a run and shower before doing anything else. once the email tap is opened up for the day, it’s really hard for me to shut it off and go do something else.

another good improvement would be to not get into the coding mindset before getting out of the apartment. getting in the zone is, as everyone know, a fickle and important thing that you don’t want to break. getting into the zone in my boxers and a tshirt about 10 minutes after waking up can’t be good for me, and staying in that zone for 3+ hours only leads to me missing two meals and breaking out of the zone when i realize something smells awful and it is me. which is basically what happened to me two days ago.

it’d be good to institute some no-computer time in the evening before bed, but maybe that’s something that can wait until things stabilize a bit, like after the season starts and i get through the inevitable start-of-season bugs.

anyway, it has been a fun thirty days, without a doubt. i have a great set of users who are patient, understanding, and really sharp. i have a pretty good, if perennially smelly boss. and look – i work on something that i both own and love every single day. not a lot of people can say that.

friday night, trills and erin and i went and saw matt good play in front of 150-200 people at the great american music hall in san francisco.

first of all, the venue is amazing. its an amazing ornate theater, plenty of space (especially when there aren’t that many people), tables (!), waitstaff (!!), and a nod towards local beers (lagunitas on tap!). pretty impressive, and highly recommended.

the concert was pretty fun, though i am not really up on the latest matt good stuff so i didn’t know a lot of the songs. also, the opener was brutal (automatic loveletter), completely clichéd. that’s right, ‘é’. but this isn’t about automatic loveletter or about the theater or about the concert, as fun as it might be.

it’s interesting how much this concert made me think. i was in high school when i first heard the matthew good band on muchmusic (the canadian MTV for those who don’t know). my parents went to toronto with my grandparents one weekend and they brought me back a couple of cds and i was hooked. i was one of the only people to buy their one american release from the tower records i worked at in college. trilling and i still talk about how awesome rico is. then they broke up, then i listened to matt good solo a little bit. song for the girl is one of the highest songs on my last.fm, especially when you remove the entire return from cookie mountain album (which you shouldn’t, ever). then matt good got a little too acoustic-y and i fell away from him a bit. but matt good was with me (and with trilling) through some pretty definitive years.

and 10 years later i’m sitting with trilling in san francisco listening to matt good. so of course, you think about those definitive years. and shit, there is a lot to think about.

at the end of the concert, trilling was drunk. and he decided, in his drunken state, to yell “sidney crosby is a pussy” incredibly loudly at the canadian matt good in front of only 150-200 people in a small, ornate theater in san francisco. needless to say, matt good heard him. and his response was why he is awesome.

instead of telling trilling to shut up or fuck off or ignoring trilling, he said “it’s funny that you should mention that” and then went into a 2-3 minute spiel about how wayne gretzky never got hit and sidney crosby does get hit and still gets back up and scrapped for that gold medal winning goal (huge cheer) and ryan miller was pretty awesome so at least america has that going on.

now, i’m sure the guy has a ton of experience with idiot hecklers, but he also has experience being a big rock star in canada, so the thoughtful, calm response was unexpected and awesome. of course, trilling wasn’t even thinking about the gold medal, he was thinking about alex ovechkin. which is a whole separate post entirely.

that was all rambly and nonsensical, but i just need to get something going, get anything going.

now, about that promise for more – ottoneu’s fantasy draft was yesterday, and i’m going to go through what my strategy was for the draft (this is the first year i had a strategy going in) and how well i did to my strategy. so look for that tonight or tomorrow.

also, boomgard pointed me to frightened rabbit, and their new album is meh, but their first album from 2008 (midnight organ fight) is really, really good. so go listen to that. and if you like jazz, i don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re interested in liking jazz, listen to coltrane+monk at carnegie hall. i might have not needed to tell anyone that. i just had to tell myself that. or admit to myself that i am an idiot for not listening to it until very recently. update: i should have thanked parker for helping me see the light on the coltrane+monk collaborations. and now i have, thanks parker.

also as i click the categories for this post, i’m realizing that metaniv and ravings go hand in fucking hand. which tells you a lot, i think.

i have been dreaming a lot recently. 2 weeks ago in vegas was an all-time high in dreams (something they pump in to the rooms?) but my mind has been pretty active in general after i close my eyes. maybe this is a result of getting better at remembering dreams. there is a lot of room for consideration here, but that isn’t the point.

the point is last night i had a dream. and my dream had to do with me doing a spacewalk which intertwined with and eventually became a moonwalk. and my main concern, naturally, was how would i get my camera out into space with me – would it blow up in outer space? how could i prevent that?

and then i read this:

The D3S digital SLR cameras and AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses ordered by NASA will be carried on the Space Shuttle and used to photograph activities at the International Space Station (ISS) in the future.
No special modifications will be made to these products. They will be the same products available to end-users, confirming the incredible versatility of the D3S.

seriously? today? after i dreamt about it last night?
creepy. and awesome.
UPDATE
now i am reading a long article about james cameron, director of multiple movies that i’m sure you’re familiar with, and i stumble upon this:

But, before bringing a camera into space, Cameron had to prove it safe.

WEIRD.