Month: April 2014

This blog post is 7 days late. It all started when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m reading Founders at Work, and I’ve just had my mind blown. Like… ka-phow! The book is a series of 10 page interviews with founders and early employees of all of the companies we all know and take for granted today. I’m about 1/3 of the way through, and THE interview of the first third of the book was Dan Bricklin’s (founder of Visicalc).

Dan Bricklin is the father of the spreadsheet. Which is in and of itself an amazing task. The story of Visicalc is actually quite a sad one. Visicalc created the PC industry (the hardware existed, but it lacked a killer app. Visicalc was that killer app). But he also was a major player in the development of the first word processor as developed by DEC.

Think about that… this guy was on the ground floor of the word processor and the spreadsheet.

The line that blew my mind was how he described how his experience at DEC building the first word processor gave him visibility into how hard it is to teach people to use software. And that allowed him to create a more compelling mental model for the spreadsheet which people had to learn to use from scratch (not spreadsheets period, but spreadsheets as software).

Just think about that. He invented A1 being the upper left hand cell in a spreadsheet. The conventions we use today in word processors may have started in the version that he built. His design decisions define how we use two of the most core pieces of software.

Mind blown.

This blog post is 10 days late. It all started on this date when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m falling sick today. I can feel it in my nose (I hate that feeling of a running nose. It’s absolutely awful). I can feel it in my bones (They creak. That never happened when I was kid, but now when I get sick my bones creak).

I went through swimming. Babies are in bed. It’s only 9pm, but I’ve got my tea/honey/cinnamon drink down, and I’m passing out.

Today is Micky’s 39.5 birthday!

I don’t think we stop to celebrate ourselves enough. I think this is especially true when there’s the chaos of kids, work, keeping up with the few friends who have stuck around, and what have you. Celebration takes time; it takes effort; and who has either of those?

So, as a combined house warming and celebration, I threw a party for Micky today. It was so much fun!

I spent the day in the garden pulling up every damn weed. I mowed the patch of lawn we have. I even found a worm (and this time put him in a much safer place. He lives in one of our planters, and I hope to find him again soon!).

I found a caterer named Nicole through Betsy and decided that that was the way to go after seeing it work so well for Randa at Christmas. That was a genius idea on my part 🙂

Food was killer; kitchen was clean; it was epic!

Then I made a book of all the folks who showed up with photos of Micky, and they all signed it as a guest book.

We even sang happy birthday around a cake.

It was a good day to celebrate a lovely lady. Happy 39.5 Micky!