Ohio Chamber of Commerce has a sense of humor
Kevin Day, September 19th, 2008From the business name availability guide on the Ohio Chamber of Commerce website:
Unacceptable Words
If a name contains profanity or words or phrases that are generally considered a slur against an ethnic group, religion, gender or heredity, it is considered unacceptable. Even if the word is the correct technical name for something or someone, such as the technical name for a female canine, it is not acceptable for filing.
and
Using different phonetic spellings or spelling variations does distinguish one name from another. “Quickie Mart” is distinguishable from “Kwikee Mart” or “Kwik-E-Mart.”
and
Dentists
The Ohio Dental Board requires dentists who are in the business of practicing dentistry or dental surgery to include in their business name at least the last name(s) of the owner dentist(s). This rule applies to all types of businesses, trade names and fictitious names. For example, if Dr. Becky Smith, DDS, wishes to register the name “House of Payne Dentistry”, she will have to include at least her last name in the business name. For example, “Dr. Smith, House of Payne Dentistry, Inc.” would be an acceptable business name.
PHP Best Practices
Kevin Day, September 19th, 2008Here are some great slides on PHP developer best practices. I learned a couple things, and I think my development procedure will improve because of these slides. Required reading for any PHP developer.
The Monk and the Mirror
Kevin Day, September 15th, 2008I saw this story in a comment by Reg Braithwaite on Hacker News. I don’t know why there are so many stories about monks (I’ve never met one), but the moral has helped me several times.
There was once a monk who would carry a mirror where ever he went. A priest noticed this one day and thought to himself “This monk must be so preoccupied with the way he looks that he has to carry that mirror all the time. He should not worry about the way he looks on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts.” So the priest went up to the monk and asked “Why do you always carry that mirror?” thinking for sure this would prove his guilt.
The monk pulled the mirror from his bag and pointed it at the priest. Then he said “I use it in times of trouble. I look into it and it shows me the source of my problems as well as the solution to my problems.”
Unfortunately, this story conflicts with Homer Simpson’s message:
To alcohol! The cause of… and solution to… all of life’s problems.
Thank God! Amazon persistent storage is here
Kevin Day, August 21st, 2008I just stayed up late last night working on backup scripts for my EC2 instances, so it was great to wake up this morning to see Amazon’s latest update. With Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS), ECS users can now mount persistent volumes directly to the file system. That should translate into more sleep for me.
I don’t know how many I/O requests I make in a month though, and that seems to be how they’re charging for this service. I’ll have to test it out first before I do anything serious with it.
Firefox Caching Bug
Kevin Day, August 17th, 2008For a while I thought I had a bug with my Ajax fantasy football mock draft program, but it turns out the bug was in Firefox 3 instead.
The bug is that Firefox 3 doesn’t handle caching properly. If you don’t want it to cache a page you have to specify your headers in a specific order, otherwise it will cache it even if the headers correctly specify not to. More info here and here.
This affected me because I use a periodic Ajax GET request to the same url in a live draft application. I reply with no-cache headers so that the GET request polls the server every time. When Firefox 3 pulled the request from the cache instead, it would miss a lot of updates and made the application appear to freeze up.
To work around the bug, I’m just appending a timestamp to the end of every request. I feel that’s better than using FF3’s specific ordering of header info because I don’t want to have to worry that they may change their magical ordering. It’s not much work to get around the bug, but it was difficult to pinpoint in the first place.
In Business
Kevin Day, August 15th, 2008As of July 2nd, I am no longer employed by General Electric. Also, I am also no longer a mechanical engineer.
What have I been doing with myself?
I have been voraciously developing the best fantasy football software website on the internet.
Fantasy Football Calculator is now hosting 1,500 live mock drafts every day. I’ve also launched three new products within the past two months: the Lineup Calculator, Draft Calculator, and Draft Simulator.
To keep up with the high traffic volume during the NFL pre-season, I’ve had to scale the site from one server to four. That process wasn’t fun, but the site is now running smoothly even during peak hours.
I’ve also started a blog on that site, which is another reason I’ve been neglecting this one. I’m going to start posting here again because I do have non-fantasy football related thoughts now and then.
Colorstrology
Kevin Day, August 15th, 2008I’m working from Phoenix Coffee right now. I hadn’t been a believer in colorstrology before, but I flipped through the book while I was waiting for my dark roast.
The books says my birth color is lavender, which indicates that I possess the qualities:
Visionary, creative, builder
That’s good news. I’ve been doing a lot of those three lately, so I’m glad to have confirmation that I’m actually good at them.
Insightful economic commentary
Kevin Day, June 12th, 2008Lately I’ve been following the blog of the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, and it’s a great read. Compared to all of the speculative crap out there that people write about the economy every day, it’s refreshing to read the thoughts of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
Check it out: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
DIY Startup School Cleveland-style
Kevin Day, May 22nd, 2008Although the official Startup School was last month at Stanford, there was enough startup activity in Clevleand last week to constitute it’s own mini startup school.
Thursday was Cleveland Startup Drinks, which was a great chance to talk with other startup founders.
Saturday was the SCORE business workshop that was a half-day of informative talks by an accountant, a lawyer, and a bank president about how to develop a business plan, incorporate a business, and finance a business. This was the first time I had heard of SCORE, and it looks like a valuable resource for new businesses. They are a large group of retired business executives that offer free counseling. What could be better than that?
Lastly, on Sunday morning Craig Newmark spoke at the CWRU commencement ceremony. It wasn’t quite as inspriational as the real startup school talks, but it was a taste of Silicon Valley nonetheless.
Startup stuff
Kevin Day, May 15th, 2008Tonight I’m going to Startup Drinks at the Bier Markt.
Also, Saturday is a SCORE business class at the U.S. Bank building downtown. The first session covers business plans and legal stuff. The second half is business finance. Only $20.
Really looking forward to both events. Should be fun and educational.
