TeamSnap, a product of Portland-based SparkPlug is the second northwest site on TechCrunch today and is enjoying a much smoother launch than TalentSpring’s. I saw TeamSnap on Mike Davidson’s blog the other day and it definitely is a good-looking site, but didn’t realize they were local. Congrats on the launch SparkPlug!

I used to play a lot of sports and do a little coaching before I got bit by the side-project entrepreneur bug, but not enough to warrant the use of TeamSnap. I don’t think it will help my golf game much either. If I start playing or coaching sports again (which I definitely want to do), I’ll have to remember to give this a shot.

I’m not sure if TechCrunch jumped the gun, but boy is TalentSpring awful. I noticed that TalentSpring is a northwest company (Seattle), which made me want to check it out, as I don’t bother with most of the stuff that comes through TechCrunch these days. Though I can’t speak much for the business and/or idea itself, as I’m not totally sure what the point of it all is yet. It seems slightly interesting, but the TalentSpring site itself is so unusable right now, I have no motivation to explore.

UPDATE:

It appears to be working again today (Saturday, 3 days after the first reports). I wasn’t able to make the switch to Google’s yet, so I’ll still use Yahoo’s for now. But, there are some changes I need to make to better prepare if something like this happens again.

Yahoo rolled out some updates to their Maps API on Tuesday night, but unfortunately they broke their Geocode API in the process. I know, I know, don’t rely on free APIs, nothing like a day without new users to drive that point home. In spite of knowing I shouldn’t rely on this API, I’m troubled by the way this was broken. I would expect better from Yahoo, who put a lot of resources into their developer network.

The folks at Pop Art have launched a new group, PDX UX (UX = User Experience), for area designers and developers to get together (via). Looks to be heavy on Microsoft stuff. That’s not an indictment against the group (I code in .NET for a living as a matter of fact), but I do know that many developers dislike Microsoft’s proprietary ways and many designers dislike working with Microsoft technology. So, it will be interesting to see how it does. I’ll add it to the list.

You want irony? On the day I drive 90 minutes to the convention center and nearly 2 hours to get home, I do a brief interview with an Oregonian reporter about my 25 minute daily work commute. Doesn’t seem so bad now :-). Let’s recap day 2:

Let Go! 8 Steps to Succeeding in a Post-2.0 World

Lane Becker and Thor Muller, Satisfaction (slides)

I didn’t write down the 8 specific things, perhaps they’ll show up here, but this talk wasn’t really about presenting the 8 things, it was more a conversation about their message, “Be Like the Internet.” What does this mean? It means giving up control, opening up more, looking outside for solutions, embracing chaos, being more agile. Again, look to the wiki they setup, hopefully they’ll build it out a bit.

WebVisions turned out all-in-all to be a good time. The sessions were great and I came out of it plenty inspired and am trying to review notes and reviews this morning so that I don’t lose track of the important bits.

AJAX Inside Out (Workshop)

Jack Herringon

Slides: http://muttmansion.com/webvisions.pdf

Code Samples: http://muttmansion.com/webvisions.tgz

Waste of time. They should give refunds for this. Not sure if it was a horrible mis-communication between WV staff and Mr. Herrington, or between WV marketing and attendees. This was a demonstration of AJAX, that’s all.

I’m at WebVisions today and tomorrow. Jeremiah is streaming live on Ustream if you want to check out the action.

Ahhh, conferences. If I had the time and money, I’d probably just go to conferences and classes for a career. It’s a blast to learn new things and listen to different perspectives. But, I’m practical and know that you won’t get much done if you’re only learning, so usually end up doing one or two outings a year. This is my third year at WebVisions, and I have to say, I much rather would’ve gone to Microsoft’s Mix. Ok, maybe being in Vegas has a lot to do with that preference. Local conferences aren’t always much fun, you don’t get to experience the whole thing as real life is still very present. But, with baby #2 nearing arrival, leaving town wasn’t an option.

For the longest time I’ve been aggravating over a Log4Net problem using the RollingFileAppender with a RollingStyle of “Date”. This is probably the most popular style of logging, with the log file rolling over every day. But, I could never get it to work consistently. Log4Net would always start the log file over each day, but would not always archive the previous day’s log. End result being the entire log from the day before was gone! Not the best result. It would archive about once a week, so that meant this wasn’t a permissions issue. This had been going one for a year or so after an upgrade to a NHibernate 1.0 release, previous to that, everything was fine.

Why do do new or moderately trafficked sites insist on using a <a href="CAPTCHA on their registration form? A CAPTCHA is a simple test to verify an actual person is using the computer and not a machine, usually in the form of a “type the letters in this graphic” question. They are used primarily to thwart spam bots roaming the web.

Sites create an unnecessary roadblock to user adoption, and it seems to be becoming more common. The problem is, these tests can be unintelligible and a normal user can’t pass it. If you’re MySpace or Facebook and getting thousands of registrations a day, then it makes sense to worry about thwarting the bots, but until then, please dump the CAPTCHAs. Use email verification instead, which you probably do anyway, so no need to beat up your users before they’re actually users with too many tests.

I bet you will soon. I remember how aghast my sociology prof was in college when some CEO made $100 million in one year. Well, imagine what will be thought of about this hedge fund manager’s 2006 take: $1.5 – $2 billion.

Given Arnold’s record 2006 — the largest sum, we believe, anyone has ever earned in one year — a slap like that just might land someone in intensive care.