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Pretty interesting 3 part piece starring Johnny Knoxville (yes, that one) as he goes through Detroit with a bunch of people who are trying to show that everything’s not as bad as you hear. It’s a nice look at a bunch of people trying to do things for themselves and turn a city’s reputation around, and makes me think about what I would do if Atlanta suddenly saw the same kind of decline that Detroit has in the past decade or so.

It’s about 30 minutes total, so set some time aside and check it out.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I like getting emails at 3:15am from people I work with that start out

So, woke up at 3am and started thinking of another program to design

That’s the kind of dedication you should be looking for in a co-founder.

This update features two very different books about high school athletes. One’s about basketball, one’s about football. One’s a story of kids growing up tough and fighting to get out, one’s a story about an old coach and the town. One’s an amazing piece of writing and among the most touching books I’ve ever read, and one’s a disappointment in comparison.

Let’s start with the latter first so I can just get it out of the way. Our Boys by Joe Drape is the story of the 2008 season for the Smith Center Redmen in Smith Center, Kansas. However, more than that, it’s a piece talking about their legendary coach Roger Barta and the effect he and his team have had on the town.

Now, this isn’t a bad book; I want to make that clear. Drape does a very good job showing how much the town cares for the team (but not in a crazy Texas HS football way), and the lasting effect Coach Barta has on his kids. My problem with it is that I come out of the book feeling like I don’t really know any of the characters.

There is very little conflict or adversity in any of the characters’ lives and we don’t get to see how they react to that. The closest we come is when Joe Osburn, one of the players, goes to Kansas City to visit his birth parents. We don’t anything out of that except that “it wasn’t what he expected.” I’m not asking for Drape to go digging in to a kid’s private life, but that was the only chance in the story to really see how these kids act, feel, and live, and we got nothing out of it.

Contrast this to The Last Shot by Darcy Frey. Now this is how a book about high school athletes should be written. Frey follows four young basketball players at one of New York City’s best public high schools, Lincoln High. Nestled in Coney Island, it’s also one of the city’s worst schools and teaches a lot of students from one of the worst projects in the country.

The story’s four main characters are Russell Thomas (really Darryl Flicking but name changed for legal reasons), Tchaka Shipp, Corey Johnson, and the one and only Stephon Marbury. Starbury, a freshman and the only non-senior in the book, is the last of 4 super-talented Marbury boys to go through Lincoln High, and the family’s last hope at seeing someone go on to the NBA.

Frey dives into the lives these kids lead, exposing the dirty world of college recruiting, the hold basketball has in the projects, the cultural biases in Prop 48 and SATs, and more. It’s amazing and inspiring to see the pride these kids have in what they do and how hard they are trying to just get out of Coney Island.

Make sure you get the 2004 edition of the book with the updated afterword. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, but you really need to know the whole story to appreciate how hard it is for kids in their situation to get ahead in life, no matter how hard they try.

I’ll leave you with two quotes from the book. The first is from Russell (Darryl), the most desperate to get out, about the difficulties growing up in Coney Island.

This is the toughest area to come up in. It really is. ‘Cause once you veer off like them, you’re stuck. Maybe you have another chance, but it’s a little less than you had before. ‘Cause what’s here today can easily fall away.

The second from author Darcy Frey summing up the situation of the kids early in the book.

Never in their lives would they be in possession of so little and on the brink of so much.

If you really want to read about high school football go ahead and pick up Our Boys. But I beg you, please, everybody go buy The Last Shot. I offer you a 100% money-back guarantee that you won’t regret it.

As most of you probably know, a friend and I have a new company that we’re getting up and running. In true customer development style I had another meeting with a potential customer today to talk about our software. They’ve been kind enough to meet with me before and are now going to be set up with a 2-3 month beta test so we can iron out bugs, see what features are useful, what else they might need, things like that.

I went through the functionality we’ve built in so far and they were really impressed. There’s not a better feeling in the world than creating something for a group of people, and having them turn around and actually appreciate what you’ve done.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: “And then there’s this, it isn’t linked up right now because we just finished it last night, but I should be able to type it in.”
Him: “Oh wow, you can automate the packing lists and BOLs?”
Me: “Yeah, and if you have a certain format you like to use we can set that up for you too.”
Him: “Man, this is all really professional and easy to use. Give me a month, but if I like what you’ve got I can think of at least a dozen other companies I can get you in touch with who could use this.”
Me: ::swoon::

If that’s not enough reason to deliver, I don’t know what is.

I always like the highlight packages that the GT Athletic Association puts out. I don’t know who’s doing the work over there, but they put out a very nice product. Here are the highlights from last week’s win over North Carolina.

I’m not sure if my favorite part is the soundtrack (featuring Atlanta’s own B.o.B.) or the fact that they showed every snap of the 20-play death march to end the first half.

Also, I have a handful of book reviews coming in the next couple days so please excuse the flood of them. I have to catch up.

Unfortunately, this was not one of those good and relaxing trips back home.

I started feeling sick last Sunday night, which rolled into Monday morning. It wasn’t much at the time, and it actually felt kinda like hunger pangs. By Monday night though I was pretty much a mess; couldn’t eat, stomach pain, etc. So I just laid in bed and slept. Then I did the same thing all day Tuesday when nothing got better.

By Wednesday I did a little webMD’ing despite the fact that I had banned myself from the site due to always thinking I had cancer or some brain disease after poking around on it. The top answer from their symptom checker, no matter how much I tried to play with the symptoms: appendicitis.

Well, great.

I went back to Peachtree City, saw the doctor, and was sent to the emergency room immediately. After some tests, it turned out my appendix had gone ahead and ruptured on me (I guess that’s what all that awful pain was) so I was there to stay. I was in the hospital from Wednesday night til Monday morning, and then one step above bed-ridden at my mom’s house until Friday afternoon when I had my last visit with the surgeon.

Without going into all the gross details, I didn’t have my appendix taken out. The doctors decided to try and drain the appendix, fight off the infection with antibiotics, and then, assuming everything goes according to plan, take it out in a few weeks after all the swelling goes done with a procedure that won’t leave a scar. Thankfully it all went about as well as you could hope for so we’re still on track for that.

I go back in 3 weeks for a followup where they’ll make sure all the infection is cleared up and then we’ll schedule a day for me to have the appendix out. That should be about a 24-hour hospital stay at most, and then another 3-4 days laid up at home as I slowly adjust to life without a non-vital organ. All is well for the time being though.

Thank you very much to everyone who stopped by to visit (or sent their mom by), called, sent emails and facebook messages, and kept me in your thoughts and prayers.

It certainly wasn’t the most fun way to spend a week and a half, especially with all of my sports playing awful the weekend I had nothing to do but watch sports from a hospital bed, but all of you guys made it so much better.

My 22nd book, The Alchemist, is apparently extremely popular even though I had never heard of it until my sister gave it to me in the hospital so that I would have a way to pass the time. The story follows a boy who travels from Spain to the pyramids in Egypt and back again in search of his Personal Legend.

As you’ve probably realized looking through my book choices, I don’t read a whole lot of fiction. I don’t know why that is exactly, it’s just never really been my thing. Because of that I wonder if I’m the best judge of books like this because the comparisons I can make are so limited.

That said though, I really enjoyed the book. It was an easy read with enough under the surface to make you think if you wanted to, and was all about a guy following his dreams which of course I’m going to relate to.

There were two passages that I marked down as I was reading that I really enjoyed.

p. 18

“What the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.

“It’s this: at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

p. 62

It was a language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as a part of a search for something believed in and desired.

It’s a pretty clear recipe for success laid out in this book, and one I have a hard time arguing against. Find what it is in life you want to do, know that you control the ability to get to that point, and accomplish things along your way with love and purpose.

Buy The Alchemist

Starting projects is really easy. You’re all excited about the product, you’re making big progress every day, the results are tangible, it’s just all around cool.

Finishing projects sucks. You do a bunch of testing, you make little improvements, you finally do the things you put off earlier because they weren’t as fun.

We’re in that finishing stage right now with liquidWMS. I would say the backend functionality is probably between 90-95% completed and I have a feeling that Aaron is going to rock out and finish it by the end of this Labor Day weekend. Mostly because I think coding 12-16 hours a day is making him go insane and he wants a break, but hey, you take what you can get.

The front end and user interface is probably 70% finished since I  was also working on backend stuff for a while and now I have to wait for Aaron to complete something before I go in, tear it apart, and maintain all his functionality while redoing design. Probably not the most efficient way to develop, but we don’t have time to spend optimizing that right now.

Our work was starting to slow a bit this past week, until yesterday. We got together at 10am (we usually work separately due to living 35 minutes from each other and him having a real job) and started going. We worked for 3 good hours, grabbed some lunch and then relaxed to watch Georgia Tech beat South Carolina State 41-10. Then it was back on the grind for a few more hours before going our separate ways.

Being able to work next to each other and take a break to do something we enjoy was a great way to break up the routine. I think we both came away a lot more energized and ready to get back to work really knocking everything out for a completed product.

A great TEDxNYED talk from a middle school teacher named Dan Meyer about how we teach math the wrong way.

The way our textbooks … teach math reasoning and patient problem solving is functionally equivalent to turning on “Two And A Half Men” and calling it a day.