Jordy Blog

Today was my first day of work in the marketing division of online retail giant Overstock. For the curious, my official title is “Product Manager / Business Analyst”, not that it necessarily helps you (or me) understand what I do. :)

Although I have a hard time showing it, I’m really pretty excited –much more that I thought I would be. The daily commute from Orem stinks, but starting Monday I’ll be carpooling, so I should be able to turn at least some of that sucky traffic time into quality reading time; and if today was any indication, it looks like I’ll be learning a lot on the job as well.

I’m excited because it’s looking like I’ll be able to use a wide variety of my skill sets. From business analysis, to tech, to internet marketing –I saw it all today. Very nice. Fun too…

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I’ve been attending the Wayne Brown Institute’s excellent How to Raise Money in Utah” seminars. It’s amazing that, even though each session basically covers the same topic, I manage to glean a little something new every time I go.

Besides an excellent introduction from Brad Bertoch and the obligatory legal discussion (this time from David Angerbauer of Holland & Hart), we heard from Devin Thorpe (aka MidMarketMaven) of the Thorpe Capital Group. Devin gave a quick overview of his 10 ways to get money to chase you series that I recently blogged about. He said he was glad to finally meet his one blog reader, but I’m pretty sure he was just being modest. :) We also heard from Larry Rigby, a seasoned repeat entrepreneur who was mentored by Wayne Brown himself. Currently CEO of ZARS Pharma, Larry is a guru in the health and life sciences industry who has raised about $75 million in his career. He’s also now an author of a new book called The Jager Artist.

These seminars are a free, fantastic way to hear about fundraising tips from people who have done it. They’re a definite must for any Utah entrepreneur who plans on raising capital someday, whether it’s angel investment or venture capital. Even if that day is far away, it’s never too early to get started. You also want to get on Brad’s mailing list to hear about local venture capital conferences and loads of other cool fundraising events.

Local chef geek extraordinaire Joseph Hall spent several days making an awesome custom cake shaped as Tux the penguin (the Linux mascot). The killer cake, part of the PLUG’s 10th anniversary celebration, was not only attractive, but super yummy. Joseph also provided a full Tux Cake HOWTO for Linux-loving food-o-philes around the world.

Anyway, check out his recipe, and be sure to give it some sweet Digg love if you like it. (Joseph certainly deserves it.)

Here’s the mirror for his page, which is getting Digg-slammed already.

We got an ad in the mail today for “Superman, the Musical”. I couldn’t figure out if it was trying to appeal to me or my wife… I think it was promoting some twisted compromise where we both lose. Segmentation, anyone?

Next up: Rambo, the Ballet. :)

I love wiki technology for its ability to allow collaboration on works in progress. I’ve used numerous wiki for work and on community projects, but nowhere did I find wiki colaboration more useful than on jointly-written college papers.

For my senior year capstone project I worked on a student team to crunch out a daunting 40 page paper analyzing everything about Netflix and its business model. There was no way our team members (who all had full-time work and attended school at night) could arrange our schedules to consistently work together at the same time. We had to do it from home, but we really didn’t want the hassle of losing pieces in email and having to merge 10 different versions of assigned chunks on the last day.

Our project wiki saved our collective butt. With it we could work remotely on one document, editing each other’s errors as we went, making sure we didn’t have duplicate content, patching our work together using a unified tone, etc. If you are a student that has to work on large group papers, please learn how to use wiki.

The only problem we had was that there was a bit of a learning curve, especially for the non-technical members of my group. That’s where a WYSIWYG editor would really have come in handy. I may be off here, but I think the real value of a wiki is the collaboration aspect. Collaboration trumps easy markup syntax, and a WYSIWYG editor would definitely make it easier for more people to contribute to a project. More editors means better content. That’s the real point of wiki, right?

My talented friend Tyler made a really smooth and simple Windows-based wiki that employed this principle. Could anyone recommend any good PHP, Perl, or Python-based WYSIWYG wiki packages for Linux? I wish MediaWiki offered some sweet WYSIWYG, but alas, it doesn’t –although the Wikiwyg project seems to be making some progress in that direction.

3DTRIS, a new online flash clone of Blockout is pretty fun. It’s actually remarkably easy to use, for a 3D game, but the game play is still quite difficult when it gets going fast. Takes me back.

In other nerdy news, I’ve created 0D Tetris for those of us who love Tetris in all dimensions.

Here it is:

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Rules: Press any key to not rotate the non-existent shape around non-existent axis. When you finally quit pressing keys, the game is over.

Feel free to download the source code, or just press period anytime for your own 0D gaming pleasure.

I’ll be going to a BBQ meeting tonight (Thursday) to help lay out plans for the first annual Utah Open Source Conference.  The event won’t take place until August of next year, but we wanted to get started early because we want it to be HUGE! :)

Anyway, if you want to come along and help, this kind of stuff is great for Utah and open source. There’ll be some cool folks working with us, and there’s sure to be some good grubbin’, courtesy of Herlo.  Hope to see you there!

Devin Thorpe (aka Mid Market Maven) from the Thorpe Capital Group just finished a great series of posts called 10 Ways to Get Money To Chase You. Devin is a smart guy who gives great, succinct advice. His blog is a definite must-read for business types.

OK, I’m not particularly evil, but I am officially looking for full-time work. What kind of work am I interested in? Well, I’m a business strategist and entrepreneur with strong technical skills and a penchant for Internet business, so anything along at least some of those lines. :)

In addition to any full-time employment that I may find (or that may find me), I’ll be doing contract and consulting work in the evenings and weekends. I’ll post some of the specific kinds of contract work I can do later, but until then, there’s a lot more information about me on my LinkedIn profile.

If you have any leads, especially as they relate to full-time work, please let me know. You can also help just by spreading the word.