goodweeds

Man this guy's writing style is incredibly unclear and annoying.

Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.

Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.

The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.

It's hearsay, but a friend of mine who was there last year told me a pretty frightening story about how one of their engineers harassed and stalked my friend's co-worker for the duration of the conference. (word to the wise, women should never put their cell phone number on the business cards they hand out at conference filled with drunk, horny nerds)

Apples an oranges here. Linode kind of sucks, their performance is good but their pricing is whack and they're not really elastic .. a 1/2 month credit when you power down an instance is pretty lame. I won't do business with those guys after their behavior at hostingcon this year.

As to RackSpace I don't trust any tech company who has a 7:1 sales rep to engineer ratio. They are overpriced in all of their services, especially their managed dedicated servers (seriously, why does it take a week to have a server installed? it takes a week because they literally have a guy go out and image servers by hand. do you really want to wage your company's future on that sort of incompetence? I don't)

The main reason to advertise on Yelp is extortion. If you don't pay Yelp their extortion fees, they only allow a small number of reviews for your business, and even worse, their algorithms pushes the negative reviews to the top. One of my friends' businesses currently has 200 "filtered" reviews and 19 posted reviews which in itself makes his business look incredibly shady (sure, he runs a dispensary, so he might be shady, but that's besides the point).

The video of this is often linked when people use the term "Meat Cloud" to describe tech companies who throw bodies at problems instead of process and automation.

Huh? I thought Virgin America canceled their routes between SFO and YYZ a year ago?