Poor Cactus Almanac

An Almanac By James Hartig

RSS

Ingredients:

16 oz Tri-color spiral pasta
16 oz your choice of vegetables
One 6 oz can of olives
~1 cup of Italian Dressing

Directions:

Cook vegetables
Cook pasta
Slice Olives and vegetables
Mix in olives, pasta and vegetables and stir
Add dressing prior to serving
Enjoy!

-James Hartig

Here is my rip off of “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon.

I am from CDs
from Cobra Starship and Panic!

I am from the bland.
white, brown; dull.

I am from the cactus,
the mexican claret cactus flowery.

I’m from Christmas parties and cheap gifts,
from Cousin Tracy and Grandma.

I’m from the  independent spirit and optimistic view,
from the birds and the bees and working hard.

I’m from mediocre church visits, which occur
once a year.

I’m from pilgrims, with turkey-casserole and
Bob’s meaty chili.

From the green goblin george and the
hilarious cards by Aunt Laura.

The old smidgen of photos in our attic and
Aunt Laura’s stash of who-knows-what sharing
the funny moments from our foregoing family.

-James Hartig

Citation:

Lyon, George Ella. “Where I’m From.” The United States of Poetry. Compiled by
        Josh Blum,  Bob Holman, and Mark  Pellington. New York : H.N. Abrams, 1996.

Most of you might not know the person behind all of Woopra’s services, but its Elie Khoury. This guy never sleeps, I chat with him online and we exchange various billing problems/solutions, we talk about Woopra’s developments, and even about my own projects. He lives in Lebanon and the time difference is +8 hours from Cleveland’s time and yet he is almost always on when I am. He is consistently working to improve Woopra users’s lives and interactions with the system.

He built Woopra’s whole billing system, which charges a user’s credit card and then repeats every month or year, depending on the User’s preference. He also totally redesigned Woopra’s backend for users and admins. I don’t want to say that Woopra won’t be where it is today without him, but I know that he has drastically helped Woopra and its users out in more ways than one. This year, Woopra finally came out of beta and started charging its customers. They have came such a long way from when I started using Woorpa and because of this, Elie deserves the Person of the Year.

-James Hartig

Citation:
P., John. “What its like to be surrounded by Genius.” Woopra. N.p., 17 Sept.
2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2009. <http://www.woopra.com/blog/2009/09/17/
what-its-like-to-be-surrounded-by-genius/>.

Yes, I know that most of you don’t consider Twitter to be a “place”. However, this year no other “place” deserves the “Place of the Year” award any more than Twitter does. When I started using Twitter, just over 16 months ago, no one knew what Twitter was, I could keep a decent conversation with their API Lead, Alex Payne, and I pretty much only had some Grooveshark friends on there. There were no news stories about Twitter, no major companies, it was very bare. Compared to now, where Twitter is all over TV, majority of the top sites have some Twitter integration, all the popular stars have Twitter’s of their own and some of my friends even have Twitter accounts. In almost a year, Twitter went from nothing to the BIG thing.

Feature-wise, Twitter has not changed too much until the last few months, where it has been making a lot of new API additions, new features, including the most recent, Lists. The more users that joined, the more it became useful and more users signed up. I would love to see Twitter’s goal of becoming the first site to have 1 billion registered users comes true!

-James Hartig

Citation:
“fastest963 twitter statistics.” TwitterCounter. N.p., 31 Oct. 2009. Web. 31
Oct. 2009. <http://twittercounter.com/fastest963/all/followers>.
“Google Trends: Twitter.” Google Trends. N.p., 31 Oct. 2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2009.
<http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter>.

I don’t really know of a perfect song of the year. Personally, I just open up my Grooveshark Desktop and hit “Radio” and let Grooveshark do the rest. I do know that this year, Paramore released a new album, Brand New Eyes, and Brick By Boring Brick is my favorite song on the album, so that is my song of the year.

Listen to Brick By Boring Brick by Paramore

Lyrics: (provided by LyricsMode)

{Verse 1}
She lives in a fairy tale
Somewhere too far for us to find
Forgotten the taste and smell
Of a world that she’s left behind
It’s all about the exposure, the lens, I told her
The angles are all wrong now
She’s ripping wings off of butterflies

{Pre-Chorus}
Keep your feet on the ground
When your head’s in the clouds

{Chorus}
Well go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
To bury the castle, bury the castle
Go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
To bury the castle, bury the castle (x2)

Ba-da ba ba-da ba ba da

{Verse 2}
So one day, he found her crying
Coiled up on the dirty ground
Her prince finally came to save her
And the rest you can figure out
But it was a trick
And the clock struck twelve, well make sure
To build your house brick by boring brick
Or the wolf’s gonna blow it down

{Pre-Chorus}
Keep your feet on the ground…
When your head’s in the clouds…

{Chorus}
Well go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
To bury the castle, bury the castle
Go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
We’ll bury the castle, bury the castle

{Bridge}
Well you built up a world of magic
Because your real life is tragic
Yeah you built up a world of magic…

If it’s not real
You can’t hold it in your hand
You can’t feel it with your heart
And I won’t believe it
But if it’s true
You can see it with your eyes
Oh, even in the dark
And that’s where I want to be, yeah!

{Chorus}
Go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
To bury the castle, bury the castle
Go get your shovel
And we’ll dig a deep hole
To bury the castle, bury the castle

{Outro}
Ba-da ba ba-da ba ba da
Ba-da ba ba ba-da ba ba
[X3]
Ba-da ba ba-da ba ba da
Ba-da ba ba ba ba-ba ba ba

You have a better song? Post it in the comments.

-James Hartig

Citation:
“Brick By Boring Brick lyrics.” LyricsMode. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Nov. 2009.
<http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/paramore/brick_by_boring_brick.html>.

-James Hartig

Citation:
“Street Light Fail.” Cartoon. FAIL BLOG. N.p., 11 June 2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2009.
<http://failblog.org/2009/06/11/street-light-fail/>.

Sometime on September 20th, Grooveshark just registered its 1 millionth user (pictures). That is a crazy amount and a great milestone for the company, especially since there were only 96,151 users last year on that same date. They have recently closed an EMI deal to secure rights to 2+ million of their 7 million songs, they just released Grooveshark 2.0 to the masses and they created a new revenue stream through Grooveshark VIPs and they stream a few million songs a day. Also, they have finalized and released their Grooveshark Artists program, as well as a Twitter link sharing site and Grooveshark Widgets. All of these contributed to the 1 million users and their massive growth.

I remember back when I started using Grooveshark, it was a tiny tiny company that paid users for uploading songs. If you mentioned Grooveshark to anyone, they were like “Groovewhat?”. Since then, I have created Grooveshark Day and everyone I know loves and uses Grooveshark. I’ve also been passionate about providing user-to-user support through either Twitter, Facebook or GetSatisfaction and when I started there were only a few new comments/posts a day. Now I get 10-20 a day from people either complaining of “Network Problems”, asking “Woah! What happened?” or trying to get their new feature (*cough* *cough* Last.FM scrobbling) added to Grooveshark.

A lot has changed since Grooveshark started and I have enjoyed watching the company grow and flourish.

-James Hartig

Citation:
Greenberg, Josh. E-Mail interview. 30 Oct. 2009.
“Site profile for: grooveshark.com.” Compete.com. N.p., 30 Oct. 2009. Web. 1
Nov. 2009. <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/grooveshark.com/
?metric=uv>.

Day: July, 28, 2009
Event: I visit Grooveshark HQ

I was staying at my grandparents house in Spring Hill, Florida for a few weeks over the summer and my goal was to get a chance to visit Grooveshark HQ sometime. Their offices are located in Gainesville, Florida, which is about an hour from where we were staying. Before leaving we arranged to come down on Tues, July 28 and since they are a young bunch that don’t exactly like to wake up early, I was instructed to come sometime mid-afternoon. My dad and I set out at noon for Gainesville.

On our way to Gainesville, it started pooring, which was odd because it was sunny when we left and when we got to Gainesville, it was sunny again. Nonetheless, we made it to Gainesville and their offices are in the center of the city, we tried to find a parking spot, however we had some trouble and ended up just parking in the parking garage across the street. We then proceeded to enter the office building, according to the sign, Grooveshark was on the second floor. Oddly enough, their first set of doors don’t get used because they are, well blocked, and lead into a tiny sitting room area.

We walked around to the second door and knocked. We were let in and I asked for either Ben or Josh. I knew them the best out of any of the employees and they were going to give me the tour. First they showed me the “former ping-pong room”, which is now the theater/presentation room. That room was surprisingly cold because the AC is actually controlled by their neighbors. Then the meeting room, which had a large meeting desk and chairs. When I visited, there was a meeting  in there, but Josh let me in and showed me the large world map with safety pins where Grooveshark had a stronghold. There were also pins for Spotify, a direct competitor to Grooveshark. Finally there was the front room for small meetings, Sam Tarantino’s (CEO) office and the server room. All of the employees worked in the main room, which was basically the whole office and everyone had a desk. There were sectioned off parts of the main room for the different “departments”.  Outside of the main room, on the side of the building there is a ledge where there are seats, the ledge extends the whole side of the building and is about 5 feet wide.

I talked with Ben, Josh and Colin for the majority of the time and we talked about my company, Grooveshark and their new Grooveshark 2.0 interface, which at that time, I hadn’t seen yet. I also saw some designs for some ad deals and a few themes they were working on. After a few hours of talking, Josh, Ben, Colin, John, my dad and I went across the street to this pizza place. The pizza was amazing! We talked a bit more about their hiring process as well as their original offices.

Then, after the pizza, my dad and I went across the city to the University of Florida campus. Their campus wasn’t much unlike the others that I’ve seen but they had a lot more medical buildings. On our way home, we stopped by Grooveshark again and picked up a few shirts then made our way back home.

Overall, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun! The Grooveshark staff is awesome and I love their open environment. I can’t wait to work for them.

-James Hartig