Inbound Thinking

One great thing about working at HubSpot is being able to work on things that are not directly related to your job. I’m normally writing code and dealing with technical issues, but every Friday I help to produce our weekly live video-podcast HubSpot TV. I worked at NHPTV while attending the University of New Hampshire, so I’ve got a fair amount of experience with producing and directing television programs. HubSpot TV is also super simple to produce, all the content is taken care of by our hosts Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin. I just take care of the set, lighting, cameras and seating for the live audience. My favorite episode so far was from Halloween, check it out below. Also check out my photo stream of behind the scenes photos from HubSpot TV.

I went to see W this weekend at the Loews on Boston Common. Overall, it was a good film. I wasn’t sure what to expect, knowing it was an Oliver Stone film I thought it might be harsh or biased. However I think it was a fairly accurate depiction of the life of George W. Bush thus far.

Scenes in the movie alternate between the modern presidency of Bush and his earlier years. While there has been some dramatization, the scenes are all accurate to real happenings in the live of W., from his years at Yale to his religious “rebirth.”

The acting is very good all around, and the casting was excellent. Josh Brolin as W. mesmerized me. It is hard to believe this is the same actor that played Llewellyn in No Country For Old Men. Casting Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush is a bit of a stretch when you first see her in the film, but as the hair style and wardrobe changes she settles into the role nicely.

I’m not a fan of Bush, which probably fueled my desire to see this film. I have wondered how we ended up with our current president, and this film provides some answers. It shows W.’s struggle living in the shadow of his accomplished father and reliable brother. You see W.’s wealth of failure as he tries to find a place for himself in the world. Interestingly it shows how Karl Rove and Dick Cheney careful steer W. through the issues facing the country.

For me, the most interesting part of the film is how it ended. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, but if you’re overly cautious about spoilers you might want to stop reading. I believe the film attempts to end in the same way as the current presidency, that is to say, we don’t know yet. The final scene shows W. standing in center field of the Texas Ranger’s baseball stadium (earlier in the film W. tells George Bush, Sr. that he feels comforted there). Although the stadium is empty, we hear an imaginary crowd and the crack of bat hitting ball. The camera pans through the sky, tracking a pop-fly to center that is not there. We see W. with his glove raised, squinting into the sun, trying to track the ball; fade to black and “The End.” W. has a chance to make the play, or to drop the ball. Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but the symbolism seems a bit of a stretch, W.’s presidency is already in the bottom of the ninth and I’m not sure he can do anything to redeem himself or his place in history.

I enjoyed the film, although it was not amazing. For those that want a more visual history of the antics that explain the current president, I think it’s worth seeing.

At HubSpot we do a lot of work, but we also have a lot of fun. Recently I helped to produce some spoofs of the Mac vs. PC ads. Maybe you have to understand how lame traditional marketing to appreciate the video, but I think the outtakes are hilarious for everyone. Enjoy: Dude, Cold Calling Is For Losers.

I’m not really the kind of person who goes out partying on a Wednesday night, but for this show I made an exception. Steve Lawler has been one of the most enduring and talented DJs for as long as I can remember. He’s also one of those DJs where the live show is so much better than any of the mixed CDs or productions. I used to download every live Lawler set I could find online to hear what kind of dark and twisted beats he was playing.

I got to Underbar ridiculously early, about 9:30pm. Usually I’m only there that early to decorate but in this case the opening DJ was already playing. I guess they wanted to give people plenty of time to get there before a line started outside but I don’t think there actually was a line that night.

Tom Bartlett did a great job opening up. I’ve know of him from various messageboards and shows, but had not actually heard him play before. He kept it dark and groovy for the hours leading up to Lawler. It was nice to hear some quality opening talent at Underbar.

Lawler took over just a little bit before midnight. He’s a traktor guy so he only brough along his laptop. For gear it was all Pioneer: Three CDJ-1000’s, a DJM-800 and an EFX-1000. I was really interested to hear what Lawler was going to play. It would seem that tech house is the flavor du jour right now, and so I wasn’t surprised when he played a lot of it.

The first hour of Lawler’s set was just awesome. It was techy but had a good dose of Balearic flavor. I can only assume those sounds are a side effect of spending the summer in Ibiza. Maybe he had those tracks regardless of playing Ibiza, but it doesn’t matter. Tech house is very, well, techy, so having some Balearic melodic flavor on top helps to smooth things out; not many people can enjoy a 2 hour techno-pounding.

The second hour was good, but not as good as the first. His set progressed, obviously, and there were lots of good tracks, but it wasn’t quite as enlightening as the first hour. I couldn’t identify any of the tracks he played but a couple of my friends could. There was at least one Cirrez D track and also a Nic Fancuilli track called ‘Ide‘.

Overall it was a good night of music, and I’m really glad I went to see Lawler in person. There weren’t really any surprises for me because Lawler is playing pretty much the same stuff as a lot of other big DJs right now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but a part of me just expected him to play some tracks so dark and twisted and non-conforming that I would go “Oh wow, this sounds like Lawler!” Regardless I had a good time: The music was great, I got to hang out with my friends, and I even got to meet Lawler after the show.

It would seem that Google is having a massive GMail outage right now. I first noticed about 5:20pm ET, and the service briefly came back up for me about 20 minutes later. The main version of GMail is still down as of this writing, but I was able to read mail by using the non-AJAX version.

The outage seems to be worldwide, a query for ‘GMail’ at search.twitter.com returns angry tweets from around the world.

There is no official explanation of the outage yet, but I’ll update this article again when there is one.

Thanks to my co-worker and HubSpot UI-guy Todd Garland for the GMail Fail Whale image.

[UPDATE] TechCruch, one of my favorite blogs has picked up the story and the image!

[UPDATE 2] GMail seems to be back up.

[UPDATE 3] Google has posted an apology on their blog, well done.

As a developer at HubSpot I spend a lot of time in meetings with other developers discussing features or planning future development. We have a great team of people in the office in Cambridge, but we also have a couple of developers overseas and some IT folks in the southern US.

Skype has been awesome for these meetings. We just quickly pull everyone into a conference call and as long as the internet connections are constant we can hear everyone clearly and get our work done together. The only unusual part is that we usually have a group in the Cambridge office connected to several individuals. So the people on Skype talk back to us through a single laptop.

So, that brings me to my feature suggestion. I would love to see a full-screen visualization for a Skype call that takes up the entire screen. It would look sort of like the current Skype conference call view (pictured to the right), but it would have larger images for the participants and lay them out in some kind of grid instead of a vertical list. The images would still have the radiating blue outline to indicate when they are speaking. By having this visualization I can easly project it in the conference room and everyone there can easily see who is on the call and who is talking.

It’s probably not a lot of work for Skype to do this. In fact, maybe someone at Skype has already figured it out and has a beta version kicking around. I know from experience that sometimes having just one user of your software ask for something can make it a priority. So hopefully someone at Skype will see this and put in a good word for my suggestion. I know there would be at least one uber-happy Skype user in the world if they did.

The windows near my desk look down on Kendall Square in Cambridge. I think it’s worth sharing. You can also see the reflection of my desk in the corner, I love giant post-it notes.

My employer, inbound marketing software maker HubSpot, is putting together the Inbound Marketing Summit this September.  The event is focused on sharing the latest strategies and best practices to leverage inbound marketing to attract more qualified prospects to your business website and generate more leads and sales online.

The summit is September 8, 2008 and is held at the Boston Cambridge Marriott.  There are going to be great speakers including keynotes from David Meerman Scott and Seth Godin.

As a reader of my blog you can get a special discount of $200 off the admission price – just use the discount code 8EHR2 when you register.

I’ll be attending at least part of the summit so if anyone is interested in meeting up in person, drop me a line at dabdinoor [at] hubspot [dot] com.

Also let me assure that the summit is not a sales pitch for HubSpot. We have built a successful company using the Inbound Marketing methodology and that is what the summit will be about, not our product.

Saturday night I went to see U23D with Craig, Heather, Thanh and Jonas. It was my second time watching this show, and it was just as good, if not better, than the first time. The reason this show is so great is because of the incredible access the camera crews had. The cameras get so close that you can even see inside Bono’s mouth (not that you would ever want to, but I bet you now get the idea of how close the camera was).

One of the greatest things about the 3D IMAX format is the editing. Having that extra dimension of depth for the visuals is simply amazing. Throughout the show you’ll see different shots overlayed on each other: Like Edge playing guitar in the foreground while Bono sings in the background. The stage show also features a gigantic LED-type wall, and those graphics are used in the film itself to really make the 3rd dimension pop. I can’t explain it accurately, but trust me, it is very cool.

I’ve always liked U2’s music, but I am by no means a super-fan. That being said, I thought the show was awesome so I feel it is fair to say everyone can enjoy this movie. Most of the songs were popular at one pont, not all the greatest-hits, but close enough. I think the overall message of the show is more important than each of the songs, the value of the concert is greater than the sum of its parts. I can’t think of any other band that can do a huge rock show and leave you with a message of peace and unity, it is impressive.

If you’re a Boston or New England native, you can catch the show at the Aquarium IMAX theater, and I definitely reccomend it.

Knowing that Jay Prouty was on opening duties for this night was all the motivation that I needed to be there. Jay is a good friend of mine, so it was great to see and hear him again. It had been a long time since we last hung out and I really dig Jay’s music so I was really looking forward to hearing it at Estate. I got there a bit after 10 and it was completely dead. That just happens to be the way Estate works on Friday, nobody shows up until midnight, at least that has been my experience there.

Jay paced himself and played some bass-heavy, groovy stuff to settle people in. The music progressed really nicely and by 11 the more upbeat tracks came out and the dancefloor was filling in. We got word from management that Dan + Donald’s plane was running late so Jay was going to have to play a bit longer than expected, no problem there. Jay cruised right through to midnight when there was finally a crowd and plenty of dancers when the headliners arrived.

After Dan and Donald got their gear set up, it was on with the show. I definitely chose the word show deliberately here. Dan was playing the tracks, working on his own trio of CDJs and using the DJM-800 to tweak out all the builds, giving that extra push to rile up the crowd. Glaude was spending most of his time playing a drum machine and scratching over the tracks. Donald also played with some a-capellas over the music, and inevitably ended up scratching those too.

It was entertaining, and the crowd was definitely into it. But I just couldn’t help but think that it was too much of a rehearsed act, a touring show that was going to be the same night after night. Of course I have huge respect for each of these guys as DJs and producers, so don’t get me wrong, I still had a great time. My only real problem with the night was that the audio was at total ear-bleed level. Just way too loud to be enjoyable. I understand when you have so much bass that your internal organs shake (that’s basically how Avalon used to operate) but when you have the mids and highs cranked it’s just totally uncomfortable.

Overall it was a very good time. Jay did a great job with his time and played some grooves that the Estate crowd normally wouldn’t be tasting. DJ Dan and Donald Glaude put on a great performance and got everyone into it, so what more can you ask for. I’m glad I went to this show, it was a necessary change of pace.