Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Christmas Day is finally here
Merry Christmas to everyone from the URSA Guild guys, we hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and that you were good this year....
Monday, December 24, 2012
The Importance of the X Chromosome
Last night I attended a "white elephant" Christmas gift exchange with a group of friends, it was all jolly and fun, the gift I ended up with was a 5 lb. Tootsie Roll that was HOLLOW with even MORE tootsie rolls inside. I'll probably get sick eating nothing but processed chocolate instead of going to the grocery store.
Anyways, some CHICKS asked me what I was doing at UCLA, I told them CS, machine learning, grad student blah blah, got some semi-interested nodding in response. Then I told them about our little pet project at the URSA GUILD (which still needs a NAME), and gave them my current pitch.
These chicks got all excited and were like "lets punch some holes in this f!@#r's idea", that's an actual quote from the night without the explicit name-calling.
So I asked them what they thought of our borrower trustworthiness problem without telling them about ANY of our ideas, like having virtual currency, collateral, trades, feedback system, mutual friends, etc. And these chicks both instantaneously jumped to the conclusion that we should have a cash deposit system for the borrower, which the lender can refuse to return if the item is damaged. She was like "yahhh, it's like you gotta quantify your risk or whateverrrr"
Jk, she wasn't a valley girl. But seriously, that was brilliant imo. Actually, she proposed a fixed deposit fee as perhaps a percentage of the original item's cost, but I argued that it should be a variable deposit fee set by the lender, because every lender has a different appetite for risk, and places a different value on any given item. What do you guys think? Fixed or variable deposit fee?
Anyways, only after she gave me her brilliant deposit idea did I regurgitate all of our current ideas. "Virtual Currency? Trades? Collateral? Boys are so perfectionist. They live in their little ideal worlds in their heads. Just make them put down money." True, true, cash $$$ is a solid way to reduce risk to an accepted level. And I guess us men are perfectionist, but hey somebody's gotta stay true to the vision to keep our mission pure.
The deposit is just so practical and enforces a sense of security, I think women demonstrate these 2 traits more than men. These chicks also had another great idea, have personalized profiles for each person, where users can do stupid crap like change their background colors and fonts in their descriptions, and add pictures or whatever. Anything that makes users spend more time on the website is a good thing, WOW these chicks are brilliant. Moreover, the personalized profiles tell a person's story, so hey, if I notice you are an eagle scout that's killed 3 bears I'll probably be more willing to lend you my bow and arrow knowing you'll come back alive next week to return it.
Some other good tidbits they gave me were fliers with CANDY, marketing to the frats for undergrad domination (keg stand publicity tours), and most of all, making everything Pretty. Ebay? ewwww so biznessy. Craiglist, are we still in the HTML fossil age? Sure we're gonna make a feedback system, but we're not just gonna represent it with the old school number of stars, no we're gonna gonna make it new and sexy cos some awesome chicks told us so.
They also laughed really hard at my name candidate "lend-a-friend".
I wonder how many chicks the instagram guys had as testers.
Moral of the Story: Get lot's of input on your idea, but ask friends from different places, aka EVERYONE.
 |
| Homemade Tootsie Goodness |
Anyways, some CHICKS asked me what I was doing at UCLA, I told them CS, machine learning, grad student blah blah, got some semi-interested nodding in response. Then I told them about our little pet project at the URSA GUILD (which still needs a NAME), and gave them my current pitch.
These chicks got all excited and were like "lets punch some holes in this f!@#r's idea", that's an actual quote from the night without the explicit name-calling.
So I asked them what they thought of our borrower trustworthiness problem without telling them about ANY of our ideas, like having virtual currency, collateral, trades, feedback system, mutual friends, etc. And these chicks both instantaneously jumped to the conclusion that we should have a cash deposit system for the borrower, which the lender can refuse to return if the item is damaged. She was like "yahhh, it's like you gotta quantify your risk or whateverrrr"
 |
| Mmmm, I want me some Valley Girl Blueberries |
Jk, she wasn't a valley girl. But seriously, that was brilliant imo. Actually, she proposed a fixed deposit fee as perhaps a percentage of the original item's cost, but I argued that it should be a variable deposit fee set by the lender, because every lender has a different appetite for risk, and places a different value on any given item. What do you guys think? Fixed or variable deposit fee?
Anyways, only after she gave me her brilliant deposit idea did I regurgitate all of our current ideas. "Virtual Currency? Trades? Collateral? Boys are so perfectionist. They live in their little ideal worlds in their heads. Just make them put down money." True, true, cash $$$ is a solid way to reduce risk to an accepted level. And I guess us men are perfectionist, but hey somebody's gotta stay true to the vision to keep our mission pure.
The deposit is just so practical and enforces a sense of security, I think women demonstrate these 2 traits more than men. These chicks also had another great idea, have personalized profiles for each person, where users can do stupid crap like change their background colors and fonts in their descriptions, and add pictures or whatever. Anything that makes users spend more time on the website is a good thing, WOW these chicks are brilliant. Moreover, the personalized profiles tell a person's story, so hey, if I notice you are an eagle scout that's killed 3 bears I'll probably be more willing to lend you my bow and arrow knowing you'll come back alive next week to return it.
 |
| Seriously? At least don't fake the paws with manicured toenails. |
Some other good tidbits they gave me were fliers with CANDY, marketing to the frats for undergrad domination (keg stand publicity tours), and most of all, making everything Pretty. Ebay? ewwww so biznessy. Craiglist, are we still in the HTML fossil age? Sure we're gonna make a feedback system, but we're not just gonna represent it with the old school number of stars, no we're gonna gonna make it new and sexy cos some awesome chicks told us so.
They also laughed really hard at my name candidate "lend-a-friend".
I wonder how many chicks the instagram guys had as testers.
Moral of the Story: Get lot's of input on your idea, but ask friends from different places, aka EVERYONE.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Databasing
Started working with Postgresql, their pgAdmin tool is actually very handy. I think I got everything down. Now to dive into Django...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Some cool events coming up in Jan.
Wish we could go to all of them, but might not have the time to:
http://la.getuncubed.com/
http://leanstartupmachine.com/events/la-january-2013/
http://ythackla.appspot.com/
http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hack-Night/events/89035512/
http://la.getuncubed.com/
http://leanstartupmachine.com/events/la-january-2013/
http://ythackla.appspot.com/
http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hack-Night/events/89035512/
Monday, December 17, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Quick update
Met with Scot the other day for a bit and had some productive discussions. Will start storyboarding on Monday....excited!!!!
On a different note, now I see why developers like using Macs...installing Django on Windows was an ABSOLUTE PAIN and took me a couple of hours just to sort through all the errors. Had to install 'distribute' in order to install 'pip' which was necessary to install Django. Then my window's environment variables weren't set correctly so I couldn't access python in my command prompt. THEN I ended having to change some registry values to be able to use django-admin.py without tagging on the whole path.
For example, I didn't want to type "C:\Python27\Scripts\django-admin.py startproject mysite" so I had to change the registry. hahah /end rant.
On a different note, now I see why developers like using Macs...installing Django on Windows was an ABSOLUTE PAIN and took me a couple of hours just to sort through all the errors. Had to install 'distribute' in order to install 'pip' which was necessary to install Django. Then my window's environment variables weren't set correctly so I couldn't access python in my command prompt. THEN I ended having to change some registry values to be able to use django-admin.py without tagging on the whole path.
For example, I didn't want to type "C:\Python27\Scripts\django-admin.py startproject mysite" so I had to change the registry. hahah /end rant.
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