Happy new year!

I started a few weeks ago as the VP of Product and Technology at a startup called Compass Aging. And today, we just pushed live the first public beta of the product!

We’re building a tool that will help adult children of aging parents take control of all the challenges and opportunities that come along with that stage of life. The vision is big, and this first public beta represents about 20% of the functionality. (So, yes, things are likely to be pretty dark in these parts over the next few months…)

What’s most interesting in this first version:

- The Care Plan tool. What we’ve done here is to build out the first version of a tool that takes the concerns you have for your loved one and builds a plan customized to those concerns, with additional information and suggestions on how to take control.

- The Care Safe. This might be my favorite piece. We’ve built out the first version of a centralized place where you (and your siblings and other concerned folks) can keep track of everything that’s happening with your parents, including to-dos, notes, important documents, etc. Just keeping everyone on the same page and bought in to the plan is going to be a major win for folks.

- Housing Search. Choosing a senior-living option is one of the most important (and expensive) decisions you’re going to have to make. We want to be best in the world at helping you make that decision.

We’ve started in Newton, Needham and Wellesley. As we figure out what information is most useful for the consumers, we’re going to build this out nationwide. The IA geek in me is very excited about this project.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

p.s., Big visions require great teams. I’m hiring for about a dozen positions right now. Check them out here: Jobs at Compass Aging.

So, it’s been a little dark around these parts lately. Sorry ’bout that.

I’m in launch mode.

I’ll be back up for air in early January.

So, this is really interesting. First Root Farm, our CSA here in Concord, is doing a Kickstarter project to buy a fancy new tractor.

This is the first time I’ve seen Kickstarter used in the world outside of media and technology products. Outstanding data point.

Here’s their Kickstarter video:

Wow, Twitter is (in my humble opinion) committing a massive strategic blunder. If you want a thriving ecosystem, let your partners feel confident and make money.

Today. Literally, today. I’m sitting down and writing the product plan for a suite of new products. They’re knowledge products, but not specifically communications products. Twitter integration was a given. Now it’s unlikely.

Classic mistakes are classic for a reason — they’re highly seductive. Still, it’s sad to see.

I spend a lot of time working with machine learning — exciting, I know. That said, this is a really interesting use of it to determine “what makes Paris look like Paris”?

Take four minutes to watch this. It’s really interesting.

Randall Munroe, author of our favorite web comic, xkcd, is writing a weekly series exploring the scientific underpinnings of interesting questions. This week? How long would humanity last in a robot apocalypse?

The good news: probably a lot longer than we’d expect.

What people don’t appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls.

This is geeky, but supremely interesting if you’re into that sort of thing: the Cambrian explosion of everything.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past few months about personal APIs, personal deputies and Freenon’s forkable nuggets of knowledge. Within a few years (maybe sooner), everything will have an API, and most of your personal interactions with the world will be API-mediated. I’m thinking through how Serendeputy fits into this model. Right now, it’s your personal intermediary for news, and your profile is its API. How does this extend beyond this one use case?

Mostly, I want to see what I can do to make sure that this future bends towards open, with individuals controlling their data and their life. (See the previous post on dystopian futures…)

Anyway, this is the type of stuff I’m thinking about. I want this to exist; now it’s just the small matter of implementation, distribution and paying the bills in the meantime

At this point, I’ve launched a dozen or more sites to the world. (including one for female sports fans yesterday.) It’s old hat at this point, but it’s still always stressful.

I think I’ve come up with my favorite comparison for it:

Launching a site is like driving in the snow. Even if you have your snowtires and a full tank of gas, even if you totally know what you’re doing, random things can happen. You need to be continually monitoring the conditions and you probably have a death grip on the steering wheel. Several hours later, you can probably breathe again.

I’ve been working on a site called She’s Game Sports for the past few months and it just went live this morning. You should check it out and let me know what you think!

CNET has an excellent writeup of the Boston technology scene.

It’s inside baseball, but a really interesting read.

With any luck, this will save people my hours of aggravation.

My problem:

I’m using .rbenv to manage the Ruby processes. When I run everything manually and through the tests, it all works great. Unfortunately, when I put it into cron, it fails.

My solution:

Step One: Find the rbenv binary:

jason:~$ which ruby
/home/jason/.rbenv/shims/ruby


Step Two: Update the cronfile:

In my cronfile, I changed from:

* * * * * cd /home/jason/program-dir ; ruby program.rb

to

* * * * * cd /home/jason/program-dir ; /home/jason/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p194/bin/ruby program.rb

Voila.

There’s probably a more Linux-fu method, but this worked. If you have a more elegant solution, please drop me a line so that I can update this post.

How many people still watch TV live? Fewer and fewer I’ll guess. Certainly not us. Other than Red Sox and Patriots games, we don’t watch anything live.

Even if we’re in front of the TV tonight to watch the hour-long How I Met Your Mother finale, we’re going to spend the first fifteen minutes of it watching something else. At 8:15, I’ll turn on the recording that started at 8:00, and we’ll fast-forward through the commercials and end up finishing it at the same time as the live show.

I can’t imagine this bodes well for the companies buying those commercials or the ones selling them.

I’m all in favor of the recently-passed JOBS act, which loosens restrictions and regulations on investing in small companies. But, the downsides are obvious.

Human nature dictates that a lot of people are going to get conned. Some of my older readers may remember grifts from the sixties, seventies and eighties — the details change, but the story doesn’t.

Entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon gives a good run-down of some of the risks. It’s worth a read.

I guess this is the inevitable path of any well-respected company, as described by a former executive.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, from a New York Magazine cover story on the New Wall Street:

“If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

Hallelujah. If we can get the best and the brightest building stuff instead of pushing money around, I think we’ll all be better off.

One of my other projects for 2012 is to get all my recipes digitized. My goal is to code up two recipes a day, so that by the end of the year, I should have them fully digitized and cross-referenced.

You can follow along if you like, by going to Jason Butler’s recipes. I have six up now, and I’ll add a dozen or so a week.

Of course, being a geek, I ended up writing my own custom recipe publishing engine. Of course!

Awesome. I’m listening to it on Spotify right now. It’s also available on Amazon or iTunes if that’s the way you roll.

Best tracks:

Ziggy Marley: Blowin’ in the Wind.
My Chemical Romance: Desolation Row
Miley Cyrus: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.

Seriously, the Miley Cyrus track is really much better than you’d expect.

My newest piece is up at 39Essays. This week: Going green is not that frickin’ hard.

This is one of the longest single pieces I’ve ever written. I’m working on improving at this whole writer thing.

Let me know what you think!

I just launched my first site of the year, one that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: 39 Essays. It’s going to be a series of essays where I try to figure out the meaning of life. It’s like your very own mid-life crisis, in handy digital form!

Read all about it in my first post, Introduction and Throat Clearing.

My little site has gotten dusty. Time to fix that. So, I just did a morning’s worth of spring cleaning.

I’ve finally updated my WordPress installation from 2.2 up to 3.3. I’m recommending WordPress to several clients, so I might as well make sure that I’m up to date on all the different ways it’s useful. I plan on experimenting with more of the plugins to test out different ideas. Should be interesting!

It’s been a lot less fun around here dealing with the continual onslaught of comment spammers. So, I’ve turned off WordPress commenting entirely, and I’m going to solely have commenting through Facebook’s plugin. While it’s powered by Facebook, you can still comment using your Facebook, Hotmail or Yahoo credentials, so I hope it’s not too much of a burden. I’ll watch this for a while and see if it ends up making life better for everyone.

And, hey, I’ve caught up to 2008. You can now like, share, tweet, fold, spindle and mutilate these posts however you like. Woo Hoo! You can start by liking JPButler.com itself, by pressing the button right above my picture over in the sidebar. Thanks!

So, those were the quick tweaks. I’m going to do some work around design over the next couple of weeks, and I hope to be writing far more often than I have been. Though, we’ve all seen that promise before.

And wow, is my PHP rusty…