Ignighter Blog is Moving Home!

Hey Ignighter friends, the Ignighter Blog is finally coming home to nest at Ignighter.com.

So update your bookmarks to http://www.ignighter.com/blog and update your RSS feeds to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ignighter/Wltj.

New content will be coming more frequently than ever on the new location so stay with us!

BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 2

When we left off on Part 1, Dan and I were heading west from Chicago into corn country, Iowa. Upon entering the state I boldly predicted that there would “most likely be little stands on the side of the highway selling fresh corn on the cob to weary passerbys.” This would prove to be incredibly wrong. Not only were there no stands selling corn on the side of the highway, but there was no corn to be seen anywhere! In movies, Iowa’s highways are lined with endless stalks of golden maize. But in reality, it’s just a lot of dirt.

The highlight of Day 2 came when we actually stumbled upon the University of Iowa (our Big Ten rivals!) for lunch. We found a great little restaurant, The Summit, with views of the campus where we ate delicious blackened chicken calzones (see Dan’s pinkie finger for perspective).

After lunch we took a quick tour around the elegant campus, passed out some Ignighter flyers, and explored an intriguing street nearby.

I’m not sure if there was something in the calzone or maybe just too much time spent in the car, but after we left the University heading toward Omaha, we really started to lose our sanity.

Dan, having recently watched Transformers for the first time was convinced that there were Decepticons on our tail. And as crazy as it sounds in retrospect, at the time I was in complete agreement. Below are a couple of the Decepticons we eluded along the way. The second one was amphibious.

When we weren’t outrunning villainous robots we were chasing storms to occupy the time. Fortunately there were so many storms that we were able to just go straight on Rte. 80 the whole time and still claim to be chasing storms. However after sashaying around the U of Iowa together, and witnessing first hand what real men from the heart of the country actually look and sound like, we knew that if were going to attempt to chase storms (or even if we were going to attempt to say were chasing storms), then we’d have to assume alter-egos.

The new identities were basically just manly names draped over our nebbishy personas. We chose names that we felt evoked hardened cowboys, real men, the kind of guy who instinctually knows where the power box is when the electricity goes out. I became Jerry Rig and Dan was Alan Wrench.

That may look and sound like Dan, but it’s actually just Wrench (real men, we learned in Iowa, don’t use first names).

Wrench and I arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in the early evening. Although the hotel had an exotic name, it didn’t exactly feel like Cabo when we got inside.

We explored Omaha a little bit and then hit the hay early.

Check back in for the shocking final installation of the road trip, coming very soon. A dead car, an incident at a fast food joint, and so much more.

Our New Lead Developer

Part 2 of the Ignighter Road Trip will be coming shortly, but before that we wanted to introduce the newest member of our team.

Kevin Owocki is Ignighter’s new lead developer. Kevin has 7 years of software engineering experience, and he has run a handful of small scale web companies. He’s an avid runner and ultimate frisbee player. He loves exploring the outdoors, meeting new, interesting people, and chatting about technology and startups. Ask him about his unique ability to relate nearly any situation to the plot of a Simpsons, Seinfeld, South Park, or Family Guy episode. Kevin is psyched for a landmark summer, and we’re really excited to have him on the team!

BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 1

The Ignighter team is spending the summer in Boulder, Colorado and we’re extremely excited and fairly exhausted.

Dan and I left Wednesday morning on a 3-day adventure from NY to CO and arrived last night. We laughed, we cried, Dan snacked (a lot), I vomited (a little). The following is the first of 3 installments recounting our journey.

First some background on our wheels:

Finding a car to take on the trip was quite a hassle, but thanks to Dan’s dad for making many trips to Long Island car dealerships, we finally secured a great ride to have for the duration of the summer. We pimped out our brand new Civic with the same instrumentation that I would imagine an F-16 keeps on board,We didn’t even have to pay $15 per checked bag!
a Magellan GPS and a Sirius Radio. The GPS was essential for reminding us to continue driving west on Rte. 80 (which we did for 97% of our drive across eight states).

Satellite radio was the fuel that kept our brains from shutting down which would have been the case if we had been forced to listen to Iowa and Nebraska’s radio programming – ever heard of a “corn debate”? Me neither. And at $6/month, the brain fuel was far more affordable than the more than $4/gallon we were pumping into our whip.

We learned that the Sirius Hits station currently plays a 7-song rotation, each song we had completely memorized by Des Moines. This was our soundtrack for the drive:
Fall Out Boy (featuring John Mayer) – Beat It
Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love
Nickelback – It’s Not My Time
Lifehouse – Whatever It Takes
Usher – Love in this Club
Flo Rida – Low

And our anthem for the trip:
Kid Rock – All Summer Long

On a side note, does anybody know if this song has been released yet? I started to get the shakes this morning because my body wasn’t used to not hearing it every half hour and when I checked iTunes, it wasn’t there.

On another side note, you have to love any musician who is self-confident enough to rhyme “things” with “things”. And this rhyme isn’t just a one-time cop-out nestled between two other better rhyming couplets. It’s actually the refrain of the song.

“We were trying different things

And we were smoking funny things”

The song is amazing. One of the best things I’ve heard in a long, long thing.

OK, Now on to the trip:

The first leg was from NY to Chicago. We did it in 13 uneventful hours through NJ (land of Liberty and Prosperity), Pennsylvania (8 hilly, twisty hours of nothingness), Ohio (Rest Stops so beautiful and spotless that Dan actually ate a prosciutto panini off the urinal),

Indiana (Gary was killer), and finally to Illinois.

Chicago is a special city to us since we went to college there and it felt great to be back in the beautiful windy city.

We arrived in Chicago at night and grabbed dinner and a beer with our old college pal Dr. David Davidson and stayed separately at 2 friend’s places who conveniently lived a few blocks away from each other. Both friends were incredibly hospitable and both places were gorgeous. Dan stayed at Jess Schneider’s sci-fi apartment complete with Delorian-style cabinets

and freshly baked banana muffins for our road trip.

I stayed with Dr. David Davidson in his big-ass apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.



In the morning it was up and out. After a quick deep dish slice at Gino’s East we were presented with a Frostian dilemma.



We ultimately chose Iowa, mainly because it was the most untraveled, but also mainly because we found ourselves in the Exit Only lane.

In Part 2 the adventure really heats up. We reveal the crime-fighting alter-egos we were forced to adopt along the way, an epic calzone, and a tale of a dead car.

Early Opinions of Facebook Chat

Disclaimer: The following post contains three very embarrassing – but entirely true – confessions by the writer. Please see them simply as attempts to prove his point and try to forget them after reading the post and understanding the point.

Facebook launched their chat feature last week and many are calling the creation another brilliant, inevitable step toward Facebook becoming the world’s next operating system. But while it was certainly inevitable and will probably, like most other Facebook creations (except for the Beacon of course) be a resounding success, I think this one is going to take a little more time than some of the other groundbreaking features they’ve recently introduced. Even more time than the initially hated, but now addictive News Feed – the goat cheese of new Facebook features.

Here’s why I think Facebook Chat isn’t such an easy sell:

I’m on Facebook all day long (embarrassing confession #1). This is not hyperbole, it is fact. If at any point in the day you were to look at my open Firefox browser you would without fail always see a Facebook tab. Even if it is just one of five running tabs, Facebook is always there. And yeah, I have justification since Ignighter is a Facebook application and I have to “do work” within Facebook, but trust me, it’s just a very convenient excuse.

Occasionally I just leave it open to my Homepage, but more often than not it’s open to poolside photos of the recent Fire Island weekend getaway of one of my Facebook friends that I probably don’t even know that well (embarrassing confession #2). What we do on Facebook, all the stalking, and gawking, and voyeurism (well that’s what I do at least) is really humiliating. Whether we want to admit it or not, Facebook is a guilty pleasure.

And I think this really cuts to heart of why I have 1,307 Facebook friends (EXTREMELY embarrassing confession #3) and I’ve yet to see more than 54 “online” at one time. You can be on Facebook and not publicly declare yourself “online”. And while I’m not sure if everybody else keeps Facebook up all day like I do, I’ve got to believe that more than 4% of my friends are on at any given time. If they are on, but just too ashamed to promote it all day, then Facebook chat is going to face quite an uphill climb moving forward. And if it’s true that only 4% of my friends are online at any given time (and I find this unlikely), then Facebook as an operating system has an even steeper climb ahead.

What do you think?

From Russia

Does anybody out there speak Russian? Somebody in Russia is talking about Ignighter, but we don’t know what they’re saying…

UPDATE: Thanks to Ignighter friend, Kristin Gaul, for tracking down a translation of that Russian blog article:

It’s a site started by a few recent graduates and it has a social networking component for young people, but how effective it is, will ultimately be up to you to decide…

Russia…always leaving the power in the hands of the people.