Rusty’s Blog

With the economy in the crapper, there are going to be a lot of online services folding or cutting corners to survive. This is a good time to make sure you are keeping local copies of any work that is important to you.

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Last year on Aug. 1, I posted my podcast interview with Screaming Sports CEO and co-founder Alec Peters. The show notes I wrote were clumsy (particularly the lede asking about VC funding) and didn’t entirely convey the point I wanted to get across. Lance Weatherby wrote a post yesterday which I think better reflects what I was trying to say about Atlanta start-ups at the time:

So there is a group [of] companies that are out there playing in the consumer space.

But to many [this] does not seem to be the case.  Perhaps because not many of them make it big.

It’s not that they don’t exist or haven’t attained a degree of success, it’s that there’s not a Twitter or a Facebook or something else that’s gotten really huge you can point to and say “there’s this city’s post-bubble success story.” Kaneva is the closest company to that, and I don’t think it has the mainstream recognition that would meet that admittedly nebulous criteria.

Lance said he plans to write a follow-up on why he thinks nothing has taken off at that level, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Also, if this sort of thing interests you, you should listen to the second part of my podcast interview with Bobby Blackwolf of All Games Radio where we discuss Atlanta’s video game development scene.

In the second episode of Sub-Optimal Beer, I join host Tony and panelists Garrett, Griftdrift, Seth, and Thomas at The Highlander to discuss Walmart and Target, a.k.a. Embev Light and Miller-Coors Lite, a.k.a. Bud Light and Miller Lite. We try valiantly to find something interesting to say about these kings of marketshare.

Thankfully, Tony shows greater editing restraint than I would have, choosing to remove a tangent on NASCAR that cuts the length down to a pretty reasonable 25 minutes. I was buzzing pretty good by then, so I don’t quite remember most of what was said about NASCAR, but I do remember a part that went something like:

Me:I only really watched NASCAR for about a year once. I had a guy who lived next door to me who was a huuuuuuge Dale Earnhardt fan. So I rooted for Jeff Gordon just to piss him off. I used to ask him, “how many races has Earnhardt won this year?” He hadn’t won any, of course. Then I’d say, “Yeah, Gordon won like seven already.”

Griftdrift: You deserve to have your ass kicked.

For the uninitiated, Earnhardt fans and a lot of other fans view Jeff Gordon as an effete, rich pretty boy who only wins because he can buy the best team, not because he’s the best driver.

You can listen to what did make the cut by clicking here or using the player below. You’ll just have to listen to get the absolute Zima reference from the title.

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Maybe when we record the third episode tonight (about hipster/douchebag beers) we can talk about Toby Keith.