SpottedWalrus

I’m not sure what to think.

Ashley and I have been anticipating the premier of Season 4 of LOST ever since the dramatic ending of Season 3. We watched all of the Missing Pieces mini-episodes and then watched the hour-long series recap before the premier tonight. Needless to say our hopes were pretty high.

I would say that I’ll be careful about giving stuff away but honestly tonight’s episode really hardly gave us more info than what we ended with last season.

I really hope this season isn’t full of filler shows. I’ve hung on for 3 seasons and am entering a 4th season. I’m getting very antsy for some answers.

What did you think of tonight’s episode?

So some 10+ years ago I was really in to collecting baseball/hockey cards.

I initially collected hockey cards because I was a huge hockey fan but all my friends were collecting baseball cards so I inevitably switched to collecting those so I could have something to trade with them.

I estimate I’ve got some 2000-3000 cards stuffed away in the basement (about 60% hockey, 40% baseball). I’ve always wondered what my collection was worth but just didn’t care to look all the cards up.

Thankfully I’ve stumbled upon Beckett’s myBeckett feature!

I’ve started the painfully slow process of inputting all my cards where they will be eternally tracked by Beckett. So 10 years down the road when I wonder how much my collection is now worth, I just fire up myBeckett, hope I still remember my login info, and easily pull up how much my collection (as well as each individual card) is worth!

It could honestly take me the better part of a year to input all of my cards, but it will certainly be nice once they’re all in there.

Now for the participation portion of the show. What sort of things have you collected in your lifetime?

My list would be: Stamps, Coins, Baseball Cards, Hockey Cards, and (my current love) Urban Vinyl Toys.

I no longer need the 6 licenses for Mint that I own…so I’m selling them.

If you’d like a license, send me an email (josh at joshpigford dot com). I’m selling them for $20 each…they’re $30 “brand new”.

As Adregate is getting super close to launching I started thinking about the road it has taken to get here.

I initially came up with the name “adregate” for “aggregating” ad statistics. So it would have basically been a place to crunch numbers from all the ad networks you were using. That never really go off the ground but I had the domain name sitting around for safe keeping.

Then about 2 years ago I was getting really frustrated with the ad management solutions that were out there. Everything was just way too complex. All the extra crap in these other ad management apps just annoyed me.

I also knew I wanted to do a hosted solution. One barrier to entry for a lot of people has been the need to install things on their own server. So I wanted that problem solved as well.

The entire development process for Adregate has certainly been a learning experience. There have certainly been times where I just didn’t want to code anymore and frankly was just sick of the idea. There was a period of about 3-5 months where nothing was touched with Adregate. Developers moved on. Programming languages were changed. Tens of thousands of lines of code were scrapped because foundations and standards weren’t set right from the start.

I’m definitely a perfectionist and it’s taken a while to grasp the idea of not making things “perfect”, per se, but just getting something out there as a start. I can hack away at things all day long but it won’t necessarily make the product any better.

So right now I’ve set a tentative launch date for Adregate of February 5, 2008. The last 10% of things that take 90% of the time are all finally coming together and I really believe Adregate is going to fill a massive gap in the market.

I’m excited to see where things go with the app hope to see some of you using it.

Well, I’ve finally caught the bug and have become a tad obsessive with Twitter. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Oh. And happy new year.