I've been tagged by Finke. Since everyone else is doing it, who am I to refuse?

Here's the history of it so far -- Me » Chris Finke » C.K. Sample » Jason Calacanis » Amanda Congdon » Michael Ambs » Rick Rey » Steve Woolf » Steve Garfield » Jeff Pulver.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me

#1. I have a dental implant. The doc's had to do a sinus bone graft, let that heal, then put in a titanium post, let that hell, then build a cap around it. Next up, boobs.
#2. I co-founded my first internet startup when I was 12. My brother, myself, and a couple of our friends took a 1 line BBS I ran out of my bedroom, got a loan from a bank, and added 3 more phone lines and some additional computer equipment. We grew it over the next 5 or so years into a small local ISP. We tried to hold onto our roots as a multiplayer gaming network / chat system for as long as we could, but ended up mainly selling dialup internet access. Eventually, everyone else had gone to college or taken positions elsewhere. I discovered girls, and we sold off the remaining assets. Online Illusions BBS (1993-1999ish), 407-722-5020. Word.
#3. I have way to strong of an affection for Morgan Freeman. I constantly argue with Gavin trying to convince him to let us name our servers after Freeman characters. I'm not sure why.
#4. I was very active in my college fraternity, so much so that I was named an "International Top Teke" in 2003. Up until our recent move, I was still involved as a Chapter Advisor at the University of Maryland chapter. LLT fo' sho'.
#5. I met my now fiance at a bar. Huh.. Didn't see that one coming... ;)

So, there are five things about me you probably didn't know. ;)

Gavin, Celly, Mike, Ryan Price, and Jason Alba at JibberJobber -- Tag, you're it.

This past Saturday night, at California Grill, I asked my girlfriend Kathryn to marry me.

California Grill was the right place to do it for few reasons. One, she just moved from California to Orlando, so there's that. It also looks out directly on the castle at Magic Kingdom and is the best place to watch fireworks anywhere in town. Because of that, it's where we went to watch the fireworks when I first brought her to Orlando two years ago. It seemed like the perfect place to conclude the last couple weeks of traveling and moving.

They brought out the ring on a desert plate with "Will you Marry Me?" written in chocolate. She said yes to a thundering applause from the entire restaurant, perfectly timed with the start of the 9 o'clock firework display.

I can't say enough about how perfect the entire evening was, about the wonderful staff at California Grill who I seriously need to thank via a written letter (gotta get those raises!), Gavin and his parents without whom I would have never been able to pull it off (his Mom was able to call some folks to get me the last second reservation, Gavin ran errands and delivered the ring to the restaurant for me), and our wonderful families for blessing/accepting us both as we start this new chapter.

I haven't gotten the chance to call/e-mail many people yet, so I figured I'd write a blog post and get the word out quickly and efficiently. Please don't take offense if I haven't actually spoken with you yet. Funny enough, someone already edited my wikipedia page with the date. Gotta love the Internet.

On Life...

We went out to our favorite Rib joint last night, I think I'm going to have to eat salad for the next three weeks to get back right. It's all about the beef ribs though.

The smog here (well, not Huntington Beach, but LA) is disgusting. I'm pretty sure the folks who say SoCal is the most beautiful place in the country really haven't been to that many places. It's Central Florida with a dash of Miami plus crime, pollution, traffic and smog. We saw a plane land last night and you could see the smog rolling off of the wings, no joke. Three cheers for asthma I guess...

We haven't hung out at the beach yet, though I'm sure we will. I'll try to judge it with an open mind, but as Wayne pointed out in a comment on an earlier post, the oil rigs really do kind of kill it.

We helped Kathryn get her office off the ground on Saturday though. We met a lot of great folks, including the Congressman from this area. He's a really funny, laid back guy.

On Work...

Netscape's going well, we just need to get that new hardware online asap. We have some servers on the west coast that are causing some headaches, but we can't take them offline until we get more servers to take their place. Catch-22. The big thing this will solve is the annoying sign in over and over stuff. It should only be happening to a very small percentage of users at any given time, but it's annoying as sin. The work around for it is to click the "remember me" option, at least, I think -- I can never seem to recreate the problem myself.

The dev team has been kicking ass and staying on top of the bug list. Tom and Andy are at it again doing some really neat stuff with the friends functionality, so stay tuned. That'll probably be the "visible" addition of the week.

Andy's also cleaned up the front page some, moving around certain items to make the design a bit less cluttered feeling. He's got some really slick design mocks of a "non-digg" look. Whenever we have a bit of time, we talk about different interface approaches. It'll probably be a little while before we switch to something different though, the masses can only handle culture shock so many times ;)

On Emurse...

We hit 1000 users sometime during the week, though we were too busy with Netscape (in addition to TMZ for Gavin) to notice exactly when. We're still sporting about a 67% active user base, which is stellar in my opinion. We're planning on unveiling some pay services for the site soon. The general functionality (what's already available) will continue to be free, since we really believe in offering as much to the user as possible, but we think it's important to start building out the business model early.

Expect to see a "plus" account with more features and resume templates, which is slated for $25 a year. Competing services seem to charge about three times that, but I mean.. A college kid who can really benefit from the service simply can't afford that kinda flow. We'll probably do a "premium" level account down the road, but I think $25 a year is more than reasonable coming out the gate.

We also have a review service (pricing is being researched now) that should be online in the next couple weeks. Gavin has already written the bulk of the backend, we just need to get the CSS straightened out so it doesn't look like poo (we're big believers in interface design, especially since we get to work with such a badass.)

If you have any suggestions for us, we're listening. Any insight into pricing structures would be helpful too ;)