4/5th of the We&Co team for a Scoutmob article coming out next week.

From left: Michael Dorio, Jared Malan, My Awesomeness, and Eric Toledo. Missing is our man in Germany, Ryan Jones. What an awesome crew to work with.

At one point I had this lofty dream of maintaining two blogs: lazyego to keep track of my inane stories and muehleman.com to keep track of the nerdy crap I do on a regular basis. However, as its become painfully evident that the sudden influx of a million social networks into my daily life has neutered my ability to keep up with one blog let alone two, I’ve decided to start posting nerdy stuff here. That’s right Mom, Dad, and some random observer in France. You will now be subjected to my troubleshooting skills on this awesome blog. Muehleman.com is now a fairly basic website with cool amazing facts about me. One day I’ll turn it into a full blown CV.

Without further ado, a problem that’s been vexing me for a few days:

Here at We&Co we’ve decided to cloudify our entire operation. Its 2011 and it just makes sense. Also I’m cheap and lazy so the cloud plays nicely into that. But whatever. I’m going through the motions of setting up our webservers on EC2 and its been fun but a massive pain in my ass. First and foremost, its been a loooong time since I set anything up on a linux machine. Second, these instances come online with out much of anything pre-installed. So I’m having to hack my way through getting even the most basic things configured. I’ve made great progress as most of the documentation is pretty straightforward. However, what should have been my easiest task, getting my EC2 instance to talk to my RDS (database) instance proved to be the most vexing.

By default, all Amazon instances are locked down military style. So you have to open a port to allow MySQL access from outside of Amazon. No big whoop. Piece of cake. However, what I ran into this weekend was getting a webserver instance on EC2 to talk to RDS. I figured this would be easy, no? FALSE. I struggled through configuration files, a million message board threads, until finally the solution was found here. I have no idea why, but you have to add a special security exception for access via an EC2 instance. Here’s what you do:

1) Go into RDS

2) Go into DB Security Groups

3) Scroll to the bottom and select “EC2 Security Group” (normally I’d select CIDR/IP)

4) Put the security group that your EC2 instance is in (could be default or some custom security group) and put in your Amazon AWS Account ID

5) Add the exception

And voila, you should now be able to connect your instance to your RDS instance.

Its true. My 5th day on this trip and I’m freakin beat. We’ve spent morning, noon, and night working on the business, meeting folks, driving all over the place, and trying to make this thing work. Its been amazing but yeah, I’m whipped. So here’s a reader’s digest version of what we’ve been doing:

Yesterday we got up, headed to downtown, and went to a restaurant for a meeting with an investment banker. Except when we got there we realized the meeting was actually Sunday. Whoops.

So we sat there and did business planning. I also ate 4 helpings of bread pudding. Taaasty.

We then bar hopped to 2 different places doing more and more roadmap planning. I drank too much. Thus you might see in the next version of the We&Co app some interesting new features.

We watched Notre Dame lose. Jared went there for b-school so I introduced him to my relentless teasing. He handled it well. We’ll make amazing business partners. I couldn’t tease Ryan because he went to West Point. Do they even have  a football team? HA! I’m hilarious.

Today we went  back to the same restaurant to have the meeting we were supposed to have. The guy we met with paid for lunch. That was nice. I had four more helpings of bread pudding. That was even nicer.

After that meeting we decided to take the afternoon off and head to Muir Woods for a hike. I went off on an anti-consumerist rant during the hike. Afterwards I marched right into the gift shop and bought a kitchen magnet. Hypocrisy is my middle name. The hike was followed by a trip to the beach just down the road. It was too cold. And I don’t like sand. But it was pretty. So that was good.

Our evening concluded with a trip into a seriously sketch section of San Francisco to partake in some Indian food. It was good as hell. We were only confronted by 18 homeless people. None of them mocked my laugh, however, they all did awkward little dances to try and get us to give them money. I appreciated that.

I’m tired now. Tomorrow and tuesday are BIG days as we head over to the Techcrunch Disrupt conference. Hoping for good things! Send me positive vibes. Or send me a check. Either will do.

Sorry but this has to be a short blog entry! Yesterday was a really cool day. We met w/ the guys behind the forthcoming Santa.com. They have some pretty awesome ideas around this site so be on the look out. They also had great advice for us and made me insanely jealous with how cool their office space was. Pretty much every office I’ve been in in SF has been perfect for the internet culture. Eccentric, weird, and totally comfortable. I wanna work here so bad.

After that we ventured down to a sustainability conference and met with a friend of the company to get some advice.  The conference was down on the water and we had to kind of sneak in to meet our guy. We got free drinks while we were there. So I’m not exactly sure if that’s going to be a black mark against my name with that crowd for helping myself to a tasty organic beverage.

Lastly, we headed back down to Palo Alto for another VC meeting. This was a pop-up meeting so I was not prepared for it. That’s to say I was dressed kind of like a bum. Not that I was dressed particularly spiffy for the other investor meetings we had. But at this one I looked like a Kurt Cobain disciple or something. After the meeting we got some really cool feedback from another meeting. Nothing I can share right now (secret secret!) but it’s good stuff! Very exciting.

On our way back to San Francisco, we were invited to go and visit the crew behind the incredibly cool site Pinterest. Unfortunately our directions seemed to be a bit old and took us down to an old apartment complex off in the distance. There WAS a Pinterest sticker on a mailbox so we walked around back of this place. What we found was a vast collection of empty beer bottles, suggesting that the fellas at Pinterest had since left and been replaced by some kind of fraternity. So while we didn’t get to meet these guys (yet), we at least got a good laugh.

More to come tomorrow!

Day 2 of our epic journey to the land of internet wealth began how all my days on the west coast begin for me — at 4:30 am wondering where the sun is and how I’m getting up so early when not provoked by a dog who needs a potty break. I tossed and turned getting cozy into the corners of the couch I was sleeping on until I finally fell back asleep –at 7am. Awesome.

The work day began at 9 with a call with a major international retailer. I can’t say who but suffice to say that I often bogart their generously free wifi when I’m wandering around a city and desperately need to get online to check my fantasy football team. The call went well and they’ve already asked for a follow-up. SWEET!

After that call I sort of realized that I still had not yet eaten after my amazing egg salad sandwich from the previous day. For a big dude like me that’s akin to trying to fly the space shuttle on a gallon of watered down gas from quiktrip. I made the amazing judgment call to go and attack a mexican restaurant. Typically I look at the chips and salsa as roadblock separating me from a few enchiladas. But this time I looked at it as fuel. I might’ve devoured not only my meal, the chips, but also part of Jared’s meal. I don’t feel bad about it.

The Mexican meal of Life was followed by a meeting at Get Satisfaction, a cool internet customer service company. We met with one of the co-founders to get some much needed advice. He asked us about Atlanta. I told him we had the biggest black gay pride parade in America. I’m pretty sure my random chit chat skills are second to none.

Our day concluded at Pitch ‘11, an event designed to hook dudes like up with dudes who have bank. We made a couple of good contacts and I got a free t-shirt. Who can complain about that?

After Pitch ‘11, Jared and I wandered back to the condo while Ryan stayed back to meet up with an old college friend. Jared and I grocery shopped together on the way back — want to get someone, see how they buy eggs. Anyways, we realized after getting back that Ryan had the keys to the condo. So I wandered the random courtyards and streets around our condo while we waited to get back in. After a long day, I seriously contemplated sleeping on an old rusted out picnic table. Just as daydreams of sleep started to dominate my thought process, Ryan materialized and we were able to get into the condo. I then cooked the guys ravioli for dinner. It sounds like a date doesn’t it?

Slate has long been one of my favorite websites. Today’s edition has about 6 super quality articles worth reading (given yesterday’s stock market dumper all of the articles are major downers. but whatever). Anyways, from this article on the Lessons from the Deficit debate comes this zinger:

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science

I’m not going to expound upon this b/c the line is perfect as is. And hilarious.

That is all

Note: normally I’d take a note this short to Facebook but I’m not in the mood to start any flamewars there with my conservative friends. We can have that battle here.

Last night’s Braves – Pirates game really sums up just some of the idiosyncratic things I love about baseball. Watch the clip here:

http://www.sportsgrid.com/mlb/video-wild-19-inning-game-ends-on-contentious-call/

And here’s what i love about this play:

• I love that baseball can go on indefinitely. Unlike football, basketball, soccer, etc, there’s ALWAYS a chance for the other team to catch up and win and not be beholden to time. Note that I’m excluding Cricket from this knowing full well its games can go on for days (literally). Cricket is played by them foreigners so I don’t count it.
• The look on the catcher’s face when he realizes Lugo was called Safe. It was a clear  ”are you f’ing with me right now Blue?” After catching 19 innings I think I would have chased the ump off the field.
• The Braves’ 8th pitcher had to bat for himself. The fact that he made contact is stunning in and of itself. But pay close attention and you’ll see him eat it on his way out of the box. Hilarious.
• Listen to the announcers. What game has announcers as colorful as baseball? Troy Aikman? FALSE. Maybe Charles Barkley but he doesn’t call games (not that I know of). Golf announcers? LAME. Baseball announcers are all like Bob Uecker from Major League (a real announcer for the Brewers but whatever). They call 162 games a year. The games are long. So when  a call like this goes down, they freak out. And I love it.

I miss baseball. This almost makes me want to get the MLB package at home. But nah.

p.s. Its so obvious that the ump missed the call on purpose so he could get back to his hotel room. Not. Even. Close.

My efforts to blog more have pushed me to start scribbling down notes as blog ideas scamper from one side of my brain to the next. Even though i’m such an accomplished typist on my phone you’d think I was the Mavis Beacon of the thumb typing world, blogging from my phone loses some of its allure. Same thing from my iPad. So I resort to waiting until I’m sitting in front of a laptop or a PC to actually hammer out the blogs that will only be read by my mom, dad, and some random follower from parts unknown. However, in many cases, it could be hours until I’m in such a position to drop an awesome blog entry on you, my fans. And since my brain is basically a vacuum consumed with trying to figure out how Transformers 3 was made into a feature length movie, I must take notes (or else you’d see post after post decrying Michael Bay). This has lead to two forms of note taking:

I write the notes down in long hand: I have a notebook everywhere I go just about. And even though I’m the gadget equivalent of the richest man on earth, I still like to write in freehand. Problem here is that my handwriting looks like someone who had a massive stroke is doing the writing (is that politically correct to say? I don’t care). I just wrote out a thank you note to some friends last night and when I was done, I was actually embarrassed. I thought to myself,  ”it might be time to hire someone to start writing stuff for me”. Since this is not practical, and I can’t really read my own notes to compile an amazing blog entry from, I resort to note taking option #2…

I keep notes in my phone: Aha! Welcome to the 21st century Muehleman. What a novel concept! Keeping notes on my phone is fast, easy, and gets around the whole “your handwriting reminds me of a drunk 4th grader” problem. However, as I scroll through my notes, i’m presented with a Seinfeldian issue. Remember that episode where Seinfeld kept a notebook by his nightstand, woke up in the middle of the night, scribbled some notes, and when he woke up the next morning he had no idea what they meant? Well I’m having the same problem. Except the two following notes were written down during waking, lucid hours. I even remember writing them down. But I have no idea what they mean:

He keeps a sextant to help maintain his navigational bearings

I mean, what the hell does this mean? Part of me is super proud for remembering what the hell a sextant is, part of me wonders what exactly was going through my mind when I wrote it, and part of me wants to go out and buy one (for real, how cool would that look in my new car. And would solve the whole how do I find what I’m looking for when google maps is down and I’m under a starry sky. But I digress).

The other note I can’t make heads or tales of is:

Margarita. Refrigerator.

That’s the extent of the note. I like margaritas. And I think refrigerators are pretty handy. But is there  a blog entry in there? I’m not sure. But I want to know more.

I’m officially in the market for a new car. The 4 runner has had a good run but now that its getting roughly the same gas mileage as the space shuttle, smells like a homeless person has encamped in it, and makes me look like a pizza delivery guy**, I’ve decided to venture into the market. I’m about 92% sure that I’m going to get something small and fuel efficient so to combat the obvious stereotype problems with such a car, I think I’m going to get a manual transmission — to make me look manly as hell of course. “In Atlanta” you might ask? And I will say “hell yes. I will destroy the hills”. Or something like that. So this brings to mind one of my favorite manual transmission stories. Yes, I categorize my car stories my transmission type. Don’t ask.

Way back when I was first learning how to drive a car, my step-dad taught me to drive a 5 speed in a 1975 (or 1976) toyota pick-up truck. I’m pretty sure the clutch was designed by an 18th century Japanese torture artist hellbent on blowing out the cartilage in my left knee. It had no power steering or air or anything really. It was kind of awesome. Anyways, when I first started learning how to drive, the concept of THREE pedals in the car kinda blew my mind. Those that know me know one very important fact about my life: I’m a serious klutz. Like epic. So bring together my inability to tell my left foot from my right foot and THREE pedals in the car and we have a real problem on our hands.

The truck could often be found in the driveway just below the basketball goal. Our driveway was sloped kind of like a parabola (I like math people. look it up). Frequently we’d ask Dave to move the truck to the top of the driveway so my step-brothers and I could shoot hoops or whatever. One day we went through the motions of moving the truck, shooting hoops, fighting, playing more basketball, fighting some more, and finally finishing up. My step-dad told me I could move the truck back to its usual resting stop. I was highly honored to be able to move his beloved truck! I mean, all I had to do was take the parking brake off, put it in neutral, and let it slide down the hill. Easy, right? False. I crawled in the truck and had a major audience. My step-dad, my three step-brothers, my asshole brother Andy (always running his mouth about something), and who knows who else. I got the truck sliding down the driveway no problem. I was in complete control of the situation. I was demonstrating to all that I could gracefully repark this relic beast. Approximately half way down the hill I started to apply the brake to slow it down. But nothing happened. It wasn’t slowing down! “God no why aren’t you working brake!!” I screamed in my mind! “This car is broken!!” I also bellowed. “What’s for dinner tonight!!” was also certainly included (this is unchanged almost 20 years later whenever I’m in panic mode). It should now be clear to the reading audience that I had been stepping on the clutch the entire time. My mastery of the clutch / brake duality would come some time later as it would turn out.

At this point I could see I was headed straight into the garage and the 1986 astro-van we had (that van was SWEET by the way). My brain did the quick calculus and made a critical decision. Veer left. By the time my feeble overwhelmed mind had figured this veer decision out, I’d reached the bottom of the driveway and would soon come to realize I’d made this choice just a fraction too late.

I veered left into a tree and the side of the garage.

At least the truck had stopped, right? I looked up and was like “oh shit oh shit oh shit, did anyone see that????” I stumbled out of the truck to see my step-brothers, my step-dad, and my total asshole brother standing there wondering “what just happened??”. At this point, you’d expect mercy from your brothers right? RIGHT? If you guessed that, you are either an only child or do not fully appreciate how much boys love watching other boys totally screw something up. Because the silence was quickly replaced with laughter, jokes, teasing, and the most merciless ribbing any brother could ever get. I was mortified. I think I literally ran off and up to my room. And left my poor step-dad to salvage his awesome little pick-up truck from betwixt and between branches, a rain gutter, and the side of our house.

Yet, despite this, I can’t wait to drive a 5 speed again!

**Note: How I dress to work, and the fact that I frequently bring pizza in to work to the crew, also contribute to the overall pizza delivery look