Author Archives: Brian Alvey

It’s okay to make fun of Matchbox Twenty. Although they were originally described as radio-friendly grunge, they’re a mainstream rock band. In fact, they named their greatest hits album Exile on Mainstream — both a nod to the Rolling Stones double album Exile on Main Street and a joke about how they’ve been “banished” to middle-of-the-road massive commercial success.Continue reading “Matchbox Twenty at Jones Beach”

Soon I will clear up confusion about the Ceros deal and explain how I didn’t sell my company and retire, even though many people think I did. But for now, you’ve got to see why I was so excited about Ceros:

Yesterday morning I had an appointment with a surgeon to check out a lump on the top of my head. For some reason I figured the doctor would inspect me and then schedule its removal for a later date. So I was in a bit of shock when he wheeled over a tray of tools,Continue reading “Scalped!”

My 16-month absence from blogging coincided with a major career transition. At the end of 2011, I decided to change my startup in three major ways. I will explain what those three ways were soon, just know that to accomplish this big change we acquired another company, merged our companies together, kept their name and kept theirContinue reading “Pivoting”

In 2008, my site got its first real design ever. It looked like this: It was a great design at the time, but after a 16-month break from blogging I wanted to return with a lighter site — not even a sidebar. This new minimalist design you see today was a ton of fun to work on.Continue reading “A fresh new look”

C.K. Sample linked to this gorgeous picture of Tony Stark which showed how the Iron Man movie would look if it had been done by Pixar instead of Marvel. It made me wonder what Marvel movies would be like if Pixar made all of them, so I speculated in a bunch of tweets using the hashtag #PixarDoesMarvel. HereContinue reading “Pixar Does Marvel”

This morning I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep for about 20 minutes. I snapped awake after a crazy dream and was lucky to make it to a 9am meeting. First, I’d like to thank my subconscious for waking me up without my alarm. Second, I’d like to tell my subconscious that thisContinue reading “Get out of my dreams, get into my car”

Jeffrey Zeldman posted an interesting reader letter, called Letter of the Month. The author wrote Jeffrey to explain that his Designing With Web Standards book had changed his entire career. I remember what I now refer to as a pivotal moment in my web career. I was sitting in bed reading your book. I knew nothing really aboutContinue reading “Quitting web design”

Two weeks ago, our Crowd Fusion team was right in the middle of the big cloud outage at Amazon. All of the big brands using our platform run on Amazon servers. George Reese from O’Reilly had the best early recap and perspective of the dozens of stories I read: If you think this week exposed weakness in theContinue reading “Surviving Amazon’s Cloudpocalypse”

[This post originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.] As a company who works with several enterprise customers in Amazon’s cloud, Crowd Fusion would like to remind everyone of what life outside of the cloud can be like. Remember, in 2007 when a Texas pickup truck rammed into a Rackspace Datacenter andContinue reading “Weathering The Storm In Amazon’s Cloud”