What Does $2,000 Mean to You?

Your Daily Snapshot for Wed., November 28, 2012   What Does $2,000 Mean to You? Surrounded by Americans who had written into the White House in support of his plan, President Obama today renewed his call to prevent a tax increase on the middle class: "If Congress does nothing, every family in America will see their taxes automatically go up at the beginning of next year," the President said. "A typical middle-class family of four would see its income taxes go up by $2,200. That's $2,200 out of people's pockets. That means less money for buying groceries, less money for filling prescriptions, less money for buying diapers. It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. And middle-class families just can’t afford that right now." To help find an agreement President Obama pledged to keep up the pressure -- meeting with lawmakers, labor leaders, and business executives. And he called on the American people to speak up and add their own voices to the debate. Add your voice - tell us what $2,000 means to you and your family. In Case You Missed It Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog: President Obama Welcomes Mexico President-Elect Enrique Peña Nieto Yesterday afternoon, President Obama welcomed Enrique Peña Nieto, the President-elect of Mexico, to the Oval Office. Giving Tuesday America has a tradition of generosity. Yesterday was Giving Tuesday, a new nationwide effort to raise attention and motivate action for the common good. It’s a trend worth encouraging. Fighting Human Trafficking in Cambodia On each leg of his trip to Southeast Asia this week, President Obama raised with foreign leaders one of his priority human rights issues: ending human trafficking, a form of modern-day slavery. Today's Schedule All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST). 10:00 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing 11:35 AM: The President delivers remarks at an event at the White House with middle class Americans who would see their taxes go up if Congress fails to act to extend the middle class tax cuts 12:30 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney 3:00 PM: The President holds a Cabinet Meeting; the Vice President also attends 4:45 PM: The President and the Vice President attend a meeting with business leaders to discuss the actions we need to take to keep our economy growing and find a balanced approach to reduce our deficit  Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live Get Updates Sign up for the Daily Snapshot Stay Connected     Facebook Twitter YouTube Flickr Google+     This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Manage Subscriptions for e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com Sign Up for Updates from the White House Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

This debate is too important for Washington to get it wrong

Hello -- Today, I met a woman named Lyn Lyon. She's a senior citizen from Virginia, and we invited her to the White House because she wrote in to explain why it is so important for all of us to make sure that taxes don't go up on the middle class. "Let's show the rest of the world we are adults," she said. "Living in a democracy, we can solve our problems by working together." All of us here in Washington have a little more than a month to find the kind of solution that Lyn describes. If Congress does nothing, every family in America will see their taxes automatically go up at the beginning of next year. A typical middle-class family of four would see its taxes rise by $2,200. That means less money to buy groceries or fill a prescription. It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. So right now, I'm asking you to join Lyn and thousands of other Americans who are speaking out. Add your voice to this debate, and I'll ask Congress to listen to the people who sent us here to serve. Tell us why you think it's important to keep taxes from going up on the middle class. A year ago, during our last fight to protect middle-class families, tens of thousands of working Americans took action. They wrote in to us, and we put their stories on the front page of the White House website. They called, tweeted, and brought in their friends on Facebook -- and sure enough, it worked. Congress listened. The same thing happened earlier this year, when college students across the country stood up and demanded that Congress keep rates low on student loans. Lawmakers got that message loud and clear. When enough people get involved, we have a pretty good track record. And that’s important, because this is our biggest challenge yet -- and it's one we can only meet together. I'm going to do my part -- not just by sitting down with CEOs, labor leaders, and leaders in Congress -- but by taking this to the American people. I'll go anywhere and do anything it takes until we get this done. But I can't do it alone. So I'm asking you to join me -- and folks like Lyn. Add your voice to ours, and share your story. Because this debate is too important for Washington to get it wrong. Will you tell us what $2,000 means to you? http://www.whitehouse.gov/my2k Thanks, President Obama

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Seth's Blog : Thank you, Zig

 

Thank you, Zig

My teacher Zig Ziglar died this morning. He was 86. 

Thanks for teaching me how to sell and why it mattered.

Thanks for reminding me how much it mattered to care.

Thanks for telling us a fifteen-minute story about Johnny the Shoe Shine Genius, so compelling that I flew to the airport just to meet him.

Thanks for 72 hours of audiotapes, listened to so many times I wore out the cassettes twice.

Thanks for that one day we spent backstage together in Milwaukee.

Thanks for making goal setting so clear.

Thanks for elevating the art of public speaking, and making it personal, not something to be copied.

Thanks for believing in us, the people you almost never met in person, for supporting us with your voice and your stories and your enthusiasm.

Thanks for teaching so many people, people who will continue to remember you and to teach as well.

You'll be missed.

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Biting the Bullet of Technical Debt

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Biting the Bullet of Technical Debt Posted: 27 Nov 2012 06:44 PM PST Posted by MozCTO Rand has talked about the technical debt  that is impacting our ability to grow and deliver new products. We knew we’d have to bite that bullet at some point, but sometimes it’s not a clean bite…you’ve got to gnaw away at it until you finally break through. To that end, we created an 18-month roadmap to pay back that technical debt, and have worked out the stepping stones needed for each team to chip away at that proverbial bullet. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and some of our funding to help get us there, with the ultimate goals of giving you, our customers, greater value, enabling further growth, and getting to 99.9% uptime. We’ll update you as we take each step along the way. But for now, take a look at the roadmap as we see it.   Get to 99.9% Uptime The first step on the road to success is upgrading system operations. We’re focusing our efforts here on hardening our network infrastructure and increasing system redundancy and monitoring, with the following key goals: Better and redundant equipment: We’re implementing the network at our own co-location facility in a way that allows us to grow and is not as vulnerable to equipment failures. We are also moving off hosted servers, load balancers, and switches in favor of our own equipment. The new equipment is much higher quality, and will be duplicated here in Seattle and at our colocation site in Herndon, Virginia. Rigorous monitoring: I love that we have enthusiastic customers willing to tweet when one of our systems is down, but that is not the normal way to monitor systems! Our system administrators are implementing monitoring not only on our servers, but also on the jobs, queues, and a plethora of other things that keep our service running. Increased monitoring will help us catch problems before the servers go down, and hopefully head off problems like the latest rankings outage before they affect our customers. The Tech Ops Team   Mark Sr. Director David Principal Engr Stephen Sys Admin Jacob Sys Admin  Nicholas Tech Writer       Fay Database architect Dave K Office Admin New System/ Network Engineer New DBA     The Tech Ops Stepping Stones Deliver Our Largest, Freshest, Most Reliable Index In parallel to this systems work, we are also working on our applications reliability and scalability.  The Big Data team’s work includes: More reliable data processing: We’re moving our processing out of the cloud and onto our own hardware. Fix things right: We now have the luxury of the time and a little cash in the bank to do things right. We’re not going to cobble together a hack that will get us over the hump today, but will come back to bite us tomorrow. Improve the index: Our goal is to triple our index size and release more frequently, getting back to our May 2012 index size, while also increasing freshness…with the ultimate goal of creating an index every 7-10 working days. The Big Data Team Carin Senior Manager Phil Principal Engineer Brandon Principal Engineer Martin Principal Engineer Doug Senior Engineer Dan Engineer   Maura Senior Engineer Sarfraz TPM Kenny Web Dev Brad K Senior Engineer David B. Engineer     The Big Data Stepping Stones Make Everything Bullet-proof The Production Engineering Team (PE) is knee-deep in the bowels of the production systems: reviewing code, suggesting where new or more hardware could be used, and making things more maintainable and bullet-proof in general. PE has already implemented code changes to our core systems over the last few weeks to address some of the current sticking points. Some of the things this team is working on: New servers: We’re in the process of standing up over 200 new servers. Reducing complexity: We’re reducing the types of databases and queuing systems we run on. We’re picking systems that either we can support or that have dependable support to help us reach our goal of 99.9% uptime. Between data storage/retrieval and queuing, we have 7 (that I know of) different types of systems.  We aim to get down to one queuing system and two or three different database types. For more information on these recent fixes, check out the blog post Where are My Rankings? The Production Engineering Team  Shawn Senior Manager Thomas Senior Engineer David W.  Engineer Evan  Engineer Ben Engineer   Ethel SDET   Shelly TPM New Ruby Engineer New Ruby Engineer   The Production Engineering Stepping Stones Net New Development The Net New Development Team is working on implementing on new product features. Shhhhh! The Net New Development Team Walt Sr. Software Manager Chris TPM Andrew SDET   Myron Senior Engineer Marty Engineer Patrick Engineer Brandon Engineer Ben K. Engineer Wes Principal Engineer John Senior Engineer AK Engineer Jason Engineer Koos Engineer New Net Stepping Stones Rock the Marketing Website Inbound Engineering is the team focused on the Marketing website. The team goals are: Create new services: Create the Common Email service, the new Moz Authorization service, and the front end for Q&A. Upgrade billing: Upgrade our billing infrastructure for more reliable payment processing. Upgrade the website: Build additional functionality into the marketing website. Inbound Engineering Team Casey Senior Web Manager Dudley Senior Director Devin PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer Inbound Stepping Stones Make Tweets Sing The Followerwonk team is working on advancing the customer experience and digging deeper into Twitter and what makes Tweets sing.  We’re going to use split-testing to specific goals to measure customer experience, which will help us decide on designs and features that our customers like the best. Followerwonk Team Peter Followerwonk Founder Galen Software Engineer Marc Software Engineer Amy TPM Followerwonk Stepping Stones Test and Document In lockstep with these teams, our test and doc folks are adding testing and documentation that will improve quality and communication across the company. These teams are still small, but are already having a big impact. We have already seen an improvement in our last index release, where testing contributed to it going out with no issues. Test and Docs Team Lisa Technical Writer Nicholas Technical Writer Ethel SDET Andrew SDET Docs Roadmap Test Roadmap Sharing Our Success As we take each step along our technical roadmap we will share our accomplishments, turning these planned stepping stones green over the next 18 months. As we gnaw away at our technical debt, we hope you’ll start seeing benefits from the changes along the way. Stay tuned! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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