shellen dot com

Plinky in today's New York Times Magazine

2009-05-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

Illustration by Peter Arkle

I had the pleasure of being quoted in the NYT Magazine today in an article about Plinky. The article speaks for itself and I thought Rob Walker did a nice job. One thing I've been meaning to write about more is what's coming next for Plinky. The article touches on this:

"Shellen says his company has more projects in the works that are �centered on conversation� but for the moment has been learning more about what sorts of prompts are effective."

Biz Stone on the Colbert Report!

2009-04-03T18:13:00.001-07:00

Last night my old friend Biz Stone appeared on the Stephen Colbert Show on Comedy Central. I'm stoked for Biz and the whole Twitter team. Their mainstream media mentions and appearances don't seem to be slowing down. Evan Williams was on Charlie Rose and they were profiled on Nightline. If you didn't catch Colbert live last night you can see the full clip embedded below.

I've been friends with Biz for a while now but we not met in real life back in 2001. However, that didn't stop us from becoming arch-nemeses, cordially of course. All the same time, I really wasn't too sure about a guy who referred to himself as "genius" and his smart aleck style of writing wasn't helping things. In 2003 when we finally met at a blogging conference I found out that he is actually one of the nicest guys around. We had to end our pretend feud. We were able to hire him onto the Blogger team at Google in October 2003 which Biz of course wrote up jokingly as an acquisition of Genius Labs. After spending years working with Biz I can't help but read anything he writes in classic Biz Stone-style. I'm glad the rest of America gets a glimpse into the kind of fun Biz brings to any project.

Clip courtesy of Comedy Central.

While we are getting truthy, a minor correction to a Techcrunch post about a rumored sale of Twitter to Google. Michael Arrington writes:

...it�s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone�s second sale to Google - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago.

It's would be Ev's second sale (if it were true) however, as mentioned above, Biz was brought on in late 2003 and wasn't part of the Ev, Steve, Rudy, Jason, Jason and Jason team. It is interesting to note that one Jason, Rudy and Steve are at Twitter though. Go (old) team!

A little free product development advice

2009-04-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

As a former Google product manager and current entrepreneur, people often email me to ask for advice in a number of areas. One of the recurring variants is a request that goes something like this:

"I have an idea for a site or service. It's going to be bigger than the disco ball! I don't really know how this technology stuff works but maybe I could tell you my idea?" What comes next is usually a variation of "...and then you could help me build it, sell it, promote it, show me how it's done or something else?"

Still other email are from small start-up founders who want to know what the secret trick is to building a great product or to take a look at their new creations.

First of all, it's flattering that people like the products I've helped build enough to seek me out. As a busy CEO of a venture-backed start-up I unfortunately don't always have a lot of spare time to dig in and help out, so here are a few of my fundamental thoughts on entrepreneurship, building products and how I can help.

I'm not a technical person

Surprise, neither am I. In fact, I've never taken a single Computer Science or Business Administration class. I received a BA in Fine Arts from a small liberal arts college. I thought I was going to go on to Cal Arts to study animation and work for Disney or Pixar, but the web came along and my plans changed. To this day, I'm at my best when I am behind the drivers seat in Photoshop or Illustrator sketching out new product ideas or at the whiteboard designing rough sketches of future web applications. As long as you can communicate with technical people, you'll be in fine shape.

Execution is underrated

I have a belief that ideas come down to execution. Great ideas are a dime a dozen but in the end the one's that emerge successful are the one's that have persevered and made something special.

The same idea in the hands of different people have many different outcomes. For example: for every Google there are 50 search companies that ended disastrously. Google executed well and refined and refined a core idea that wasn't necessarily unique. Some ideas when executed well take off and others fail to capture the imagination.

If you think it's interesting, make a demo

If someone came to me and said, "Here's my great idea, but I want to
be paid for it if it's good." I would probably shoo them away -
implement your idea, even as a simple demo you have 10x more
likelihood of being taken seriously. Venture capital or even angel money is rarely given to people who don't have a working demo. Product managers and engineers at top software companies usually need a demo to continue development and receive support from their superiors. If you can't code, make friends.

Version: Perfect

No one ships something perfect right out the gate. If you are doing it right, there is a good chance you will throw away most of the code every 6 - 18 months. Hell, sometimes you'll throw away the first product. Premature optimization is usually the main stumbling block of any small team. Go fast and learn from mistakes.

The competition

Aim high. Don't think of your competition as the other guys in a garage, aim at someone who doesn't know you are coming and potentially someone who wouldn't see it coming until it's too late. Don't worry about the other guys doing similar things unless they are doing 100% the same thing. Have a long term vision and imagine what wild success would look like if your service or product takes off.

You are what you read

If you aren't already reading Paul Graham or Joel on Software then I highly recommend subscribing. Paul works with many start-ups and Joel is an old hand at software development. You are not creating a product in a vacuum, many other people have been down this path, learn from the masters of the craft. Half (or more) of my pearls of wisdom here are borrowed, stolen or filtered from what I've read somewhere else. Entrepreneurship-by-osmosis has served me well. If you are looking for more folks to read, my Founders list from Google Reader has some eclectic folks who might get you motivated. Get reading!

Good to great

If you are a good engineer but think you need to acquire product management or business skills for your new idea to succeed, I might offer a few suggestions. I think you probably have a better chance of becoming great at something you already do than adequate at something you don't currently do. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a familiarity with many different aspects of building products, but experience has taught me that going from good to great is more rewarding.

Secrets

Keep your idea a secret if you want, but most good ideas usually have my friends and family members scratching their heads about why I would want to build such a thing in the first place. Your idea will take far more than a slip of the tongue to kill it than someone overhearing it. Be careful of overly valuing secrecy.

How can I help

I probably can't help you if you send over an email that says "Do you want to hear my idea?" I don't have a single friend who doesn't love to hear a good idea. Will I keep your idea a secret? Sure, but as I've said before the idea isn't necessarily the interesting part, it's what you do with it. If I haven't dissuaded you, my email address is jason at shellen.com.

All this free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it, but it's served me well over the past few years and might help you too. It's grounded in observations,� my own successes, spectacular failures, and even things I'm still learning on a daily basis. Now go make something great (that real people want to use too)!

The doctor ordered "Back to the Future II" and bedrest

2009-02-11T21:34:00.001-08:00

I've been sick with a cold. Not any cold, but some super human cold to end all colds. I'm finally feeling better and I've ingested my share of ibuprofen, Sudafed, codeine cough syrup, Tylenol PM, pho, hot tea, home-made soup (thanks Allie), but mostly a bunch of movies. My eyes have been hurting so a lot of the time I just listened to the movies.

Since last Friday I've re-watched (or listened to): Mission Impossible 3, Wedding Crashers, Singles, Batman Begins and watched for the first time: Hitch, Step Brothers, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. The re-watches were all good to great, the first timers - almost every last one of them horrible. I've learned that when you are sick, go with what you know.

Sequels in general make for great movie watching when you are sick, because plot details don't matter as much and the fact that it's not as good as the original won't matter as much. Plus you have probably already seen it a few times so you can doze off for periods of time and the story still makes sense.

I recommend Back to the Future II or BTTF II as we true fans call it. It's not as good as the first but definitely better than the old West flying train piece of junk that came out after it. Lot's of Biff getting his just desserts and Marty's girlfriend gets upgraded from nameless actress to Elisabeth Shue between BTTF 1 and 2. Not bad! Other things to love about this one mainly appear in the future, Nike self-lacing shoes, Mattel Hover Boards, hover cars, 3-D advertising and a fax machine in every room of the home.

For my money what's better than a movie about the future when being sick essentially puts you in a wormhole to next week anyway.

Try to avoid tense movies like MI3 or The Dark Night, I learned my lesson the hard way. Other recommended sequels would include: Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi.

Roads? Where you're going you don't need roads... Motrin maybe but no roads.

America needs Jon Stewart

2009-02-03T08:31:00.001-08:00

President Obama has had his chance at picking a Cabinet and he's done a fine job so far. It's hard to pick from a crop of only real human beings so any fictitious characters are noted with an asterisk, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be great.

Jon Stewart
Secretary of State Now maybe this one is too easy, but he does have a great sense of what's askew in America and could deliver bad news with a humorous delivery. Also his Bush impression kills me.

Clair Huxtable*
Attorney General You remember Clair? She was the Mom on The Cosby Show but she was also a whip smart lawyer. Do you think she would let any of this crazy "Is it torture? It's not torture" stuff slide? Would there be any doubt that she would get to the bottom of who leaked an American spies name to the press? When Theo and Walter decide to listen to a recording of "Macbeth" instead of reading the book, who would set them straight? Clair Huxtable that's who.

Gavin Newsom
Secretary of Looking Fabulous Currently Mayor of SF but that head of hair is too good to waste on one city. If there were any younger Kennedy men around that wanted anything to do with politics then Gavin might have competition. This does require creating a Department of Looking Fabulous, but with the success of all these make-over shows - I think America could get behind it.

Tina Fey
Chief of Staff Smart, known for keeping her co-workers productive and funny. Is there anything she can't do? I think she would also be motivated to make sure she never needs to resurrect the Palin impersonation.

Iron Man / Tony Stark *
Secretary of Defense. Technically I don't think the Iron Man suit would fit into a Hermann Miller chair in the briefing room. Of course this is America and we could probably get a government contractor to whip something up to the tune of $500K that would work for Tony/IronMan to use while be-suited. On second thought, let's just make him stand at meetings.

My hip-hop posse would include Zach Galifianakis

2009-01-23T10:20:00.001-08:00

My sons Drew and Miles and Allison are my real posse but if I were a famous rapper with loads of spare time to terrorize restaurants and act badly at retail clothing stores this would be the crew to hit the town with.

Zach Galifianakis
Every posse needs someone making the boss laugh. Have you seen the Kanye West video for "Can't Tell Me Nothing?" with Zach? The guy is all hip hop.

Mike "Money" Brandt
Aside from every crew needing a "Mike" (get one if you don't have one), he's got mad b-boy skillz from the early 90's. An old friend from back in the day on the mean streets of Fremont, CA. Former-basketball player, perfect for all occasions.

Taylor "Lil Bro" Shellen
Isn't there some sort of law that every posse needs a least one sibling? Plus Taylor is in better shape than I and could escort haters to the door. I think anything past 3 in a posse starts to get weird so I think that's the list.

Plinky is live!

2009-01-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

It feels like I've been up for about a week straight but we launched Plinky today. Much more on that tomorrow for now, go and give it a spin!

Well I wouldn't say I "missed" work

2009-01-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

I'm featured in an article on CNN today called: They left the corporate cocoon to blossom. The article is about people like Vanessa Fox and I who left cushy gigs at big companies to strike out on our own. Highly recommended reading *ahem*.

A couple points of clarification about the article:

CNN must have some sort of editorial policy against outbound links, you can sign up to be notified of our pending launch at Plinky.com
The article states that I was "complacent" at Google. I would probably use the word "restless".
Start-up life isn't for everyone and I certainly wouldn't advise foolishly quitting a perfectly good job because it was my preference to do so. This downturn isn't going to be easy on anyone, least of all small businesses.
That said, it does feel a lot more like you are living your own life when you have a hand in your own fate. Don't let the economy keep a good idea down. I feel a flurry of motivational quips coming on: "Where there is a will there's a way", "Just do it", "If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it". The last one snuck in there and might not apply.

For all of you who have been waiting for Plinky... it's just around the corner. More on that soon.

A simple theory

2008-12-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

Ivor Tossell's interesting theory on the differences between Facebook and Twitter in The Globe and Mail:

"Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better."

This seems to hold true in my experience, how about you?

A little over four years ago...

2008-11-06T00:42:00.000-08:00

I attended the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Protesters, supporters, an abundance of police, armed forces and secret service milled around Boston's Fleet Center. Once inside, I was lucky enough to slide into some borrowed VIP seats in time to see Barack Obama deliver the keynote address. I wondered to my colleagues aloud at the end, "When can we have this guy as our President?". He delivered an amazing speech, a unifying speech and not just for the Democrats. He was commanding, eloquent and spoke honestly about how to heal a divided nation. When people have asked me why I have supported Obama I keep pointing back to that night that I had a glimmer of the hope that an Obama presidency would bring.

Barack Obama delivering the keynote at the 2004 DNC on Flickr

Last night, when the Obama landslide victory was announced, I welled up uncontrollably. I didn't cry for a politician, I think like many Americans I felt like a veil had been lifted. Seven years of fear mongering, misleading the nation and mishandling of both man-made and natural disasters are finally book-ended by a historic win for a deserving, intelligent leader. I finally feel truly hopeful about America for the first time in a long time.

This wasn't an easy win and I have friends and family who flew to battleground states, made phone calls, donated money and goods, held fundraisers and more. When it was all over there was dancing in the streets. DANCING. IN. THE. STREETS! When is the last time a political candidate inspired more than a cocktail party? Truly amazing.

I know it sounds corny and empty without action behind it but, I believe in Barack Obama, I believe in the hope he has already inspired and I know that will translate to action in the coming years. I can't thank all of you enough for voting for Barack Obama. Yes we did!

Laptops for change?

2008-10-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Chris Wetherell decided he couldn't sit on his hands during this election and flew out to a county that is in need of Democratic assistance. He's been there since early this month and will be staying through the election. Chris tells me that their greatest need right now is laptops that can run Firefox. Just a straw poll of our own office yielded a few good laptops that we are going to send their way. Can you help Obama with your old laptop? A few requests and things to note:

Please wipe off any data you might need before sending. Ideally, you would nuke it and reinstall the OS and Firefox.
Do not send junk. Please fire it up and check to make sure it's in good shape. Send along power supplies, etc.
Don't wait! DO IT NOW!
After they are done using them, they will be donated to schools serving the underprivileged.
[updated] With the laptop, please send a note with your name address, and phone number so we can thank you or call with any questions.
Please send them directly the office where Chris is working:

ATTN: CJ Ash, Florida Democratic Party
2321 Central Ave
St Petersburg, FL 33713

Thank you!

Sad excuse for a blog

2008-09-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

Recently at a cocktail party I met someone who said, "Didn't you used to keep a blog?". Ouch. That hurt. All I can say is, I have a few tricks up my sleeve to keep this baby going. More on that soon.

Let's go for a ride

2008-08-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

Allison and I have been married ten years as of today (1998!). Neither of us had any idea of what we were getting into, but it's been the ride of our lives. Here's to future adventures with my best gal and best friend Allison.

Bread!

2008-07-31T18:43:00.000-07:00

A tweet from my old buddy Eric Case reminded me that I hadn't heard Google Technology Director, Craig Silverstein doing his traditional freshly baked bread announcement since I left the company almost a year ago. Luckily, I captured this a few years ago on video so we can all remember that it's all about the bread.

Plinky

2008-06-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Apart from making with the jokes on Twitter, I have been very busy starting a new company, Plinky, Inc.. In short, Plinky will be focused on helping people have fun while creating great content.

I've had an idea for this new web application for a long time and thought about incubating it under the banner of The Secret Agency which I created last fall to do such things. A funny thing happened on the way to the incubator idea though, what happens if one of the ideas consumes you and seems like it really has legs? After iterating since last fall with my friend Sim Simeonov the idea for Plinky was consuming me and I decided to raise some seed funding to help build it out as a company focused on one product. I'm accepting a round of financing from the nice folks at Polaris Ventures in Boston as well as some smart angels (to be announced at a later date). When we are done with the round we should be at about $1.5M raised to help propel us.

We have a small team of web developers and will be hiring a back-end tech lead engineer soon. Drop me an email to jason at plinky dot com if you live in the SF Bay Area and are interested.

I can't wait to have folks try out our application in the Fall/Winter time when we are ready for testing. I'm sorry I can't say more about the product at this time, but it's nice to finally talk about the company building process publicly. Look for more company building blog posts from me in the future. One thing I will say is that this is not a Blogger 2.0 or a MySpace-killer but rather something that should help make using any social site more interesting

Om Malik wrote about our brief conversation about Plinky and my co-founder Sim wrote about starting Plinky. If you want to be notified when we launch, please add your email address to our list over at Plinky.com.

Now the real work begins!

Another way to look at atomization

2008-05-21T02:04:00.000-07:00

Josh Kopelman wrote about "The Atomization of Conversation" the other day:

Conversations are indeed becoming atomized and asynchronous. No need for the "Hey, how are you doing?" discussion. Personal dialog is being replaced by a Mini-feed.

Josh is right. Even this blog post doesn't necessarily need to be a blog post. I could have starred or shared Josh's post in Google Reader and added a note to it and it would just become one of many things that are consumed, streamed or duly noted by my friends and readers. I find what Josh points out fascinating because it's a new problem and one we didn't have a few years ago.

When some of the founding members of the Google Reader team and I were putting together the original product plan we spent a lot of time talking about the death of the shared experience. I remember recounting that time and place shifting had wreaked havoc with the normal water-cooler conversation at work. No longer were there conversations that started with, 'Did you see Johnny Carson last night?' because aside from the fact that Johnny was long gone, there was no single shared event to center around with 180 channels, TiVo, DVD's and the internet. How could we bring back shared experiences in a world where everything seemed so fragmented? Like any good problem I ever spend brain cycles on I came to the conclusion that surely there was a web-app that could solve this problem! Hence some of the features that slowly made their way into our little social-enabled Reader.

FriendFeed, Facebook and Reader each have ways to tell what your friends have liked, read or voted for explicitly but I would love to see more advancement in this area. It's close but not fully fixed yet. One of my inspirations over the years has been the clustering used by the link blog aggregation at HotLinks. Check out one of the levels, like level 3 to see the clustering in action. Simple, but effective in rolling together shared likes.

Back to Josh's atomization question, it feels like there is a new problem. Now that we have good ways of keeping up with people and maybe even having some sort of shared experience filter/aggregation, what next? The insight posed by Mr. Kopelman isn't all bad, I definitely feel more informed about my friends from across the country by using services like Twitter and perhaps that can deepen relationships but there is a larger question. Where do we focus as technologists? Do we improve the quality of conversation? Do we pull together like minded folks around their likes and dislikes? Will FriendConnect, Facebook Connect, and the like mean we will further annoy our friends with the persistent connectedness or will we begin to use them as exclusion lists so we can begin to discover what people think outside of our explicitly named networks?

It turns out it's not just one question but maybe a whole slew of them. For the technologists in the crowd, what problem do you want to solve? What's driving your interest in this brave new world of socially aware applications?

10 things to be happy about on the web

2008-03-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

Some of these are applications and some are content. I don't have a lot of strict rules for lists. List rules are for babies. Please don't tell the babies I said that. They have a strong lobby in my household. Ok, clearly I've lost it...the envelope please....

FriendFeed - It's fun to see what your friends are up to on Facebook. It's even more fun to see what your friends are up to without having to be bit by a zombie.
"How many record execs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" - It's either funny if you don't have to work with labels or painful because you've had a similar conversation.
Twitter - If you don't get it that's cool. You'll be like all those people that gave me a funny stare when I tried to explain what a blog was in 2000.
Tumblr - Like blogging but lighter. Like delicious but heavier or easier or... just try it. Mine is at shellen.tumblr.com.
Weebly - I met the founder at a ballgame recently and thought I would give it a try when I needed to create a quick, easy to edit website for my Mom. Very easy to use and well thought out. This is what Google Pages should have been.
Google's Visualization API - In a few months I wouldn't be surprised if this is the new favorite mash-up API. I can't wait to see what people build. Sorry Google Maps. :(
Merlin Mann's Twitter stream - He's a comedians comedian perhaps but still, I find it funny. I find myself starring every one of his posts.
The anticipation behind Socialthing - Not the actual site, just the anticipation. It's not available yet and I don't have an invite but with sexy looking icons and a first page that screams 'I'm cool, don't you wan't to use me!' I'm looking forward to an invite code.
live.yahoo.com - Who thought Yahoo would make the list? Despite the pending sale to MSFT their secret camp over at the Brickhouse pulled out a fun easy to use site centered around live video streams. Content at night gets a little sketchy though.
Wire & Twine - Love the site design and the shirts.

On paralysis by analysis

2008-02-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me every so often, mostly on days when I'm not consumed by meetings but, working from home reading about all the smart, fun, interesting things that are being launched by friends, competitors, strangers, seniors in high school, cats and the occasional fruit bat - that if you don't shut these things out at some point that one may never actually build anything and certainly without a doubt will not ship it. It also crosses my mind on days like today to yank the ethernet cable out of my router and get back to work.

Vote!

2008-02-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

Design and reminder courtesy of Matt Haughey.

Raid over Moscow

2008-01-16T19:09:00.001-08:00

It's amazing to think that in 1985 I played a computer game based on taking out nuclear sites in the USSR and now years later I'm heading over to get a look at the Kremlin in the flesh. Hopefully it's not really the way it looked in 8-bit graphics on the C-64.

Either way I'm glad that Russia and the US are pals now. I also hope todays kids are smarter than I and play things like 'Humanitarian mission to the Congo'. I would buy a copy.

Macworld SF 2008 Annual blogger lunch and schmoozefest

2008-01-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

It's time to mark your calendars for another edition of the Macworld SF Annual blogger lunch and schmoozefest. Last year I dropped the ball because I was at CES. Sad choice because Apple announced the iPhone and I was left in Vegas looking at suddenly old looking hardware. Onward and upward!

The lunch will be on January 15, 2008 at the Yerba Buena Gardens. You don't need to be attending the conference to come out to lunch, but if you would like to go to the show too you can grab a discounted Macworld Expo Pass from the generous folks at Other World Computing. The nicest thing about this lunch - low formality and purpose, high on chocolate chip cookies and goofing off. I encourage you to let me know if you are planning on attending either in the comments or on the Upcoming page with all the event details and please spread the word! Over the past few years we had a great time and I expect this year to be Mactastic as well. See you there.

Ghosts of Christmas past: 1988

2007-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Shellen brothers wish you a very Merry Christmas. If there had been a thing such as YouTube in 1988 we would have used our Fisher Price PXL-2000 videocam to make you something with our gifts that day, such as the Nerf flag football set and the Star Stage. This photo actually explains a lot about the Shellen brothers if you look carefully. Merry Christmas everybody, we hope you get a snazzy robe or something flannel.

I'm joining LiveJournal as VP of Product Development

2007-12-19T16:43:00.000-08:00

From the announcement to the LiveJournal community:

We are happy to announce that Jason Shellen will be joining
the team as our new Vice President of Product Development at
LiveJournal, Inc. Jason comes to us with very relevant experience,
having been part of Pyra Labs, which created Blogger. In 2003
Google acquired Blogger and Jason went on to work as Product
Manager for Google Reader and became part of the Google New
Business Development team.

Jason will manage product development for LiveJournal, Inc.
and also oversee the pipeline of new products that SUP is
producing in other markets around the world. He'll be located
out of the LiveJournal, Inc. office in San Francisco.

More on this over the next few days. In the meanwhile, here is the official press release. I'm very excited about this opportunity and hope to build great things over the next few years.

Everyone's a critic

2007-12-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

Regarding my call for feedback on my new blog design the other day:

I took a peek.
You asked, so I'll tell you.
It's great except the lettering on the "shellen.com"
title at the top looks kind of fuzzy and weak.
I know! It looks like it was done on an Etch-a-Sketch!
I think a different font would be better.

Just my opinion.
Otherwise, very impressive.

Love you.
Mom

She's not wrong (or alone in her distaste) the logo has been messed up for about 7 years. It's a mis-use of Kottke's Silkscreen font that was meant for small navigational areas where a bitmap would be best. What am I doing wrong? I'm aliasing it or anti-aliasing... wait, I can't decide if I'm pro or anti-alias. Either way it looks horrible the other way too. I hereby promise a new logo design for 2008. My mother and Biz Stone will be pleased and really that's all anyone can ask for in this crazy world.

Next year: Stephen King novel adaptation in graham cracker

2007-12-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

My youngest brother Grant explains in his post that we had a friendly little graham cracker house making party at Mom's recently. My competitive spirit lay dormant until he reminded me in the midst of building how creative (demented?) I had been in years past.

Jason has been more adventurous, one year creating a graham-cracker car accident that left a gingerbread man severed in half, bleeding red sprinkle blood onto the foil road beneath him, still a smile on his lifeless face.

Morbid but true. This year's house is not quite as full bore as I had hoped but I had to try so I decided to make an American Gladiator joust style event gone awry on the side of the house. The tree turned out odd too.

I think my sister-in-law Heather's tribute to Joseph Eichler would win if Froot Loop trophys had been awarded. Here are a few more photos of my graham cracker house. See Grant's blog for the other more G-rated houses where gingerbread men live happier, sugar coated lives.