the real Nate Clark

Several years ago I was in New York city with my mom and my sister, Jacki. While Jacki was taking forever inside H&M, I was wandering through the many street vendors who had set up shop on the sidewalk nearby. A table full of hand-drawn inspirational quotes written in Chinese caught my eye. I spotted this framed poster, and bought it immediately for about 30 bucks.

In case the image is hard to see, the quote reads:

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, and live the life you’ve imagined

I fell in love with this quote. It’s so direct. So assertive. Yet, so inspiring. And, I think Chinese writing looks cool.

When I got home, I hung it on my bathroom wall, directly above the toilet where I was sure to see it every day.

All this time I thought that this quote was some kind of well-known Chinese proverbial wisdom passed down through generations … until a few months ago when I started dating Lavinia, who’s from Taiwan and speaks Chinese natively. She assured me that Chinese to English translation is correct, but she’s never heard the saying before. After a bit of Googling, I find out that this was originally written in English by 19th century American transcendentalist author, Henry David Thoreau. Oh well, that doesn’t make it any less inspiring, and Chinese writing still looks cool.

I was on my way back to Atlanta from my friend’s wedding in Ohio, tired and worn out from a whole weekend of eating, drinking, and partying. Despite my mentally drained state, sometime during the flight home, the idea just came to me. I get new ideas all the time. One or two a month … at least. Most of them are written off quickly as too hard, too silly, or too expensive … so I let this idea soak for a while.

Hours later, I’m at home in bed. It’s 4:00am. My brain won’t turn off.

I slide out of bed and into my computer chair. A few clicks later, and I’m whipping out my credit card to register a handful of domains at GoDaddy. “Fantastically simple, but this could be huge!” I think to myself. With the comfort in knowing that my domain names are secure, I get back into bed and sleep soundly ‘till noon.

I’ve been working diligently on my build-your-own-social-network startup, Wamily for quite a while now. We’re weeks away from a public release. Did I really want to divert my already sporadic attention to something totally new at this point in the game? Was this mini-startup worth giving up precious development time? Is my co-founder gonna be pissed at me for putting Wamily on the back burner? Am I crazy?

After careful consideration, the answer to all of these is yes. I gave myself one weekend to hack something out, then I have to get back to Wamily. Hell, it’ll be fun.

Three days later (ok, fine … a long weekend) and it’s up. Using the Google Maps API and Ruby on Rails, I hacked together a neat little search tool to find biodiesel filling stations around the world. Yeah, I didn’t expect you to get it right away. But just wait a couple years, this alternative fuel thing is going to be huge.

So, am I glad that I did it? Well, yes and no. But mostly yes. This little mini-project has given me the opportunity to work with a couple of tools that I hadn’t had the chance to learn before. In one short weekend, I created a cool and useful website, and also got to:

• play with the Google Maps API and the YM4R Ruby plugin
• implement the MaxMind GeoLite City database to detect your site vistors’ city and country from their IP address
• deploy a production application on Edge Rails
• open up my first Google Adsense account
• help save the world by making alternative fuel more accessible
• hedge my bets on Wamily

The only downside, really, is that I find myself wanting to spend more time on Find Biodiesel, when I really should be getting Wamily ready to go. Oh well. What’s another weekend in the big scheme of things?