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Many of you probably watched the Super Bowl last Sunday. You also probably watched the commercials. To throw out some shameless self promotion, I had the pleasure of being apart of one of those ads. Ok, it was not me directly. Although I do enjoy Doritos and not wearing my Dockers.

In the third quarter Google had an ad. You can watch it below. They called it Parisian Love. Between seconds 36 and 40 search of ‘AA 120′ is made (a flight number). This referenced my employer, FlightStats.

There has been a ton of chatter in our office the last couple days, but in general we are all really excited. One of our marketing people said he would never be able to top an accidental Super Bowl ad appearance – career over.

I do have to say it is nice working for a team and product with such high credentials.

You might wonder why anybody would ever want to disable their spam filter. Well let me explain why I have.

For the last seven years I have been managing this domain. For the first six or so, my buddy hosted the site and mail for me. About two years I started to use Gmail to read my mail. Gmail was not hosting it, so essentially it was fancy interface. Other users on the domain were still using the provided mail interface. Six months ago, I moved my domain to professional hosting, including converting mail to Google Apps.

This worked just fine for the first couple months. I still forwarded my mail to my Gmail account and the rest of the users had everything Google Apps provides.

This brings me to my problem. In a few cases, some mail was incorrectly marked as spam and not forwarded for me to read. Quite frustrating.

Obviously, anything marked as spam will not be forwarded. Two solve this I created two filters.

The Gmail filters allow you to put some unpublished ‘tokens’ to refine your search. This like ‘in:’, ‘is:’, and ‘before:’ will work.

The main filter will move anything marked as spam into a new label. Add these entries:

‘Has the words:’ -> ‘is:spam’
‘Apply the label:’ -> ‘Spammy’ (spam is reserved)
Select ‘Never send it to spam’

Normally, spam will be deleted after 30 days. The previous filter will stop this from happening. We also need a filter to get rid of these occasionally.

‘Has the words: -> ‘label:spammy AND before:2009/12/31′
Select ‘Delete it’ and ‘Apply filter to XYZ conversations below’.

This last filter will not work naturally and thus needs to be run occasionally. Sorry. On some frequency the date will need to be update and rerun. Should take two minutes.

Doing these steps will forward all the ’spammy’ messages to the second account when it had be stopped at the source. Since I started this, no messages have been incorrectly marked as spam.

One of the perks of working at Conducive is a free parking pass. Parking Management Company (PMC) is kind enough to organize the logistics of this sweet deal. PMC has about 300 locations in Portland, Salem, and Vancouver which I can now use anytime I want.

I found a problem though. After looking and looking, I could not find a map of the locations. If my normal lot is full, I could not find an alternative easily without skimming the list. On the weekends, I want to find a location close to the weekend activity of choice. So, I made a map. I hope somebody out there finds this as helpful as I think it will be for me.

View PMC Parking Map in a larger map

With all the talk about Scrabulous closing down on Facebook this week, it reminds me of the one and only Facebook app that should exist. Last I knew, it did not. Sad times.

There is only one word that can describe this app: freakin-awesome. This game is Worms, and according to Wikipedia is owned by Team17 Software who needs to get their ad-driven-revenue-priorities straight.

In case you are are not familiar with Worms, get familiar. To help, here are a few videos:

Now, it typically does not have the silly music but instead has silly worms that talk. Here is an example of Holy Hand Grenade in the 3D version of the game:

See, freakin-awesome.

Fred Wilson wrote a post earlier on his blog, A VC, called Powerpoint vs Working Code?. In this post he mentions a small study which shows how Venture Capitalist would rather see a demonstration of your software than a silly Powerpoint presentation.

Early in the fund raising process, it might be hard to get large amounts of a web application completed on the budget provided from seed funding. For reasons like this, web frameworks (tools to make creating web applications easier) have started to build into their ‘toolkit’ prototype like functionality.

My favorite is Tapestry 5. With T5 I would be able to create, say, a registration form in less time than it will take to write this post. Now, this form might not be in the final visual state I would like it, but it gives me a chance to quickly get something working.

If you are a developer and are interested in how this works, you can see a screen cast for this form. If you would like to see what a prototype would look like with this method, this screen cast will show this too.