The good folks at Brazen Careerist are hosting an online session with Jason Fried tomorrow. It should prove to be informative. I really enjoyed reading REWORK and if you register, you’ll be entered to win an autographed copy of it.
This is such a first world problem I thought about not posting it. But, I feel there’s an opportunity to make some money and make people happy. I hope I’m not the first to think of this…
How often do you come home to a “missed delivery” notice? I often get it once a month because I forgot to change the shipping address to my office. I’m one of the lucky ones: many people can’t have things shipped to them at work. Consultants are in a different location every week. Where is the delivery service that can drop off my package at my house between the hours of 6 and 10 PM?
Do you hear horror stories of trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment? Not only do they not answer the phone between 12 - 1 (because that’s their lunch break, coincidentally the only time some of us have a chance to make personal calls). Some of us have to take a half-day from work just to get there, sit and wait, meet with the doctor, and then go back to work. What about an oil change? Most of us go to our jobs somewhere between the hours of 7 AM - 7 PM. Oh, and you’re closed on Sundays? How convenient, that’s a day of rest…
Is there no demand for an “after hours” delivery service to make sure I don’t have to drive 10 miles out of my way to get that package I missed? Are there really no doctors willing to work evenings (after we all get off of work) so they can spend the day with their kids? And you’re telling me nobody at Jiffy Lube will work on evenings or Sundays? Let’s be real…
Services like UberCab are headed in the right direction. They are geared toward people willing to spend a few extra bucks for regained time and service on our schedules.
I went on safari in Kenya in December 2008 and have posted some of the 2,000 photos, organized by location, to my Flickr profile. Have a look…
“You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories. 1. Beautiful things. 2. Emotionally important things. 3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function. 4. Everything else.”
Found via David’s Log and Tim Shey, this is an excellent read on a recurring theme in thinking about possessions; from quantity to quality.
Most people will argue that your signature should not include your email address. It’s overkill; it’s redundant. Sure, for one-on-one conversations it makes make no sense: you just emailed them.
But, if you’re forwarding an email or get involved in a thread later, your email client usually does not include full email addresses in the quoted reply/forward content.
Thus, you see “Jim Smith” was looped in early on but don’t have his email address to loop him back in. Or you are forwarded a message that needs follow up but all it says down below is “From: Mark Johnson (Acme Co).” What now, Mark?
Plus, you may have a dozen different accounts that end up at the same inbox. Adding your email address in your signature helps you communicate your preferred address and avoid misdirection in the future.
Ensuring your email address is somewhere in your initial message avoids these situations. No matter how much we use it, email is hard sometimes… let’s make it a little easier for each other.
There has been plenty of coverage of 23andme, lately1. Like any self-respecting nerd (I took three years of biology in high school) I had my own DNA analyzed. If you’re not aware: you send a spit sample which is reviewed for known DNA markers to help identify traits, your propensity towards certain diseases and ancestry.
While I agree the ability to learn more about diseases (as an individual and the scientific community at-large) is an amazing step, I’m also interested in learning what was previously dismissed as un-knowable. Having been adopted at birth, I’ve only had a superficial understanding of my ancestry. Not knowing my biological family, I’ve had no insight into any history of diseases or traits, either.
For many people, they can say “grandma had Parkinson’s, and her sister did, too” and understand there is a chance they’re pre-disposed to this disease. Or people can look at their father and say “well that’s where these freckles came from.” Though incidental, these are experiences and conversations I’ve never had throughout my life.
It’s interesting to me how 23andme has closed a gap that some might not even be aware of. It’s helped shift knowledge back to the individual.
I always point people to the WIRED article about Sergey Brin’s search for a Parkinson’s disease cure. ↩
WordCamp Boulder 2010 at Boulder Theater
After a couple solid weeks of work it finally came together. Thanks to the co-organizers and volunteers that helped make the event a success this past weekend.
I’m pretty pleased with how this retro Apple logo iPad decal turned out. Thanks, Alex
Dashboard.me: Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a holistic, real-time view of your Company’s key business metrics that looks just as stunning on an iPad as it does on a 60’ plasma?
This reminds me of the Panic Status Board which the entire nerd universe fell in love with when they first saw it. I’m looking forward to checking out dashboard.me in the near future.
“Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars.”
Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4
I had predicted my iPhone’s signal-strength indicator on T-Mobile was being generous and it seems that may be the case. I figured it was a carrier mis-match since I wasn’t on AT&T. If only I had a place to post these predictions…
Place an order with Amazon Tote and you get free batched “shipping” to your door once a week. No minimums, no obligations, no subscription. If you have Amazon Prime then you have two delivery days available each week. At first I thought this might cannibalize Prime subscriptions (I only have Prime so I can get free shipping in just a few days) but this just extends the benefit.
One of Crowd Favorite’s recent workshop projects has been to answer the question: is there a (professional sports) game tonight that would affect my commute? Now there’s a simple web app to answer that. Even living downtown, I think to myself “why are there so many people in my bar tonight?” and quickly I realize there’s a baseball game down the street. Additionally, Apple recently selected it as a Web App Staff Pick.
Billed as “online storage re-imagined”, put.io is my new favorite web app. In short, I can tell it to download a torrent, a direct file, or event rapidshare links and it performs the download. In the case of torrents, it will then continue to seed the download until it reaches a 1.0 ratio (unverified, I’m slightly suspect here). Then I can stream the download from their site, or zip up the files and download them all at once. And based on your storage plan, you can just leave the files up in “the cloud” to be downloaded and streamed again later, shared with a friend, etc. If you check it out, add me as a friend: devinreams
People think that the iPad is going to destroy a lot of wonderful things about computers: tinkering and programming, creating and publishing. So what does that leave us with? Consumption. Or in other words, being an audience.
I’ve heard this labeled as a problem: something to the clever tune of a “120% consumption rate” or: we have more people consuming than producing content online.
So what?
In short, I learn more, read more, and find more interesting thoughts and opinions that prompt me to write and share my own.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. In fact, I think this is a great thing. I’m spending more time with higher-quality content than if I were to turn on the TV, throw in a DVD, or spend 30 minutes browsing friend’s photos on Facebook.
Steve Jobs has famously said:
You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
By this definition, I feel the iPad is a computer and I bet Steve agrees. Many others are categorizing it as a television. People are not simply picking up iPads to turn off their brains (arguably Plants vs Zombies is a game dedicated to brains, but I digress), many are also picking up a new device that allows for meaningful consumption.
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As with last year1, Crowd Favorite will be hosting and organizing the local WordCamp conference for the Denver/Boulder area. If you don’t know, WordCamp is a WordPress conference for people of various backgrounds and interests (it’s like no other conference I can think of). I’m excited to see how our Hydeified approach works out this year. We’re always open to suggestions and ideas, feel free to reach out. Oh, and please don’t point out the irony of posting about a WordPress event to a tumblr blog. ;)
“People had ideas, innovations, technology and the Stone Age ended. And not because we ran out of stones.”
“My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn’t hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it.”
I’m fascinated by which apps people have on their iPad and iPhone home screens. In fact, I’m curious why people use one app over another and why they organize their screens the way they do. I’m sure other people are interested. iPad26.com is my Phase I attempt at exploring the best apps on the iPad. Feel free to submit your own iPad home screen.
“We’re doing the best we can, we’re fixing mistakes. But what happens is — people lie. And then they run to the press and tell people about this oppression, and they get their 15 minutes of fame. We don’t run to the press and say “this guy is a son of a bitch liar!” — we don’t do that.”
Here’s a little known secret: you can add footnotes to a tumblr blog by switching your Account Preferences to use the Markdown1 editor. I looked at Marco’s blog2 and, after reviewing the markup, realized there had to be an automatic way to generate his footnote links. After extensive searching to no avail, I realized Markdown Extra3 has a few extra syntaxes (like footnotes). Nice!4
Markdown is my favorite syntax for plain text documents (and now blogging). I use it almost all day at Crowd Favorite. ↩
Marco is the co-founder of Tumblr and a very smart developer. ↩
PHP Markdown Extra adds all the nicities you sometimes wish Markdown had. ↩
I got carried away to illustrate my point. But, if you liked this post, you should recommend me to be listed in the tumblr directory. Thanks!
↩Nothing frustrates people more than a website going down at the same time they’re in need of it’s services. Just look to twitter when Media Temple or Gmail experience unavailability; people lose their cool. Twitter was down so much that it accidentally popularized their growing pains via the fail whale.
I look at downtime a little differently, though. When I see all the hundreds of millions of WordPress.com blogs disappear for two hours, I think to myself “let’s see how they handle this.” I breathe a sigh of relief when I read that WordPress.com was able to recover from a catastrophic failure costing millions of lost pageviews (read: revenue). In other words, there’s a service provider that can come back from downtime and I have no questions about whether they can handle a similar incident in the future.
Performing regular backups is not enough. When magnolia admitted to not having backups of it’s users bookmarks, people were rightfully upset. But, even if they had been saved, would there have been a there a process in place to restore the data? Would service be restored in a timely manner? Even more, has the data ever been tested for recoverability or just thrown on a disk or into the cloud assuming everything is all set in case of emergency?
When I see pinboard, my favorite bookmarking service, take a spill twice in two weeks I rest peacefully. I go to sleep knowing that Maciej has a hot backup server that he can quickly switch to and continue running with just a few minutes of downtime. I love that. No data will be lost, just a hiccup in the day. One hiccup that, if it were to happen yet again, could easily be handled.
Of course, my data is portable in many of these cases. I can extract it at any time and back it up however I choose. There’s no reason to rely on my service provider. But, that’s really not the point of portability. Even though there may be no service agreement, you’re using a service with some (perhaps incorrect) assumptions that it will always be there and always work. Perhaps that’s an issue with free services, they need not provide any guarantee.
But even the services we pay heavily for: our web hosts, the photo storage sites, the hosted project management tools. Some of these sites and services have gone on untested and unproven. I’m a little more wary of what might happen if something unforeseen happens to them. Could flickr recover from an issue and maintain my priceless photos and memories. Could my business still operate if 37signals went down? Am I paying them for any guarantee of restored service? I honestly don’t know. Even web hosts store backups, but that snapshot may have included the virus that originally took your site down… that’s no help.
I love downtime because it shows me how a provider will handle an adverse situation both in and out of their control.
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Traveling with the iPad is great. I recently visited f8 and carried only the iPad in the Apple iPad Case (I was there for just the day). During the conference I could use it to pull up websites, twitter, email, and take notes; arguably the essential needs during a conference.
I also visited WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks later and, although I brought my MacBook Air (just in case), I ultimately only used it as a very large iPad charger back at the hotel.
Though others have talked about traveling with the iPad at length, here are a few of my observations:
In short, I will continue to use this as a laptop replacement at conferences or similar events. A laptop is either very heavy to carry or would require a bag. Typically all I’d want to do anyway is check email, tweet, or browse websites; the iPad handles these splendidly. Coupled with the excellent battery life and great experience while reading and watching video, I love traveling with the iPad.
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“Well, I sent the client the message. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn’t what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I hadn’t heard a question the Chair of the Board had asked me.”
Devin can be described as sensibly impulsive, consistently non-committal, and passionately impartial to the world around him. He manages bits and people at Crowd Favorite in Denver, CO.
Photo by Matt
