April 2006 - Scrollin' On Dubs

Apr 29

Ballsiest idea for a tax return ever

Uncategorized 2 Comments »

“Value-for-Value” as my friend Ed Nusbaum would say… if I hadn’t already filed my taxes this year I would try this approach:
************************

Dear Internal Revenue Service:

Enclosed you will find my 2005 tax return showing that I owe $3,407.00 in taxes. Please note the attached article from the USA Today newspaper dated 12 November, wherein you will see that the Pentagon (Department of Defense) is paying $171.50 per hammer and NASA has paid $600.00 per toilet seat.
I am enclosing four (4) toilet seats (valued @ $2,400) and six (6) hammers (valued @ $1,029), which I secured at Home Depot, bringing my total remittance to $3,429.00. Please apply the overpayment of $22.00 to the “Presidential Election Fund,” as noted on my return. You can do this inexpensively by sending them one (1) 1.5″ Phillips head screw (see aforementioned article from USA Today newspaper detailing how H.U.D. pays $22.00 for each 1.5″ Phillips head screw). One such screw is enclosed for your convenience in matching the correct type of screw.

It has been a pleasure to pay my tax bill this year, and I look forward to paying it again next year.

Sincerely,

TAXPAYER
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note- this came on a printed page from my grandmother so I don’t know to whom it can be attributed but it’s genius. Odds of the IRS finding the humor in this…zilch. Odds of getting audited after this stunt…solid to very solid.

Apr 28

Pasteurized homogenized grade-A thought

Uncategorized 1 Comment »

pasteurizedThought

Paul Scrivens over on 9rules Network recently advised prospective applicants for their network to maintain consistency in the frequency with which they post. I’ve seen this advice given elsewhere so I don’t mean to pick on Paul but I respectfully disagree with this. Blogging is not about informative journalism, it’s about taking what’s in your head and bubbling it up into a virtual playground which extends beyond the earshot of the people you normally share your ideas with and making them available for anyone on the playground to consume, synthesize, criticize, remix and respond. It’s not about grammatically-perfect language, absence of spelling errors or slick design (though those elements help the digestibility and transmissibility of your thoughts)- it’s about unadulterated expression of the things that are core to one’s being and it’s about connecting with other people on a very fundamental level. The term blog when used as a verb still feels hoaky to me because it seems to imply that you’re practicing a different art that involves customary practices. Dude, you’re not- you’re writing. Period. It just so happens that your publishing mechanism incorporates certain features that make it easy for people to monitor and respond to your words but there’s nothing inherent to this act of writing when it’s on a blog that should demand it occur on a certain schedule. I went 3wks this month focused on other things and now this is my 3rd post in the past 12hrs… If you’re looking for traditional journalism with regular frequency of publishing you pick up a trade publication or periodical (ahem, periodic-intervals…). Imposing artificial consistency and forcing regularity on one’s blog posts robs them of the characteristic that makes them interesting to begin with- their "raw-ness."

The critical thing to understand here is that the people writing the interesting blogs out there are not writers by trade- they are wacky people in weird professions doing bold things and chronicling what happens. It’s the realest of the reality shows- an uncut, from-the-source account of what is happening. Would you rather read the blog of a media journalist or the blog of a deep-sea treasure hunter? How about a forest fire smoke jumper? Or an arctic explorer who hiked to the North Pole on foot ? Call me crazy but a few weeks without posts from any of those people would be completely acceptable. I don’t proclaim to have nearly as sexy a job as any of those people but I’m extremely excited about the projects I’m part of right now and I’ll go stretches of several weeks without posting and instead focusing intensely on other pursuits. Being able to write at will and not adhere to any deadlines (I believe) is core to the proposition of what makes blog content compelling. If you have ever tried writing a piece of music by a schedule it’s the same effect. So "why do you write?" is the question my buddy Keith asked. It’s a stew of motivations for me, namely:

expression: idea catharsis from all the things that pile up in one’s head
connection: a basal desire everyone has of connecting more intimately with other human beings
uncertainty: that "you-neva-know-whatchu-gonna-get" thrill of the random backflow of ideas and people you meet
archival: consolidation of insights and techniques and references in a spot you know you can come back to and refer others to
credibility: hosting a living resume that anyone can traverse to learn your capabilities
encoding: writing helps with retention and recall of concepts later on
exposure: shameless self-promo for whatever you do and a way of reaching new potential customers

Running your raw observations through any purification process dillutes the effect of each of the above and removes the edginess – at that point you’re not truly L-I-V-I-N as Wooderson would say. Google’s blog as useful as the info is, has the distinct flavor of being run through five approval layers and tweaked by marketing folks until all the impurities are gone and it "meets criteria for alignment with corporate vision" or whatever. What’s funny is getting syndicated by 9Rules is on my laundry list of goals – arguably criticizing the advice of their founder is counterproductive to the realization of that goal and yet reserving one’s honest opinion for the sake of advancing is an empty win and in doing so you trash the validity of what you’re you’re trying to get syndicated. And therein lies the rub…but that’s just my non-journalism-major take on this subject. Oh and I swore I would never fall into the trap of blogging about the act of blogging like Dennis but here I am doing it- I suppose it’s inevitable at some point.

Apr 28

Google Sketchup and Google Desktop: Brain Edition

Google, Nerd, Ponderings 2 Comments »

I just downloaded Google Sketchup and went through their tutorials. I did two years of work with 3d studio max creating animations for jury trials and I gotta say this is interesting. From a 50,000-ft strategic view, it seems perplexing why Google would release a 3d modeling application when they’re typically thought of as a search company. And yet when you look more closely this move is hugely-consistent with John Battelle’s assessment of them building a massive database of intent.

If you think about what Google really is- they’re not a search engine company at all. They’re not even an ad company. They’re an information broker that is making their commission through different angles by hooking people up with the knowledge they seek. Their mission statement says their goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” By their own words they want to become the librarian for the card catalogue of everything that currently exists. But realistically their goal is more ambitious than that: it’s to know exactly what everyone wants at any given moment that does not yet exist for them. If the analogy of energy in its kinetic vs. potential states can be extrapolated to “information as energy,” Google is far more interested in the “potential” side of the equation. In fact I would argue that they are closer to Joseph Campbell and Karl Jung in their motivations than they are to Rupert Murdoch in terms of desire to create a real-time map the world’s collective intelligence at any given moment and broker the info exchange vs. scraping profiles on Myspace and targeting users with personalized ads. Of course they’re a public company now so it’s not entirely up to Google anymore what Google will become…

The SketchUp program from a tactical perspective is the distillation of the basics of a 3d modeling environment without the animation capabilities. It’s extremely friendly, simple, intuitive and their quickstart tutorial is solid. Compare the toolset from SketchUp on the left to that of 3dsmax on the right:

It’s reminiscent of the way Flash first felt as a vector drawing program after having used the more-powerful-yet-complex Adobe Illustrator for so long. The most interesting promise of this 3d app is not just in that it reduces the barriers for the layperson to be able to model fictitious things – it’s greatest value is in its integration with google earth. It will allow people to imagine things and overlay them where they would exist in the real world (or the “big room” as my buddy Dave calls it) and then share these dreamed objects with others. The teaser example graphic on their homepage shows an animation of a 3d model planning of a wooden deck evolving on the back of a house presumably tantalizing the viewer with the prospect of conceiving new home additions and overlaying these dreamed additions on reality via google earth. WOW- so Google essentially wants to:

know what your dreams are (exactly how you envision that log cabin you want to build in the mountains)
and where you want to manifest them (30 yards away from the creek and just south of the rock outcropping- lon/lat GPS coords…)

Understandable now why this app is compelling and very consistent with their strategy…It’s them giving a virtual lego set to the world and watching what people make with it – a more open-ended way of asking “what do you really want?” Armed with that intelligence they will have all the essential ingredients to broker info that helps get you there and doesn’t just satisfy your sterile web searches but that hones on the emotions and the passions that are driving your searches, and THAT (any salesperson will tell you) is where the the true power is in being able to close a customer.

The real question is, “which will be the first bionics company that google purchases?” And once that happens, how far off is it until the release of “Google Desktop: Brain edition?” There have been huge advances in bionics recently and scientists can now patch into the visual and motor cortex and to the point to facilitate sight in blind people, hearing in deaf people and even instill telekinesis in monkeys (no joke – listen to the podcast to hear how they’ve done it). My question to you is: if you could upgrade your brain to jack directly into google’s information database but the tradeoff was that they got to index your brain, is that a pill you would willingly swallow?

Apr 27

Prediction for 37signals’ next move

Ponderings 4 Comments »

A public prediction for the next move by the five-person company that is taking the development world by storm: you will see 37signals launch a guild/certification within the next few months whereby developers pay $x to get "37sigified" and receive a plaque and a snippet of javascript that let’s them display a badge on their blog substantiating that they know how to "Get Real." This is the move that makes the most strategic sense. This post on O’Reilly Radar says it best:

37signals is taking “vertical integration” to new heights — now they not only make the software everyone is using, write the books everyone is reading to know how to use the software, sell the PDFs everyone is reading to know how to sell the software they’re writing, and design the interfaces everyone is copying, they’re also putting the butts of the developers they’ve trained into seats at the startups they’ve inspired with their new job network

The next logical play for them will be to capitalize on all the street cred and developer loyalty they have amassed thus far, or at least that should be their next play. Kimbro says, "those guys are just printing money" and that is the true mark of an important company when they can manifest dollars at will from the value they represent. The developer certification program would not only allow them to print another batch of dinero for cashflow but the nature of the program would also extend their reach and blow up their already disgustingly good Pagerank and visibility by having developers display a small 37s logo on their blogs and link back to them. Those guys are positioned for world domination in 2007 and they have to know it.

Apr 22

Kernel Dump Q2 2006

Travels, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

Starting a new monthly tradition, here’s a smorgasbord of thoughts, none of which is significant to merit its own post but all of which deserve mention.

Buying a place in Mexico

I just did it. This one will get its own post at some point as I intend to journal the entire process of what’s involved in legally establishing ownership rights to coastal property in Mexico. Basically, Americans are not allowed to own property within a certain proximity to the coastline in MX (200mi?). The way it’s achieved is via what’s called a “fidei comisso” or a trust established through a Mexican bank with yourself listed as the sole beneficiary. The trust is renewable indefinitely and gives you all the rights of ownership to be able to deed, inherit, sell, whatever. My friend Benny and I just picked up this pre-construction condo in Playa del Carmen (shhhh don’t tell anyone, this place is poised to explode). There are a bunch of great pics from my college reunion trip down there last week that show how nice Playa is. I’ve almost perfected the art of the tripodless QTVR and I shot two down there, one on Mamita’s beach:

oh and here’s a video that shows where the Mayan athlete’s played this wicked game of cricket where the winner got beheaded as a sacrifice to the gods. Talk about motivation for point shaving and throwing the games… jeesh. My plan is to live down in Playa for about 3mos out of the year next year once G7 is in full swing with steady revenues. Their internet is fast and living is cheap.

Airplane headphones off indicator idea

So this is a random thought, but on the way back from MX both times the flight attendant lady had to come by and tap me on the shoulder to say “the pilot has announced you need to turn off your headphones.” I had to take my headphones off and ask her to repeat what she just said- there’s zero chance that anyone with headphones on would hear the pilot tell them to shut them off- they need a visual indicator. I’m thinking every airplane still has the antiquated “No smoking” illuminated signs left over from the 80’s when there were actually times when people could smoke on the plane. These signs stay illuminated 100% of the time- what’s the point? They should really just paint a “no smoking” sign and swap out that illuminated sign with a “no electronics” indicator so that passengers have a visual cue when to disable things like headphones. Audible cues don’t work too well when you’re jamming out…

Art of the Start and Purple Cow

I finished both and they were each good in their own right. I should really write up cliff’s notes on each one but the 30sec take on these books is:

AOTS – dense book packed with many genuine, actionable insights from Guy Kawasaki – the core essence of what he proposes is to focus on creating meaning rather than creating money. I’m a big fan of this guy and his syle, he was the product evangelist for the Macintosh and he has a knack for slicing through the “bullshitake” as he calls it and getting to what’s real. He’s very 37signals-esque in this respect and anyone who is starting up a business or a project of any kind for that matter would do well to read this book. I also recommend tuning into his blog which is also excellent and obviously interactive and current.
PC – Seth Godin crams a lot of nuggets of wisdom into this short book. It had aromas of both Gladwell’s books, Tipping Point and Blink and a smidge of Christiensen’s Innovator’s Solution, but the idea is that either your business is remarkable (like a purple cow) or it’s invisible. The covers all the different ways you can transform your idea to be remarkable. It discusses why the traditional evolution of companies cause incumbent businesses to grow complacent and fail to innovate beyond their first home run. Seth recommends poaching from big marketing budgets and channeling those funds into internal skunk works R&D projects. Focus on creating a killer product that people will rave about rather than marketing to people to tell them how good your blah product is.

Grid7 update: McPing and Rawjobs

A bunch of people have asked me what’s up with Grid7- we definitely haven’t kept the homepage current with the progress we’ve been making but in our defense, we’re focusing strictly on development at the moment. We launched the first G7 project which is not sexy in itself but serves as a cornerstone for the bigger picture of the structured blogging initiative in which we’re engaged. McPing is live but not officially announced, you can take a sneak peek and we’ll make the announcement once it’s loaded with useful data (disclaimer: we’ve had server instability issues this past week so the site is intermittently down until we move hosts). Here’s how it works:

Structured blogging is the passion of my partner Kimbro and it’s where blogging/RSS is all headed. There are three moving parts to the structured blogging thing- the content feeders, the notification router and the end-user directory services. MCping is essentially the Ping-o-matic of structured blogging and serves as the librarian that knows where all the feeds are and passes realtime notifications through to the edge aggregators that are monitoring the feeds. Again, it’s not visually sexy (but then again neither is Ping-o-matic) – it’s a foundational piece for us though and finally nice to have something live as our stake in the ground. The first edge aggregator vertical we’re tackling is the job postings market. The site were building is called RawJobs (raw as in, “the stem directly from other blogs using structured blogging to post them, no middlemen involved). To the end user it will function not much different than all the other job sites out there except for one major distinction under the hood: how the jobs postings are acquired – it’s entirely open in its approach and anyone who posts using the jobs micro-content definition format will have their listing appear on RawJobs by virtue of their use of this format. Pretty slick.

More to come on this stuff as we roll out the structured blogging initiative. We’ve setup a Grid7 blog and just need to customize it before adding it to the site. In the meantime if you’re interested in learning more about structured blogging, there are a ton of resources we’ve clipped on our “Tag” page.

Cold Turkey Adult Prom Gig

Cold Turkey played one of the most fun shows of our musical career the night after I returned from Playa. I setup a flickr account for the band and posted a slideshow on our site.It was a wild time and proved that many people (myself included) still have a repressed desire to relive the 80’s hairmetal days. My brother had an emergency come up last minute and we found ourselves scrambling for a bass player the day before the show. Fortunately my boy Manny filled in and turned what could have been a disaster into one of the best performances we’ve had. Big ups to Dixon Oates for organizing this party- it became an overnight legend.

2 iPod Hacks

Does everyone know you can play audiobooks back at 1.5x their normal rate? The setting to achieve this is under Settings > Audiobooks > Faster – I haven’t figured out how to add podcasts and voice memos as audio books to appreciate this same benefit on other spoken word audio, but I’m sure there’s a way. I would think this would be mega-useful for any student that wanted to record a lecture via iPod and doze off or work on something else- he/she could digest the material in 2/3rds the time at a later point.
The “Hold” button on the top of the iPod can be used to hold it in the off position just as effectively as it holds it in the on position while working out or doing anything where buttons are inadvertently pressed. Maybe this was obvious but I just discovered it and it saved my batteries this trip (last time it got jostled around in my bag turning it on occasionally so my batteries were dead when I arrived)

Odeo and iTunes store review

I’m in the process of setting up a client with the capability to do weekly podcasts and distribute the audio he currently sells on CD via the iTunes store. I’ll blog what I learn once the iTunes store has been established but I can say that Odeo makes about as simple as it could be to record and syndicate a podcast via your site.

Massive Del.icio.us goodness

I finally got around to one of those much-procrastinated items on my todo list of transferring all my firefox bookmarks over to del.icio.us (btw, does anyone else find it a pain to write the word “D E L . I C I O .U S). There is a ton of gems in this pile – I didn’t realize that they had the ability to protect certain bookmarks so now I have all the server maintenance-related stuff in there as well which is nice because I can get to this stuff remotely if I’m not on my own laptop.

Good Movies

The Three Burials of Milkiado Estrada – obscure independent film that slipped under the radar. Well worth renting when it comes out. Also, Why We Fight – another independent that looks at the military industrial complex in the US and traces its origins back to WWII. The old footage of Eisenhower’s speeches cautioning the public to keep the MIC in check are eerily relevant today.

VPC / Eclipse filesave slowdowns

I had a day’s worth of hair pulling associated with this problem I’ve encountered where saving files in Eclipse over a mapped drive to a virtual PC instance takes like 15sec on each save. When you’re deep in development and you’re saving and testing repeatedly, that’s a serious morale killer and causes big delays. After ruling out various culprits, we sniffed the traffic on the network interface and discovered a shit-ton of chatter on the SMB protocol. I disabled the SVN browser plugin I had installed on eclipse and that seems to have helped and gotten filesave time down to about 5sec, but it’s still problematic. I was advised to eliminate the mapped network drive aspect as Eclipse has problems saving this way. I tried UNC paths but that was actually worse for me. My friend Benny recommended NFS which I’ll probably try next but the real solution here it sounds like is to get VMware running on one of the new Macbook Pro’s. Budget-permitting I hope to make that switch this summer…

Stop this ridiculous telcom bill

Take 2min and fill out this petition. It’s disturbing that they have this bill on the ballot and clearly the result of some slimly lobbying by big Telcom companies but this will pretty much ruin the Internet for people if it goes through. It’s the equivalent of asphalt companies in the US suddenly banding together and declaring that all streets are now toll roads… insane.

Avail for consulting

Lastly, my partner Kimbro and I will be available for consulting contracts shortly. He’s big time software architect and knows about 20+ languages. I’m talented with Coldfusion as a developer but my strong suit is in business process analysis and distilling true business requirements and managing the development of a project. Kimbro is avail now and I will be looking for the next contract around mid-may when I deliver the massive extranet we’ve created for ABC that helps them interact with their housing providers and social workers. If you have a relatively-large project and need consulting, get in contact with us.

Apr 05

Acknowledging good customer service

Kudos 2 Comments »

Contrary to posts I’ve read on the nightmares people have had with Dell, I had my third experience with their customer service yesterday and it was nearly flawless. I actually added a new category of feed called “Endorsements” to offset the “Rants” and acknowledge companies when they kick ass. Every computer breaks occasionally – you can’t fault a manufacturer for goods that wear out from usage – just like with people, it’s how they handle the problem when it happens that defines their character and all I can say is that this is the reason I bought a Dell in the first place. The experience of getting the repair was _nearly_ perfect and my only qualm with it was that they buried the service request form deep in their site and made me go through their troubleshooting wizard before displaying the ability to file a service request. I can see how this would help limit the number of unnecessary requests by forcing people to try their troubleshooting steps first but I knew this problem required filing a service request and spent about 15min hunting around their site for it before attempting the wizard.

So I’ve been hammering out code for ABC the past few days which is good, but the problem with hammering out code is that you hammer out your keyboard as well- my “d” key became ultra-sensitive on Monday and started generating the letter “d” spontaneously while I was typing. I’ve had my Inspiron 9300 for almost a year now and other than an SD reader that went bad this summer, this is the only problem I’ve had. It wasn’t a total showstopper for using the machine but it was definitely a nuisance and hindering my ability to type quickly because I was constantly deleting a bunch of “d’s” (deeezz nuuutz). I checked the dell.com site and found that I had 11 days remaining on warranty, floundered briefly on their site trying the livechat and looking for the service request form, finally found it by walking through their troubleshooting wizard and filled out the request form. I got an email an hour later from a human that said I didn’t have on-site warranty status and I would normally have to send them my laptop but that in light of the repair necessary and my expressed inability to go without a machine at this crucial time, they would drop a keyboard in the mail along with instructions on how to fix it (the beauty of human intervention over automated handling of this service request). Having never performed a keyboard transplant before I was skeptical about conducting this type of surgery myself but given that the hindrance in typing was becoming a real roadblock, it made more sense to try and fix it.

The next morning (yesterday) when I got to work, there was a new keyboard on the doorstep complete with tools and instructions on how to make the swap. Somehow between writing code, learning songs for our upcoming gig and dashing off to the Refresh meeting, I managed to perform a successful transplant of the keyboard and I’m now happily back in business. There was prefilled air bill in the box and I just repackaged the defective keyboard with the tools that were included and dropped it in the mail today. This is how it’s supposed to work, right? I have to give props to Dell for a stellar display of what good customer service should be.

On another note the Refresh meeting was probably the best I’ve attended so far and we had a lively round table discussion with about sixty participants of what’s involved in launching your own business. I recorded the audio and made it available here. If you’re outside of Phoenix, check www.refreshingcities.org to see if there’s a Refresh in your town yet – this is a very passionate group of people sharing insights about their trade. Big ups to James Archer from 40 Media for moderating this discussion.

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