Apr 28

Pasteurized homogenized grade-A thought

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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:

  1. expression: idea catharsis from all the things that pile up in one’s head
  2. connection: a basal desire everyone has of connecting more intimately with other human beings
  3. uncertainty: that "you-neva-know-whatchu-gonna-get" thrill of the random backflow of ideas and people you meet
  4. archival: consolidation of insights and techniques and references in a spot you know you can come back to and refer others to
  5. credibility: hosting a living resume that anyone can traverse to learn your capabilities
  6. encoding: writing helps with retention and recall of concepts later on
  7. 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.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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:

QtvrThumbMamitas.jpg QtvrThumbChichenitza.jpg

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

© 2006 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mar 15

How to create a QTVR using a regular camera

Nerd, Tutorials, Uncategorized 4 Comments »

Quicktime Virtual Reality Panoramas are immersive scenes that show a 360deg view of one’s surroundings. There are high-end solutions for creating these scenes that utilize special optics and tripods but you can also create a decent one using the digital camera you already own. I’m down in Mexico once again working from the road and enjoying spring break. My buddy Dave has a beach house here in Rosarito and a few of us shot this QTVR last night from his rooftop:

Here’s the simple recipe for how we did it using my Canon SD550 digital camera:

  1. Setup the scene – You’re going for 30deg separation on each shot – you need a way of aligning the scene so you can shoot 12 images equidistant around the “clockface” where you are standing. If you’re in sand you can actually draw a clockface on the ground and align each shot on its corresponding numeral, otherwise you’ll need to find orthogonal objects to give you a reference for the “12, 3, 6 and 9” positions and estimate 1/3rd the distance between each for the intermediary pics. I was standing on tile so that made it easy.
  2. Shoot the pics – the goal is to produce a sequence of images in perfect vertical alignment with a minimal change in brightness amongst each pic. Hold the camera vertically, focus and shoot one pic on each of the twelve numerals of the clockface. If you’re on a slope, you want the camera perpendicular to the sky and not to the slope (if you position relative to the slope you’ll end up with a QTVR that looks like a sine curve). I generally disable the flash unless there’s bright sunlight raking from an angle and you need to compensate for the objects in shadow. You want to hold the camera at the same vertical height as you spin around.
  3. Produce the movie – there are tons of options but I found a $70 shareware windows app called Panorama Factory by Smoky City Design that does an amazing job of intelligently splicing the photos to produce the final scene. Import the twelve photos you just shot into the program and follow the cues in the wizard using all the standard defaults. You’ll need to rotate your sequence of images unless your digital camera does this automatically for you – Panorama Factory has an option on import to do this automatically. You’ll step through a series of about 6 screens on the wizard and arrive at a point where it lets you save the final image. Choose the QTVR option and jpg compression and adjust the slider for quality depending on the delivery format (CD or Web) and how small you want to make the final file.

That’s it. Once you perfect the process of creating the QTVR, try experimenting with the advanced hotspot features to create a series of linked scenes that make a full virtual tour. Some camera vendors bundle QTVR software with their products – it’s probably a good idea to check the software that came with your camera before buying anything extra.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Mar 02

Directions of Healthy Balls

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This is just too awesome to not post- I was in a Japanese antique store yesterday getting some furniture for our office and I saw some of those clangy metal spheres you twirl in your hands that supposedly help you relax. After reading the instructions I had to buy them:

Dude, you had me at "Dalls."

A funny site that aggregates these kinds of mis-translations is Engrish.com– check it out.

Feb 20

My Treo likes to reboot

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First off, I love this phone. I think it’s the greatest convergence device ever made. In its defense I work it extremely hard- my treo runs java, acrobat, google maps, excel, word and a bunch of other apps I use daily. It can record phonecalls, give me directions, take hours of video, show me current flight times, play mp3’s, read RSS, sync with all my info, and can probably pilot the space shuttle with a little more tweaking. Right now it can do just about anything except send or receive phonecalls. Instead it has taken a liking to rebooting every 15secs when it’s in phone mode.

The guy at the Cingular store said I needed to upgrade the firmware. Having remembered seeing a post by Ben Forta warning that this was a messy upgrade, I googled around a bit and confirmed that there are many horror stories from people saying the new firmware is more unstable than the last. My phone is past the point of instability though and is now unusable at this point so I figured I have nothing to lose by trying the new firmware. So I read through the instructions and dove into the process.

I downloaded the installer for my CNG version, fired it up and saw the intimidating screen on the Treo:

Step 1 Backup went smoothly- sweet. Step 2 Started flashing the ROM and got about 90% when a small error message popped up on the phone and said ROM upgrade unsuccessful. I threw some salt over my shoulder and hit the hotsync button again. This time it seemed to go through a different series of screens on the treo and threw the following error this time on my laptop:

Your Cingular device revision 1.02 cannot be updated to a Cingular device revision 1.17

Well that’s unnerving because if there’s some intermediary upgrade between .02 and .17, I sure can’t find it anywhere. I googled for that error and got nothing. I hit the palm site and searched their support for the error and unfortunately got the expected:

Crap. So I did a hard reset on the Treo, knocked on my wooden desk, threw another pinch of salt over my shoulder and tried the upgrade again. Now it’s in an endless reboot loop. I was half-expecting to see this error:

At least then I would feel like it was being straight up with me. I’m hesitant to go back to the Cingular store tomorrow as last time I was there their idea of custotmer service was spelling out the URL of the support site for me. And all in all, I have found Cingular’s service to be infinitely better than Sprint’s hamstermaze . At this point I think the best chances of resolution are if anyone happens to have a good contact at Cingular who would sympathize and hook me up with a new 650. If you have such a contact I would be greatly-indebted as I do really love this phone and Palm OS and would seriously like to keep using it. This is more a testament to a great device than anything- when you’re willing to put up with this kind of frustration to keep it. My Israeli roommate tells me that cellular stores in Israel are entirely different and will bend over backwards to please customers- they’ll rip open a box and give you a new phone on the spot to keep you happy. All this hot on the heels of yesterday’s toilet incident (read below). Here’s hoping that there’s an Israeli guy working the counter tomorrow…

UPDATE: I went to the Cingular store and they dialed the support phone number for me. I explained my situation to the Customer Service person on the phone line. Fortunately I came in 4 days under my warranty expiration on my treo and they shipped me a new one. The call to them was 15min and pleasant, I had the phone on my doorstep 16hrs later with $7 expedited shipping fee. I popped the battery, simcard and sylus into the new one and I’m back in business. fyi: i’ve been relying on skype for phone service the last few days and skype 2.0 is amazing for call quality- zero detectable latency, they really got it right. The only real bummer was reinstalling all the apps back to the Treo from scratch. Here’s a quick list of URL’s for anyone who needs to do the same:

The only caveat is I had to reinstall palm desktop to get my outlook conduits working again. It required a reboot before it successfully synced but now all is as it was before the firmware upgrade. I just saw Forta reporting a nasty CS experience w/ Cingular. I guess it’s all relative – I have found them insanely more helpful than Sprint (but then i’ve had oral surgery that was less painful than sprint csr calls).

So just to reiterate:
I love the Treo 650.
I love Cingular.
I hate this firmware update.

Avoid the upgrade if you possibly can unless your phone is running the old firmware and is still under warranty in which case you are better served taking a shot at the upgrade while they will still replace your phone in the event that you brick it.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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Feb 20

What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever had to do?

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Was hoping someone could beat mine from last night… I won’t even describe the scene as our upstairs toilet overflowed with the –ahem– “contents” of the bowl spilling over, well, yea- not good. And the water valves were rusted permanently in the on position. Oh and did I mention I was wearing flip flops? The funny thing is, as bad as it sounds, it’s still a distant second to a Mexico experience I had a few years ago. I’ll refrain from posting that one out of decency (and fear of creating the internet-wide version of the “ultimate barf-o-rama” in Stand By Me). Can anyone beat this one though? What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever had to do?

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