Oct 25

Just curious. Here are the services for which I’ve written checks in the past month:

  • Rhapsody
  • LinkedIn
  • Flickr
  • iContact
  • Ning
  • AuthorizeNet
  • MyFax
  • Quickbooks Assisted Payroll
  • Adsense
  • StumbleUpon
  • There are a kajillion other free services I use but I’m interested in hearing which ones people find valuable enough to purchase.

    Oct 18

    Tuesday night I did a presentation for the San Diego Java User Group on how to use Trac to manage the development a software project. Below is a video capture of that talk (~45min). We cover the big picture of what’s involved in effective project management, the qualities of what makes a good tool and then we walk through hands-on usage of Trac in a real project scenario to demonstrate how it fulfills these objectives.

    I’ve also made the resources I used in the talk available for download including the slides, the notes and the final state of the from the demo so you can actually play with the exact data we used. Big thanks to Paul Webber for allowing me to present for the group. There were some great questions asked and I even learned some new stuff about Trac like the Mylyn Connector that allows you to interact with your tickets right from within Eclipse. There’s also a shorter video screencast that covers a subset of this talk (the screen is more readable than the projector in the video).

    Sep 30

    The book Made to Stick by the Heath brothers, Dan and Chip, is a safari tour of the elements of effective messaging. What is it that makes certain ideas resonate and survive while others immediately fade? Not surprisingly, the messages from the book themselves stick well and there were a ton of great stories with nuggets of insight in each.

    Rather than try to hash through everything in a long post as I did with Buzzmarketing, I figured I’d try a different approach. I captured the notable stories on a single page via doodles that trigger a memory of each story and its meaning. I’ve scanned that page and created an image-mapped graphic with a text snippet summarizing each insight.

    The most interesting takeaway for me in reading this book is a “meta” realization that came not from anything particular within the book but rather from thinking about this book in relationship to other marketing books I’ve read (Anatomy of Buzz, Buzzmarketing, Freakonomics and Tipping Point). A discussion of that relationship merits it’s own post but the critical insight here is that for a message to be re-transmitted it must first stick with the recipient. The achievement of the sticking factor is a prerequisite for buzz-worthiness to ever be possible (ie. a virus endowed with traits that make it highly contagious will have zero effectiveness if it can’t survive within the host long enough to be spread).

    The takeaway is that we spend a great deal of energy trying to spread the word when we would be better served to improve the longevity of the word for the people that it reaches. It’s not what you come away with that ultimately matters- it’s what stays with you over time. Along the lines of a post I wrote awhile back called “If an elevator pitch falls in the woods…” – the weakest link of the re-transmissability of a message is its stickiness, not its buzz-worthiness. The notes I drew up from reading Made to Stick are mostly for my own edification of these concepts and to have a reference for the future, but hopefully you find them useful as well.

    Sep 24

    Wow. This thing is great on so many levels. With the exception of one conspicuously-missing feature, I’d say Apple has a game-changing device on their hands.

    The void that this product fills


    On the continuum of multimedia-based, time-wasting activities there is a gap. If traditional television sits at the extreme of the passive / linear / spoon-fed type of media consumption, surfing the web and reading blogs is at the opposite end requiring too much effort and brain involvement for times when you just want to decompress. I just finished setting up an Apple TV box this evening and I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now and this thing falls squarely in the middle of that continuum as an easy way to consume digital multimedia without having to sit in front of a computer screen.

    The Apple TV allows you to sync your iTunes via wireless and watch/listen via your entertainment system. It can aggregate media from multiple computers, display photos and album art in the background and has an interface for surfing youtube content (provided it’s connected to the Internet). There was an Apple TV at a birthday party I was at last weekend and it was a blast passing the remote around and be able to pull up an old SNL episode or Mr. T singing about his mom. In the same way that the Nintendo Wii transforms a typically anti-social activity of gaming into a social experience, the Apple TV makes for a fun way of exploring digital content.

    Setup happiness

    The setup was almost as painless and intuitive as configuring a JumpBox. Running the wires for the component video took the longest time of any step. Once we got the wiring right the on-screen setup of the Apple TV from that point was a snap and took all of about 30sec to connect to the hotspot and start syncing to my iTunes. We did have to disable mac address filtering for it to connect. You pair it like you would a bluetooth device by entering in a combo on the iTunes of the computer which you wish to sync and it does its thing. About an hour later it had successfully synced some 2000 songs, a handful of video podcasts and a movie. You’ll want to pull down the album artwork for your iTunes library if you don’t already have it because it makes flipping through your music feel like flipping through a CD collection.

    Usability

    The visual interface is clean and what you’d expect from Apple. The remote is the same one that comes with the MacBook laptop and has only a few buttons- it makes the universal remote on the coffee table look like a monster. You navigate a tree of options based on Music, Movies, TV shows, Podcasts, Youtube and device settings. The only thing that’s awkward is typing in characters for a Youtube search via an on-screen keyboard.

    Valuable real estate for Apple

    I don’t know the numbers on prevalence of Apple TV’s at this point- I would guess it’s just a sliver of the market. But this device represents the “last mile of track” for Apple in a digital entertainment railway into the living room. I can see how owning the iTunes player, the iTunes store and the Apple TV device gives them a wildly-valuable distribution channel for digital media assets.

    My perception of the Apple TV before using it was “this could be neat but it seems like a technology solution chasing a problem.” My feelings after having used it is that it makes you forget that you’re using the Internet – it’s more like a Tivo experience than an Internet surfing experience. The interface, transitions and usability that went into it make you want to explore and play with it. By taking a situational vs. feature-centric approach, they zeroed in on the scenarios that people want to use this for and nailed it. There’s only a few minor deficiencies at this point – but like the iPhone, this is a strong first showing for a product.

    Enhancements I’d like to see

  • So the obvious question is “where’s the Rhapsody integration?” They have Youtube integration – this is a glaring omission. There has to be a deal to be made there that makes sense for both companies. They have the ability to log you into your Youtube account so I can’t imagine it’s a technical issue that prevents you from authenticating your Rhapsody acct. It has to be either a political or business issue. Perhaps they see the unlimited access to your Rhapsody music eating away at iTunes purchases? I don’t buy that argument though- there’s no impulse buys via Apple TV like in iTunes because you still have to purchase via your computer.
  • Wireless keyboard – it has wireless built in but I don’t believe it has bluetooth. I don’t know how much of a stretch it would be for them to add the bluetooth capability or if there’s may an IR-based way of achieving this but it would be nice to see integration with their wireless keyboard. Typing text using the on-screen keyboard is clunky. Of course doing so makes it more like a computer at that point so I’m not completely opposed with how it is now- just would be nice to have that option.UPDATE: the iPhone “Remote” app solves the text entry issue. Sweet.
  • Be able to treat it as an external HD – I’m running out of disk space on my laptop. I’ve been meaning to buy an external hard drive and offload my iTunes library. I was hoping that I could kill two birds with the Apple TV having it serve that function but it seems it can only sync what exists on my laptop (ie. removing a file from my Mac propagates to the Apple TV and kills it there as well). There may be a way to create a current playlist of all iTunes media, sync it and then disable syncing before removing it from the laptop but that’s hackish. I’d like to see an easy way to treat the Apple TV as an authoritative media base station subscribed to various content and have the syncing work in the other direction with my laptop pulling only a subset of those files.UPDATE:Boxee solves this issue.
  • Conclusion

    This is cool device. I had tinkered with the Democracy player and Joost on my laptop awhile back thinking “wow, power to the people. I’m going to start watching non-mainstream content more” but then I never did because at the end of the day, sometimes you just want to plop on the couch and hit the remote. The Apple TV moves that unique, independent content into the living room where it can compete in watch-ability with movies and TV. I wouldn’t say drop what you’re doing and race out to get one but this definitely a neat addition to a media center and sure to further erode the receding coastline of the TV networks.

    Sep 19

    So a couple friends and I are nominated to do a panel at South by Southwest this year in Austin. Voting closes midnight Friday and we need your help. If you want to learn how to bankrupt a startup in 5 easy steps, take a quick sec and vote for our panel. It’s my buddy Josh Strebel from Obuweb, Noah Kagan of OkDork.com, Ryan Carson of Carson Systems and myself and should be an entertaining and instructional talk with all of us having fumbled our way through the startup minefield.

    Signup for the panel picker mini-site takes all of about two seconds and doesn’t require a confirmation email. While you’re there, vote for my partner’s panel on virtualization for developers and these other fine panelist candidates from AZ.

    Sep 13

    Get back to work.

    I’ll say it again: some of you have literally made a job out of preventing other people from doing theirs. Stop, go back to work and do something useful. You busy yourself with the task of harassing people who are coming to this country and busting their ass with insanely hard work in order to make a better life for their families. Granted, they don’t have the appropriate papers to be here but instead of wasting your time trying to keep them out, why not embrace the reality of this situation and find a workable solution to cope with what is happening? Somehow along the way you have confused citizenship with what it means to be American. What these people are doing is in fact the very essence of what it means to be American. Remember that we came uninvited to this country to escape a crappy situation at home and build a better life. We certainly didn’t get our papers from the Indians when we arrived. And yet because the illegals that come over now lack official documents stamped with official symbols, you decide to waste ungodly sums of money raised through the efforts of those of us who are working in a futile attempt to prevent them from being here. And the worst is that they’re doing jobs that nobody wants to do anyways. Frankly, those people are way more American than the ones that are born here who choose to sit on a couch and collect welfare.

    I’m an Arizona native of thirty-two years. I’ve had the privilege of watching Phoenix evolve to become the fifth largest city in the US. It’s a place of incredible potential and yet we are home to some of the most right-wing, close-minded curmudgeons imaginable. We have a sheriff that makes his prisoners wear pink underwear because he can. We have wacko, sanctioned vigilantes at the Mexico border called “minute men” who are armed with rifles and pistols volunteering to pick off anyone who comes across. I love this State but we are famous for our “Rambo-style” idiocy and legislative blunders like the conversion natural gas debacle. About once a year we seem to fall on our face with a new piece of ill-conceived legislation from our government. And in keeping with that tradition this year we now have this latest disaster-of-a-law (House Bill 2779) that is supposedly the magic cure for stopping illegal immigrants. Let me explain why this is not going to work.

    I am not a lawyer but from what I can understand from reading this bill, this law which becomes effective 1/1/08 proposes to attack the problem of illegal immigration by giving the State government teeth to go after businesses that hire an illegal. Sounds great on paper, right? Consider though that one infraction from a company doing business in AZ made unknowingly can result in suspension of their business license. A second infraction discovered (not committed) during the probationary period results in the permanent revocation of their business license. Companies headquartered in AZ that have employees in other states? All employees layed off. Companies with thousands of employees where two somehow slipped past HR’s eligibility screening? Goodnight. Critical infrastructure companies like hospitals, public transportation, utility companies? Not exempt. The obvious flaws with this legislation that somehow escaped those signing it into law:

  • How does the State propose to process the influx of complaints? The government staffing necessary to receive and enforce the complaints – where does that money come from?
  • How about the fun new burden on HR in every company in Arizona? They’re required to maintain compliance by periodically re-verifying each employee’s I-9? How many person-hours per year across every company in AZ will be required to perform this task and from where will these hours come?
  • Provided that resources magically manifest on both the government and business sides of the equation, do you really believe this top-down approach is going to stop some guy from hiking across the desert or piling into a van to come to America when his family is starving and there’s no way to provide for them at home?
  • So what we end up with is the same number of illegal immigrants entering the country now with zero chance of doing anything productive for society once they’re here. They’ll still have the same starving family at home so either they’ll turn to crime to raise the money necessary to feed them or you’ll see them begging on the median at the highway on-ramp. All this law does is guarantee extra headaches for employers, added taxes to fund more beaucracy and paper-pushing in government, and the displacement of illegals from constructive jobs to crime and destitution.

    I love Arizona but I’m afraid this is shaping up to be another faceplant in our tradition of ill-conceived legislative moves. This bill is not the product of trying to come to a realistic solution, it’s clearly the re-election tactic of a few politicians wanting to win votes by pinning the hard-ass immigration star on their lapel. Were they to be responsible for actually implementing this (beyond signing the parchment) there is no way in hell this would fly. We need to take a Freakonomics perspective here and ensure incentives are at work at every juncture of solving this problem. We need to establish a scorecard for how effectively the bills passed by each Senator actually performed at accomplishing their objectives- basically a fantasy league for Senators that tracks what they did. Campaigning becomes dramatically less important at that point- just look at their scorecard for how well they did last term.

    So to summarize: yes I realize we need some kind of mechanism to deal with illegal immigration but this law is not the way. Piling up sandbags to prevent a flood works in situations where there are acute and infrequent downpours. But when it’s the ocean that’s steadily encroaching, sandbags aren’t going to help- you need to rethink the problem and figure out how to work within the reality of the new terrain. As cheesy as the acting in this movie is, it has an interesting premise: what would happen if all the illegal immigrants suddenly vaporized? Think about it: agricultural industry would grind to a halt, restaurants would be left with nobody in the kitchen, good luck finding a gardener, the construction industry would collapse… These people perform jobs that nobody else wants to do. Who is going to tar a roof in a 120deg Arizona summer? Certainly not the guy sitting on his couch collecting a welfare check, he’s busy watching Jerry Springer. Rather than wasting immense resources to “vaporize” these immigrants, we need to figure out how to utilize them. Think amnesty programs. Think multi-lingual centers for processing new entrants and having probationary “parole office” arrangements whereby these people check in, contribute taxes on their earnings and are accounted for. Contrary to belief, reduction in the supply of menial labor jobs does not take away gainful employment from American citizens, it frees them up to do more interesting, fulfilling and skilled work.

    I’ve already wasted too much time in writing this letter. And you as well in reading it.
    Get back to work.

    sean

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