Scrollin' On Dubs

Jan 07

Playa del Carmen

Ponderings, Travels 6 Comments »

is an amazing place. My friend Benny and I just got back from a 2wk trip there and took a bunch of good pictures. It was our first time and both of us are now looking into buying property there. Having been to quite a few places in MX (Mazatlan, Guadalajara, Puerto Penasco, Cabo San Lucas, Loretto, Rosarito, Ensenada, Tijuana, Nogales, Laredo) I can say that of every spot I’ve been so far Playa is definitely my favorite. It has a high concentration of European tourists and is also apparently a popular tourist spot for Mexicans so you end up with this melting pot effect of non-local Mexicans, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, Kiwis and Norweigans mixed in with a handful of Americans. With the recent devastation of neighboring Cancun and Cozumel from hurricane Wilma, I really think it’s poised to explode in value. It reminds me a lot of how Puerto Vallarta used to be ten years ago when it was still an undiscovered gem . I’m glad the closest major airport is an hour away because it should help keep it “inconvenient enough” to deter the typical gringos and attract only the more mellow travelers.

Observations and Reflections

Mexico trips are always these rejuvenating experiences and before the excitement of the trip wears off and and the daily grind resumes, I want to write about the random things we observed and experienced. It’s surprising how after only 2wks of not driving an automobile, it feels completely foreign. Other stuff that seems strange right now:

throwing your toilet paper IN the toilet. Seriously. They are all on septic down there so you have to put it in the waste basket (which sounds gross but it’s just the way it’s done). Try doing that for 2wks and I promise you that you will have to make a conscious effort to actually drop it in the bowl when you come back.
drinking fountaiins: we take them for granted. All of Mexico’s water system is non-potable and used only for washing purposes. It’s odd to come back and be able to drink from the tap or a public drinking fountain.
the air and food are not as fresh here which is so funny because the stereotypical image of Mexico tends to be a dirty town like Tijuana and that’s just not representative of the rest of the country. Phoenix in the winter has a bad pollution problem with the inversion layer that traps our smog close to the ground. Both Benny and I noticed we felt significantly healthier day to day down there and that the air in Phx actually has a bad taste that is only noticeable when you come back to it. Same goes with produce and poultry, in Playa it’s all grown right there so it’s tough to beat the freshness.

PDC is not perfect- it’s definitely humid and supposedly their summers are unbearably hot with 100deg temperatures and 100% humidity. There’s a very real possibility though that you could set up a small office there for six months out of the year. Their internet connectivity was actually very good. I ran a traceroute from an internet cafe and there were surprisingly few hops to my server.

Actually I wasn’t intending to check email at all but we came back to the hotel one morning to find an note the hotel staff had posted on our door relayed from an ex-FBI detective who was working with my father on a big case in Florida. He needed server logs to confirm a hypothesis and I was able to assist his investigation remotely by providing by using RDP to get in and give him what he needed. Remote access is great.

I read two Paulo Coelho books down there (Eleven Minutes and The Zahir). Coelho books are ideal vacation reading material and while neither one was as good as my favorite Coelho book of all time, The Alchemist, they were both good. The Zahir hit very close to home and made me realize I have a zahir of my own right now, a face indellibly etched in my thoughts that refuses to leave. Coelho is the latest addition to the smart people list- he writes with a simplicity and honesty that nobody else does. Probably the greatest testament to his skill as a writer is that his books have been translated into every known language. If you’ve never read the Alchemist, you owe it to yourself to check out that book.

What worked well

Before we left, Benny and I hit up Walgreens and stocked up on a box of these $2 laser pens. It sounds funny but cheap electronic gadgetry is worth its weight in gold down in mexico and each night we went out we would bring a “super pluma” with us and invariably find a way to trade it for something worth more to us. They were practical in that you could point out stuff half a mile away or grab each other’s attention across the crowd. We both agreed it would be valuable to learn morse code as a means of communication. There were also countless other stupid uses for these pens.
Fortunately neither one of us lost any crucial travel documents and therefore didn’t have to rely on our remote backup plan but it was nice to know that we had it if we needed it.
The restaurants all hung these ziplock water bags above their outside tables. We asked why they were there and our waiter jokingly told us that it was in case we didn’t leave a good tip, they could shoot them and drench the gringos. It turns out they actually repel flies. I have no idea HOW it works but we did notice that the restaurants without them had significantly more flies. I would love to hear the explanation of why this trick works if anyone knows.
The iTrip came through big again and I used it to record an interview with the owner of one of the smaller hotels down there. We realized that there are a large number of hotels down there that don’t currently do online reservations. After talking with the owner of a small one we think there’s opportunity to mimic their current homegrown Foxpro booking systems that everyone seems to use and turn it into a local app that broadcasts availability to a central server. Their hangup on accepting creditcards is that it’s very difficult to get a merchant account in Mexico and their discount rate is like 6-7% (3x that of the US). We were thinking of ways to solve the online res problem in the face of these higher transaction fees. We came up with the idea of creating a type of escrow service based in the US that would allow people to book their res online by authing their card. The guest could then pay cash for their room and the hotel owner would still achieve full price without having to jack rates to cover merchant commission fees and at least the small hotels could capture the res online. . We thought setting up this service on a mac mini and selling it as a cheap appliance and taking a comission on the transactions we generate would be ideal. This could make an excellent Grid7 project. My friend John Blayter pointed me to this existing product which sounds to have a similar goal but appears to be a traditional reservation system and not the same escrow concept. Anyways, it’s an interesting idea. Here’s the interview for anyone interested.

Lessons learned for next time

Don’t change a light bulb while standing in the shower. This is obvious in hindsight but Benny nearly electrocuted himself in our cabana at La Ruina. He was knocked ten feet onto the bed and, fortunately so, because it broke the circuit and he escaped with just a shock.
Zip ties and carribeaners would have come in handy on a couple occasions for fastening stuff. We rolled with hiker packs and the trip would have been impossible with regular baggage. The mobility afforded by having a pack proved to be key when (due to a booking oversight on our part) we got kicked out of our hotel and had to find a new one at the apex of their tourist season on New Year’s eve.
_Never_ use a flimsy plastic bag as a carry-on with a bunch of stuff in it, it will turn your fingers into sausage links and you will arrive at your destination with zero perfusion and have pins & needles the rest of the night (notice the hand turning purple – not cool).

Here’s some cool videos :

their equivalent of Times Square on New Years
these crazy fire dancers we saw at the Blue Parrot club.
a cool QTVR I shot at La Ruina

Looking forward

My New Year’s resolution this year is to eliminate daily distractions and have laser focus on the things that matter. I’m actually resolving to read _fewer_ blogs (which is probably hypocritical because here I am writing my own huge post). I came back to 227 emails and 454 unread blog posts which really puts into perspective how much distraction I willfully subjecting myself to each day. Even with David Allen’s GTD method, it’s just a deluge of info that leaves your head spinning at the end of the day. As far as what’s going on for me now, I start classes at this entrepreneurial workshop called FastTrac on Tuesday with the goal of sponging off other entrepreneurs and ironing out the kinks in the Grid7 model. My office partner Kimbro is now my business partner and over the break he hashed out the skeleton of an immense side project he and I will be undertaking together that dovetails perfectly with Grid7. I know I’ve been talking it up for a few months now but February is the month this stuff all launches and we both have huge faith in this endeavor.

Other than that, I’m moving out of my house right now and converting it into a performing asset as a rental. It should cover itself plus my apartment rent which will nice. This is all part of a massive downsizing effort for me to sell off all my stuff, simplify, consolidate and become mobile for a big US working roadtrip I plan to take in August. This is a neat time of year because everyone has these bright hopes for the coming year. I share the same optimism but I’m always reminded of that lyric from the U2 song “nothing changes on New Year’s day.” It does and it doesn’t. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand but it helps us frame things and establish goals which is always a good thing.

I wanna end this post by paraphrasing this cool passage from The Zahir book. “Two firemen go into the woods to fight a forest fire. They both return only one’s face is covered in soot while the other’s is perfectly clean. Which do you think washes his face?” It’s like that cardgame “booger on the head” also called “indian poker” – you can see everyone else’s cards but your own. The fireman with the clean face will see his partner and assume he’s covered in soot and conversely the guy who really needs the bath will look at his partner and assume he’s clean as well. This was such a simple yet mind-blowing way to look at why some relationships fail unexpectedly.

Anyways, 2006- bring it. This image captures the essence of what I’m in for this year:

Dec 22

lifehack: scanning and storing vital travel docs in gmail

Lifehacks, Travels 10 Comments »

Here’s a simple solution for the traveler who needs to ensure he/she has access to important docs while on the road. If you’re traveleing outside the US for any decent length of time it’s advisable to keep a copy of your passport in a separate place from your original in the event that you lose your wallet. So I’m standing in front of the fax/copier combo-machine trying to make a copy of my passport in preparation for a trip to Cancun tomorrow. I realize there’s no way I can run my passport through the fax machine to make a copy and decide that rather than making a trip to Kinko’s, I’ll scan it on the flatbed and print it out. Then I think "duhhh… if I’m gonna scan it why not just post a digital copy on my server and password-protect that directory?" Then the more I think about it, I realize "why not just scan every critical document I have and store them remotely?" Seriously, how many unforseen occasions could arise in which you need a copy of your health insurance card, or your driver’s license or whatever… and then I finally realize I might as well not even mess with my server/ftp/iis and instead email each jpg to my gmail account. I scanned and emailed each one separatley tagging the subject lines with "vitaldoc: passport" and "vitaldoc: birth certificate." With 2.5GB of free storage and near-perfect uptime, there’s really no reason not to store these critical docs in a gmail acct (assuming you trust the gmail security and are careful about how and where you access your account). And with the prevalence of internet cafes in most foreign cities, finding web access and a printer is a trivial task. If you have a secure USB jumpdrive you could store them there as well.

On that note, as far as the issue of security when accessing your email account from a public terminal- how have people handled this? I’ve just made a point of typing a bunch of random characters in notepad and then cutting/pasting my password from that instead of typing it in verbatim. I guess it’s possible that keyloggers have the potential to record cut/paste operations as well to reverse engineer the password but it seems like one of those scenarios (like using a CLUB on your vehicle) where an attacker probably has easier targets and would pass over this more-difficult-to-reverse-engineer password in favor of snagging just the plaintext passwords.

A completely unrelated tangent- Skype came through large for us again. My friend Benny and I are headed down to Cancun (actually Playa del Carmen) for the holidays for a 2wk adventure. After booking the plane tix we discovered that ALL THE HOTELS down there were sold out on every travel site we tried. Apparently they were hit pretty hard by hurricane Wilma and a bunch of the rooms are actually being used by construction workers. Fortunately we googled around and found this web site where you can sub the citycode in the URL and find local phone numbers of hotels in Mexico. I fired up Skype and we used some of my remaining skypeout minutes to bypass the travelsites and make international calls to the hotel managers directly. After about eight failed attempts we found one that had a vacancy which did not appear online and the owner was completely cool to us. Knowing Spanish, knowing about Skype and figuring out the pattern for the new areacodes in Mexico were the key pieces that facilitated this lucky break. I’ll be without email and phone for a few days. Happy Holidays everyone and Feliz Ano Nuevo.

sean

Dec 18

Violent video games and aggressive behavior

Ponderings, Psychology No Comments »

This debate has been occurring for awhile now fueled by psychology research that seemingly supports the idea that games cause aggressive behavior in those who play them. Although I have zero allegiance to any companies producing violent games, I do feel compelled to chime in and point out a few thinigs in their defense. This whole scenario feels like a modern day rehashing of the same arguments surrounding music censorship put forth by the PMRC over a decade ago.

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While there have been compelling studies conducted that show playing violent video games has a positive correlation with aggressive behavior, we all need to remember that causation cannot be assumed from correlation. Kids with violent personalities may just gravitate to the violent games. Just like the faulty conclusions drawn by Tipper Gore, et al in the PMRC days that listening to Judas Priest and Iron Maiden "rotted the brains" of the youngsters and drove them to commiting violent acts like killing their parents- this same leap of causality with games cannot be made upon corrleational studies alone.

I find it hugely ironic that for all the flak that game makers like Rockstar Games are now receiving for selling games like GTA:San Andreas that supposedly instill violent behavior in young people, the US Army is somehow exempt from the same criticism. They are arguably the single biggest contributor to this effect giving away the free first person shooter game America’s Army but I guess it’s okay as long as the violence they encourage is directed to our enemies and not manifested within our own country (?!?). From a pure business perspective, releasing this game for free is an ingenious move on their part- "get ’em while they’re young." It’s essentially the best possible recruitment and training tool they could hope for if the goal is to raise the next generation of soldiers, get them excited about the Army and have a comprehensive training course early on to teach genuine military tactics. It seems ironic though that police are now making a fuss saying that these games are producing more criminal activity. If it can be shown to have any significant effect at all (which it has not), isn’t this what the Army intended? If you stir up a hornet’s nest and get the reaction you sought (only in the wrong place), can you really be mad for getting stung?

I have to say I don’t play violent games. I played Myst and Riven awhile back and I had an Xbox a few years ago that was later stolen – the only game I ever played on it was Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Having now read the actual study that is the centerpiece of the argument against violent games and from a methodology standpoint it seems flawed. Polling 227 college students for aggressive behaviors and showing that their frequency of violent video game play correlates positively with irritability and retaliatory tendencies… okay, so what? It’s expected that you would find a positive correlation in this scenario, in the same way you’d probably discover a positive correlation with personality characteristics like introversion and creativity. For anyone not familiar with this flaw in correlational studies, the classic example in Psychology textbooks is that of a study conducted that found a positive correlation between crime and number of churches in a city. The researcher presents incontrovertible evidence to show that the more churches in a town, the more crime that exists. Obviously, making the causal leap that somehow the crime can be attributed to the churches is absurd. It’s not until we learn the critical driving factor is simply "city size" that we see how ridiculous the prior inference is. The non-correlational studies conducted in the lab setting have their own flaws (drawing the conclusions they did from studies measuring participants’ horn-blasting behavior after violent games seems like a leap in itself- it may have relevance for roadrage scenarios but extrapolating conclusions about general domestic violence and crime seems like an impossible stretch to me).

Having said all this – I can say that I remember in playing Tony Hawk for an extended period one day, and remember walking around outside afterwards and looking at every ledge or bench on the street thinking "I could grind that…" Games are more and more realistic now and their interactive, fast-paced nature definitely elicits stronger physiological responses than just passively watching a violent movie. More research needs to be conducted in this arena, but to claim that "violent games are the root of society’s aggression problems" is just silly. Kids with violent tendencies are undoubtedly drawn to violent games. And articles like this one that try to pin tragedies like Columbine on the Doom video game are just sensasionalistic crap.

Dec 12

Essential Firefox Extension Roundup

Nerd 5 Comments »

The top news headline today on Wired is The Firefox Hacks You Must Have. While they have good suggestions, there are a bunch of essentials that are conspicuously absent. Rather than write up descriptions of each, I’ve screenshotted my extension manager and linked each one directly to its download file. enjoy. If there’s more essentials that are missing, please post below. *Note- you’ll have to authorize installation from this site only once.

Dec 02

Using Gmail’s contact export feature to mine correspondence for LinkedIn connections

Google, Nerd, Tutorials 1 Comment »

If you use Gmail and are on LinkedIn, here’s a neat trick you can use to “excavate” your gmail correspondence for LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn already has an Outlook toolbar that will scour your sent folder in Outlook to do this (which is great if you use outlook as your email client but unfortunately there has been no equivalent for Gmailers that only use the web interface). Well now there is.

You may not be aware that Gmail automatically records the name and email address of anyone to whom you send a message in your contacts. There’s now a feature that allows you to export these contacts in an Outlook CSV file which you can then upload to your LinkedIn account. It will then show you who of those contacts is already on LinkedIn and allow you to invite those people to your network. Here’s the exact steps to make it work:

In Gmail, click the “Contacts” folder on the left. Then click “Export” on the upper right. Choose the Outlook CSV option.
Now go to your LinkedIn account and click on the “My Contacts” tab. Choose the “Other Contacts” sub tab and then click on “upload contacts” in the upper right.
Follow the instructions to verify the contacts are correct. Now when looking at your contacts you should see something like this:
Follow that link and you should see a list of all your contacts that are currently on LinkedIn. Now you just invite them to join your network.

Depending on how you use your LinkedIn account, you may want to be more or less stringent with who you invite. I treat mine fairly sacredly and only connect with the people that I personally know well enough where I would feel comfortable vouching for their capabilities.

This method boosted my contacts ten-fold and I discovered a bunch of people that I deal with daily who are already on LinkedIn. HTH

-sean

Nov 30

Mambo presentation for students at SCC

Arizona, Nerd, Speaking 1 Comment »

Big thanks to Rob Loy for the opportunity to present to his class tonight at Scottsdale Community College on the Mambo content management system. Mambo is an opensource CMS that rides ontop of PHP and MySQL and runs cross-platform. As promised, here is the powerpoint from tonight’s talk. There were some great questions asked tonight, some to which I could not give a solid answer. I’ll try and clarifiy some things below but if you have any questions regarding the framework itself or any of the other stuff we discussed tonight, feel free to use the comments section here as a forum.

To the gentleman that asked about which to choose going forward- Mambo or the new re-branded Joomla after further reading I would say it’s a safe bet that either will be supported but that I really like what I see on the Joomla Roadmap. They claim it’s not a true development fork but rather a simple re-branding of an existing product which is true, but they’re diverging codebases from this point and that’s the definition of a development fork so, call it whatever you want. I would say Mambo has a much larger base of existing sites but it looks like the inertia of the development community is behind Joomla and all the features of the latest Mambo release should be compatible so you don’t lose anything in terms of components and template designs. I would probably start a new project on Joomla rather than Mambo at this point.

Regarding the question about the recent security exploit I mentioned, apparently the official patch took a few days before it was posted but manual fixes to the code were immediately available in the forums the same day the problem was discovered (just meant you had to edit the PHP code by hand). Someone had asked about how to stay notified of security announcements and that link is here.

Lastly, to the woman with the animal shelter site and the question about how to turn off certain navigational elements on an index of content items- I know it can be done because I’ve done it on my sites but I’m not seeing the option at the moment. I’ll post a comment when I find it- it’s buried somewhere in one of the tabbed menus on like a section or category- i don’t remember which.

Anyhow, great questions tonight and it really was a pleasure getting to speak with the students in Rob’s class. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have them- Mambo’s developer community is perhaps one of its strongest assets.