This lead me to ask myself a question; what is my string? In other words, what do I get excited about? What would I rather be working on or doing than anything else? What would I sacrifice just about anything to be able to do?

Once you answer those questions and figure out what your string is you should immediately start to plan how you can spend more time doing it.

I know a lot of business books say “Do what you love!” but that isn’t the point of this post. I don’t think you have to make money at something that you love doing in order to enjoy it. In fact, I’d wager that for most things we enjoy in life money can actually lessen the joy of doing it. Especially if it becomes your main way of making a living. When you have to make money doing something it isn’t nearly as enjoyable as doing it simply because you want to. My cat gets nothing out of chasing the string. Actually, in most cases he doesn’t even get the string!

I’m still in the process of truly figuring out what my string is but when I figure it out I’m going to try do spend more time doing that activity. Maybe you could do the same.

This is especially true with writing software but lets think about an everyday task, shall we? What about washing the dishes? How long is it going to take you to wash the dishes the next time you decide to do that oft procrastinated task? Five minutes? Ten? Two hours? The truth is, you don’t know. You might count the number dishes, say 10 dishes, and think it will take you about 5 minutes (or 30 seconds per dish) to wash, dry, and put them all away. But, how dirty are these dishes? Is one a burnt pan? Do you have the right soap or tool to do the job? What if you find that, while you’re washing a pot, that the pot’s handle is loose? Do you fix it right then or wait till next time? If you fix it right then how long will that take?

You see where I’m going? Estimating the amount of time it will take to complete a task is – well, I’ll just say it – impossible. But we try. We try to calculate all of the possibilities, rule in error, and even give ourselves some padding in the estimate to lower expectations and over deliver. But we almost always fail. Sometimes miserably. The difficult part is coming to grips with that and embracing it.

In my entire life I’ve never been 100% accurate on estimating time. I’m forever an optimist and because of that I’m almost always late at getting something done because I always think it will take less time to finish something than it really will. I think in rose pedals and rainbows.

One quick example to beat this horse until bloody. Recently I was playing around with a pet project of mine and I wanted to add Twitter’s authentication tools to it. In short, this allows people to use their Twitter credentials to log into my application. Should be relatively straight forward, right? Well, ever the optimist and being smart and efficient I grabbed an open source library that claimed to do exactly what I needed. I thought, foolishly, that I’d simply plug the library into my application, follow the setup instructions and I’d move on in less than 30 minutes. It works this way sometimes but not very often. Suffice to say it didn’t work like this for me. In fact, I still haven’t finished hours later. Hours. Something I thought would take me less than 20 minutes and I have now spent hours trying to get it to work properly. And guess what? I’ve decided to scrap it. Hours and hours wasted only to figure out that I’d have been better off building this myself. And now it will take me a few hours to do just that (or much longer).

I’ll never learn. I’m freely admitting that right now. I’d rather be an optimist than be the person that thinks that everything they ever want to do will take too long, be too hard, and will ultimately not be possible to achieve and thus; never try. I’m going to continue to try and continue to fail but – every once and while – I’ll succeed (although later than I would have thought) and be happy.

However, something else about this information seems to be changing too. Its size. Seemingly it is being chopped up into smaller and smaller bits until what is left is but a few sentences. An entire story told in 140 characters.

This too is good in that this information can be easily distributed, consumed, and used in ways we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of. However, I think it is the way that we’re consuming information that might end up hurting us. I think that those of us that consume this stream of information on a day-to-day basis are actually training our brains to become bored easier.

It is a proven fact that one way humans can fight boredom is through variety. By switching tasks throughout a day you can avoid becoming bored with any one thing. Wake up, make breakfast, read some news, do some work, listen to some music, draw a picture, go for a walk, talk to some friends, watch some TV, read some email, go to bed. Most of us would look at this list and think “not a bad day”. However, a sure fire way to feed boredom is to grow accustomed to being able to switch tasks without completing the last one. If the next task is always available and easy to move to – what stops you from moving from one task to the other aimlessly – never accomplishing anything?

This is what the consumption of information is beginning to become. Not for everyone, mind you, but for a growing number of people connected to the Internet or their cellphones. Think about how many times you change topics in a given day based on how you consume information. You open your email and you have 20 unread messages from friends, family, and coworkers. Each of them has their own topic. You skim through them, replying to some, simply reading others. There is 20 topics in the span of only a few minutes. You open your favorite news website and scan through those topics. My last count on the CNN homepage was a few hundred different topics. Again, you could choose just one or two but the length of these articles is dramatically shorter than they used to be so you’re able to go from one to another in just a few moments. Now, you move over to your social network of choice – or maybe you’re part of more than one? – and you scan down through that stream. Your friend just ate some lovely sushi, your brother is golfing, your neighbor mentioned something you have no idea about so you follow that link to Wikipedia and spend 5 minutes figuring that out, your mother put up a photo, and – of course – you have to update with the type of coffee you’re drinking. Oh, and you just got an Instant Message from your cousin who wants to come visit and an audio chat request from your coworker for that meeting you had scheduled. This continues throughout the day.

Again, none of these are bad things on their own but by jamming them all together in just a few minutes of time we’re really training ourselves to be bored with whatever our current task is.

Not sure if this is effecting you? How many times do you check your phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, or __________ through out the day? When was the last time you read more than 40 pages in a book? Listened to an entire album without skipping or shuffling and doing nothing else but enjoying the music? Watched TV or a full movie without your laptop, iPad, or iPhone next to you? (For what its worth, Google TV-like devices are going to bring this “stream” to your TV making it even easier to be distracted and – ultimately – bored.) In fact, when was the last time you spent more than an hour on anything at all without being distracted by something else?

I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this notice this trend too. Most of you are probably OK with it. You feel more connected to the world around you than ever before, more informed than you’ve ever been, and more capable of spreading the word then the local news station. But chances are none of those are really true. What is going on at your local market? How is your family doing? What single topic are you most interested in at the moment? Are you learning anything new well enough to teach others?

Maybe it is time we all slow down a bit and pick just a few things to care about and focus on them instead of training ourselves to become easily bored. We need to start training ourselves to be focused, productive and interesting.

Nearly no other business is impacted by corporate transparency more than software development. Many applications we purchase come with a promise of future updates that are, generally, free of charge. This means that you’re not just investing in the features in the application that you know about, but are also investing in the features you hope will come. Typically, though, you do not know what features are on the roadmap. Most software companies do not let even their best customers know what is coming in future versions of an application unless the company is 100% sure they can deliver those features. In essence, you’re paying for something to be delivered that you don’t know what it is and you don’t know when you’ll get it.

Which leads us to the issue at hand… how do you know when to invest your hard earned money and time into an application?

Some applications are more important than others and, as such, deserve more scrutinization than others in this area. Important applications are the ones we use every day. Even more important applications are the ones that we use all-day every day. But no other applications are as valuable as the ones that we use to make money and have them open all day, every day. The need for transparency should be measured by the importance of the application in a user’s every day workflow. However, it seems like the opposite is true.

Developers of free applications are generally amazingly forthcoming. Open source applications are good examples of this. However, the applications that we generally rely on every day to put food on the table – those companies are generally tight lipped until you see a press release about a new version being released (often times not even on the company’s Web site).

The investment goes beyond dollars and cents, though. Purchasing an application typically isn’t even required to see if the application is right for you. Most applications come with a trial period that gives you enough time to decide if the application will work for you. However, with these types of applications you aren’t just making a decision about whether an application works for you today – but whether it will work for you tomorrow, next week, and next year. Also, you may measure it against how many other applications you will need to buy to complete your workflow.

Not to belabor the point, but lets follow this a little bit further. Some tasks take several applications to accomplish. For example, receiving a photo from a family member via email and printing it to put on your office wall is a task that relies on several applications and pieces of hardware to do. First you receive the email in your email client. Attached to this email is a photo, which you open with a photo viewer (perhaps Preview on Mac and “Explorer” or some crappy thing on Windows (sorry, this is my blog and I am free to call anything on Windows crappy whenever I want, b’okay?)). Then you ask to print it which sends it through, perhaps, your printer software or the printer application included in your operating system. The information is sent to the printer and it pops out.

Lets say you had to buy each of those applications. You knew that you needed an email client, an image viewer, and a printer application. You purchase all three because you need to. Over time, however, the email client is “upgraded” to include the image viewer. This is excellent news! You now only need 2 applications to accomplish the same task you needed 3 for. But wait, you purchased the image viewer. Suck. Next thing you know, the email client is updated again to include the proper features to communicate with your printer for the specific purpose of printing a photo. Superb! Now you only need 1 application where you needed 3 and that 1 application does a much better job than the 3 did a few months ago. For most people who use and care about software the above scenario is utopian in nature. If this ever happened with some of our most used applications there wouldn’t be a single complaint. But I think the process is broken. And it may not be something that can be fixed easily.

Would you have purchased all three applications if you knew that the email client was going to be updated within three months to include the same features? If you knew that an email client could include all three of those features would you have hunted around for a competitor that already included all three of these features?

More pointedly; if you knew what was going to be included in future updates of your most used and important applications would you be more likely to be loyal to that application with both your wallet and the time you’ve invested in your workflow?

I think you would and I think that is why we should call on software developers to be more open about what they are planning to be in future updates of their products. I have several ideas on how this could be done – but I feel as though each company (whether an indie developer or big company) will solve this issue in their own ways. However, I’ll share one of my ideas here.

The struggle with altruism and self-preservation is a valid struggle. There are two groups of people, however, that I think need to be informed of upcoming software updates. Potential buyers and existing customers. Potential buyers may not be able to get the same information as existing customers, since the very real risk of letting one’s competitors know of upcoming features exists, but they should have the proper tools in place to help them make an educated decision. This, for the most part, is already being solved. Full featured trial software combined with free point-release updates is probably one of the best deals in the history of mankind. Name any other product that you’ve ever bought that you can try for free for thirty days and that you get free updates to (sometimes for years). Potential buyers are fairly well taken care of. They get to try the product, every single feature, for an entire month before they decide if they want to pay for it. And they know that they will get at least a few new features and probably a fair amount of bug fixes before their license expires.

Existing customers, however, are sort of left in the dark as to their future with the product. They know that they will get a few free updates but that don’t know what those updates will consist of.

Of course there are exceptions to all of this. Both good and bad. Some companies publish their roadmap right on their site. Others don’t offer free trials or, if they do, offer crippled versions of their products.

Did I say I was going to offer a solution to this issue? With potential buyers being fairly well taken care of lets focus on existing customers. I think having a mailing list or, if your company is really forward thinking, a blog that could offer “what’s next” to existing customers would be a very big step in the right direction. Most software developers will tell you that the list of features that will be done in the next version of their products is typically done long before that version ships. Then, after some development, the list gets smaller and smaller until it is “locked”. The feature list being locked means that no other features will be added to the version. I believe this time period would be a good time to let your existing customers know what is coming in the next version of the product. The earlier the better but you wouldn’t want to let them know something is coming that won’t make the cut. Some companies already do this but many more should.

I think waiting to let the world know about an upcoming version’s features until you put together the marketing for the version is a mistake. If your customers read about the next version’s features of a product they already own on another blog or online magazine then you are not treating your existing customers any better than people who do not own any of your products. Marketing to gain new customers is essential to your company but it shouldn’t be considered communication with your user base.

What does this do? It gives your existing customers a lot of power. If the company that made the email client in our example above let their existing customers know that they were going to include an image viewer in the next update, it could have saved you some time and money.

Based on my thoughts on transparency in software development I decided to ask one of my favorite Macintosh application developers, Panic co-founders Cabel Sasser and Steven Frank, a few questions about Panic’s incredible Web site development application Coda. I’ll be posting that interview on Thursday. How is that for transparency?

Alex Payne, one of the many talented people behind Twitter, recently wrote on his blog his thoughts on blog comments. In a nut, Alex felt that by leaving comments off he’s elevating the level of conversation. That, if he had comments turned on, there would be less than desirable comments written on his blog. That, by turning comments off, it forces people to reply to his blog posts from their own blog. Since people don’t want to write stupid things on their own blog the level of conversation would automatically be risen. Smart.

Alex isn’t the first person to share this sentiment. I’ve written about blog comments in 2004, again in 2007, and have thought about it many times since I began blogging around the turn of the century. In 2004 I was commenting on the indirect benefits for turning off comments. The main benefit I highlighted was that by not allowing comments, you’d be forcing people to link to your site from theirs, creating more link backs to your site, increasing your blog’s audience, and improving your site’s Pagerank on search engines. All very good things for any writer. I suppose those benefits really just improve Alex’s reason. Improving the conversation while at the same time doing well for yourself.

In 2007 I was, in an ironic sort of way, responding to Jeremy Keith’s thoughts on leaving blog comments off. He said that he didn’t like having them on because of they were “examples of antisocial networking”. He made examples of YouTube and Digg being saturated with worthless comments. I’ve recently reread my post and I think I worded my response quite well, so if you’re interested, give it a read.

I think my thoughts hold up, two years later, that Digg and YouTube are, well, Digg and YouTube. Digg, generally speaking, is meant to act as a human filter for the world’s news. The comments on a Digg are, for the most part, about whether or not that particular news item, link, photo, video, or whatever should be worthy of being on Digg at all. Digg has gotten so much better than it was when it first reached critical mass. YouTube, however, still has a lot of maturing to do. The community is so vast that as you browse around the site you will see that thoughtful videos usually are rewarded with thoughtful responses while not-so-thoughtful videos are not. The nature of the beast I suppose.

There are edge cases, of course. Where you have a thoughtful video that gets the attention of the trolls. Where dumb people with nothing to do flock to a particular video and, for no other reason than their own personal entertainment, tee off in the comments in a tirade of incredibly distasteful, worthless, and (even I’ll admit) humorous commentary.

I suppose my main reason for agreeing to disagree with Jeremy was because, well, my site isn’t that popular. This isn’t Digg. This isn’t YouTube. I don’t have the problem of having millions of troll-like morons looking for an excuse to yell things like “first” or, well, any other worthless response (let alone the off-color ones). If I did I’d probably deal with that in my own way. This is, afterall, my house. I very much doubt I’d ever turn comments off entirely. One of my core beliefs, which I mentioned in my 2007 note, was that I thought of blog posts as the beginning of or the response to conversations. I still feel that way. I wouldn’t write anything on my blog, ever, if I didn’t in some way want someone to think about what I’m writing about and, if they chose to, respond to it. That is why I write.

Daring Fireball, one of my favorite Weblogs of all time, which made my Best of 2008 list, and is run by my friend John Gruber, also leaves comments off. John, who recently linked to Alex Payne’s thoughts, has covered this topic a few times. Based on what he’s written publicly about this topic I can safely say that he is in agreement with both Alex and Jeremy. And he has reason to. Jeremy’s main point about how there are too many worthless comments out there has a lot to do with scale. Daring Fireball has enough scale, though no where near the scale of Digg or YouTube, to create those types of moderation problems for John. You see, John curates Daring Fireball like a rooftop garden in a busy city. He cares for it. Every pixel. He cares for it as though it has very limited space. He uses that space efficiently. It is like he needs to get the greatest quality vegetables possible from the absolutely least amount of area. Besides John’s writing it is probably the biggest factor in the success of Daring Fireball. With as much traffic as he gets (which is about 1.2M hits per month according to his Sponsorship page) he would probably run into the problem of trolls. When John goes off on jackasses (which are some of my favorite posts, by the way) I’m pretty sure other jackasses would chime in.  With regards to Alex’s main point, about the fact that Alex really enjoys well thought-out discussions rather than terse commentary, John also tends to link to many people that mention his site in thoughtful posts. John enjoys good writing as much as anyone. In other words, I can see why blogs like Daring Fireball leave comments off.

TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs right now, has comments on. It has some troll activity. It has some comments that, in my opinion, aren’t worth all that much. But, some people have used the comment area on TechCrunch to do a great job of responding to not only TechCrunch’s commentary but also to the TechCrunch audience. Gary Vaynerchuk, someone I consider a dear friend, runs a Web site called Cork’d. (You can read my interview with Gary about Cork’d, if you’d like). When Cork’d got hacked, and TechCrunch promptly reported on it, Gary took the opportunity to directly communicate what was going on through his own blog and through TechCrunch’s comments. I’d love to hear Michael Arrington’s thoughts on comments on TechCrunch and why they’ve chosen to leave them on for the majority of their posts. I’m positive he has an opinion on this matter.

Again, I’ve been blogging for 10 years. Longer than it has been called blogging. Longer than there has been any form of personal content management systems. This topic of comments, and whether or not to have them on my site, has been debated in many conversations with other bloggers at blogging meetups and conferences, with myself in the shower, with the road while I’m driving, in my own brain, and many other places over those years. I struggle with it. All. The. Time.  My strategy, as of today, is that if it even became a problem where I began to regret having comments on – where the comments I get on my site do not have a value to quantity ratio that I’m happy with – or when my goal is for people to link to my site from their own sites for the sake of getting linkbacks – then maybe I’ll turn them off. But not until then. And neither of those situations have happened in all of these years and I doubt they will any time soon.

I’m just happy to know that other people think about these sorts of things still too. That, even after 10 years of publishing on the Web, we’re all still struggling together with the same fundamental issues that the Web, in all of its social greatness, has imposed on our efforts of sharing ideas. No matter how good the tools get, no matter how many people jump online worldwide and join the conversation, we will always have the decision to make of how we’d like interact. What we’re comfortable with for us, for our companies, and for our Web sites. The learning curve is, as far as I see it, infinite. And I’m okay with that.

I thought I’d quote the entire thing here, because I think we can all learn something from this by parallel it to something in our lives be it at work, at home, or just about anything.

Predicting snowfall amounts is every bit as difficult as predicting rainfall amounts and in both cases the amounts can vary greatly over even short distances. However most of the time when rain is the call we are not compelled to say how much since for most of us varying amounts of rain for the most part do not matter all that much. Whether we get 3 tenths, 5 tenths or 8 tenths it doesn’t really matter. But here’s something you can take to the bank: If meteorologists had to predict how much rain would fall EVERY time rain is expected, most of the time the forecast amounts would be off by a few tenths of an inch or even more and viewers should realize this. If I said 3 tenths would fall overnight and we got 8 tenths. So what. Big deal. No complaints. Hey it rained overnight. The forecast was accurate. Yet the inaccuracy of a rainfall AMOUNT prediction pretty much goes unnoticed. In fact a lot of time we don’t even bother to predict amounts of rain yet I can guarantee to you this: that IN MOST INSTANCES the predicted amounts and the actual amounts would not match up. BUT and this is a big BUT, EVERY TIME snow is expected it becomes mandatory to predict how many inches. One inch of rain equals about ten inches of snow. That is, one inch of snow is merely a tenth of an inch of water. So if I predict 2 inches of snow and instead 7 inches falls that’s comparable to missing a rainfall forecast by 5 tenths of an inch. No big deal when it’s all rain. It’s only a little water. No one would notice. But oh my, when it’s all snow…by golly you blew it! Predict 2 inches and get 7. A total miss. Hang the weatherman. The event becomes a ‘surprise snowfall”. When newscasters and viewers sound off it can seem like we didn’t even predict a single flake. It’s so frustrating, in fact maddening. We are merely talking about a few tenths of an inch of water from the sky and unfortunately the limited accuracy of the computer guidance allows these kinds of inaccuracies to happen more often than we would like. A way around this is to categorize snowfall amounts as either nuisance, plowable or crippling. But that won’t fly. We want inches! And inches you will get but unfortunately in this day and age in between the accurate forecast of inches will come the inaccurate forecasts and with that the ridicule from those who don’t and never will appreciate and understand how difficult it is to precisly predict how much rain will fall every time it rains and how many inches will fall every time it snows.

The text is a bit rough but I wanted to leave it as is. I found it rather eye-opening (at least for me) that predicting the snow can be as hard as picking how much rain would fall down to the tenths of an inch. I knew that 1-inch of rain equalled 10-inches of snow – but never thought anything beyond that.

For me, I parallel this in many ways. One of the first is Viddler’s sign up and confirmation process. On occasion we get reports that people aren’t getting their confirmation email. Sometimes they come in, over the course of the week, in the dozens. This means that there is a larger problem underlying and we need to fix that.

I am not even sure if the two go well together but that doesn’t matter, the point is I think we can learn from the experiences of the weather man.

What does this make you think of?

Ok, on with my point before this too gets unwieldy.

The Panelists

In the “Better than 1,000 Words: Video on the Web” panel one of the panelists said: “The problem is finding the good stuff, not that it doesn’t exist” which came from the panel’s thoughts on YouTube. And I completely agree with them. The amount of content on YouTube, and many other large video community sites, is staggering and it is being created and distributed so fast it feels like a runaway train. This has always been the challenge of the web – finding the signal inside of the noise. I believe that smaller communities will emerge, dedicated and focused on a singular idea or genre of video, and it won’t matter what video service you use because all of the content will be automatically aggregated and segregated. Unless of course your content is best suited for these services flagship technologies. We’re already seeing sites and services that do this, and even build ranking systems on top of them – but I believe we’ll start to see much more refinement in this process to where the communities are very, very focused.

For instance, many video sharing services build groups or channels to pool videos together in an attempt to create and foster those communities around a specific topic or genre. And this is fine and dandy, but we’re going to see a lot of these groups and channels branch out into entire sites decided to that topic or genre. Some of them are popping up already, but I really do believe that we’re going to start seeing communities that form around very specific criteria – perhaps even within age groups, sexes, or geographic location. Again, the problem isn’t that the quality doesn’t exist out there – it is just hard to find it unless someone does some work to help separate it out.

So how will this happen? Obviously there has been a lot of development in making it very easy to upload and share video online, and the infrastructures that are behind these services are years ahead of anyone starting on day one. So how do these communities develop? They’ll leverage (Web 2.0 expression borrowed from Andy, thanks Andy) the existing services, their APIs, their features, and their infrastructure and build community specific features ontop of them to allow their respective communities to flourish without constraint.

So I agree that it is difficult to find really good content on some of these larger communities, but I think we’ll stop looking at these larger communities for the content soon – and we’ll look more to the focused communities that still use the same technologies as these services with a little bit of salt, pepper, and (insert your favorite spice name here) to allow the content to shine above all else.

Oh, and even if I wasn’t consulting for Viddler I would say that I believe Viddler will be one of the leaders in this new wave of how video is being shared online. Again, in the near future.

UPDATE: Loren is right, Jeff Jarvis is not the future of online video.

[tags]video, online, sharing, viddler, youtube, sxsw, panel, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]near-future-video[/slug]

I am not a huge boxing fan (since I don’t watch boxing all that much I wouldn’t want to call myself a fan for fear of being ridiculed) but I am a fan of Muhammad Ali, and his boxing style and career. When I read Paul’s entry about the redesign, and when he referred to it as Ali, I got a little bit frightened. Would the new site hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali?

Being that I am familiar with the system that runs 9rules (which I’m sure, from what I’m seeing now, has been improved 10-fold since my tenure) I know that an enormous amount of hard work went into creating this iteration of the site. Style, layout, and panache aside – the underpinnings of the new 9rules.com is a monumental upgrade from the previous code-base which was a mashup of the incredibly crappy code I wrote while I was there and Mike Rundle trying to patch said crap. I’d be willing to wager that only a small percentage, or almost none-at-all, of the code that I wrote is still in use at 9rules (which is a blessing for them, trust me).

In other words: the 9rules team did as Ali taught: “I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.” They were willing to go back to the “drawing board” to rebuild their architecture simply to make it more manageable, faster, and more stable. And really this is something the general public, or any of their members for that matter, wouldn’t have noticed – but this is exactly what they should have done. And from what I’ve seen so far they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.

So, does it hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali? Actually – it blew the candle right out. I’m really impressed by this accomplishment.

Take a look around the new 9rules. I think you will like what you see. Register for an account so that you can take advantage of notes (which got a huge shot of nitro in this release) and my.9rules (which is brand-new) – which are teeming with life right now. Oh and don’t forget to play around with topics, which is a feature that 9rules has wanted to do for quite awhile and I think they pulled it off really well. I’ve been messing around in the apple topic all morning.

Kudos Paul, Mike, and Tyme. You guys are class acts and 9rules Ali is really great. I recommend everyone buying these guys a drink, or a milk for Mike, at SXSW.

To leave you with another quote from Ali, that I feel applies to the 9rules team: “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill. “

[tags]9rules, paul scrivens, mike rundle, tyme white, redesign, muhammad ali, blogging, community, social network, web design, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]9rules-Ali[/slug]

Let’s say you have a day job where you are a mechanic. Obviously your normal business day is filled with fixing someone else’s car, doing routine maintenance, etc. However, if you could take one day and simply think about a better way to do one of those common tasks, what would you correct? Would you take some time to build a tool to help make a common task easier? Would you do something even more simple; such as cleaning up your area to make you more efficient for the week ahead?

I can think of tons of things like this that I could fiddle on. Today, I focused on two. My blog here, and a yet-unreleased service from ChanceCube.

I thought about this blog and what it is lacking, and I started to fiddle with a few things that will allow me to fill those gaps in the near future. Obviously this was done purely for personal reasons, but I am hoping these little adjustments will improve your experience here. No, I am not going to do a complete redesign of my site – but much of the markup is being rewritten to give me some more flexibility and work in some Microformats (oh, and this site has yet to work properly in IE). More on this later, but I was able to take a few hours and focus on a few minute details that really, in the end, give you a lot of satisfaction that you were able to spend some real time thinking about only a few little things.

With the service (called mystreamr) that we have yet to release, I wanted to do some “outside of the box” thinking that I may not normally have the time to do otherwise. How would a mother use this? How would a kid who found this service through digg use it? How could I explain this service to someone that doesn’t speak English? What happens if I use the service in the complete opposite way it was intended? All of these questions I was able to address, in some form, today.

I think that this is a great exercise for anyone to try and do (especially when the temperature dips to below freezing!). Get out your watercolors (which I still might do later), and try a style you’ve never tried before. Waste paper! Go into the kitchen, whip out a recipe book that has 4-layers of dust on it, and just start cooking. Look through the garbage and find the instruction manual for your digital camera and learn to use it better. Go for a jog on a street that you’ve never been on. Knock on that neighbor’s door that you’ve never met because your work schedules conflict. Have you read your Bible lately? Have you taken 30-minutes in the last decade to appreciate the night-sky? I could go on forever! I have tons of things that I would love to find the time to do but so many other things end up getting in the way.

Perhaps the next time your day’s activities get cancelled, you shouldn’t worry about filling those slots with more things to do, just fiddle.

[tags]thoughts, weekend, saturday, schedule, chancecube, mystreamr, fiddle, cdevroe.com[/tags]
[slug]fiddlin[/slug]

Recently I’ve had a lot of family members, friends, and even people I’ve never met before tell me that they were “thinking of switching” to the Macintosh platform or, in their words “gettin’ a Mac”. Obviously we’re seeing switcher stories pop up all over the place, even some guys at Microsoft said they wanted to jump ship.

I really think that the main reason that more people have not switched to the Mac faster was due to misinformation. A lot of people didn’t even know that Apple made computers let alone how much better the experience was on one when compared to a computer running Windows. Most of the people I’ve spoken to, that are going to make the switch very soon, are doing so because they’ve owned an iPod and have enjoyed that experience. Or, they’ve seen my computers and really desire to be able to do some of the same things I am able to do without giving it a second thought.

I think that some of the consumers are starting to finally see the truth in the entire Mac vs. PC war that has raged on for far too long. It isn’t a question of being better or worse, it is a question of actually working and being easy to do.

The war is over.

[tags]apple, Microsoft, macintosh, windows, ipod, mac, conversion, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]conversion-rate[/slug]

Well, Roxeanne of Beach Walks with Rox, decided to reply to that post with a slightly different twist on the same idea. She says there is no need to keep up-to-date on everything all the time, but she’d rather search for something once she needs it.

Great idea. Why keep up with everything when you may not even need that information? Just look it up later. This reminds me of another famous great mind Albert Einstein (yes I’m comparing Roxeanne to Einstein) who:

When one of Albert Einstein’s colleagues asked the eminent physicist for his telephone number one day, he reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. “You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, understandably startled. “No,” Einstein replied with a shrug. “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?” — via Anecdote

I am not sure if this is fact or fiction but the idea rings true regardless. The Internet is an enormous phone book that can be consulted at anytime using powerful tools like Yahoo! or Google whenever you feel like you need some information. And as Roxanne says “…you might find something even better…” than what you would have if you’d kept an out-of-date bookmark of that information from the past.

If you aren’t already subscribed to Beach Walks with Rox I certainly suggest you check it out. The show is ran by two of my friends (whom I’ve not yet met) in Hawaii and it is one piece of entertainment (though I think Beach Walks has an enormous amount of value beyond simple entertainment) that I will never get rid of.

Thanks for responding Roxeanne and “Secret Cameraman”. Keep up the great show!

There are also some other great replies to that post in the comments, so be sure to check out those too.

[tags]beach walks, video, personal, thoughts, entertainment, hobbies, internet, web, thinking, roxeanne darling, hawaii[/tags]
[slug]re-entertain-yourself[/slug]

Being entertained by today?

The world continues to shrink due to the speed at which information is broadcast worldwide. This makes it really easy to tap yourself into pretty much whatever type of information you want and soak it all in. However, regardless of how small the world is perceived to be because of technological and information distribution advancement – the world is still huge. The amount of information found on the Internet is increasing at an immeasurable rate. In other words; you will never be able to keep up.

Let’s say for example that you are interested in space. By now you probably know that I have a modest amount of interest in space that continues to grow. The amount of information on the Internet about space is staggering. I can imagine a kid walking into a library years ago and pulling an entire section of books off the shelf dealing with space and being overwhelmed with the amount of information he has to catch up on. Even with modern day tools to help us find exactly what we’re looking for, this feeling remains very much the same for me. But this is a good thing – the bad thing would be to try to “keep up-to-the-day” on a particular subject globally, since it proves to be near impossible to do unless you are a researcher by trade.

Call it information overload. But there are ways to combat this. Be specific in what you are looking for and the amount of information on the specific thing can be whittled down into something manageable. Do not “tap your brain” into the Internet and hope that you have the time, or the ability, to weed through the right, the wrong, the bad, and the good. Eventually the cream will rise to the top.

Being yourself?

More specifically; finding out what your personal interests are. I get the whole “social web” thing that allows us to monitor hundreds if not thousands of topics or people in various ways. It allows us to interact with people who have similar interests than us regardless of geography, economic situation, or language. I completely agree that the Web is a cool place.

But have you ever found yourself being a follower of everything? I touched on this in “Taking advantage of the things you already own”, where people want the latest and greatest before they even know how to use what they already have. I’ve been guilty of this. But there is also the idea of the quantity of “things” you have too. Or the quantity of the interests you supposedly have. Do you have 1,000 hobbies? Or, perhaps you just have 1 but it changes every single day before you have a chance to fully explore the hobby you did yesterday? I think it is good to have a few hobbies, this way you can pick what you want to do today based on your mood – but having too many can lead you to never fully exploring any of them.

Where did all of this stem from?

Hopefully if you read this you are able to understand what I am trying to say and maybe you can even relate. I’m definitely not the best writer and I seem to leave stuff out pretty consistently so I hope I was able to at least make a little sense.

Where did this all come from? A few months back I was notified that my Flickr account was going to expire. It got me to thinking about whether or not I use Flickr to its fullest potential, and whether or not I could simply live with the free-account for what I actually do use it for. A few days later I got an email from Microsoft about my Xbox Live account expiring. I looked at the pile of dust on my Xbox and decided that I would not renew that either. I don’t want to be forced into using something because I’m paying for it. Then I looked at my telescope and watercolor paints collecting dust. Realizing I’d much rather use them than the Xbox. I spent some time outside collecting fossils (I used to spend the majority of my life outdoors and now it is the opposite) and I really wanted to start to find out what my “real world” interests were again. It used to be mostly natural things. The woods, animals, plants, dirt, anything outside. Then it completely switched where I spent over 10 years almost completely indoors learning how to do what it is I do now – but I believe there to be a balance and I am definitely not striking it. Call it my resolution for 2007 or just a personal goal – I want to balance things.

I was talking to my friend Dave O. the other day and he feels very much the same as I do. I’m guessing that we’re not alone. He was commenting to me how much he enjoyed playing games with his son, or just “petting the dog and staring at the wall”. I couldn’t agree more. I’m looking forward to this new challenge – and it will be a challenge. I’d like to start spending nearly the same amount of time pursuing real world personal interests as I do online ones.

The World only looks like it is shrinking when you look at it through a monitor.

[tags]personal, thoughts, entertainment, hobbies, flickr, xbox, nature, space, telescope, internet, web, thinking[/tags]
[slug]entertain-yourself[/slug]