You can watch the director’s cut (extended edition with DVD extras) of my presentation here.
Unfortunately, my small HD video camera gave out only 22 minutes into a 32 minute presentation. The above is from the still of the actual presentation at PodCamp. However, I have re-recorded the audio (and hopefully adding back in a bunch of the tips I forgot to tell the audience or ran our of time to include). You can watch the whole thing in the link above or head on over to SlideShare to watch.
My friend Trey was part of this online beard-growing contest a couple of years ago. In actual fact, it is really a photography contest with growing beards as a theme (and is thusly pretty much limited to male contestants, though females certainly jump in and contribute). For the past few years, I’ve been growing out a “winter beard” every year around November and shaving it off in again around the beginning of March, which just so happened to coincide with Whiskerino.
Unfortunately, Whiskerino only happens every couple of years so I had to wait until this season to participate. Sign-up was on the 1st of November and the response was so overwhelming I almost didn’t get in (my grandfather was visiting that day and I had waited until family left to try). Fortunately, an e-mail plea to the organizer got me signed up and I posted a photo of Angela kissing my beard good-bye.
I really did my best to be creative. I was pretty much constrained to what I could pull off by myself (I work at home, alone) during the time I was taking to eat some lunch or take a short break from writing. I had a few good photos and the photo constraints of the contest forced me to think about how to use my camera and limited resources (no post-processing allowed; i.e. – no Photoshop).
However, between parenting and visiting family around the holidays, and all of being more sick this past winter than our entire lives, it put a strain on my time. Internet beard-growing & photo contests are unfortunately the sort of thing that has to get put aside first in these situations. I stand in awe of the guys who did this every last day with kids, jobs, and way more stuff going on than me. But it is important to note that many of these guys have been doing this for years and have become very close friends. This is the modern internet equivalent to a guy’s road trip.
And, in fact, there was even one of those! (though many women came along for the fun, too). Last weekend many participants came together here in Nashville for the Throwdown weekend. I was able to join for a taco lunch and got the chance to meet some people whose work I’ve been admiring for the past 3+ months. They were all the nicest, most interesting people from every background you can imagine.
Despite all the grumblings from Angela (who has never approved of my beard-growing activities and was not happy at all about Whiskerino), despite all the crazy one-upmans-ship that I had not way of competing in, despite all the discomfort that I get when my beard goes for a few weeks untrimmed, let alone four months!; I’d do again were it to happen in a couple of years.
Why? Because I started to see what all the people who’ve done it for the past few years see in it. It is way more than beards. Or photography. Or posting every day. It is about making friends with people whom you’d never would have had the chance to meet otherwise. It’s about taking the most individual, least competitive things in the whole world and turning it into some sort of team sport. One where the team consists of over four hundred other guys whom despite not knowing you and maybe having nothing else in common with you, encourage you and are your friend.
It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever done and it was so much more fun than I can begin to convey in a blog post. But don’t take my word for it. Go over there and look at the photos from today. Read how much this means to the guys involved. Then go and read some of the amazing stories they shared (babies, engagements, cancer, broken backs, swine flu, newspaper interviews, tattoos, even bigger tattoos, and so much more).
All that being said, I was more than ready to shave off the pile of wire and horse hair that was growing out of my face. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable (both physically and socially) and was never so glad to shave as I was today. I did try and have a little fun with that, too:
To see what was truly the best of the best in these photos, please check out the King Beard section (each day’s favorite photos, as voted upon by the participants). Note, I only made into the top ten one time, and I’m proud to say it was by one of the most amazing photos I’ve ever scene.
A couple of months ago, Google announced that Android 2.0 (their mobile operating system) will include a maps navigation service which will provide turn-by-turn driving directions. This news was credited for driving down the stock price of navigation device manufacturers Magellen and Garmin.
But really, this should really come as no surprise. GPS was once so bulky and expensive of a technology that it’s inclusion warranted an entire device be built around it. Now, I get GPS along with WiFi and gigyabytes of storage in something the size of a quarter in my EyeFi camera card1. As the cost of a technology like GPS, accelerometers, cameras, or WiFi approaches free, the uses for it will increase exponentially. Where it once was odd to include WiFi in a stationary device (an iMac or the Wii, for instance) which could be hardwired, cheap WiFi hardware does away with the need to run wires. Bluetooth does essentially the same thing, only with far less range and bandwidth. But, I think that the single best thing about this sort of device consolidation is the new uses that having essentially free hardware allows. Uses that we really can’t quite grasp until the tech is cheap enough to unleash them.
Even now, it may seem odd to think of GPS being included in to what is essentially a stationary device — like a desktop PC — but it once the cost of GPS is nearly zero, then it’s inclusion is inevitable. Including GPS allows a device to suddenly know where it is and that can be handy information; even if that doesn’t change very often. Why should it be easier to pull out your phone quickly get a map of what lunch places are around the office when you’re sitting at a desktop computer? Or insert the need for location for any other website of program you use on any given day2 Data storage is cheap. GPS is cheap. The reasons for having a dedicated GPS device are rapidly approaching zero, which is what both my wife and I have tried to explain to anyone who mentioned we should get a car GPS.
So, I posit the following:
When the cost of the technology behind a device drops below a certain threshold, that device will become obsolete in favor or other common devices which can co-op that technology to greater effect. Let’s call it Coleman’s law until someone else shows me someone else previously said it or something similar3.
You might argue: what about a device like the Kindle that uses cellular networks to communicate? E-readers surely won’t replace cell phones, will they? No, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that cell phones are destined to replace e-readers. And this coming from a guy who would love to have an e-ink display reader, himself.
Another argument against device consolidation is that general purpose devices (like a cell phone4) just can’t do any one of those things as well as a special purpose device; and surely that’s true. However, I never hear anyone complain that their low-budget GPS device doesn’t work as well as a high-end mapping system by Trimble used for construction. Nor do I really think most people care that the quality of video on YouTube doesn’t rival that shot on a RED camera. As a matter of fact, I doubt most people even know who Trimble or RED are. So does it really matter if your cell phone doesn’t shoot the same kind of photos or video as a fancy DSLR? My answer is no. The enthusiasts who really want that kind of quality will continue to use those device but the majority of people are taking photos for high-quality but rather because any photo is better than losing the moment.
Truly, the EyeFi card is simply amazing. It is the first bit of tech I’ve had in a long time that really seems closer to magic than to science.↵
Of course, cell tower triangulation or IP addresses can be used as reasonable substitutes for GPS technology, but the falling cost of GPS with respect to its accuracy makes it the logical option in almost any device, now.↵
Though possibly an extension of Moore’s law, they are not really the same thing.↵
I’m not using the phrase "smart phone" here as I simply now consider non-smart phones to simply be last-generation phones.↵
It doesn’t really pan out that way, though. In particular, the states with the highest percentage of men having been married three or more times are some of the reddest of the red states: Arkansas (10%), Oklahoma (9%), Tennessee (9%), Alabama (8%), and Mississippi (8%). The state with the lowest percentage in this category? Blue, gay-lovin’ Massachusetts at 2% (stats aren’t much different for women, incidentally). So much for the gays ruining marriage; we heterosexuals seem to be devaluing that hallowed institution just fine on our own. [0# ]
I’m anxiously awaiting the release of Tweetie 2 by Atebits. I purchased Tweetie for my iPhone back in January and the desktop app in April. I think they are both amazing applications and I use them almost exclusively to interact with Twitter (particularly given the Twitter web interface’s scripting vulnerabilities). They are both simple and wonderful apps which deserve the design awards which they have been given. I was surprised to see some criticism of Atebit’s plan for charging for the new versions; mostly brought to my attention by following Gruber. One paragraph from this rather long post just floored me:
The whole ‘it’s a completely new app’ argument seems like utter bullshit to me. It is still a Twitter app for **** sake. A slew of new features and functionality does not, to me, make it a different app. I don’t see anything that says this is not just a very much beefed-up, improved version of an existing app – it has the exact same ultimate purpose of making it easy and effective to use Twitter on the iPhone.
Try re-reading that sentence replacing Twitter with your favorite desktop application’s name and iPhone with computer. It starts to hold a lot less water. He goes on to argue that there should be a upgrade price for existing users, which I agree would be great. However, I’m not sure that upgrade pricing is possible in the crazy world of Apple’s App store (certainly not straight-forward, at any rate, for either the developer or the consumer). Atebits feels that this represents enough work on their part to warrant full price for anyone who wishes to use the product. Though no examples come to mind, I doubt this is unprecedented in the world of computer applications and thinking that an iPhone is so different ignores the full-featured platform this device is (which is becoming true of all mobile devices, really).
Time will tell if charging full price for (what appears to be) a significant upgrade is the right choice. Further, we’d be kidding ourselves if we ignored the relative costs here. At a full price of $2.99, a reduced upgrade price couldn’t really save much. You’ve only got a few price points between $3 and free, none of which represent much of a different economic hurdle (though, it could be argued there is a large chasm between free and $0.01).
It appears to me that the author of this post really values Tweetie at nothing and, if that is the case, that is exactly what he should pay for it. Tweetie 1.x will continue to work just fine for the foreseeable future.
For my part — as you have already no doubt guessed — I’ll be happy to pay $2.99 for the upgrade. I’m amazed every time I view the list of apps on my phone which have new versions for downloading to see that none of them charge upgrade prices. I’m astounded that this is the case and it seems unsustainable for me, at least for indie developers. The app store has a lot of growing pains yet to be worked out and this will ripple into the larger, future market of mobile applications sales.
In the meantime, let’s be happy to reward months of hard work with the same amount we tip the waitstaff at a burger joint. Remember Mr. Pink’s diatribe about not wanting to spend a buck or two on that in Reservoir Dogs? He might have a point on principle, but he looked like a cheap jerk, too.
John Graham-Cumming recounts his successful efforts to have the British government formally apologize for its treatment of Alan Turing:
On the bus home I heard directly that Alan Turing’s nieces had many memories of their Uncle Alan. They even still had his teddy bear. I hung up and sat at the back of the bus and cried quietly. I had always felt that Alan Turing’s treatment was appalling, but to hear the family speak of the man was too much. I was convinced that I had to see my campaign, which had started on an impulse, to its completion.
Graham-Cumming did all this in a little more than a month and as he states "most of it from the top of a red London double-decker bus using an iPhone." I’m personally thrilled at his success as it has been a long time coming. Whether we know it or not, Turing played a large part in all of our modern lives and certainly the recent history of Britain. [0# ]
This has kind of been bugging me about iTunes for the past year or so. I had some tiny hope that it would be addressed in iTunes 9, but of course it hasn’t:
Why aren’t DVDs played in iTunes like CDs are, instead of a separate uni-task app (DVD Player)?
Okay, I understand clearly why Apple isn’t going to allow users to rip DVDs using iTunes. But iTunes has clearly moved beyond just audio (or Tunes, as it were) and now stores videos, movies, TV Shows, and even mobile applications. With iTunes Albums (for music) and iTunes Extras (for video), it has become the mac’s digital media repository. Some of the changes in iTunes 9 reflect this evolution.
What makes this even weirder is that DVDs are present in Front Row, which has always seemed to me like nothing more than a pretty, full-screen interface for iTunes. Why, then, isn’t DVD play just integrated into iTunes? All of the extra features in DVDs could easily be accounted or without adding much to the interface with the same simple controls any remote offers and the heads-up display in iTunes video already has.
OS X has loads of interface inconsistencies; most of which are easily overlooked by the vast majority of its users (especially if they came from Windows1). However, this is a functional inconsistency that seems confusing to me. As iTunes has now supported video for some time, many users might expect a more consistent treatment of entertainment on an optical disc.
The way Windows treats DVDs is not only confusing, but actually downright pathetic. Windows Media Player will recognize a DVD and add it to the media list. That’s where the convenience ends, unfortunately. That’s because Windows doesn’t come with a codec that will actually play DVDs. Instead, you have to purchase a third-party DVD Decoder, even if in the so-called "Ultimate" editions. A cryptic error message indicates that you need to do something to get Windows Media Player to play the DVD, just not what. And Windows Media Center (the equivalent to Front Row) doesn’t even show a DVD at all (though it might once you’ve paid for something Microsoft should have included in the OS).↵
It’s been a rough week for some of the high-tech telephony solutions that I use every day. Namely, Google Voice on the iPhone and Skype. I use both of these at work most everyday: my “office” number is a Google Voice line and Skype is great of overseas calls and chatting with colleagues.
This past week, news has arrived that Apple has rejected Google’s official Google Voice app in addition to pulling the third-party Google Voice apps from their iTunes App Store. Apple has faced a slew of complaints from developers over their “brick-wall” tactics when rejecting an app from their store (which, by the way, is the only official means of putting an application on your purchased phone). But this appears to be the last straw on the developers’ backs on which Apple has made a mint selling iPhones1. At least one high-profile developer has had enough and is going to switch to developing to the Palm Pre, the iPhone’s most recent would-be contender.
Yesterday I also read that Skype owner eBay and Skype creators are in a legal battle over the core technology and its future is in question. I’ve been a fan of Skype for some years now and have been impressed with the ease of use and quality of features they continue to add and improve upon in this multi-platform application (I use it on my iPhone, my home OS X desktop, and my work Windows laptop). It really has risen to the top of a fairly large heap of VOIP and chat programs in terms of quality. I was pleasantly surprised that a number of my colleagues at Bentley use Skype for their international calls, as well. Finding another replacement for all those zero-cost international phone calls would be tough2.
And here’s the real kicker: none of this comes down to an issue of engineering or really even cost3. These are solely profit-driven decisions. Is profit important? Of course it is. But these scorched-Earth tactics are really ridiculous. Denying consumers high-quality products for the sole purpose that they may reduce your profits doesn’t actually help anyone. It just drives customers away to someone who is willing to be a bit more open.
As for me? I’m not jumping ship just yet, but I should point out that of my requirements for a smart phone, none of them stated that it had to come from Cupertino. Practicality will out-weight brand loyalty anyday.
There’s been a lot to do about Malcolm Gladwell’s criticism (somewhat heated given Gladwell’s usually calm writing and demeanor) of Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price1. I’m a fan of both Gladwell and Anderson, though I think Anderson’s The Long Tail was a much more down-to-earth book when it comes to business. I think that Gladwell’s books have something of a spiritual feel to them, with little to provide in terms of guidance on business.
But after reading into Gladwell’s criticism of Free, it rang very hollow to me. I think Anil Dash explains it perfectly (emphasis his):
The core of Gladwell’s argument is simple: “Free” fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten year ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. Ah hah!
Anecdotes are just that. Maybe both of them will be vindicated as having brilliant insight into how mass markets work. But just mentioning a couple of examples that support a guy feeling are only enough get folks’ attention, not prove anything
Of course, I’ll continue to read just about everything both author’s write in the New Yorker, Wired, or in long-form print.
Update: I made a small editorial change to the article regarding using quotation marks versus italics for titles.
Maggie, our overly-sensitive Airedale terrier, has some gnarly claws. I mean, she’s bread for digging up larger rodents and snapping their necks, so one can hardly blame her. It’s just what she is. Her claws are those black, really brittle type that are very tough to trim. The only way to do it that doesn’t leave her yelping in doggy hysterics is with a high-speed rotary tool and a mini sanding drum. However, even that can get nasty if she decides to struggle and ends up getting a sander to the knuckle (yeah, fur doesn’t really make that much less painful).
Which is exactly what is being sold as: a safe, easy way to file your pets claws. The product itself isn’t entirely useless, though our dogs now fear it because it does make just enough noise to freak them out (Maggie also doesn’t care for my electric toothbrush, though). So even though it hasn’t worked too well for our pooches, I’m sure that some folks probably swear by the thing.
My problem is with PediPaws – the company. When I bought this thing, we were told they were online or phone only. That is, “not available in stores! Order Now!” However, literally the next day after ordering I was in Bed, Bath, and Beyond and saw them at the check-out counter (“As seen on TV!”). I snapped a photo and sent it to Angela along with a couple of choice swear words. I got home and called their customer service number to cancel the order. They told me that it hadn’t shown up yet and that I couldn’t cancel; that I should call back in a couple of days. Of course, when I call back the order has already gone through and shipped. I gave up and figured it wouldn’t be so bad…
Now, I keep getting checks that sure look an awful lot like rebate checks. Of course, there was never any sort of rebate offered on these things. But, once you read a bit of fine print, it’s clear that this check has nothing to do with the PediPaws product. It’s a contract that if you cash the check you agree to let them charge $140 a year for some credit monitoring crap on the card you bought the PediPaws with.
Does this look shady to you, too?
Yikes!
So a company I already feel questionable about has my credit card and is trying somewhat shady things to get me to authorize more charges on it; plus they want to get to review all my other activity (or, possibly worse, pass my card information off to some third party). This is not cool and I sincerely regret ever having bought this thing at all and especially from PediPaws directly.
![The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]](http://media.readernaut.com/book_covers/0374292795_t50.jpg)
