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The Business Journal…Unread!

The Business Journal

I followed a link to a Business Journal article and when I saw a little red circle at the bottom with a number in it, I thought “Hey, I have some unrea…. Wait-A-Minute!!!”

Did you think the same thing? Many of us have been conditioned by Mac OS X, iOS, Facebook, and other applications/interfaces to instinctively click on any icon with a red circle and a number it in. Those of us who are obsessive will click on these things for just one reason, to make them go away.

Whenever my wife would log into Facebook I’d yell “You have messages, click on the red thing!” so much she banned me from looking at her screen until I stopped. She never clicked on it, and didn’t care about, and I eventually came to accept that.

Hey Business Journal, you almost got me. I almost clicked on it… but I didn’t.

So for those of you in the web design, marketing, advertising, publishing, and UI/UX worlds… Is this clever as heck, or deceptive as hell. (Or both!?)

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The dea.th of del.icio.us?

dea.th of del.icio.us

So the news is that del.icio.us, er, I mean “Delicious” is all set to be jettisoned by Yahoo! I’m a bit saddened by the news because I’ve been a user and fan of delicious since the early days… my oldest bookmark goes back to December of 2003… that’s 7 years worth of bookmarks.

I’ve written a lot about delicious over the years, but even through all of my posts, I was always prepared for the day it would go away, the day it would disappear, the day it would die. Last week it looked like that day had come.

I’m not concerned about my data, as it lives on elsewhere… See Scuttle rides again for info on that. My main concern was losing what many considered the whole point of del.icio.us… the network.

del.icio.us was the first big success in “social bookmarking” and one of the first sites to really get (and push) “tagging” as a way to categorize things. Back in the 2004 many of us thought Yahoo! acquiring del.icio.us was going to lead to great things, not just for Yahoo! but for the web itself.

It appeared that del.icio.us was all set to become a success story for Yahoo! but as is often the case, trying to fold what made something great into a larger organization doesn’t always work. In fact, it’s probably rare that it works.

If anything good comes out of this whole thing, it’s the ideas people have, and the code/services that may crop up in the future. Just check out these posts:

I’m proud to say that Jon and Les and I were all, uh “comrades” back during the web’s heyday of the mid-2000’s… I think were we called “bloggers” back then. It’s neat to see their thoughts on this issue. Les has even more insight, as actually he worked on del.icio.us.

So now what? Well, I did get a Pinboard account, and I’m still collecting everything at p2url.com/bookmarks, and both of those are currently syncing with del.icio.us, which (for now) is still the master. I’ll figure out what to do next, but I’m not worried about the data going away. I am interested in what kind of distributed social bookmarks network may come out of this…

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iPad

iPad

I haven’t done a drawing in a while, so here’s a drawing of an iPad. It was drawn using a Wacom tablet on a Mac Pro, and not drawn on an iPad. I do look forward to seeing what the results of trying to draw on the iPad will yield. If you’ve got any suggestions for iPad drawing apps, let me know.

(Also note that this is actually a drawing of the iPad on the box that the iPad comes in… but I did take a photo of the box, and used that as the basis of this drawing, so it’s either self-referential or recursive… or both.)

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Heat Gun vs. Blow Torch

Heat Gun vs. Blow Torch

It’s winter. If you live in Wisconsin that means you may have to decide between a heat gun and a blow torch for many tasks around the house. I’ve written this brief guide to help you out based on my heat gun and blow torch usage in the last week.

Frozen door knob on garage. For this task I choose the blowtorch. The door knob is metal so I figured it could take the heat of the propane blow torch just fine. Also, since there is no power outlets on the outside of the house, it would have meant running power from the kitchen, and that wasn’t appealing in any respect. Blow torch wins.

Frozen water line. There is a water line running into the refrigerator from the basement. The line is a small plastic tube and it’s close to the outside wall of the house so it freezes easily. For this task I choose the heat gun. Power was readily available, and there were too many flammable or melt-able items near the water line to risk using the blow torch. Heat guns wins.

Frozen gas tank door. This was a tough one… I would have preferred to use the heat gun, but the lack of power outside forced me to use the blow torch. While this worked, I was slightly nervous about putting an open flame to the fuel tank door. A few quick swipes provided enough heat to get the door open though, and it all ended well. Blow torch wins, but Heat guns would have been preferable.

As always, caution must be exercised when using either a heat gun or a blow torch. They can both melt things (including you!) and they can both set things aflame.

Respect your tools, and your heat sources, be careful, be safe, and hopefully you’ll have no problems.

Enjoy the next 6 months of winter!

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BarCampMilwaukee: Progress

BarCampMilwaukee We’re about two months past BarCampMilwaukee5, and I stumbled across an old blog post of mine titled BarCampMilwaukee2: Ideas which was posted about two months before BarCampMilwaukee2 happened. I hope that made sense…

The post mentions a few things that we wanted to do at the time, and I’m happy to say we’ve (finally) accomplished a few of these things.

Kevin had the following suggestion:

Podcasts. There is no time of year better then when the SXSW podcast feed fires up again. I think video of the whole confab will be too intense and would require some people to be in production all day. That’s no fun. I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop. Video of some more interesting visual sessions (read robots) would be neat. In fact, we should have a session room dedicated to video so were not schlepping stuff all over.

Ah yes… Audio! Kevin says “I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop.” Well, we came pretty close on that one. The Convo Droid consists of a Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder with an 8GB SD card. It can easily record over 30 hours of high quality audio. I ran it pretty much non-stop during BarCampMadison3 and BarCampMilwaukee5. I captured a ton of audio. In fact, I probably still haven’t processed it all yet. (We need to define a process for BarCampMilwaukee6 to mark the beginning/end of a session, and do a better job of tagging the audio.) For BarCampMilwaukee5 we also had Gabe Wollenburg and Joshua Cowles capturing audio. Most of it showed up on the BarCampMilwaukee Blog (I also set up my own site to allow for automagic download “podcast style” see my audio tag for more info.)

Kevin also mentions video… a bit more resource intensive than audio, but still doable. For BarCampMadison3 I had two MiniDV video cameras, and a handful of blank tapes. I managed to capture a number of sessions, which you can find by browsing through the barcampmadison3 tag. I would have recorded more, but I ran out of tapes… I was able to do a lot of video capture at BarCampMadison3 because I wasn’t really involved in organizing or running it, so I was free to capture. For BarCampMilwaukee5, I was too involved in running things to deal with setting up cameras and swapping tapes.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have at least one room in Bucketworks wired up for quality audio/video capture at the push of a button before BarCampMilwaukee6 rolls around…

And if you’re wondering why we care so much about capturing and publishing the audio and video from BarCamp, it goes to the core of what the event is all about sharing knowledge, not just with the people at the event, but the people who couldn’t make it, or don’t know what BarCamp is yet. Share what you know… Learn what you don’t. :)