I’ve been traveling the past two weeks for work and noticed some small conveniences that airlines, hotels, and rental car companies have provided and a lot of opportunities they have to go the extra mile for their customers without a lot of effort.

Restaurants

That’s convenient. Why doesn’t every service everywhere that wants a tip have this? I’m instantly inclined to tip more because of this simple little table. I think they could take it further and have the tip added in so I could just circle what total I want and sign. People love when they don’t have to think. Waitresses, bartenders, valets, and other people expecting tips love bigger tips. It’s win-win.

Rental Cars

Most people who rent a car are in a different city and don’t know any of the local radio stations. That’s why Sirius XM radio is so great. The station title gives away the genre, there aren’t any annoying commercials, and the music selection is better so you don’t have to hear the same 10 songs while you’re in town.

A feature most cars come with these days that’s often overlooked is an auxiliary audio input jack. It allows you to play your MP3 player through the car stereo, but not a lot of people pack the $4 cable when they travel so they can’t utilize the feature. It’s like a hotel room having an ironing board without an iron. Would it really be that hard for rental car companies to throw one in the glove box? If someone takes it or loses it, charge them double so you can buy two to replace it.

While they’re throwing stuff in the glove box why not include napkins, tissues, or a pen and pad? Some basic things everyone keeps in their car just like a hotel gives you shampoo, towels, and a TV.

Hotels

I stayed at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel last week, and they had something I had never seen before. The only way I can describe it is as an A/V box with HDMI, VGA, and RCA connectors. Then, in the desk drawer there was a VGA cable and an audio cable so you could hook up your laptop to the 36″ LCD TV. It was pretty well thought out and would allow for visitors to watch DVDs or stream Hulu or Netflix in their rooms.

The box was unique because it encouraged guests to plug in their own stuff. They obviously didn’t want guests getting behind the TV and messing with the cable and pay-per-view devices. The box even had a power outlet built into it so I wouldn’t have to get behind the dresser.

Before I move on, why does it cost a minimum of $10 for 24 hours of internet access in a hotel? Honestly!? It’s 2010.

Airlines

Like I said, I’ve been traveling for business which means taking the same flights every week, which also means seeing the same in-flight movies. They change out every couple weeks and are different going east and west, but still not a lot of people watch them even with free headphones from the airline.

So I came up with a fun idea to get more people engaged in the movie selecting process. Before each flight when you are checking in at a kios or online and picking your seat, why not also vote on which movie you’d like to watch? The movie with the most votes gets played. Simple as that.

Of course, I still prefer JetBlue’s DirecTV in each seat along with the option to watch a number of movies (for a price). I wouldn’t care what’s on if the airline has Wi-Fi. That is the ultimate in-flight convenience.

Conclusion

I love convenience because it saves time, energy, and frustration. It’s simple. Sometimes that comes at a price, but other times it just takes some creative thinking. It’s true I have come to expect the little things as a customer. I want my snack bags to reseal so they’ll be fresh later. I want my cases of beer to have the same fridge packs as my Diet Coke. I want others to stop overlooking all of these everyday conveniences that would be so simple to implement.

A few months ago, I was answering dozens of Craigslist ads a day to try and find any work I could including paid surveys and research settings. In the fury of it all, I accidentally involved myself in a mail fraud scheme by responding to a spam message I mistook as a real response to one of my inquiries to a paid survey. Everything looked very convincing and authentic to the point I almost unknowingly committed a crime by trying to cash counterfeit postal money orders. Luckily, I caught on in time, called my local FBI field office, and filed a complaint to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

One of the problems I found in getting replies after inquiring about a Craigslist listing is that you don’t get a response from the Craigslist generated email address (i.e. gigs-yvmsq-1541740782@craigslist.org) you originally emailed. I also found that most people didn’t keep the same subject line and didn’t include what I originally wrote which is what made this scam so hard to spot. If I hadn’t been answering so many different ads and hadn’t actually been looking for Craigslist paid surveys, I would have immediately marked this as spam. Here’s what the email said:

Craigslist Paid Survey

Dear Applicant

Thank you for your recent online application on Craigslist dated 3rd November, 2009. We appreciate your quick response as we believe it portrays good sense of responsibility and efficiency.

We are a dynamic Organization Development and Management Consulting firm involved in helping Companies achieve market leadership and Improve connections between professional services firms and their client organization. Our company is currently conducting a survey on Money Gram Outlets to help measure and improve effectiveness of the services they provide to the general public. This is as a result of complaints from some of Money Gram reliable customers about the behavior and orderliness of most Money Gram outlets.

The survey involves you visiting a Money Gram Outlet in your area to patronize their business services as a customer and give us feedback on your overall customer experience by filling a simple online questionnaire. Each survey takes a maximum of 20 Minutes to complete and you’ll be paid $85 for every survey completed, No Sales Involved and this will not inconvenience your present occupation.

If you are interested in participating, please send us a reply with your Full Name & Email Address, we’ll get back to you after receiving this information to confirm your participation in the survey.

Your faithfully,

Terry Schultz

Research Analyst

RSM Research

14621 Firethorne Path

Fort Wayne IN 46814

260-494-3832

It’s a pretty legit sounding email and they end it with only needing my email address and full name (nothing too personal and come to think of it they should already have it if I responded in the first place). I willingly responded and a few days later got this very real looking email:

Survey Date

Good Morning,

This is to confirm you have been selected as our Survey / Evaluation agent in your area. You will be evaluating Money Gram outlets in your neighborhood and the survey date is November 13, 2009.

Please note that you will be required to visit one Money Gram outlet within your neighborhood to patronize their business services as a customer and give us feedback on your overall customer experience with them by completing a questionnaire.

Funds to cover all expenses needed to conduct this survey will be delivered to you on the surveydate by USPS. Deduct your compensation of $85 after receiving the funds and proceed to the nearest Money Gram with the remainder of the funds to complete the actual survey evaluation, further information on how to proceed will be emailed to you on the survey date.

Respond ASAP to this email on your acceptance and willingness to carry out the survey with your Full Name, Mailing Address, Phone Number where the funds and guideline to completing the surveyshould be mailed to.

Thank you and hope to hear from you today.

Your faithfully,

Terry Schultz
Research Analyst

RSM Research
14621 Firethorne Path
Fort Wayne IN 46814
260-494-3832

I gave out my address and my Google Voice number. (I don’t consider my apartment that I don’t have long term plans of staying at very sensitive information and my Google Voice number isn’t real either since it just forwards to a number of my choosing.) Now a flag should have started to go up when I didn’t hear anything after a few emails, but then an update came a week later.

Money Gram Survey Update

Good Morning,

We apologize for the postponement in the survey date, it was due to a logistic arrangements error by our courier. The survey funds will  be delivered today or tomorrow by USPS. Follow the below instructions to complete the Evaluation as soon as you receive the funds.

Attached below is the Money Gram form, study the questions carefully before conducting the actualsurvey on Money Gram and have the form filled out and emailed back to me after completion of thesurvey.

1.1 Write your Name & Address on the pay to Column of the Money Orders and fill in the return name and address on the package on the Sender Column before cashing them at your bank.

1.2 Deduct your pay of $85 after cashing the Money Orders.
1.3 Deduct another $65 for transfer fees.

Locate a Money Gram Outlet near you to conduct the survey by patronizing their business services, you are to appear as a potential customer making a Money Gram transfer to a relative outside the country. Below is the transfer information you need for the wire.

Transfer Amount : $1650
Receivers Last Name: Adams
Receivers First Name: Jonathan
Destination: Pretoria, South Africa 0180

Be sure to observe how long it took you to get services, Smartness of the attendant and Customer service professionalism during the transfer process and Under no circumstances should the Money Gram Agents know this evaluation is being carried out on them.

Email me as soon as you make the transfer with the following information;
Reference #, Amount Sent, Name And Address Of Sender.

Thank you and get back to me as soon as the survey is completed today.

Your faithfully,

Terry Schultz

This is about the point where all my flags went up that this had all been a scam when I saw they wanted me to send money to South Africa. I have nothing against South Africa, but when you’re on the same continent as Nigeria you become scammers by association. It also didn’t add up why a company in Fort Wayne, Indiana would have me send funds to a different continent. I marked this email as spam and moved on with my life.

That is until I received an overnighted USPS envelope the next day with two postal money orders inside totaling $1925. The scam plot continued to thicken as both  money orders were from a Cary Ross in New York City but the envelope was sent from Carla Killeen in Joshua, Texas.

I initially thought, “Oh no, some poor woman has been scammed! But maybe I can get her her money back…” I did some googling to see if I could find any information about either sender. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much. The NY address was for an apartment building and the TX address was out in the middle of nowhere. Neither name returned anything in either city or state either so I was stuck.

In my frustration, I started examining the postal money orders and noticed how cheap they looked. I had never seen or used one in my life, but have seen some counterfeit money and fake IDs in my time. I quickly brought up the postal money order security features and saw the Ben Franklin watermarks were missing and that the vertical thread looked more stamped on than weaved. To confirm my suspicions, I called the US Postal Money Orders hotline (1-866-459- 7822) and entered the serial numbers, amounts, and ID to verify they were fake.

This is the point where I could have just walked away, but I figured that these scammers had wasted enough of my time that I could try to turn them in somehow so I called my local FBI field office. A few seconds into my story, they cut me off and knew exactly what I was about to tell them. In true government fashion, I was told to visit http://www.ic3.gov and file a complaint and to keep the fake money orders as evidence.

Like I already said, if I hadn’t been answering so many craigslist posts this would have never happened. I wanted to post their emails verbatim so search engines could index them incase other people get them. When I was searching for information about the NY and TX residences, I found out that the first email I received was a scam but it didn’t look like anyone had become as involved as I did.

Nothing ever came of my complaint (not a big surprise). I’m glad someone didn’t get scammed out of any real money. I’m REALLY glad I didn’t try to cash those fake money orders. I hope someone finds this post before they get involved in a dumb scam or can at least get out of it if they are already involved. In closing, here’s some tips from the United States Postal Service for protecting yourself against money order fraud.

Do people still submit their blogs to Technorati?

(Claim token 77QZ6TZ65T6G)

I could have probably hidden this post so it only shows up in the RSS feed, but I’m lazy

The new year is here and everything is, well, new! New job, new city, new friends, new social networks, new toys. With all of this new, I best try to use it to improve myself and maybe even help others. Here are my New Year’s resolutions for 2010:

1. Save and Invest

This is the first year in my life that I will earn more than I spend. There’s no more tuition to pay and I’m one of the lucky 2009 grads to have a paycheck. I have some manageable debt in the form of student loans, but for the most part I’m looking to get my income into a 401k, IRA, savings account, or some other form of investment before I can go spend it.

I’m not making gobs of money (yet) but if you need $10 or $100 or $1000 to do something awesome, send me an email. I figure the easiest way to start giving back is by donating to designers and developers who give out their work for free and have little charity pages setup.

2. Optimize Information Intake

Since starting my new job, Google Reader has become unruly and my Read It Later List has grown to nearly 200. I need to take an hour or two a night to knock out 10-20 old links and do a better job filtering or scanning new articles as they come up. Surprisingly, I feel like I’ve kept up with Twitter and other social networks pretty well.

3. Read More Books

I read a lot on the screen, but never on the page. I couldn’t tell you the last book I finished cover to cover. I’m hoping to read one book a month but perhaps more depending on how much I fly and how crazy the new TSA rules are. I think I’ll try to keep a springpad list of books I read.

4. Return to the Dark Side

For the past 4 years, I’ve done everything in my power to get away from Microsoft to the point everyone in my family now owns a Mac or runs Ubuntu. Joining the corporate world has forced me to submerge myself into everything Microsoft once more. I knew it was going to happen so I’ve been trying to learn more than fight.

I also have a Windows Home Server that I’ve neglected for months, so now that I’m back into dealing with Windows headaches I should hopefully be able to trick it out. I want to enable remote access so I can access all of my media when I’m on the road, automate torrents (legal ones) to download to it, and explore what our household XBox can retrieve from it to play across the house.

5. Produce More

I want to put out more blog posts, more videos, more designs, more code, more everything and not just get things started but actually finish them. I want to focus on getting things done. I have tons of ideas and half-cooked projects started, but nothing is completely done and out in the wild. I want to be able to show more from 2010 than I can from 2009.

6. Visually Brand Myself and My Sites

My blog design is tired and nearly expired. I don’t have a logo. I want to further develop a brand so I’m more recognizable across all 100,000 profiles I have everywhere. I really like what Kyle Haskins has done with how he’s kept his blog, Tumblr account, and portfolio all congruent. Both of the Hale brothers are putting the finishing touches on their new designs which has motivated me even more to get my own out there.

The last few things I want to do this year are minor and I haven’t completely figured out how I’m going to do it. I want to play more basketball and get back in shape. I also want to stop ordering the same movies as my roommate Alex from Netflix weeks and months after he does. Anyone know of a collaboration service that can read your Netflix queue?

This is more of a journal entry than a blog post, but I hope other new college grads and those about to be can take something from my experience. To summarize – I worked, I travelled, I waited, I made it.

A little over a year ago, I went to a 3rd round interview in Chicago for Accenture. It was a stressful day among the endless introductions, multiple interviews, and nosebleed at lunch in front of the other recruits and current employees. I walked away tweeting it was 1st class and didn’t think I made the cut. A few weeks later I got an offer! It was my third along with ArcelorMittal and the NSA. I stopped interviewing with other companies and accepted it. I was Chicago bound!

Before I graduated in May, I was notified that my start date had been pushed back from my requested June 1st to November 16th. As someone who had grown impatient waiting for Christmas breaks to end, I was horrified. What the hell was I going to do for 6 months?

To start, I went home for a few weeks and conquered a massive to-do list for my parents (wireless this, backups that, you know) while simplifying my way of life based on the “100 thing challenge“. I helped my neighbor with a small project and the itch was on to get involved with something. I considered emailing Gary Vaynerchuk to see if he’d put me up for a few months in NYC in exchange for helping Vaynermedia get off the ground by doing whatever I could. Luckily, there was a startup just as interesting launching in Bloomington. I attended the SproutBox opening making a point to talk to Mike Trotzke so I could express my interest in, again, showing up to do whatever I could. We had met at career fairs before and I followed him on Twitter so I didn’t feel like a complete stalker approaching him.

SproutBox

After being through dozens of interviews just 6 months ago, I was incredibly nervous to meet with Trotzke and ask if I could work for free to help them out. He welcomed the help and I was back in the gritty startup environment I fell in love with at ChaCha. From day one I learned something new every day! I walked in there like I had a college education but was clueless when it came to version control systems or PHP frameworks.

Thankfully everyone from Kyle and Matt (designers) to Dave and Cameron (developers) to even Marc, Mike, and Brad (cofounders) were available to consult for help immediately next to me if they weren’t busy flying helicopters, gliding scooters through the office, or planning Tequila Tuesdays. I looked forward to coming to “work” in the morning and learned as much as possible from everyone there. I loved my time at SproutBox. I wish they would have been hiring when I was hunting for jobs.

Eppley Insitute

I was quickly running out of graduation money so I applied to work for the Eppley Institute as a web developer. During my interview, I did the 2009 – match a face to a Twitter avatar who ended up being Jacob Gube (goo-beh for the non-l33ts). I thought he was setting me up when he asked what sort of blogs I followed for design and development. I said the obvious Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Depot along with a few smaller (now bigger) names like Chris Wallace, Rogie King, and Tim Van Damme. I purposely didn’t mention Six Revisions and tweeted about it afterwards.

That tweet caught the eyes of both interviewers (Matt and Jacob). Every career counselor will tell you to do your homework about the company you’re interviewing with and that you should write hand-written letters to thank them afterwards. Since there wasn’t much info out there about Eppley, I relied on my knowledge of the web design/developer community. Instead of wasting my time with a most likely illegible post-interview thank you note, I got the attention of both interviewers while blasting a good word about their company to all of my followers in less than 140 characters.

At Eppley, I was given the daunting task of mashing together three different open source content management systems to satisfy a number of requirements from every branch of the company’s org chart. Basically, they wanted a more robust ecommerce solution that kept their user system synced with their existing eLearning system. There were restrictions such as payment methods the university could accept, delays such as marketing reports that would shape the branding and layout of the site, and even limitations of what the open source solutions could deliver even with their worldwide network of developers and supporters. It was one of the toughest projects I had ever taken on.

Frustration grew, progress slowed, life went on. I signed a lease for an apartment in Chicago and had to start paying rent even though I was still in Bloomington. My car died so I had to borrow my brother’s car to get to/from work. JetBlue announced their ‘All You Can Jet‘ pass. All of that made me decide to chalk up the Eppley project as a loss and move on.

I admit I failed at completing that project and it was a valuable experience in a professional setting. It’ll be my go-to story the next time I’m faced with the inevitable interview question “tell me about a time you didn’t succeed”. I have my theories and suggestions on how we could have done things differently (which is how you end those types of interview questions) but the Eppley web developers were great to work with regardless.

All You Can Jet

I made the complete and official move to Chicago at the beginning of September only to fly to Boston a few days later. Then we flew to Los Angeles, Portland, DC, Seattle, and San Diego touching down in Chicago every week for clean clothes and a good night sleep. I also went to Sarasota and Las Vegas to round out my 26 flights in 30 days. I had the time of my life and only regret not taking more pictures, shooting more video, and writing more blog posts about all the awesome things we did. (I did try to post to Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and other social sites so our travels didn’t go totally undocumented.)

Freelancing

For the last 6 weeks before starting my career with Accenture, I looked to take on small projects so I could pay the rent and maybe have a few beers on the weekends. I was very limited in regards to what jobs I could take on since I couldn’t commit to anything longer than a month or two.

I primarily used Craigslist to find small local computer-related jobs. The Chicago network is pretty active so there were a couple dozen posts a day to sift through. I responded to over 100 posts and maybe heard back from 10 (never in a timely fashion even though most posts said they needed help ASAP or to have the project done tomorrow). It was appalling how uneducated and unprofessional the people looking for help were. Everyone wanted everything for nothing if they even knew what they wanted. It was beyond frustrating to the point I wrote a post just to vent.

Somehow I was able to find a few projects and pay my rent on time. Overall it was a very humbling experience and made me appreciate my pending job with Accenture all that much more. I realized how unprepared I was to be a freelancer. Not so much the technical aspects, but business related tasks such as invoicing and contracts. I experimented using my Google Voice number as my “business” line but even that needs some perfecting. If I had to do it again, I would definitely approach friends and family for projects and not waste my time on Craigslist. If I was more established I would have felt more comfortable bidding for bigger projects on professional designer/developer job boards, but I didn’t think I was ready to compete with people who freelance for a living.

Starting at Accenture

After my first week at my new job, I know I’m at the right place. From the people to the corporate culture to the endless extra perks, I’ve calmed any worries I had about putting my life on hold in order to start this career. I’m excited about the kind of projects I’ll be involved with next year being in the Identity and Access Management security group in Technology Consulting.

The last six months have been a blast! I met a lot of great people, visited a lot of new places, and managed to not run out of money in the process.

Social networks are great except you can’t always be there to see everything that’s going on. People are always friending, following, commenting, and direct messaging. The default from the beginning has been to email you about this. Then came the SMS updates from AIM, Twitter, Facebook, and Brightkite even MySpace ::cringe::. Finally, push notifications came to the iPhone and I’m convinced I don’t need anything else.

For me, AOL Instant Messenger was the first service I got SMS updates from. It didn’t matter what number the updates came from before I had an iPhone. When my texts became threaded, I came across a way to keep all my AIM texts in one stream using a vCard with all of their SMS numbers. When Twitter came along, they just had one SMS number which was fine, but then Facebook started offering SMS notifications and they have close to 100 different numbers! I tried to create a proper vCard to duplicate my success with managing AIM, but I could never get it to work properly with Google Apps contacts.

(I have them pushed to my phone and they seem to only allow for one “mobile” number per contact. If you can figure this out, please let me know)

Facebook SMS Updates

Makes for a mess managing text messages, doesn’t it? Email is no better. I’ve setup a Gmail filter for all of my social network accounts just so they don’t clutter my inbox and I’m not even one of those people who gets hundreds or thousands of emails a day. The email notifications, for the most part, don’t really tell me anything and just want me to come back to the site. I don’t gain anything from the notification since I’m going to return to the site anyways and it will tell me all the things that have happened (good sites at least).

Social Emails

Solution: Push Notifications

Instead of getting SMS or email notifications (and somethings both), I would rather get push notifications from my iPhone apps. I have apps for just about every network that sends me any sort of notification (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AIM, Brightkite, Foursquare). I’ve even considered switching to (or adding) Echofon because it offers push notifications for mentions and DMs.

AIM is my favorite app with push notifications because when I installed their new app it new I had SMS notifications on and switched them to be “pushes” instead for me! It also allows me to keep signed in after I’ve closed the app for up to 24hrs so I can keep receiving IMs if I’m away from my laptop for an extended period of time.

To me, it would make sense for any website that offers SMS or email notifications to develop and deploy push notifications for their iPhone app. When I get push notifications, I don’t need anything else which saves them money in the long run (SMS is expensive). This would also save me money because I may be able to go to the next lowest tier of text messages for my cell plan if I know I can eliminate a couple hundred incoming texts per month.

I know Facebook said they would be adding push notifications to their app later last summer, but their lead developer just quit yesterday so who knows when they’ll add that. Twitter is in the business of letting everyone else build apps around their service so you can’t blame them. I can request Tweetie add push notifications so I’m not tempted to add another app just for that. I’m surprised (and disappointed) Brightkite didn’t add push notifications after their big 2.0 rollout. As a smaller startup who spends a lot of time on their mobile apps, you’d think that it would be higher on their priority list.

Two apps that do it right are Foursquare and ESPN Fantasy Football. I just joined Foursquare and I’m not crazy about it since I haven’t been going out as much lately, but when someone checks in near me I get an innocent push notification instead of a text that costs me money. When I’m sitting on the couch all Sunday (and now Thursday night), I get updates from ESPN about how I’m doing in both of my fantasy leagues. It’ll even notify me if one of my bench players is projected to outscore a starter!

(you can steal this background from me here)

Don't worry I'm winning

These are all my personal preferences and opinions. I know some people would prefer only getting email notifications and others have never turned on SMS notifications. Most people don’t have an iPhone so push notifications are out for them. Mobile notifications are becoming more prevalent and SMS costs aren’t going down. Both social networks and users alike are looking to save a buck and venders are listening. Just because the phrase “push notifications” is pretty much owned by the iPhone don’t think Android with the Motorola Blur and the Palm Pre aren’t trying to tap into that market with their own social play.

(One step further: why aren’t PayPal, eBay, Chase, Bank of America, and other financial focused apps using push notifications? eBay wants to charge you for SMS updates on auctions, but wouldn’t push notifications be cheaper and drive more people to bid raising their earnings? For the financial institutes who think it might be insecure, I already use Mint because they’ll alert me with push notifications about my accounts with you so what’s holding you back?)

Yesterday, the popular Twitter / Facebook / MySpace desktop app Tweetdeck updated its iPhone app and I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I was disappointed in the direction they took with the trivial features they added. The big “additions” included Facebook integration, video integration via 12seconds, landscape composing, and Bit.ly support. Instead, I would have liked to see them try to integrate some of Twitter’s new API features such as geolocation, lists, and retweets.

In the past couple months, I’ve fallen out of love with the TweetDeck iPhone app because it’s slow and crashes often (like more than any other app I have). The original reason I started using TweetDeck was for its columns feature and when they announced they would sync those with my iPhone app, I was blown away. When it took forever to load tweets into columns and often crashed on load, I started using it only when I had a few minutes to check updates (and had the patience to let it load). When I wanted to quickly look at updates, I chose Tweetie and still do. Now with all these added features, I fear Tweetdeck will be even slower and crash even more (although they say they’ve fixed the compose crash in v1.1).

Facebook Integration

Facebook integration on the desktop app is great because it saves me from running another AIR app and I can follow both my Twitter feed and Facebook feed throughout the day in the same window. I hardly go to Facebook’s site because of it. When I’m using my iPhone, it’s a different story. I have a Facebook app already and the newest version is pretty solid even though it’s missing push notifications. Some people may like both feeds in one app, but what happens when you want to do something else on Facebook like:

• Check your Inbox
• See whose birthday it is
• See who’s online to chat
• Anything but check your News Feed

The updated TweetDeck app also lets you create Facebook groups that will sync with your desktop. They’re already using the Facebook API so why don’t they allow you to pull your friends lists you’ve already created on Facebook? I would rather see my Facebook friends lists pulled into TweetDeck and synced between Facebook, TweetDeck desktop, and TweetDeck iPhone app.

Video Integration

With the iPhone 3GS video capabilities it was inevitable almost every app would try to add it. Tweetie has video capabilities and offers the option to use either yfrog or TwitVid. TweetDeck only allows you to use 12seconds.tv for video upload even though they support yfrog for image uploads. The problem with using 12seconds is that you can only upload videos that are 12 seconds long.

TweetDeck Video Disclaimer

If you go over that, they are automatically trimmed down so the best part of your video could get cut out if you’re not careful. Yfrog and TwitVid do not have length limits (that I’ve found anyways). If TweetDeck is already using yfrog for image posting, how hard would it have been to tap into their video API as well?

Other Features

I don’t use the landscape keyboard so that’s not a major feature for me. I’ve had an iPhone since day 1 so I’m used to and pretty skilled at the normal keyboard. Including the Bit.ly account is another nice small feature, but I don’t know the last time I shared a URL on the go and wanted to track how many people clicked it. I also didn’t like typing in the 32 character API key.

Features I Actually Wanted

TweetDeck’s bread and butter since day 1 has been their columns feature. Twitter has picked up on how much people liked them so they created lists. I know not everyone has the list function available to them yet as it is slowly rolling out in beta fashion, but I want to see both TweetDeck’s desktop app and iPhone app convert my columns into lists and then continue to sync them with Twitter and my TweetDeck clients. They claim on their blog that “what [they] have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights“.

The “nearby tweets” has been a feature on a number of iPhone Twitter apps so it’s about time TweetDeck added it. They could have 1-up’d everyone by incorporating the new Twitter geolocation feature. If they are using this new feature, why aren’t they bragging about it to separate themselves from everyone else?

The last and least likely feature that I still want to see on both the desktop and iPhone app is retweet. Yes, I know they have the default “RT @username:” but I’m talking about Twitter’s built in Retweet that was announced back in August (along with geolocation by the way). Sure, the limited roll out just started last week, but has TweetDeck already included it in their code? Again, why aren’t they bragging about it?

Conclusion

I love using TweetDeck on my Macbook Pro and still love that it syncs my columns to my iPhone. But, I want more and to know more is coming. I’m weary that all the additional features will bloat the application on both platforms. It’s one of the biggest memory hogs on my Macbook Pro and app most likely to crash on my iPhone. It has outgrown its name as “TweetDeck” and should probably be called something like “SocialDeck” now that it continues to add more social networks. With LinkedIn adding the ability to tweet your status, you have to think they are going to be the next social network to be added. My other prediction is that since TweetDeck is built on AIR, we might see a browser based version of it. Then, Safari can use all of my RAM!

I love finding new desktop wallpapers that I can hide in the background behind the dozens of windows I typically have open. Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse of one of the nearly 150 I’ve collected over the years. Knowing that I’ll be getting a new work computer in a few weeks, I wondered if there would be a simple way share and sync my wallpapers between a few computers. Dropbox to the rescue!

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of Dropbox, it’s “software that syncs your files online and across your computers” for free. You can view the full tour of features and use this link to sign up (please do since I’ll get 250 MB in additional space).

I had the idea to move my existing directory of wallpapers to my Dropbox folder so that they would be backed up in the cloud and also available for other computers to use. Dropbox is so awesome that they automatically created a gallery of all of my wallpapers to share with you! Feel free to steal any you like. I got them all for free so I don’t think the original designers would mind (the Corona cap is actually a picture I took).

Mac OS X Instructions

Open up System Preferences and click on the Desktop and Screensaver icon.

Desktop and Screensaver Settings

Then, click the ‘+’ and navigate to your Dropbox folder. I’ve placed my ‘wallpapers’ folder inside my ‘Photos’ folder which allows me to share them publicly as a gallery.

Dropbox - Photos - Wallpapers

I then set some general options like centering photos that won’t fill my screen, change picture every 15 minutes, random order, and keep the menu bar translucent.

When I get my work computer that’ll run Windows, I can follow these simple directions and have the same pictures on both computers. Then if I find a new background, I can add it to my ‘wallpapers’ directory on either computer and it will automatically show up on the other.

If you’re looking to share desktop wallpapers with someone else like a coworker, family member, or friend, you could use Dropbox’s share feature to collaborate on your collection.

I hope this little Dropbox trick will spur other interesting and useful uses for both you and me. If you have any wallpapers that are plain awesome, please leave them in the comments so I can add them to my collection!

What do you get when you cross a Macbook Pro with a 500 GB hard drive with a 500 GB Time Capsule? A slim margin for back ups. I knew this day was going to come when I upgraded from my old Macbook that just had a 60 GB hard drive. Now, I have the daunting task of figuring out what to do now that what I want and need to backup is too big for my backup media.

Source: Flickr

Before I continue, I will say once again that Mac OS X’s Time Machine with Apple’s Time Capsule is the easiest and most thorough backup solution around. Set and forget it. Never worry again about anything. I love it and highly recommend it to everyone I know (and those I don’t). When I got my new Macbook Pro, instead of having to spend a day or two configuring settings and installing new software I was able to just plug it into my Time Capsule and tell it I want it just like my Macbook and in a little over an hour I had an exact clone. It was a real time saver!

On to the problem at hand, what happens when Time Machine can’t back up anymore because there isn’t enough space on your Time Capsule? I called Apple Support for ideas and of course their first answer was to buy a bigger Time Capsule. The 1 TB model would suffice and the 2 TB model would probably be best, but I don’t have an extra $300 – $500 at the moment to buy another one.

The other solution was to erase my current Time Capsule and create a fresh full backup. This would erase months of backups which means I wouldn’t be able to restore to previous versions of files or recover files I had accidentally deleted. I was comfortable enough to do this so I took the following steps:

1. Turn off Time Machine in System Preferences
2. Open Airport Utility and select your Time Capsule from the list of devices on the left
3. Click “Manual Setup” and then the “Disks” tab at the top
4. Click “Erase…” and choose which level of security you want

AirPort Utility

I chose the quick erase option since I was going to be putting the exact same sensitive information back on the hard drive. This also is the quickest method so you can get to the next step. After it has been erased, connect your Mac to your Time Capsule with an ethernet cable if you’ve been doing this wirelessly thus far.

WARNING: Performing a full backup over WIFI will literally take DAYS

Once they’re connected via ethernet, go turn Time Machine back on in System Preferences and select your disk once again as the backup destination. This first full backup will still take a few hours when you’re connected via ethernet so you might want to leave it running overnight.

That solution is really just a “bandaid” and won’t last long term. Sooner or later, I’m going to need a bigger external hard drive. It doesn’t have to be another Time Capsule, but it’ll be easiest if it is. So what do you do with your old Time Capsule?

• Use it to backup another Mac with a smaller hard drive and expand your home network range
• Use it as a network storage drive for media, etc. and expand your home network range
• Sell it to a close friend or someone who isn’t very tech savvy

Why do I say that? Even if you use the most secure erasing methods, your data is really never gone. If you think about what Time Machine is doing, it’s not just keeping every single file that has been on your Mac but also the different versions you’ve had of it. If you’re one of those naughty children who keep a text file named “passwords” on your desktop with all of your passwords in it, someone could not only recover what your most recent passwords are but look back at what different passwords you’ve used in the past. From there, they could look for patterns in your passwords and maybe even guess future passwords.

If you noticed in my screenshot, we have tons of other Apple products spread around our house that makes our WIFI network awesome. When you’ve outgrown your current Time Capsule, turn it into a media server to store all those pictures and videos that are accumulating from weekends and vacations. I’ll probably dedicate mine to all the HD video my Mino Flip HD camera takes so I don’t have to worry about filling up another hard drive.

For you hardware hackers out there that probably thought this was going to be a post about cracking open your Time Capsule to throw in a much bigger hard drive, it has been done already. My only warning is that when I took my TC in to the Apple Store to check an ethernet port, the Genius technician told me that if you try to pop open your TC to change the drive you’ll probably break it completely. Apple doesn’t want you in there so they’ve designed them accordingly. That’s my only word of caution from the horse’s mouth.

Backup, backup, and backup again!

UPDATE: If you don’t feel like reading this, just watch this video instead. It’s the same message.

Before I start, I’m sorry to any experienced designers and developers who have read these dozens and dozens of times before. Sadly, the laymen still continually make these mistakes so every couple months beginner bloggers like me have to reinforce these issues.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hunting for freelance jobs in the Chicago area on Craigslist. I’ve slowly learned that this is the worst place to look for work. There’s a bonus freebie. After going through a couple hundred listings, I’ve noticed the same reoccurring trends that have started to make me cringe and not even bother replying. If you have or are thinking about making a job posting on Craigslist or any other service, please avoid listing any of the following.

“I need someone who can do EVERYTHING!!!”

As much as I hate to admit it, no one can design you a logo, design and code you a website, incorporate some e-commerce, make it #1 in every search engine, and also be a systems administrator who is an expert in Flash and Final Cut Pro and is a Social Media Ninja with strong graphic design skills. They did start design firms and ad agencies for a reason. I find it perfectly acceptable to seek someone who can do frontend work as well as backend work, but there are limitations.

“I want it fast and cheap.”

Fine, but you’ve already picked your two. This kind of thinking is so old and common there’s even a Wikipedia entry on the classic “Project Triangle”. In other words you have three options:

• Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
• Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time.

If you need to think about this outside of web design, think about what happens when you build a house in a day with just cardboard. Cheap, right?

“I’d like a sample of your work to compare against someone else before I hire you.”

TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE! I’m happy to show you my portfolio and even projects that are nearing their completion that haven’t made it to my portfolio. Wait, you want me to “enhance a photo” or give you all of my ideas before I start? Well if that’s the case why did I spend all that time revising my resume and putting together my portfolio in the first place? Ah, you want it cheap, fast, and good. Doesn’t work like that (see above).

You don’t hire someone for a job, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to pay them. In reality your hiring thought process should be more along the lines of, “hey this person has done quality work in the past and I can see that. I expect them to do the same, if not better, work for me,”

Time Expectations

It’s a fact of life that deadlines need to be met. But! If you think you’re going to post something on Craigslist and get it done in a day or a week, then it’ll probably take a week or month, respectively. (Unless you don’t require high quality, see above)

What’s even worse than putting a designer or developer under the gun, is “knowing” how long it will take them to complete a project. The posts usually read, “I’m a programmer so I know how long it takes to design” or vice versa. Newsflash: your math savvy applicant is going to adjust their hourly rate to accommodate the amount of hours you think it’ll take to “get the job done”.

Job vs. Internship vs. Volunteer Position

The economy sucks. Fine. I can’t afford someone who is experienced. Fine. I want someone to work for me for free. Not fine. Seriously, it’s illegal and insulting. I could go on and on with phrases people use to say, “I don’t have any money to pay you now, but there will be TONS of future work”, but I think my favorite from today is:

Please don’t respond if you aren’t willing to start on internship basis, we’d be offering $ now if we could.(link)

First, there are such things as paid internships. (I’ve had a few) Second, if you’re starting a business why would depend on complete strangers to help you succeed? Friends, family, and fools. Ok, there are a lot of fools on Craigslist.

Bottom line, don’t call something a “job” or say that you’re “hiring” if there isn’t any compensation. Let people come to you if they want to work for free, don’t go out phishing for them. Internships are meant to be valuable experiences so individuals can go on and perform at a higher level at their next positions, not for young college and high school kids to be taken advantage of. If you aren’t offering a cup of coffee or a couple bucks an hour, then you’re just offering a volunteer position.

Every designer and developer understands that not everyone understands how much time and effort goes into their work so for every layman out there – please don’t underestimate us! Our work is valuable, specialized, and, for some, a livelihood. Thank you for not making yourselves sound like oblivious morons in your job postings!

As you might expect, when you are an investor in a new company you are privy to features unbeknownst to the public. AJ Vaynerchuk, partner at Vaynermedia, tweeted something the other day that got me digging into his site’s source code. What I found was a simple way to display your latest photo from DailyBooth.com!

What I Found

AJ Vaynerchuk's Blog Header

Here’s the HTML for his center image from DailyBooth.com:

<div id="polaroids">
<a href="http://dailybooth.com/ajv">
<img style="margin-left:14px; margin-top:15px; position:absolute; width:275px; border: none;" src="http://dailybooth.com/ajv/latest/large.jpg">
</a>
</div>

Very straightforward- a simple DIV with the “What I Look Like Today” polaroid as a background image CSS, a link to his DailyBooth account, and an image from DailyBooth.com that, as you can gather from the URL, is his latest upload.

The strange part is that I haven’t found any sort of documentation about this feature anywhere. It’s not mentioned in DailyBooth’s blog, FAQ, or listed as an option under their “Share” tab for a user. The closest thing I found was a blog post of theirs that explains “How to create a dailybooth screen saver” for Mac OS X using an undocumented RSS feed.

How You Can Use It

I’ll cover the simple stuff first which is hot linking to your latest picture on DailyBooth. I’m only encouraging hot linking because they say in their FAQ that it’s ok to hot link to DailyBooth icons that don’t yet exist (at least for me) on the share tab. There are three different sizes (small, medium, and large) to choose from (all somewhat odd dimensions if you ask me):

117 x 94 pixels

233 x 186 pixels

450 x 360 pixels

The URL structure is pretty easy to guess if you looked at AJ’s code: http://dailybooth.com/<username>/latest/<size>.jpg where <username> is your username like ‘maxbeatty’ and <size> is either ’small’, ‘medium’, or ‘large’.

I love how AJ displays his picture prominently with the custom background, but I don’t like that he uses inline CSS styles to “shrink” the picture from DailyBooth. Here’s how you could style the large image with just CSS using the following HTML markup:

<div style="width: 460px">
<a href="http://dailybooth.com/maxbeatty/latest/large.jpg">
<img title="450 x 360 pixels" src="http://dailybooth.com/maxbeatty/latest/large.jpg" alt="450 x 360 pixels" width="450" height="360" />
</a>
<p>450 x 360 pixels</p>
</div>

Here’s the CSS I use on my site to “frame” pictures:

.wp-caption {
	border: 1px solid #ddd;
	text-align: center;
	background-color: #f3f3f3;
	padding-top: 4px;
	margin: 10px;
	-moz-border-radius: 3px;
	-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
	border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
	font-size: 11px;
	line-height: 17px;
	padding: 0 4px 5px;
	margin: 0;
}

You could also take AJ’s route of using a CSS background image. I’m guessing that DailyBooth plans to release some of their own “frames” to let you share your latest photo based on this FAQ entry. Until then you can use this undocumented direct URL to your latest image. Maybe in the future DailyBooth will allow you to also pull the caption from your photo and include how many responses you’ve had to it. Right now, you could parse a user’s RSS feed to grab the photo and description. If anyone is interested, leave a comment and I’ll whip up the PHP for it.

With Vaynermedia announcing their involvement in financing DailyBooth and then AJ being one of the first to use the feature on his own site, I almost wonder if they wanted someone to uncover this little easter egg before they made a formal announcement about a traditional badge that every other social site offers. I’ll be interested to see what they officially release as far as “badges” in the coming weeks.

Every night at 9pm my Macbook fires up Photo Booth to take a snapshot and import it into iPhoto. I’ve been doing this since December 19th, 2007 and have accumulated 275 photos (some days my computer was off and other days no one was around to be captured so I didn’t keep the photo). I automated this process using Mac OS X’s built-in Automator program and a rarely used feature in iCal. First, I’ll show you how I extended the original tutorial I found to accomplish this and then explain why I’m ditching it for the new web service DailyBooth.com.

Two Years of Daily Snapshots

Before I show you how to automatically take a picture of yourself every day using Automator, maybe you’d like to see the results I had from almost 2 years of captures.

Daily Snapshots

You can see how it captures the happy, sad, and boring nights of my life. Looking back through 2 years of pictures, I realized a few things about myself like my hair is always different and I don’t shave as much as I thought. My little sister told me the other day that I have a very serious face when I’m on my laptop and that’s also very apparent.

Creating the Automator Workflow

Automator is super simple to use because it’s all drag and drop with a few options. The original tutorial from TUAW goes into more detail about what exact steps to take and what exactly you’re doing with each step so read that first if the rest of this doesn’t make sense. Take a look at a screenshot of my workflow and then download the workflow.

Automator Workflow

You can see that I tell it to take a video snapshot using my built in iSight camera in my Macbook and to save that picture to my desktop. Then, I import that file into iPhoto and add it to an existing album called “Daily Snapshot”. This step also deletes the original image on my desktop since iPhoto makes a copy in its library. This part is optional, but I love Growl notifications because they tell you what’s going on behind the scenes on your Mac. Finally, I tell it to quit iPhoto so everything on my system is back to how it was before the script ran. Pretty simple, right? Finally, make sure to save your workflow then “save as…” an application (download here for the lazy) for the next step.

Save As Application

Now for having it run automatically every day using iCal. In iCal, I created a new calendar called “run_scripts” that I could hide so it didn’t clutter my other events on other calendars. I created a new event at 9pm and told it to repeat every day forever. Here’s the trick- as an alarm for the event I have iCal run a file- my daily snapshot application if you couldn’t guess.

Open File as Alarm 0 Minutes Before

Now, every night at 9pm iCal will launch the Daily.Snapshot.app and the workflow will be processed.

Open file every night at 9pm

Why I’m Ditching This for DailyBooth.com

There’s nothing wrong with this system. Occasionally in Snow Leopard, I’ve noticed iPhoto crashes instead of quits after the import. With iPhoto’s evolution, each import is classified as a new event which makes organizing my other photos harder since I have to scroll through all of the individual events with only one photo. The main reason I’m switching is that DailyBooth.com gives me what I’ve always wanted to do with my script – sharing with everyone else.

When I update my account on DailyBooth, other people can comment on it, and I automatically tweet about it to give more people a chance to see what I’m up to that day. I also have more control over when I want to take a picture each day. You might have noticed I only had 275 pictures from 677 days. That’s just above 40% which isn’t even 3 days a week. DailyBooth.com offers to send me an email whenever I go 24hrs without taking a picture. I think I’ll update more since I’ll be on my own schedule. I’m just not around my laptop at 9pm like I used to be!

Come back tomorrow to see how easy it is to display your latest DailyBooth.com update on your blog or website!

An avatar or profile picture is one of the first things people recognize and allows them to immediately establish some sort of connection with you. It acts like your personal logo to brand who you are. Whether it’s your AIM buddy icon, Facebook profile picture, or Twitter avatar, it should be the most unique thing about your account besides maybe your username. (I’m sure in the coming months (or years) people like Kevin Makice and Christian Briggs will release some serious academic research to back me up on this)

So why do people and organizations use the same avatar as someone else?

My main gripe is with Twitter accounts associated with Indiana University. Eight different accounts use the same generic block logo for IU (more with the red background). I had started noticing the overwhelming use in my twitter feed, but it became apparent how uncreative these facets of the university were being when I started browsing the new IU Twitter page (http://twitter.iu.edu/news).

The Pros

I can see the benefit of conforming and trying to keep a branding ubiquitous. It’s simple, people know it, and it’s a no-brainer when setting up the account. As soon as someone sees it, they thing Indiana University.

The Cons

The entire reason you have a separate account from @IUBloomington is that your content is specialized and different from what they tweet. If your mission, purpose, and content is different, why wouldn’t your avatar? Here’s a list of offending accounts I quickly found:

• @IUWebmaster
• @iucompliance
• @IU_Basketball
• @IndianaHoosiers
• @indianabuzztap
• @iuinformatics
• @IUgradschool

By using the same avatar, these accounts also look the same to their followers who might be like me and are scanning hundreds thousands of tweets a day. Here’s what my “Indiana” column looks like in Tweetdeck sometimes:

Click to Enlarge

From a glance, I can quickly differenciate between @iubtechcareers, @iuocs, and @itiu but can’t tell who those other guys are (@IUBloomington and @IU_Basketball in this case).

The Solution

Obviously- be unique. If you have a designer in house or are looking to hire one for a reasonable price, you could come up with something cool like the IU Creative Services.

@iuocs

The simplest solution is to just tweak the existing IU logo like Thom Atkinson (aka @IUWebmonkey) did:

@IUWebmonkey

I also like what the Indiana Daily Student has done with their separate Twitter account avatars:

@IDSNews

@IDS_Sports

They keep their original circular design but replace it with a basketball to signify “sports”. If they start an account for their Arts section, they could just as easily replace that basketball with a painting palette like so:

@ids_art

See how easy it is to distinguish your niche account with a more meaningful avatar? Now I’m off to change my avatar!

Before I begin, this offer may become bogus in the next week. Until then, I have to vouch for a product I’ve tried in the past and absolutely loved.

I follow a few discount hunters that often turn up great technology deals. Today, I came across a deal from FatWallet.com for Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 Legit 1 year key on 22nd Oct. I hardly use Windows anymore, but when it comes to antivirus software, Kaspersky is the first name that comes to mind.

For full disclosure and FTC compliance, I’m not being comped to write this. This is a true testimony to Kaspersky’s PC defense. When I was in high school, I used to wander through what the Indiana University IT Security Policy Officers considered the “dark alleys of the internet” (read: IRC). So, I stopped and lost my edge on landing a real security job.

The first time I heard about this crazy awesome antivirus program from Germany, I had no idea how weak Norton and the rest of Symantec were to defending from script kiddies. When I would be associating with other individuals who were wreaking havoc with super simple tools like Sub7, our first test was whether it passed through the latest Norton, then the latest McAfee, and if you had a build that got through Kaspersky you really had something on your hands.

After Sub7 builds got picked up every afternoon, folks got into bots that included rootkits for poorly managed linux servers. Associates of mine on IRC could control thousands upon thousands of “bots” with a few favors from friends (read: the stuff you read on the news now 5 years later). When enough people had been “in the game” long enough, they started writing their own custom bots that did what they needed. Some wanted to automate clicking ads, others wanted to take down sites (read: DDOS), and some just loved the voyeuristic aspect of watching what everyone typed.

The key to rolling your own bot was being undetected from antivirus networks like Symantec, McAfee, and Kaspersky. The dumb AVs would take days if not weeks to recognize a new suspicious malware app. If you scanned your custom bot (aka virus aka malware aka bad thing) with Kaspersky, it would be picked up and added to their database within hours. So if you, the badass coder, gave your buddies your new creation and they scanned it too often, too quickly it would be flagged as a threat. Awesome for stay-at-home moms, terrifying for stay-at-home hackers.

When I was evaluating PC antivirus software on a daily basic (full disclosure: from a somewhat malicious point of view), I only respected Kaspersky. Symantec was a joke, McAfee wasn’t much better, and I knew I had something when Kaspersky missed it. Maybe things have changed, doubtful I’ll get a good hacker to poke his/her head up to tell me differently, but I still hold my alliances with Kaspersky when it comes to Windows defense. Maybe I’ll do more research on the better Mac AV (Kaspersky doesn’t have one >:[), but until then I’ll defend my virtual machine with the best antivirus software I’ve ever attacked.

I found out about a new auction site called BidFire after they started following me on Twitter. I’m always heedful to sites that appear to be offering high end electronics for next to nothing, but I went ahead and checked it out anyways. After a little observation it was easy to figure out where they were making their money, and that the bidders are vulnerable to spending more than they realize.

At first glance, BidFire is a very cleanly designed site that’s well put together and simple to get around. Kudos to their web designers. There is a short video that explains how the site works. Surprisingly, it has very little in common with eBay for being an auction site.

Instead of being able to bid as much as you want like on eBay, on BidFire you pay each time you bid. It costs $1 and you have to buy bids in packs of 10, 25, 50, 75, or 100 before you can use them.

On eBay when the auction is over, it’s over. On BidFire, the countdown to the auction’s end is reset every time someone bids within the last minute of the auction. This means that an auction could go on as long as bidders have bids they’re willing to use.

Auctions increase at a fixed amount, usually a nickel, on BidFire. This is what keeps their auctions so appealingly cheap. It’s also where they make their money.

I was observing an auction for 25 bids that was valued at $25. With a little over 2 minutes left in the auction the price was $0.10. All of a sudden, the action picked up just like you would expect an eBay auction to. Instead of someone with the fastest internet connection putting in the last bid with two seconds left in the auction, a group of six or so bidders went calmly back and forth sometimes bidding with 50 seconds left and other times with 2 seconds left. Either way, the clock reset to one minute and the price went up a nickel. Here’s where the auction turned into a game of sorts.

The point of the game, as I see it, is to bid as few times as possible to win the auction. The final price is not important because it never comes close to half the retail price of the actual item. Every time the clock nears zero, you have to predict whether or not someone else is going to bid to reset it for everyone else. If no one does, the auction is over. If someone does, a nickel is added to the auction price and the clock is reset to one minute. If two people bid, both are charged with using a bid, the price goes up twice, and the clock is reset just once.

This auction for the 25 additional bids ended with a final bid of $2.15. As long as the winning bidder didn’t bid more than 22 times, he came out ahead and beat the system (22 x $1 + $2.15 < $25). For everyone else who bid, they played into BidFire’s revenue model. It took 43 bids to get the price up to $2.15 so BidFire made $20 on the auction! (43 x $1 + $2.15 = $45.15)

Another auction that just ended was for a Playstation 3 Slim 120GB that retails on Amazon for $299.99. What did it go for? $15.40! Someone got a real steal right? Sure, but BidFire didn’t lose any money. If you divide $15.40 by $0.05 you get 308. BidFire could take the $308 they just made, go right to Amazon and spend $299.99, ship the Playstation for free to the winner, and still have enough left for a delicious meal at Taco Bell.

You might be thinking that $20 here and $8 here isn’t much especially when BidFire doesn’t even have 10 auctions a day, but what if they did? What if they had the right backing where they could have 100 or 100,000 auctions every day? If they did, would economists rule the site and play the odds to their favor? Is it technically gambling since you’re betting your dollar that you’ll be the top bidder each time? How else do you explain not winning an “auction” when it cost you to bid?

It should also be noted that they don’t always profit. If you look at their FAQ, they’ve listed some sample auctions like one for a $50 Walmart Gift Card that was won for $0.05 (technically $1.05 since the bid cost a dollar).

Kudos to BidFire’s clever profit model. Is this actually an old model I’ve never come across (e.g. pyramid scheme)? Please leave a comment if you’re better at math than me and can give me some pointers to gaming the system (legally).

One of the first things you learn to do in web development is make sure everything works. Do all of your links work correctly? Do all of your images show up? And as your website progresses and grows, is someone linking to one of my pages that doesn’t exist anymore? Or are people looking for a page they think should exist but doesn’t? You can check on all of that with some basic testing and looking through boring server logs, or you could make your website work for you and tell you when someone couldn’t find something.

In Wordpress, when a page or file can’t be found a user is redirected to the 404.php page. Mine looks like this:

404 Landing Page for MaxBeatty.com

I came across a great tutorial from Nettuts+ for creating a PHP auto-mailer for 404 and 403 errors, but since Wordpress already had it’s own 404.php page, I decided to simplify their method a bit.

At the top of my Wordpress theme’s 404.php page, I added some simple PHP to get environmental variables, construct an email, then mail it to myself before loading the rest of the page.

Replace:

<?php include_once 'header.php';?>

With:

<?php
# Gather visitor information
 $ip = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR");                // IP Address
 $server_name = getenv("SERVER_NAME");       // Server Name
 $request_uri = getenv("REQUEST_URI");       // Requested URI
 $http_ref = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");         // HTTP Referer
 $http_agent = getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT");    // User Agent
 $error_date = date("D M j Y g:i:s a T");     // Error Date
 $msgbody =
 "There was a 404 error on the ".$server_name." domain".
 "\n\nDetails\n----------------------------------------------------------------------".
 "\nWhen: ".$error_date.
 "\n(Who) IP Address: ".$ip.
 "\n(What) Tried to Access: http://".$server_name.$request_uri.
 "\n(From where) HTTP Referer: ".$http_ref.
 "\n\nUser Agent: ".$http_agent;
mail("you@yourdomain.com", "maxbeatty.com 404 report", $msgbody, "From: 404@yourdomain.com\n");

include_once 'header.php';
?>

Now every time there is a 404 error in Wordpress, you’ll get an email about it. But wait, do you really want your inbox cluttered with error emails you may not be able to address until the weekend? No- enter Gmail filters.

In Gmail, go to Settings then click on Filters. You want to label any emails from ‘404@yourdomain.com’ as ‘404 Errors’, tell them to skip the inbox, and never be marked spam because odds are the URLs and technical details will look spammy.

Filter messages from '404@yourdomain.com'

Skip the inbox, apply the label, and never mark as spam

Then when you have time to look over errors that your site has produced for the day/week/month, they’ll all be waiting for your review under the ‘404 Errors’ label in Gmail. From there you can try to recreate and diagnose the problems.

If you’re lazy or scared of editing code, there are Wordpress plugins our there to do all of this for you and even enhance your boring 404 landing page.

• 404 Notifier is a plugin that will send you emails anytime a 404 error is produced. You might still want to set up a Gmail filter for their emails.
• 404 SEO Plugin will “automatically display links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.”
• Smart 404 will “perform a search of your posts, pages, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that content instead of showing the error. If there’s more than one match, the 404 template can use some template tags to provide a list of suggestions to the visitor.” I think this could be annoying if a user KNOWS what they are looking for, but could be helpful if a user has a typo in the URL.

Hope this quick copy/paste will improve your site and help your users find what they’re looking for!

I follow Mark Cuban’s blog and if you can get over the typos and poor grammar (not saying I’m perfect) he has some valid points from time to time. He takes a real world business approach to Internet idealist topics like offering everything for free. His series of posts a few weeks ago on ‘Free vs Freely Distributed‘ made sense to me since I had recently received an email from Tatango saying they would be discontinuing their free service. Soon, I was getting more and more emails from my favorite free web services that said they were cutting back on what they used to offer for free.

Pandora had a huge win in an Internet radio royalty ruling but this also meant that they would have  “to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora”. If you go over the free 40 hours in a month it’s just $0.99 for unlimited listening for that month. I think that’s a great deal, especially since I sit at a desk most of the day and can’t stand listening to my coworker’s idiotic side comments.

My new favorite web service of the summer has been Dropbox which allows you to store files online and sync them across multiple computers. They sent me this email last night about changes they’re making:

The Dropbox team has been hard at work these past few months and we’d like to tell you about some upcoming changes and enhancements to the Dropbox service.

We’re Changing Undo History
Did you know that Dropbox automatically:

• Safeguards any files you delete in case you need to undelete them
• Saves old file versions in case you need to go back to them later

It’s like having “undo” for all your files and folders.

Today, Dropbox keeps these deleted files and old file versions (“undo history”) forever. For many people this creates clutter, and it also wastes space.

Because of this, beginning August 1st, our new policy will be to keep 30 days of undo history.
…

I actually had no idea about that feature since I’m new to the service, but once again you can see they are scaling back the free service and pushing the premium subscriptions (freemium model).

The last email I received about “new policies” was from Vimeo who starting August 1st will only keep your original video source file for one week after upload unless you become a Vimeo Plus member. I wasn’t as bummed about this one since I have only uploaded one video there to date. I may do more if I ever start editing stuff I film with my Flip HD.

I’m not mad at any of these companies for cutting back free services. I understand it costs money to offer them to people for no charge. SMS messages are expensive and so is streaming music and paying royalties. Hard disk space has become cheaper and cheaper but it still costs money. I don’t think any of these companies are trying to force people into becoming paying customers, they just can’t simple take on the costs and subsequent losses like Facebook and YouTube do.

Mashable’s had a great article today that was very Mark Cuban-esqe talking about how “free will not last forever“. It was less about how companies can’t survive giving everything away for free, but more about how the end users are willing to pay for services if it’s better and easier than the free alternative.

If users are persuaded to sign up for a premium account for Tatango, Pandora, Dropbox, or Vimeo, they’ll expect more whether it be more features or a more polished experience. And if those users are willing to spend the money, they’re probably going to shop around for some alternatives where their money could go further. If they lose the functions they love the most about these services and don’t have the money, then they’ll find the next best free alternative or maybe get inspired to start their own service.

I’m lucky enough to have more disposable income to subscribe to more premium services and buy more apps and software, and I think a lot of people are with me at least in their willingness if they don’t have the extra cash. (I mean who wouldn’t pay for TweetDeck?) All of this breeds competition which is great for me- the end user. I want the best of the best for as cheap as possible and while that might not be free as often as it used to be, I should still be the one getting more out of it.

A few weeks ago I learned about a great Gmail feature that allows you to filter your email with personalized email addresses using a plus sign. For example, if you think you’ll be spammed by signing up for something like a forum, you could sign up with the email username+forum@gmail.com and setup a filter to automatically mark those messages as spam.

Both of my current projects at Sproutbox and the Eppley Institute involve setting up or testing user systems. To do this, I make a lot of dummie test accounts but these accounts need to have valid email addresses to test things like password recovery. Instead of racking my brain for every email address I have ever created, I started registering test accounts with emails such as username+tester1@gmail.com.

This was working great until today in Joomla my email addresses weren’t validating with their JavaScript validation script. Luckily, it was easy to see how they were validating email addresses.

Inside the validate.js script was a small function that used a regular expression to make sure entered email addresses were in the traditional form of Username09@Domain1.com.

this.setHandler('email',
function (value) {
regex=/^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z0-9.-]{2,4}$/;
return regex.test(value);
});

If you’ve never seen or used regular expressions before, they are very powerful and awesome but can be overwhelming at first. All that expression is saying – “Look at the beginning of the line and make sure there are only upper and lowercase letters, numbers zero though nine, periods, underscores, and dashes before at least one at sign.” The rest of it goes the same way.

So to allow plus signs in the first part of the email address you just add a ‘+’ after the ‘-’ and before the ‘]’.

regex=/^[a-zA-Z0-9._-+]+@([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z0-9.-]{2,4}$/;

Now it will allow email addresses that look like Username90+whatever@Domain1.com.

If you’re a developer and want to be nice to your users, make sure to remember to add this ‘+’ in your form validation scripts so that soon-to-be Gmail ninjas like me can filter your spam newsletters accordingly.

Businesses have to learn to admit when they are wrong and be somewhat transparent about their alternative motives. It’s a new world where if you aren’t customers like me have to call you out. Today’s example is Pavilion Properties, the best worst real estate management firm in Bloomington, Indiana. I politely emailed one of the owners, Mark Hoffman, about when we would be receiving our security deposit. Here’s what he said

Well I finally got it on 6/25 which meant it took two weeks for a letter to travel from Bloomington, IN to Carmel, IN. It should have only taken one day- but wait it did! Look:

Envelope from Pavilion Properties postmarked 6/24

Postmarked 24 Jun 2009

Why couldn’t he just admit that one of his dumb secretaries forgot to mail it out or admit that 6/25 was exactly 45 days after our move out date which means that was the longest he could hold our money? Don’t tell me it was sent out two weeks ago when it obviously wasn’t. I’m not an idiot.

If they keep being morons, lying to their customers, taking advantage of their customers, I’m going to keep writing about it which means negative blog posts from MaxBeatty.com are going to come up in search results before PavProp.com. Just something to think about…

This weekend is the end of the annual Fun Frolic in Bloomington. If you don’t know, the Fun Frolic is “a family-friendly Bloomington tradition since 1957, the Fun Frolic features rides, games, amusements and traditional carnival food. Proceeds benefit Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana and IU Child Care.”

What some might not have known is that John Mellencamp used the Fun Frolic as the setting for his 1985 music video for “Lonely Ol’ Night” (embedding was disabled )

Something cool I learned yesterday from my mom is that my Uncle Ray is actually in the video! Check him and his then-girlfriend out at around 2:46

My Uncle Ray makes a cameo in a John Mellencamp video

I thought it was a little trivia that should be shared with the world. I don’t know how I never heard about the Fun Frolic until this year or how I’d gone my entire life without knowing my uncle was in a music video!

On Friday, I finally got back to Bloomington to pick up a stack of cups with my Little 500 logo from PizzaX (formerly Pizza Express) that they had set aside just for me and wanted to thank them publicly for their small effort that meant a lot to me.

Logo on PizzaX cups (formerly Pizza Express)

If you read my blog, you probably know a logo I designed was selected for the IU Little 500 race this year. One of the many places it ended up was on the side of cups from Pizza Express. Any time anyone in Bloomington ordered a drink from Pizza Express they also received some of my art work. As soon as I found this out, I was ordering their Big X Bargain every couple of days so I could collect as many cups as possible to give to friends and family.

The week after the race Pizza Express underwent a name change to PizzaX which was reflected on their new green cups. I was bummed my cups weren’t being delivered any more but then had a thought they might have extras laying around. I sent @PizzaX a message on Twitter asking if they had any extra cups and if I could have them. A few days later, they sent me a DM saying they had a stack set aside for me at their office and I could come pick them up at my convenience.

This isn’t the greatest story ever told about the generosity of a company, but I thought it was very cool of them. It didn’t cost them anything to set aside some extra outdated cups, and it didn’t take me anything but my spare time to write up a little free press for them (however minimal it may be).

It was also very cool this was all set up via Twitter. We never emailed each other, exchanged phone calls, or met face to face. I hope more small businesses use Twitter to interact with their local customers (and not just to give away free stuff). I would have been just as content if they replied that they didn’t have any extra cups. It was more important that they reached out and communicated with average little me. Thanks PizzaX!

This morning my dad and I sat around playing with some new ideas for his business cards and overall brand. You can see his old logo on his site. The redesign and rebranding stems from wanting to be clearer about what he does as a business while at the same time simplifying his office setup. Instead of having a landline phone number and mobile number, he’s just going to have one. Instead of paying for a fax line, he’s going to do more email invoices and electronic faxes. It’s smart and more efficient, but that wasn’t the point of this blog.

I just felt like posting a few of the ideas I had to redesign his logo and business card. It’s very minimal, not a lot of color (still cheapest to print black and white), and it was meant to transfer between business cards, invoice headings, yard signs, and print advertisements. Keep in mind I have no training whatsoever in graphic design or print design. Here goes:

Vertical version

Based off Pages Invoice template

Traditional and Minimal

None of these are finalized. They were just ideas we were throwing around. I know some people find it interesting to get a sneak peek into design processes. If we totally rebrand I’ll be sure to make the announcement here first!

Twitter is renowned for allowing its users to create and define some of its features (i.e. @replies, #hashtags, retweets). The Favorites feature is one of the older ones on Twitter, but it doesn’t get a lot of publicity. To see your favorites go to http://twitter.com/favorites and to see other users’ favorites go to http://twitter.com/username/favorites. You’ll see not a lot of people use them because they are usually unsure how to use them. Today, I wanted to quickly talk about the three ways I use Favorites on Twitter:

1. Social Bookmarking
2. Self Promotion
3. Awesome Tweets

Social Bookmarking

People love Twitter because of its great content. Most of the people I follow have something to offer me like the latest news, great design posts, and other wacky stuff I would have never heard about if it weren’t for Twitter. I don’t always have time to read every article or the patience to load every web page over EDGE so when I’m on the go I favorite tweets that look interesting to check out later.

Sometimes if they are relevant to Twitter I’ll leave them in my favorites. If it’s something I’d like to share further, I’ll either retweet it, or share if on delicious and it’ll get tweeted out from FriendFeed. (note: most of my newest favorites are usually ones I haven’t decided to keep)

Using your favorites as a social bookmarking tool allows others to see what you find valuable while at the same time sharing interesting content.

Self Promotion

The best way to validate yourself as a worthwhile member of the Twitter community is to be acknowledged by your peers. Sites like MrTweet allow others to recommend you, but it’s just as quick to favorite a tweet from someone who is thanking you for your help or complimenting your latest blog post or design. This is one of my favorite tweets that came from a former student:

Favorite Tweets That Promote You

Awesome Tweets

Sometimes you come across tweets you never want to forget. Sometimes it’s a meaningful quote and other times it’s just something funny. While it may be tempting, don’t favorite a bunch of fake celebrity tweets no matter how funny they are. A better example of an awesome tweet to favorite is this one from Daiv Russell:

Favorite Meaningful, Motivational, or Funny Tweets

It’s my opinion that you should try to keep your favorites under control. They lose their usefulness when you have too many. If you notice you are using your favorites for social bookmarking too much, consider getting a delicious account. If you can’t find any tweets to favorite that promote you as a worthwhile Twitter user, get more involved in the conversation. If your friends’ tweets seem mundane, check out sites like MrTweet to get recommendations on new people to follow that might be more interesting.

How do you use your favorites on Twitter? You can now leave comments using your Twitter account. Try it out!

My grandfather had a great business insight a number of  years ago- people love having stuff even if there’s no room to put it. He built some self storage units on some extra land and has been successfully renting them ever since. One of my personal goals over the past year has been to simply my life by simplifying my possessions.

I’ve moved four times in the last year, and each time it has become easier because I keep getting rid of old stuff. Just yesterday I donated three full trash bags of clothes to Goodwill. My next big challenge is to get rid of all the extra computers and peripherals I’ve accumulated. When I told my dad, he had a pile of electronics to get rid of as well.

Everything still works and is in good condition so my first inclination was to put it all on eBay, but the shipping costs for a 30lb computer is almost more than the computer would be worth to someone. The price of new equipment also makes it hard to resell old equipment.

Fry's Ad has new Laptops and PCs for next to nothing

Currently, I personally have my Macbook, an old self built PC from high school, and a small Shuttle XPC with great specs. My dad is looking to get rid of his ancient Dell laptop and two similar Dell towers. On top of this there are speakers, keyboards, mice, and 3 LCD monitors (15″, 17″, and 19″). We’re pretty much ready to open a Circuit City in our garage.

I would like to sell my computers to get a new Macbook Pro and maybe a 24″+ monitor. My dad is just looking to not throw everything away. The best solution so far that I’ve found besides eBay or Craigslist is Best Buy’s Trade In program. You tell them your specs, they shoot you a bid, if you accept it they give you a pre-paid shipping label, and in 7-14 days you get your agreed amount in the form of a Best Buy gift card.

It’s not a bad deal for older equipment that might not fetch much on eBay. I have no idea what Best Buy could be doing with all these old parts. Maybe they are building a stockpile for Geek Squad house calls. If you have another suggestion on what to do with old computers, please leave a comment.

Also, if you are in the market for a 53″ Panasonic  HDTV my roommates and I are looking to get rid of it ASAP.

53" Panasonic HDTV includes HDMI and 1080i

I probably could have fit all of this into a tweet if I wanted to but I thought I’d explain it all in a short post. Ralph Lauren is holding a Private Sale for the next few days where you can save up to 40% off. If you spend $175, you get free shipping otherwise they have a flat $5 shipping fee on orders that are less. You can use the code MAY1418 to receive an additional 15% off already reduced prices.

I promise my blog isn’t going to become just “deals of the day”, but now that I graduated it’s time to adjust my wardrobe for the professional world. A lot of my clothes have become ripped and worn without the help of Hollister or A&F. I also won’t be able to get away with wearing t-shirts and gym shorts for a majority of the week anymore.

Since I don’t have much else going on, I’m going to try and get a post out a day for my blog. See you tomorrow!

Poor promotional offers are meant to be exploited. I recently discovered that the promotional code for Miller Lite’s Peel and Reveal Carb Day Ticket Offer is the exact same on every label. All you have to do to claim the tickets is create an account on the IMS website. They’ll mail them to you or you can pick them up all Will Call.

1. Go to http://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/millerlite and click on the Peel and Reveal Carb Day Ticket Offer
2. Verify that you can easily fake your age and that you are an Indiana resident (even if you aren’t)
3. Enter YC9PC4KRW3 and press “View Promotion”
4. You’ll see you have 2 tickets to Carb Day that you can ‘Add to Cart’
5. It’s all free to ‘Proceed to Step 2′
6. Now you need to create an account if you don’t already have one.
   

   You can only register one account per email address, but they never ask you to verify your email address so you can put a fake one down. If you plan on picking your tickets up at Will Call, you can fake all of your address information as well. You just need to use your real name so that your photo ID matches when you pick up your tickets.

   This is the weakness of the promotion. You can create as many accounts as you want and keep reusing the same code to claim as many free tickets as you want.

7. After you’re done registering, you choose whether you want the tickets mailed to you or if you want to pick them up at Will Call (note: you need photo ID to pick up)
8. Complete your order and then repeat these steps if you want more tickets.

If you get some free tickets because of this post and want to meet up next Thursday, leave a comment and we’ll share a Miller Lite at IMS.

Yesterday, I finished the joke of a class they call “Digital Art”. It attempted to cover Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash in 16 weeks and failed miserably. We were required to produce 3 images, 1 website, and 1 animation that had to be based in Flash. If you are a professional, you don’t get (or need) three weeks to produce an image in Photoshop, a static HTML website in Dreamweaver, or a basic tweening animation in Flash.

You can check out my portfolio of the semester’s worth of work along with some side projects I threw in there. They aren’t the greatest pieces, but I think it shows some growth from two years ago when I took a telecommunications class that covered the same material (and a lot more). I got featured for my work in T284 and have been on the class site as an example of previous semester’s work.

Putting the two courses’ syllabi side by side reemphasizes how big of a joke FINA D210 was. I feel bad for the kids in there who needed to learn how to use those tools but had a really poor instructor. There need to be more Norbert Herbert’s in the world. I now realize how lucky I was to have him as an instructor.

One of these days, I’ll pick through all these portfolios and put one on this site. One of these days…

How long would it take you to copy and paste 230 things from one text file to another? If your answer is more than 10 mins, you could probably use this short script I wrote tonight.

I needed to expand a list of URLs I already had that are serving as “seeds” for my search engine project. I knew I had a nice collection of design blogs in my Google Reader, so I thought I could export those as an OPML file and extract the URLs. The OPML file is just XML that looks like this:

<outline title="Design Feeds" text="Design Feeds">

<outline text="10 Steps" title="10 Steps" type="rss"

xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/10Steps" htmlUrl="http://10steps.sg"/>

<outline text="1st Web Designer" title="1st Web Designer"

type="rss"

xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/1stwebdesigner" htmlUrl="http://www.1stwebdesigner.com"/>

I didn’t want their RSS feed URL, just the URL to their homepage for my web crawler. I could have sat around copying and pasting for hours, but I’m lazy and have other things to do so I wrote a quick Perl script to do that for me.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "Need OPML file to extract URLs from i.e. google-reader-subscribtions.xml" unless (@ARGV == 1);

open (FH, $ARGV[0]) or die "Cannot open $ARGV[0]: $!\n";

my %urls;

while(<FH>) {
$_ =~ /htmlUrl="(.*?)"/;
$urls{$1} = 1;
}

print join("\n",keys(%urls));

close FH;

The code just says to open a file, look for where you see htmlUrl=”http://domain.com”, and print all of the unique URLs. There might be a simpler or shorter way to write this in Perl, but I thought this was straight forward enough. Leave a comment with your simplified or shorter method

I can then run it in Terminal ./extractURLfromOPML google-reader-subscriptions.xml > seeds.txt and I’ll have a nice text file with a URL on each line. I copied and pasted all of those into my original seeds list and now I have around 250 URLs to crawl within a couple of minutes. This is just another reason why Perl (and programming in general) is awesome.

That code solves a specific problem, but it could easily be modified or expanded to solve other problems. For example, I want to know how many different artists I have in my iTunes library (I know iTunes will tell you but go with it). You could modify the regular expression line in the above code to look for $_ =~ m|<key>Artist</key><string>(.*?)</string>|; and it’ll match and print all of the artists in your iTunes Library XML file.

If you wanted to expand this modification, you could take the Perl modules for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to automatically send a friend request to all of the artists in your iTunes library on all of your social networks. It might not be a perfect solution, but it would save you some time and effort for sure.

It looks like I’ll have a few months this summer to freelance so I’ll try to post some more simple code tutorials and examples. Enjoy!

Not a week has gone by in the last four years where I didn’t have to try and explain what Informatics is. For starters, it’s my major and it’s awesome. If you come off as the type of person who isn’t on Facebook and thinks a Nokia 3310 does the trick, I’ll probably tell you that informatics is “computers and stuff”. For people who seem more interested or in a professional setting, I’ll tell you informatics is applying information technology to other fields of study like biology, telecommunications, or business.

Still, this doesn’t always satisfy people’s curiosity most times about what you actually do with informatics. Last week I came across two real world examples of how you can use informatics in real life to solve real world problems. I hope to continue this “series”  as I find more real world implementations of informatics to help explain to the layman what it’s all about.

Forming Groups in Class

The first example comes from my Search Informatics class where every student is building their own search engine. As part of the most recent assignment, each student had to find three other students to evaluate their engine and return the favor for three other students.

I wrote a simple Perl script to match up everyone with three peers to evaluate that also made sure everyone was evaluated three times. We could have counted off in class or emailed each other a few times to work it out, but it was easier to let the computer do the work. Here’s the script and the output:

my @peers = ('Nurzhan', 'Max', 'Matt', 'Andrew', 'Dmitriy', 'Tom');
my @tempPeers = @peers;
foreach my $p (@peers) {
my @evals = ();
for(my $i=1; $i<=3; $i++) {
push(@evals, $tempPeers[-$i]);
}
push(@tempPeers,shift(@tempPeers));
print "$p evaluates ", join(', ',@evals), "\n";
}

It outputs:

Nurzhan evaluates Tom, Dmitriy, Andrew

Max evaluates Nurzhan, Tom, Dmitriy

Matt evaluates Max, Nurzhan, Tom

Andrew evaluates Matt, Max, Nurzhan

Dmitriy evaluates Andrew, Matt, Max

Tom evaluates Dmitriy, Andrew, Matt

Simple, effective, and probably earned me some brownie points with the professor. I posted this to the class forum and everyone liked the idea and used it.

Critiquing Flyers and Posters

The second example I came across on Twitter from Jay Steele, a HCI/d master student. A couple of his fellow peers posted some design critiques around a poster hung in the hallway of their design lab. On a college campus, there are fliers and posters everywhere so if you want to get any sort of response from people (i.e. show up at your event, join your club, vote for your candidate, etc.) you need to design it properly.

These subtle, often overlooked, details could transform this boring posting that’s probably being ignored to something that makes people want to, in this case ironically, enter a poster design contest.

These two simple examples from last week will hopefully help people better understand what you actually do with informatics. Letting a computer properly match up students for a group assignment saved everyone the time and effort of organizing and error checking by hand to make sure everyone was covered. The HCI/d master students had a little fun by offering some truly constructive criticism that could help make this poster stand out to people passing by.

I was super impressed by Zappos when they delivered two pairs of shoes to me in less than 24hrs last week, but a small sandwich shop from Greencastle, Indiana just topped them. If you’ve heard of Greencastle or DePauw University, you’ve probably also heard of Marvin’s and their GCB’s. For those of you are clueless, it’s a small sandwich shop that students like my little brother love.

He was visiting the other weekend down at IU and decided he wanted one of Marvin’s GCB’s (Garlic Cheeseburger) so he called them up for a delivery to Bloomington. The guy taking orders thought he was kidding too until my brother pulled out, “I thought you guys delivered anywhere?” I guess that’s Marvin’s motto and they will ship you sandwiches around the world.

An hour or so passed and my brother, still hungry, called back to check on his order. The new receptionist told him that they were packaged and would be shipped out tomorrow. My brother wanted something to eat that night so he convinced the people to cancel the order and promised to order some GCB’s when he got back to DePauw. We all assumed the order was cancelled and his credit card wasn’t going to be charged- until today.

A package addressed to Jackson showed up today and sure enough it had three vacuumed sealed sandwiches inside along with directions on how to cook them! I called my brother to make sure he didn’t get charged unknowingly. Since he’s notorious for not answering the phone, I had to track him down on Facebook Chat to get the details. He checked his credit card statement and there wasn’t any charge!

What I hope: Marvin’s shipped him the sandwiches for free to prove the point they will deliver anywhere.

What probably happened: The sandwiches were already in the stack to ship out and they forgot he cancelled the order or didn’t have any way to check if the person paid. (Don’t try to scam this small business because of their lax shipping practices!)

I’m going to stick with the hope they were out to stand by their brand’s guarantee. It’s just more awesome that way. Every once in awhile you hear about big players doing something awesome (ie Steve Jobs personally shipping Final Cut to a HS Student), but never about small businesses in small town America doing the same thing.

I’m going to write them a letter offering to build and host a website for them regardless of their reason for shipping those sandwiches. It’s the least I can do. Go Marvin’s!

You are disabled meaning you can’t physically climb a flight of stairs at all or without being in severe pain.

That’s the only acceptable reason for taking an elevator up or down one floor. If you are moving a refrigerator or suffer from extreme bathmophobia, then maybe I can let you slide, but no able-bodied person should ever take the elevator up or down just one floor. You are lazy and putting yourself at risk to being punched in the back of the head!

I don’t care how heavy your backpack is or how long of a day you’ve had- take the stairs. They are there in case of fire and in case you only need to go one flight up or down.

I stress the up or down because someone tonight actually took the elevator from the 4th floor to the 3rd floor. Usually, you see people taking the elevator from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and they deserve to be verbally abused with phrases such as:

1. “Were the stairs broken?”
2. “Could you be any lazier?”
3. “Would you like me to show you the stairs so you don’t have to take the elevator down?”
4. “Consider this a warning!”
5. “Incoming!” followed by a punch to the back of the head for those who have been warned

This has been building up for the better part of 4 years and that lazy individual who couldn’t mosey down one flight of stairs put me over the edge. I’d appreciate comments including more things to say to these people who refuse to take the stairs.

My day has been filled with people misusing technology tools as common as voicemail and email, and as “cutting edge” as Facebook statuses and Twitter. I’m not an expert or guru or ninja at any of them, but I’d like to think I pay enough attention to see how people are using these tools and even what the designers’ intentions were for the tool. Because of that, I get something out of them and even make them work for me. Not enough people do.

So many people out there think social networks are distractions, that email in your pocket is unnecessary, or that text messaging is going to destroy the English language. The reality is they don’t know how to use the technology or they’re misusing it which is why they find it useless or unimportant. These things are important to me and my generation, so it’s time to catch up or be left looking stupid because you’re too old to figure out Facebook let alone email.

I was awoken this morning by a call from a New Hampshire number I didn’t know. Groggy and a little angry, I didn’t answer since I didn’t know who they were or what they wanted. Sure enough they didn’t leave a voicemail, and I spent my morning walk to class wondering about my morning mystery caller.

I wasn’t curious enough to call back because their initial call obviously wasn’t important enough to leave a message. If you think people will call you back without leaving a message, guess again. I’m not the only one with too much going on and too many other modes of communication to worry about a missed phone call. This was the most minor of misuses today, but it irked me enough to continue looking for examples.

I get to my first class and get on Facebook because I’m in college (read: helluva multitasker). As I’m scrolling through my news feed (I love the new Facebook design by the way), I noticed a number of people pasting links in their status instead of sharing them properly as videos or news articles. Facebook has taken notice of people pasting URLs in their statuses so they’ve begun hyperlinking them, but this makes for more work by me, your friend.

Every day more than one of my friends has their status set to a URL to a YouTube video. YouTube makes it VERY easy to share their videos on Facebook. Facebook actually embeds those videos so you can play them directly in your feed! Why would you take the time to copy the URL from YouTube, login to Facebook, update your status, and then expect your friends to click on the URL, leave Facebook, watch the video, then come back to Facebook to ‘like it’ or comment?

Sharing on Facebook has been streamlined with the new design. More people see the video, discussions begin, and the social network experience becomes more valuable to everyone. This doesn’t just go for videos but sharing news stories and other information on Facebook (remember me griping about forming groups when you can use Facebook’s phonebook?)

Finally in my last class, I was put over the edge and inspired to write this blog post when I received an email from my landlord. (This isn’t the first time they proved their incompetence with technology) Here’s a screenshot so you know I’m not lying:

Yes, the email message concludes by saying, “Please DO NOT respond to this email via email.” Should I write them a letter, call the office, send a fax, make an appointment to come in, or  send them a message on Twitter? WHY WOULDN’T THEY WANT ME TO PRESS REPLY!? They contacted me via this medium so why wouldn’t I use the same medium to respond?

This wasn’t an automated message from an unmonitored account. It was from one of the owners of the company. If an automated billing service were notifying us, it’s totally understandable to have an unmonitored account sending out emails, but almost every automated or unmonitored account message includes an email address you CAN respond to. What are you saying about yourself and your company when you write personal late notices to your tenants and then strongly instruct them not to reply? Don’t you care if I have questions about why you think we owe you this money?

To me this screams, “We have no idea what we are doing or how to use simple technologies such as email.” It also continues to reenforce what I’ve thought for months about Pavilion Properties- they don’t care about their tenants, they are incompetent when it comes to bookkeeping, and they are going to need a major overhaul in how they do business in the very near future.

How nice would it be as a tenant to only get an email when I owed money and not when one of my roommates does? How nice would it be if @mahoffma12 knew how to use his Twitter account so I didn’t have to not email him with questions like “Who owes that money?” What if PavProp’s Facebook page could help me find subleasers for the summer? These aren’t hard things to do even for a novice computer user.

Want to get more out of technology?

• If you want your call returned, leave a voicemail
• Sharing information is great! Do it correctly and you’ll share more than a silly YouTube video
• If you contact me through a medium like email, expect me to respond with the same medium. That’s what the reply button does.

Start using these simple tools correctly and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Twitter isn’t on the news every night because it’s solely mundane details of people’s day to day lives. Facebook doesn’t have 175 million users because college kids love it. Email didn’t become a word in the dictionary because it’s inefficient. Voicemail didn’t earn Scott Jones a billion dollars as a novelty item.

These are new ways to communicate that make it easier for people to connect and share. I’d even go so far as to say it’s improving the quality of (my) life so get on board and stop embarrassing yourself!

I had an assignment in my digital art class to create some sort of animation to go along with one of three 30 second audio clips the teacher gave us. As always, I wasn’t too inspired so I did what any lazy artist does- reuse and recycle. Just last week, I was actually teaching a class on Flash and one of my examples to them was an imitation of the flickr animated gif for when something is loading. I reused it (over and over actually) in my latest assignment and am pretty happy with how things turned out.

Here’s what I showed my class how to do:

If you want to see how simple it is you can flickr animation FLA. Now see if you can tell where I used it in my assignment:

I know it’s not the most awesome animation in the world, but I don’t even know if we’re getting a grade on it. I was just amuzed/impressed I was able to reuse a simple animation and turn it into something more complex. I’m definitely showing my class how they should be taking my simple (stupid) class examples and turning them into cool things for their own projects!

Here I sit a week away from turning 22 and a month away from graduating college. Senioritis is almost full blown as classes become optional on sunny days and assignments are approached with a “C for degree” mentality. It has made me take a step back and look at the big picture which I don’t think people do enough.

The first thing I see – I live a pretty awesome life. I love it. I am thankful.

I’m earning a great degree from a major university with ease. I have a challenging job teaching my peers that pays enough to cover the bills and a few drinks with my friends. I actually have plans to get paid after graduation which is quite an accomplishment in this day and age. I’m glad I’m not losing sleep worrying about anticipated job offers or graduate school admittance like most of my other friends. As my grandfather aptly said this Sunday when I went and visited, “Well Max it sounds like you’ve got it all planned out.”

It meant a lot coming from him because he’s a very successful man in his own right and I wasn’t so poised for graduation last time I was a senior. I graduated from high school by the skin of my teeth (not because I was a poor student, that story will be unveiled when I get my book deal) so I’m somewhat anxious to do it right this time. It’ll be the first time I’ve been in a cap and gown since kindergarden (I think my mom still has the picture somewhere).

The other side to the “get across the stage” anxiety is the feeling to cherish every day until then because life is really going to change for me this May. Last week I saw a friend from 1st grade and I honestly don’t when the next I’m going to see her. Another friend from first grade came down to go to Oliver Winery this weekend for his wine appreciation class and it was a great time. I went to Indy Tuesday night because I scored a pair of complimentary tickets to a Pacers game (thanks @indianapacers!). Last night, my roommate came into my room at 1:30am and convinced me to go to Bluebird.

I’m going to miss the college life. I’m thankful to have such trivial worries, such great friends, and an even better family. Sometimes it takes a little self-reflection to realize it, but I guess that’s what blog posts like this are for. On May 10th, I’ll start showing more of my excitement for my new life in Chicago but until then- senioritis.

Dear Scott Weber and the rest of Volatus Advisors, LLC,

GET A NEW WEBSITE! Yours is embarrassing in every sense of web site evaluation.

Thanks,

Web Designers Everywhere

P.S. Here’s something to get you started:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var currentTime = new Date()
var year = currentTime.getFullYear()
document.write(year)
//-->
</script>

Before I get on to regurgitating what you talked about last week, I wanted to recap how these blog posts are evaluated. We receive one point for being within 50 words of our 750 word requirement. We receive another point if what we talk about in our post is related to the assigned questions. We receive out last point for posting before midnight the following Sunday. I’m going to come right out and admit to Travis, who grades these, that I’m not even attempting to get close to the word count this week. Just not feeling it, sorry.

Here are the points I wrote down:

• compelling concept
• well thought out business plan
• emulate most successful company
• gotta be realistic
• outgrowing management
• be nimble, define processes
• think about what you want
• corporate culture
• acquiring funding
• change in business

As you can see they’re pretty self explanatory. What would save everyone some time is if your talk was captured and uploaded to Canteloupe.tv or some other website so anyone who is interested in hearing your formula for success can watch your talk instead of relying on my crappy recap. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk has a whole section to his website for his keynote speeches. It’s awesome.

Here is Max Beatty’s formula for getting people care about what you have to say:

1. Get a new website
2. Post your talks there
3. Follow your own advice

Thanks and have a great day!

I somehow got on this Oncourse mailing list awhile back and usually disregard most of the emails, but today they were showcasing a faculty member at the Indiana University East campus who is using a Flip camera to record short lectures for his course. I think it’s brilliant!

Here’s more from the email:

Rob Tolley, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at IU East, was faced with the challenge of describing that and other topics.  Rather than utilizing just a written description, Rob is making innovative use of the Flip digital video camera to make live field recordings of many of the processes and techniques that are part of his course curriculum.

“[Within the course Rob teaches], there are a lot of opportunities for me to do active demonstrations,” Rob says. “This camera has made it possible for me to show students things in an online course that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to show them.”

The videos Rob has produced have proven very popular with his students.  “I can get a video up and running very quickly.  On several occasions this term, I’ve had students e-mail me questions.  I’ve been able, within half an hour, to record a short lecture or demonstration that’s allowed the student to get their answer not in text, but in video.  Those videos are then posted on Oncourse for all students to see.”

You can hear more about Rob’s work, as well as see examples of some of his recorded lectures, by clicking on the following link:
https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/group/1097251561621-1228/CL_Faculty_Showcase/tolley+center+pickwebstr2.mov

I have a Flip MinoHD and absolutely love it! It’s great this faculty member had the insight to use it to show students examples instead of trying to describe them in a long email or handout. I wish more teachers would take this sort of initiative to improve the learning experience for their students instead of sticking to old, worn out methods.

What I would like to see next are screen captures of lab exercises, for example, posted to some place like Oncourse so the students can come back later and watch their instructor step by step instead of having to revert to Powerpoint slides or their own notes. Some might say this would tempt students to skip class, and I say so what?

What’s wrong with time shifting lectures or labs? The students who want to get the most out of the class can show up for the real hands on experience, and the slackers or students who don’t need the hands on experience to learn could view the material at their own leisure. I know this is starting to sound like forming an online college, but these video supplements could really improve the traditional college setting.

Kudos to Rob Tolley for improving his course with a tool I personally love!

Yesterday, I read a great write up over on PC Pro about how Adobe’s Dreamweaver is dying off as an option for designers looking to make the switch from print to web design. I couldn’t agree more! Like they point out, the web is no longer static meaning you can’t run a site by building it one page at a time. You need dynamic content that builds itself, which Dreamweaver can’t help you with.

Using Dreamweaver or another HTML/CSS page-based builder is slow and more work than a content management system (CMS) like Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal. Maintaining a static site is a pain because every time you want to add on or change something you have to do it manually across multiple pages. If I want to add a page or change my ‘About’ link to say ‘Bio’, I just have to do it once with Wordpress and my entire site is changed. I would have to hunt down every link to my ‘About’ page on a static site and change each and every link.

What eats at me is that Dreamweaver and these static page creation techniques are still all that is taught at the college level (at least at IU). I’m currently in a class learning Dreamweaver while also teaching a class about Dreamweaver. When I’m the student, I politely tell the teacher I’d rather code by hand in TextWrangler, but when I’m the teacher I have to stick to the curriculum provided for me. Neither of these classes are even bothering to cover the basics of HTML and CSS which is even worse! Point here, click here, drag this- presto you’re a web designer…

The other computer science class I’ve taught goes over HTML and CSS, but to no real depth beyond what you can get through in an hour or two on W3Schools. They at least tell students not to use GUI editors like Dreamweaver. Actually, it seems this semester they are allowing kids to use them based on what someone I tutor told me. Tsk, tsk.

Where are the classes on Content Management Systems? How about a class just to learn to create a database driven site built with PHP? It’s a good start to know the ins and outs of HTML and CSS, and definitely to get a basic understanding of JavaScript, but I think it’s time for academia to take the next step and apply these basics to what students actually use in the real world. They should know HTML tags to create semantic blog posts, CSS to create a flexible theme for their CMS of choice, and know enough JavaScript to create an image gallery or AJAX contact form.

I met with someone last week who was cold calling sororities and fraternities to gain web design experience. He was a college graduate with a degree in graphic design and based his entire web design knowledge in Dreamweaver. Because he relied on it as his only tool, he had no idea what it meant to connect via SSH or that the entire site he wanted to edit in Dreamweaver was built in Flash. I rest my case on why Dreamweaver is dead and those who use it outright aren’t far behind.

I’ve been very lucky over the years and have only had one hard drive crash. That time didn’t matter because it was on an older system that didn’t have anything important on it. Now, I live off of my MacBook and iPhone for school, work, and personal life so I take backing up my data very seriously. I’m so paranoid that I could probably be back up and running like nothing happened within an hour or two (and that includes buying another MacBook and iPhone). Here’s how I stay on top of my precious personal data:

1. Mac OS X’s Time Machine

   I use Time Machine with a 500GB Apple Time Capsule. It automatically backs up all of my data for my entire computer. I can go back and get files I may have deleted by accident or get a different version of a file. It’s just as easy as the videos make it look! The Time Capsule is nothing more than a wireless router with a hard drive inside, but using all Apple products completely streamlines the process.

2. External Hard Drives

   I currently have 4 external hard drives.

   • 1TB USB SATA that I built back in December
   • 250GB USB WD Passport drive I use as an external iTunes Library (read how to on Lifehacker)
   • 1TB “DriveZilla” that is really a RAID system of 4 250GB ATA drives
   • 120GB USB WD Passport drive that was my old iTunes library drive, but I needed more room so I upgraded. Now I store all of my Flip MinoHD footage on it.

   My newest 1TB drive stores everything. I mirror its contents on the DriveZilla. I backup my iTunes Library drive to the 1TB drives and also have copies of my Flip footage on them as well. I’ve decided to put more trust in my bigger 1TB drives since I don’t travel with them like I do with my smaller Passport drives.

3. Déjà Vu

   In order to keep a copy of my iTunes Library on my 1TB drive, I could periodically copy and paste everything on the drive, but that’s archaic and would take too long because most of the time would be spent copying over files that haven’t changed. This is the essential thinking behind the Time Machine feature. I exclude my iTunes Library in my Time Machine backups so that my Time Capsule can fill up with more important documents.

   This is where Déjà Vu comes to the rescue. I can easily tell it to copy everything from my iTunes Library drive to a folder on my 1TB drive and it’ll check to see if new files need to be written or if old files need to be updated. You can schedule Déjà Vu to run daily, weekly, or monthly but I just do it manually whenever I feel like it’s been awhile. The limitation in using all of these external drives is that you need all of them to be plugged in, turned on, and mounted before starting any of these backup processes or they will fail.

4. DVDs

   The last line of defense and the safest bet is hard disc media like DVDs. When I accumulate 4GB of new music, I burn the files to a DVD in case my iTunes library or drive ever becomes corrupted. If I have to start from square one, I can import DVD after DVD of music. I also burn important software to DVD that I may have downloaded (legally of course). If I need to reinstall something like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, I can grab the DVD a lot quicker than I can re-download multiple gigabytes of install files.

   I also have a growing collection of unix distribution CDs and DVDs that have come in handy. Just the other week my roommate was downloading gOS to install on one of his parent’s PCs and my archives saved him some time.

   downloading gOS to put on the parents PC and finally end the constant nagging about Windows (tweet)

   @llobster I have the ISO on my shared drive and it’s prolly on a disc around here somewhere (tweet)

This configuration allows me to sleep easy at night because I know my entire laptop is backed up, my entire iTunes Library is backed up, and most of my other media is mirrored as well. Something is missing… my iPhone! Where is my iPhone backed up to? Every time I sync it I see it says it’s backing itself up. Everything should be ok right?

In reality, my iPhone is just being backed up to my laptop but that backup is being ignored by my Time Machine backup by default. Luckily, the smart guys over at TUAW have laid out an easy way to hack this default so that your iPhone backups are included with Time Machine. With that in place, NOW I can rest easy and feel properly prepared for when something inevitably happens to one of my drives.

I installed Safari 4 Beta earlier this week and it is wreaking havoc with Wordpress! When you try to insert a link or media via the WYSIWYG editor buttons, the pop up dialog is hidden behind the dark opaque screen. This doesn’t happen when you click on the icons above the WYSIWYG editor by “Upload/Insert”. Here are a few screenshots so you can see what I’m talking about:

Safari 4 Hiding Link Dialog

Safari 4 Hiding Insert Media Dialog

Safari 4 Doesn't Hide Dialogs When Prompted from Outside WYSIWYG

I tried the WYSIWYG buttons in Firefox and they worked fine so it has to be something in Safari 4 Beta. I never had any troubles using Safari 3 with Wordpress 2.7.1. I hope someone fixes this soon or I’ll either have to revert to Safari 3 or do all of my Wordpress posts in Firefox.

Earlier this week some of the guys and I played some poker, and I ended up winning which made me want to try my luck online. My tweets about playing poker prompted another twitterer to let me know about the Twitter Poker Tour which meets on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker for tournaments. PokerStars didn’t offer a Mac client but their Windows one works great in CrossOver. Full Tilt Poker did have a Mac client which I was excited about but then my account wouldn’t work and I had to contact support immediately. They replied saying they needed proof of identity, but their method of collecting my information is anything but secure.

Here’s the portion of the email with their requests:

You are unable to log in because your Full Tilt Poker account has been temporarily suspended pending verification of your identity.

Please understand that requesting proof of identity is by no means an accusation of any prohibited activity. We often request ID to verify the identity of account holders and ownership of payment processor accounts. These account verification policies are necessary to ensure the validity of transactions, confirm registered account information and protect our players.

Please send scanned, clear copies of the following documents to security@fulltiltpoker.com:

1) Photo ID:
One of the following: valid driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID that clearly shows your birth date and the date of issue or expiry.

2) Proof of Address (less than 3 months old):
One of the following: bank or credit card statement, utility bill, cell phone bill, home or auto insurance papers.

Before sending copies of your documents, please ensure the following requirements are met:

* The copies are clear and legible (96 to 150 DPI or higher recommended for scanned copies).
* The copies include the full document (bill/pay stubs, folded papers and partial sections are not accepted).
* Email attachments do not exceed 3 MB and are in JPEG (.jpg) format.

If you do not have access to a scanner, we will accept digital photos of the documents providing they meet the requirements above. If your camera has a macro feature (appears as a tulip icon), please enable it and take the photo within a 12 to 18-inch distance. If your camera does not have this option, please take the photo within a 24-inch distance.

Please note that your Full Tilt Poker account will remain suspended until we receive and verify legible copies of all requested documents.

Once we process your documentation we will contact you with an update on the status of your account.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Regards,

Rosalie
Cashier
Full Tilt Poker 

To summarize: scan your driver’s license and bank statement and email them to us.

Just because their email address is ’security@fulltitlepoker.com’ doesn’t make it a secure communication. I might be ok with sending an email with a secured attachment, but no they want plain JPG files. Anyone can read and intercept my emails, and if they had my driver’s license along with my bank statement attached, my identity might as well be marked STOLEN. 

Beyond that, who still has their bank statements and utility bills mailed to them? I’ve been paperless for months and love it. I could get them a PDF no problem, but that isn’t an option. Should I print my PDF and then scan it as a JPG? That doesn’t make any sense!

Full Tilt Poker needs to get an SSL certificate and make a basic file upload page where I can submit these valuable documents securely at the very least. They could also look into other methods of proving user’s identities online that doesn’t require giving up so much information. Either way, I’m not sending them anything but these comments on their security policy.

PokerStars hasn’t requested any of this information so I’m going to use them exclusively until they make a similar asinine request.

I lost my KingMax 8GB USB drive and before I realized it a stranger had sent me a Facebook message wanting to return it to me. This is the kind of story most people think can only happen in a small town or on a small campus, but really it could happen in any metropolitan area with the help of social networks like Facebook.

To give you a better idea about what I lost, it’s a small USB drive that’s about the size of a paperclip and has a rubber cover that makes it a little bigger than one of my iPhone earbuds.

You can imagine how easy this would be to lose, and now that I think about it I probably left it plugged into the back of one of the older iMacs we use in my Digital Art lab. I was surprised to get this Facebook message last night from a stranger named Christopher Holland:

Hey Max. A friend of mine found a blue “KingMax” 8 gig jump drive the other day. I plugged it in and saw your name on most of the files. Thought you might be looking for it. Let me know how you want to go about getting it.

I immediately wrote him back thanking him and we set up a place to meet. I met him today in the union and my little blue USB man was lost no more!

It’s pretty amazing that in this day and age Christopher’s friend didn’t just pocket my lost USB drive for themselves (I had Adobe CS4 on it with the key in a text file. Major score for anyone who can’t download it for free like we can at IU). It’s also somewhat amazing Christopher was able to figure out it was mine just by the file names (I preface most of my school work files with my IU username. I guess it finally paid off!). The most amazing part was that they were able to track me down and get in touch with me with hardly any effort thanks to Facebook (Understanding and properly using privacy settings CAN pay off!).

In the past if I were to lose something even with my name on it, the best I could hope for was someone turning it into a ‘lost and found’ (if one existed) and I would have to continually check back to see if someone turned something in. In the recent past, I might have been able to post to an online forum saying I lost something and continually check back to see if anyone found something similar or replied to me. Now with the power of social networks, someone can search Facebook or Google for ‘maxbeatt’ and find me making it extremely easy to contact me as well. 

Even though technology tools made it possible for my lost USB drive to be returned, none of it would have happened without the efforts of Christopher and his friend, and for that I am very thankful! I hope people who lose and find items in less quaint and friendly places than Bloomington, Indiana will remember how easy it can be to recover and return items using social networks.

I hate to hang on Mark’s every word, but something he said is STILL bothering me. Since the class videos still aren’t up (capstone team or Cantaloupe responsible?), I’ll try my best to paraphrase what Mark said during class:

Open Source just isn’t profitable. I don’t like it. You’re not going to find a lot of companies out there that are profitable after maybe Red Hat.

I don’t think Mark could have been more misinformed or incorrect in his statements. Try googling “open source isn’t profitable” and then “open source is profitable” and see what kind of results you get. My results were all pro open source profitability and one article stating that “Microsoft SharePoint-based Solutions: More Profitable than Open Source” (typical) Here are some of the other headlines that came up:

• Open-source companies see profit aplenty
• Open source software: building profitable solutions for people
• HP: Open source can be more profitable than proprietary
• Running a Profitable Open Source Company (pdf)

If you haven’t already, go see Revolution OS and learn why open source is not only important but better. When I tweeted about what Mark said on Monday, it was very fitting that my first reply was from an entrepreneur who has moved from Bloomington to the Silicon Valley.

My Tweet: Mark Hill doesn’t like Open Source and thinks no one profits from it. I know what I’m blogging about this week for his class!

First Response: @maxbeatty example #471 of why we left the Midwest

The real problem I have is that a class focusing on entrepreneurship in informatics (read: Indiana) comes out and says,”Open Source isn’t profitable so don’t start a business based on it”, but at the same university where the class is taught, only Open Source languages are taught to undergrads. During my time at IU, I’ve had classes in C, Perl, Scheme, XML, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript – all open source and open standard languages. I know other informatics undergrads have had classes in Python, Java, and recently Processing. Even the capstone projects of the school of informatics focus on open source technologies!

If proprietary languages like C#, .NET, and SAP are such coveted skills, why am I along with the rest of my classmates not being properly prepared for the real world? My roommate is currently in the MSIS program of the Kelley School of Business and he is learning C#, .NET, and SAP. Does that mean you have to grad school before you really know anything?

If Mark is right, the university and school of informatics are wrong. If Mark is wrong, what happens to his creditability with the class? There’s always the fallback argument that a mix of proprietary and open source solutions is probably best, but either way such blanket statements as “open source isn’t profitable” should stop unless you can back it up. The floor, which happens to be WordpressMU that’s coded in PHP that runs on an Apache web server that’s installed on a server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is open (source) for you, Mark.

On to this week’s questions:

1.  As a company grows, why might someone that was successful and engaged in the business become less successful and disenfranchised? With that in mind, what would be an important trait of someone going to work in a small company?

People change, lose interest, or are replaced by someone else better fit for the job. Greg Oden was great in high school, pretty good in college, and now hasn’t played any sort of substantial roll in the NBA. This could very well directly correlate with his engagement with basketball. At each new level, basketball became less important to Oden as other responsibilities like celebrity status and business deals took over. If a coder comes into a company loving to code and puts out great code, he’s probably going to earn a promotion that may or may not take him away from what he loves- coding. If he’s in the corner office budgeting expense reports he has no idea about, he’s not going to be successful or engaged.

An important trait of someone going into a small company is knowing their roll. Do they code, design, or manage? If they can code and manage, they should manage coders. If they can only design, they should stick to designing until their skill set expands to manage or code. Until then, they should know their roll and keep to designing. If they can’t expand their skill set, they probably aren’t going to be very successful because they can’t adapt to change.

2.  When hiring early members and/or partners to the team, what are two important things to think about?  How would you ensure that those are thought about?

Early members and/or partners to a team should have a shared vision of the project and have complimentary skills. If everyone isn’t on the same page, they can’t progress at the pace they need to. There are surely going to be differences along the way, but everyone’s description of the “big picture” should be in the same ballpark.

Having everyone on the same page doesn’t require everyone to be clones. In fact, it is best if the team’s skills compliment each other in order to maximize potential. For example, if you have two people who do great backend development but neither does frontend development, you aren’t maximizing potential. Instead, having one backend developer and one frontend developer would allow you to put out a complete product unlike the last combination. Ideally, the smaller the team, the less overlapping of skill sets.

3.  When a manager hires into a specific role, what is a common mistake and how might one avoid it?

A manager in too specific of a role may want to branch out and thus ignore his initial responsibilities. Being new to an organization and their definition of roles may also be hard to adjust to. Instead of busting in on a new scene and trying to be a hero, it’s often better to lay low and take notice of your surroundings. Once you understand your setting, take action.

What isn’t web art? Anything your browser renders is web art in my opinion. From the CSS+XHTML compliant layout, to the interactive Flash portfolio, to the favicon that brands every domain. It’s all web art. Web design is web art. The effective combination of typography, colors, and images rolled into one usable interface displaying information is the goal for every website. Thinking that something displayed on a web page is web art is like not seeing the forest for the trees.

For my example of web art, I’m going to use my newly created favicon for my site:

It’s small, simple, meaningful, and not only brands my site but myself as well. If you want some awesome web design galleries, here are a few I came across the other day:

• Top 35 Web Design Galleries
• WPCandy for Wordpress Designs
• Beautifully for CSS+XHTML

I’m really excited for the last half of this class because I love web design and am always looking for excuses to roll out work.

I was trolling OneStart Classifieds a couple weeks ago looking for cheap deals on stuff I didn’t need and seeing if there were any job postings for some quick, easy money. I found a job entitled “Informatics Student” with this description:

We are looking for a certified IT person preferrably a student in the Informatics field. Must have experience in the web design, merchant services, and other web related technology. Serious inquiries only.

It said it was going to pay $10/hr so I shot off an email to the guy that was rather plain but straight to the point. He didn’t give a lot of details so I didn’t either.

I’m a senior Informatics student with years of web design experience. Please review my resume and list of technical skills:

http://maxbeatty.com/resume
http://maxbeatty.com/skills

I’ll be graduating in May and starting an IT consulting job in Chicago at the beginning of June, but I have lots of extra time this semester to take on a new project. Could you provide some details and what you’re looking for? Thanks and can’t wait to hear from you!

Best,
Max Beatty

The job was posted on 1/29, I emailed him on 2/2, and then he finally responded at 2am on 2/17

How are things going Max? This is Derren XXXXXX who once put a post on onestart about working with an IT student. I have checked out your resume and would like to sit down with you and let you know what I am looking forward to working with you on. I am in Bloomington tomorrow all day, if you want to meet however, the evening is the only time I have available. Wednesday I will be here all day and any time will work with me. Please give me an email back or a phone call so we can set up a meeting. My cell number is XXX-XXX-XXXX and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you

I emailed him back around 3:45pm later that day trying to set up a meeting time and included my phone number so he could call me if that was quicker than email.

Hey Derren,

Would some time around 7 be good for you tomorrow? Where would you like to meet? Some place on campus like the union or library? My phone number is 317-319-1140. Look forward to meeting you tomorrow!

Max

I never heard from the guy. No call, no email, nothing. Was I right to wait for a response from the guy? Obviously, the ball was in his court but then again people say not to wait for someone else to call you back. Since I didn’t know anything about this guy or his project, I wasn’t dying to get in touch and learn more. It was just a standard $10/hr gig and I’m not totally pressed for cash at the moment.

Shouldn’t he have emailed me back? Was it too much to ask for a call? I’ve had success in the past couple of weeks meeting people to tutor them and this is the usual formula:

1. They email me asking if I can tutor them
2. I respond sure, here’s my fee, and try to set up a meeting time offering my phone # for convenience
3. They respond to confirm plans and give me their phone # 

It’s simple. It works. Is this Derren guy new to setting up meetings or am I too used to meeting freshmen at the library? I’d love for any feedback you might have as I continue to look for freelance gigs this semester.

After a surprisingly warm and positive reaction to my artwork today in class from my fellow D210 classmates, I wanted to make an announcement about stealing my artwork in case any of them wanted a copy or wanted to use it elsewhere. I’ve uploaded everything so far into a Flickr set entitled “Digital Art” and tried to give every piece a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Go. Steal. Remix. Reissue. Do art!

Cross-posted from my I400 class

Kim Lee presented last week about her experiences with start-ups even though she has never started a business. For the most part, her employee perspective was refreshing especially since we’ve talked so much about finding talented employees and keeping them happy. Her history exposed some flaws and strengths of pasts companies that are applicable to all new businesses. I was a little worried when she requested our name, email, and cell phone number without giving us any explanation about how it was going to be used. I noticed a lot more of my classmates put down “N/A” for their cell phone number than was believable, but I don’t blame them for not trusting her.

I’m personally not sold on Vontoo, but then again this weekend my little sister immediately gained interest in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am when she learned that Justin Timberlake was a participant. Maybe more people are sold on hearing a celebrity’s voice recording than I care to admit.

On to the questions that Mark specifically formed based on the post-break attendance.

1. Explain the profit chain.

The profit chain consists of three links- employees, customers, and investors. If you have happy employees, they are more likely to produce a better product and serve customers better. Serving customers better makes them happy, and investors like happy customers. Investors like happy customers so much that it makes them happy. If the investors aren’t happy, it’s probably because they’re hearing from the customers. When the customers seek out the investors, it usually means they are unhappy because of an inferior product or poor service. The inferior product or poor service comes from the employees who don’t care because they hate their job. Keeping one end (un)happy usually results in a chain reaction for the other links.

2. What would an entrepreneur like me think is the most important part of communication?

Communication is an exchange of information. Someone is giving, another is receiving. It’s how the world works. Mark is a man of action, though, so if he’s going to get his message across he’s not going to waste his time with words. Actions speak louder than words. Instead of telling someone how to do their job, show them. Instead of vaguely describing how you want something done, show them. It’s a much more effective way of communicating.

When someone asks me how to do something on their computer, it’s easier for me to show them the actions they need to take by either sharing their screen or making a screencast than it would be to write out explicit instructions in a blog post for them to follow. When you’re learning to flip a burger, they could waste your time with an instructional video or take 5 minutes to hold your hand as your grill up your first patty.

If this isn’t what Mark wanted for his most important part of communication, I’m going to go with listening as my second answer. When you listen, you’re taking in information that you can later act upon whether it be user feedback, investor instructions, or general market trends.

3. Compare and contrast the difference between “good is good enough” and “good is the enemy of great.”

When I hear “good is good enough”, I think of high school. Nothing really matters in high school besides getting a diploma and meeting the state university’s minimum SAT score. Some people relish in the fact they had straight A’s all through high school, but the kid who passed with C-’s is still going to sit next them in finite class freshman year at StateU. There are developers that won’t let their code graduate unless it’s absolutely perfect, but often times it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect or not. As long as it’s good enough to pass, it’s probably ok to let go so they can move on to another task. Spending too much time on one task and forgetting about others is when you need to remember that “good is good enough”.

Going back to the high school example, the student that is hellbent on getting all A’s may end up with their mediocre peer in freshman finite, but could at the same time be in a greater position to succeed at the same time. Those A’s probably landed the student a few grants and scholarships, and their hard work probably prepared them better to excel in college. This is where “good is the enemy of great” comes into play. The average student didn’t need to be “great” to get to the same place “good” would have gotten them. Their ambitious peer, however, isn’t ready to settle for good so they are continuing to improve. When a developer or company admits that things are as good as they can be, they won’t get better.

There are times when “good is good enough” probably more on a day-to-day basis, but in the long run for a company to be innovative and deliver the best product “good is the enemy of great”.

The word on the tubes is that bokeh is quickly approaching as the next design craze like rounded corners, reflecting logos, and diagonal stripes. I found a nice tutorial from Abduzeedo on how to recreate the photography effect in Photoshop. I used some new colors released by the Pantone Color Institute for Fall 2009.

Here’s what I came up with after struggling a little with the tutorial:

I originally thought I was going to use the effect in my self portrait assignment, but now I have a different idea involving playing cards. More on that development later

My brother informed me tonight that this clip I saw earlier in the week of a kid falling out of bounds and making an 80ft buzzer beater was from a JV basketball game between Bishop Chatard HS and Broad Ripple HS in Indianapolis. This may not mean much to you, but I went to both of those high schools!

The clip has been dugg over 500 times on FanDome.com so far, but here is the newscast posted on YouTube:

I played freshman basketball at Chatard and eventually graduated from Broad Ripple. I can’t believe I didn’t pay closer attention when I first watched it. And for everyone who noticed the scoreboard, my brother says the shot was at the end of the first half, not the end of the game.

Thanks Jackson for filling me in!

Last night when I was doing everything but homework, I came across this WiseStamp Firefox plugin that lets you easily create customized email signatures that include links to your social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The only problem I had with it is that it only works in Firefox and I compose most of my emails in Apple’s Mail app. With a little HTML tweaking and hacking Mail’s signatures I ended up with this:

Old Signature

New Signature

First, I installed the WiseStamp plugin and configured my settings to form the signature I liked.

WiseStamp Settings

Then, I went to Gmail in Firefox to compose an email so I could see the final result.

Signature in Gmail

I then used Firebug to steal the HTML that WiseStamp produced. I didn’t like how the AIM and gTalk looked and I wanted them linked so someone could click on them to launch either chat client. I also adjusted some CSS and came up with this:

<div dir="ltr">
<div>
Max Beatty
<br />
<font size="2" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">
Email: max@maxbeatty.com<br />
Phone: (317) 319-1140<br />
Site: http://maxbeatty.com
</font>
</div>
<div style="padding: 5px 0pt; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3px;" dir="ltr">
<a style="text-decoration:none; border:none;" target="_service" href="gtalk:chat?jid=max@maxbeatty.com">
<img width="16" height="16" alt="Google Talk: " src="http://www.images.wisestamp.com/gtalk.png"/>
</a>
<a style="text-decoration:none; border:none;" target="_service" href="aim:goIM?screenname=maxbeattydotcom">
<img width="16" height="16" alt="AIM: " src="http://www.images.wisestamp.com/aim.png"/>
</a>
<a style="text-decoration:none; border:none;" target="_service" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxbeatty">
<img width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Linkedin" src="http://www.images.wisestamp.com/linkedin.png"/>
</a>
<a style="text-decoration:none; border:none;" target="_service" href="http://www.facebook.com/maxbeatty">
<img width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Facebook" src="http://www.images.wisestamp.com/facebook.png"/>
</a>
<a style="text-decoration:none; border:none;" target="_service" href="http://twitter.com/maxbeatty">
<img width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Twitter" src="http://www.images.wisestamp.com/twitter.png"/>
</a>
</div>
</div>

I saved it as an HTML file and previewed it in my browser to make sure everything looked ok. Now, I wanted to use it in Apple’s Mail app. My first attempt to just paste it into their signature editor failed. It printed straight HTML. Luckily, I was able to find a workaround from Mac OS X Hints for creating HTML signatures in Mail.

I found it’s easier to already have a signature made that you just want to upgrade like I did. Like it says, quit Mail. I already had my HTML open in Safari so saving it as a Web Archive was easy. Then, I had to track down my already created signatures in ~/Library/Mail/Signatures and there were a few other web archives along with a ‘SignaturesByAccount.plist’. I opened up the .plist file and which is nothing more than an XML file. I scrolled down and found this:

<key>SignatureName</key>
<string>max@maxb</string>
<key>SignatureUniqueId</key>
<string>9735F373-4681-4D58-8039-55937D333511</string>

One of the web archives in the Signature directory was named ‘9735F…’ so I knew that was my old signature. I replaced that archive with my newly created archive, keeping the same name to match the .plist.

Finding the Signature files

When I booted Mail back up, my  new signature was in place and worked like a charm! If you want to see it in action, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure to respond.

I know this has been covered more than once, but my old AI Marty specifically asked me how I integrated Twitter with my site so I  thought I’d write out a little more than 140 characters in response.

I have to admit most of the work was done for me by CSSRockstars’s free theme Charade, although I had to do some tweaking to get it how I liked. They used Twitter’s Blogger javascript file to insert the latest update of a user to an element on the page with the ID of ‘twitter_update_list’. It’s really only 5 lines of code to get you started:

<div id="twitter">
<ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul>
</div>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/<?php echo $mytwitterid;?>.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1"></script>

The wrapper div around the list is just for the CSS styling. The CSSRockstars chose to make a separate file where you could fill in your username for Twitter and the other social networks in the header. If you have plain HTML, you can just put ‘username’  instead of ‘<?php echo $mytwitterid; ?>’. The last parameter on the Twitter JSON call is how many tweets to retreive so if you wanted 5 or 10 instead of 1 you change that value. It’s important to note that the scripts are called in the footer of the page and the twitter div is in the header. This allows the rest of the page to load and then make the JSON call so your page load doesn’t hang on it. Here’s the CSS that’s used to style it:

#twitter {
position: relative;
padding: 14px 0 0 60px;
height: 33px;
background: url(img/twitter.gif) top left no-repeat;
color: #7A94A0;<span> </span>
font-size: .95em;
text-align: left;
}

#twitter a { color: #7996A2;}

#twitter a:hover { color: rgb(0, 142, 239); }

ul#twitter_update_list { list-style-type: none;}

ul#twitter_update_list li { width: 550px; }

There are other jQuery scripts, Wordpress plugins, and even Twitter’s own badges you can use but I think this method gives you a little more control over how and what to display.

I also added a button that didn’t come from CSSRockstars to allow people to tweet about the current post they were reading. I used to use TwitThis but the button didn’t feel right and it required you to log in through a 3rd party. By the time you did all that you might as well use my custom button and Twitter’s actual site. Here’s the code to that:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading: <?php the_title(); ?> < ?php the_permalink(); ?>" 
title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" 
target="_blank" 
class="share7"></a>

The image is actually loaded via CSS in the background using this little one liner:

.share7 { background: url(img/6.png) top left no-repeat; }

Hopefully this helps Marty and anyone else looking to add a little more Twitter to their site!

“Use more than one digitized images to create a single composition that representing an emotional state, such as sadness, happiness, embarrassment, and ecstasy.” I chose frustration

Frustration by Max Beatty

I needed to take an Arts & Humanities course to graduate so I signed up for a 100 level American Studies course entitled “What is America?”. After a month of the class, I hate it. It’s not interesting or stimulating, and worst of all most of the course is just an opportunity for the teacher to further their own personal agenda. It’s not even a third (1/3) of the way through the semester and we are already having a midterm. The midterm is on one (1) of the five (5) books we’re covering this semester. That means that 40% of my final grade is dependent upon my comprehension of my teacher’s PhD thesis. What could be so compelling that answers what is America? Japanese American Internment.

Yes, it wasn’t cool. It was bad. It should have never happened. Everyone said they were sorry and the US government paid over a billion dollars in reparations to surviving internees and their heirs.

That doesn’t mean it defines America (or even 40% of America). Honestly, all things considered, it wasn’t the worst thing happening to a group of people in the 1940s. Ever heard of the Holocaust? Even for America, it wasn’t the worst treatment to a group of people. Anyone remember slavery? I’m pretty sure they’re still waiting on their reparations if they haven’t given up completely.

If my grandparents were internment victims like my teacher’s were, I might be out there trying to educate people about something that gets overlooked when studying WWII. I wouldn’t spend 15 years on a PhD and then shove it in the faces of a bunch of college kids whose grandparents and great-grandparents were overseas dying for the war instead of being relocated. If my teacher knew anything about America, they’d write a book or make a documentary, win some awards, put some money in her pocket. This is the “land of opportunity” not the “land of oppression”.

The remaining four books that the final will be over are more of the same faults of America that you don’t need a college course to know. Racism is still alive, the poor get poorer while the rich get richer, fast food has made Americans lazy and obese, and when all else fails you can run away from your problems with no consequences.

I’m sorry for anyone who majors in American Studies and has this as their introduction to the department. I’m sorry if I sound inconsiderate towards my teacher’s efforts and those affected by Japanese American interment. I’m not sorry for wanting to actually learn something and still being proud to be an American and live in America.

I’ve been tweaking a new theme over the past week or so based on CSS Rockstars’ Charade theme. I took out their credit line in the footer because some of their stuff was broken and I’ve made some other additions. I mentioned you in the first line of the redesign post, so don’t be mad.

As simple as the last design was, this one gives me some more places to showcase my social media involvement and it promotes my RSS feed better. I’ve also migrated all of my hand-coded pages to Wordpress pages for easier management. I’ve tried to keep as many of the old permalinks in place during the revamp.

I added some new plugins and removed some others. I’m sick of the snow here in Indiana so the snowfall plugin had to be deactivated. The new theme has links to Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter on each of the posts so the AddThis plugin and TweetThis plugin bit the dust.

If you’re using IE6, you should know it and switch ASAP!

If you’re one of the 150 million people who use Facebook, you can leave comments on my site using your Facebook account. If you haven’t seen it on other sites, try it out. It’s really simple and nonintrusive on Facebook.

Own an iPhone or iPod Touch? Try http://maxbeatty.com and see how it’s nicely formatted for you thanks to WPTouch.

The only thing I don’t like about the redesign is that it’s based off of someone else’s work. MaxBeatty.com 3.0 will definitely be a homebrew! I also need to find a good way to present my portfolio using WordPress or something that integrates well. Look for that coming soon but until then enjoy, read, comment, share, friend, follow, chat, and be well!

It looks like my Amazon account was attacked by some Germans and caused Amazon to reset my account password. Sadly, I was ready to disregard the email they sent me about my account change because I didn’t trust the sender. According to Amazon’s phishing guide, I was doing the right thing but their guide didn’t take into account their own international sites.

Here’s the email contents:

Dear Max Beatty,

Hello from Amazon.com.

As a precaution, we’ve reset your Amazon.com password because you may
have been subject to a “phishing” scam.

Here’s how phishing works:

A scam artist sends an e-mail, which is designed to look like it came
from a reputable company such as a bank, financial institution, or
retailer like Amazon.com, but is in fact a forgery.  These e-mails
direct you to a website that looks remarkably similar to the
reputable company’s website, where you are asked to provide account
information such as your e-mail address and password.  Since that web
site is actually controlled by the phisher, they get the information
you entered.

Go to amazon.com/phish to read more about ways to protect yourself
from phishing.

To regain access to your Amazon customer account:

1.   Go to Amazon.com and click the “Your Account” link at the top of
our website.

2.   Click the link that says “Forgot your password?”

3.   Follow the instructions to set a new password for your account.
Please choose a new password and do not use the same password you used
with us previously.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept
incoming e-mail. To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit
the Help section of our website.

Well written, no attachments, didn’t ask for any personal information, actually provided my first and last name, and didn’t include any links that weren’t hosted on the “amazon.com” domain. These are all signs of an authentic email so the last thing to check is the sender: konto-aktualisierung@amazon.de. This is where my mental phishing phlags went up. That’s not from ‘amazon.com’ like their Identifying Phishing or Spoofed E-mails page said all of their emails would be sent from!

5. Check the return address

Is the e-mail from Amazon.com? While phishers often send forged e-mail to make it look like it came from Amazon.com, you can sometimes determine whether or not it’s authentic by checking the return address. If the “from” line of the e-mail looks like “amazon-security@hotmail.com” or “amazon-fraud@msn.com,” or contains the name of another Internet service provider, you can be sure it is a fraudulent e-mail.

If you know your internet, you know .de is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany. If you know the footer of Amazon.com, you know they have international sites for other countries like Germany. Amazon.de is the official domain for Amazon.com in Germany so the email sender can be trusted. Wouldn’t you know that ‘konto-aktualisierung’ translates from German to be ‘account update’ in English? When I received my password reset email from ‘account-update@amazon.com’, I finally accepted the email as being legit.

I could now assume that someone in Germany was attacking my account which prompted Amazon to send me an email from their German domain. If this was so, why wasn’t the email in German? Maybe I have an Amazon preference set to receiving emails in English…

Moral of the story, don’t trust any email you receive and don’t take company phishing guides as literally as I do.

It’s been 75 days since I signed up for the somewhat controversial ad network for Twitter so I’d thought I’d give an update on how much bling-bling I’m raking in by allowing them to insert tweets into my timeline that are ads for other products related to what I tweet about.

Log of paying tweets from be-a-magpie.com

In two and a half months, I’ve earned €1.78 from 6 ad tweets. That’s no where close to the €40~ per month they quoted me originally when I signed up. What’s worse is that the ads have become very infrequent even though I’ve been tweeting more and more since November and almost doubled my followers. Either they are struggling to find advertisers or what I tweet about is too sporadic for them to hone in an audience.

I still have it set to tweet one ad for every ten of my tweets, but I tweeted 900 times in December and November and only had 3 ad tweets! (read: something is obviously broken)

I’m going to keep on with the #magpie tweets since they haven’t chased away my followers on Twitter and even with their poor return should make me enough by the end of the year to renew my domain. Something I did do last month was turn off the promotion tweets for #magpie that tried to entice others to join with my affiliate URL. For a few days it was going crazy and tweeted way more than my setting of every other day. 

I’m going to try and fit the Magpie badge in my footer in case any visitors want to sign up (and earn me some commission). Is anyone else using #magpie and seeing good returns? What about other sites like Twittad.com that replaces your background on your profile with an ad?

Today’s in-class exercise was to create two squares where one represented happiness and the other sadness. After everyone was done, we rotated around the classroom leaving a few sentences in an open Word document about our observations. When we were done commenting on three or four other pieces, we turned the JPG and DOCX in to Oncourse.

What bugged me about the exercise was why we didn’t just upload the images to our blogs that we’re maintaining for the class and have everyone just leave a comment on the post? It’s simpler, less time consuming, and would have taught everyone how to post their images to their blogs.

Here are my happy and sad squares:

Leave a comment about what you think or open a word processor, type out what you think, and email it to me. Whichever you find easier for you…

I wish this week’s teleconference audio was clearer so I could have taken better notes on Don Brown’s presentation, but I had to concentrate so hard on what he was saying it didn’t leave much time to jot much down. Luckily, he’s very easy to find on Google:

• Article from BizVoice/Indiana Chamber (pdf)
• Forbes Profile (including salary information)
• Mini-Bio on Interactive Intelligence

Describe the characteristics of an entrepreneur that you would look at in thinking about

working for a start up company. If you have any direct experiences, please share how you

thought about those.

After reading those it’s apparent what the first characteristic is that I’m looking for in an entrepreneur- experience. If you’ve been successful in the past, chances are you’ll be successful in the future (see Mark Cuban and Scott Jones). I interned at ChaCha a few summers ago and was always impressed when I heard Scott speak. When times seemed tough, the future uncertain, or employees got on edge, he was there to calm everyone and tell them he had been there before. It also didn’t hurt that his rolodex was filled with all the right connections. Whether it was hosting parties for the governor, striking deals with the state university, or finding funding at the most opportune time, it was usually because of Scott’s experience.

If it’s the first time around the block for an entrepreneur, I’m looking for a hustler. Not just someone who can get things done, but someone who spends his every waking moment dedicated to learning more about their project. An entrepreneur who is the master of their domain and is also passionate about it, stands to be very successful.

What was the value that the venture capital firm provided which helped Software Artistry

become successful?

This question could have been worded differently to be clearer, but I think the answer they are looking for is R&D or research and development to the layman. Don Brown said he continues to work directly with developers. Given his educational background of physics and medicine, two fields heavily researched, it’s no surprise he adopted this value for his start-ups.

Describe the concept of runway and how it impacts the risk profile of starting a company.

How long of a runway would you want to see if you were going to work for a startup or start

your own business?

I found a great simple explanation of runway by Steve Spalding over on How to Split an Atom that I thought I’d share here:

For businesses “runway” represents how long you can stay in operation based on your revenue, burn rate and savings. If you have $10k in the bank and $5k worth of expenses a month, your “runway” is two months. At that point, you either get a loan, start flipping burgers on the side, or find a benefactor (VC/Angel/Family) to hold your head above water.

The goal of any business is to make its “runway” infinite, which simply means bringing in more revenue than it pushes out in expenses.

The risk is in the revenue. If you don’t produce any revenue, you run out of runway and crash. The longer runway you have, the longer period of time you have to make your revenue greater than your expenses. It’s very risky to start a company on a short runway just like it’s very risky to try to take off in a plane on a short runway. You might even be able to extend the metaphor to say that bigger planes need longer runways much like bigger startups need longer runways.

Mark has mentioned both weeks that you’ll always need more time and money than you think for your startup to take off. Continuing with the metaphor, you would want to leave some grassy bailout room after the runway instead of a brick wall incase everything doesn’t go to plan.

If I were going to work for a startup, my first question about their runway is if they planned accordingly for scalability. For example, would the product work the same for 10 people as it does 100 people? What about 100,000 people? 100 million people? What does an increased user base do to your expenses and have you planned accordingly? Some companies will have the same expenses if they sell one widget or a million of them, but you see a lot of startups that can’t handle a sudden influx in demand which sometimes drives potential customers away leaving their revenues less than what they could have been if they planned to scale accordingly. Mark Cuban often write on his blog about how internet video isn’t ready to challenge cable and satellite providers because no one can provide the enough bandwidth to handle the millions of viewers cable/satellites do.

If I were starting my own business, I’d keep my day job to extend my runway. When I have to start tapping into my sick days because nights and weekends aren’t enough to develop the project AND I’m making money from the project, then I’d consider quitting my day job to pursue my passion project full time. Hopefully by the time the project is that demanding, it is profitable enough to cover expenses and my increased attention could take it to the next level. That’s a very vague runway, but the moral of the story is to create the longest runway possible. When you break that threshold of profitability, you have an infinite runway!

This week’s digital art blog assignment is to, “find an art piece which is related to digital composite, and talk about it.” I went to my doodle album on Facebook and pulled a few of my old composites I used to use on intro splash pages back when they were popular for websites.

This first one is made up of a picture of my keyboard, a picture of a wave, and then a bunch of filters and effects along with the text.

This second picture is composed of a picture of a drainage grate and a drawing of a fist in the clouds that I found online plus the text.

This last photo I made with a free brush set in Photoshop in like 15 seconds. It’s very random and has no point, but I’ve always liked it.

Our first assignment which is a digital composite is due Monday. I’ll probably post my finished product to Facebook and Flickr if you’re interested in what I come up with based on my supporting materials.

I had some thoughts after the first couple of weeks using the i400 blog and the course in general. Hopefully they’ll continue to listen and improve the course. It’s been pretty good so far, but as you’ll read has some kinks to work out like any beta production.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford

Before I get into this week’s questions, I thought I’d offer a little feedback on the course and the blog system thus far this semester. Simply put- it’s in beta, which is why feedback is important so the teachers and capstone team can make improvements. Thankfully, I’ve already tried to give some feedback to Travis Brown, the AI, a few times and he’s been very receptive. It’s great! I wish more classes would take continuous feedback on the course instead of waiting until the end of the semester to be reviewed by burnt out students on vague scantrons.

For example, this week I told Travis that I thought he could save himself and the students some effort by simplifying the process in making announcements. He had sent out a few messages via Oncourse about the schedule of speakers and this week’s blog assignment being available under the Resources on Oncourse in PDF to download. Since the PDFs were nothing more than plain text I wondered why he didn’t just send that in the messages instead of going through the trouble of creating a PDF, uploading it, and then sending out a message about it. He thanked me for the feedback, but said not all students check their messages diligently enough and I respected that. For those less diligent, make it easy on yourself and just have your messages from Oncourse forwarded to your email. If I were Travis and the capstone team trying to drive more traffic to this blog and show its potential, I’d post all announcements here. Force students to subscribe to the RSS feed (or at least Travis’ posts).

The technical hiccups in the classroom are another sign of beta status. The real classroom wasn’t ready the first week and we all crammed into a much smaller classroom. No sweat. This week the sound quality was terrible, but I got the jest of what was going on. I’m sure the production will gradually smooth out. What I’m really waiting on are the video archives of talks to go back and review when making these blog posts.

I’ve seen a lot of progress with the blog in the past few weeks with the layout changing, sidebars filling up, and kinks such as the IE login problems being resolved. That’s beta for you. I’ll throw my two cents in about the blog because I really like the idea of it being used to organize a class.

First, the permalink structure should be changed to something more human readable and thus better for SEO (i.e. /?page_id=48 < /lectureres).

Second, it takes 2 seconds to create a contact form using something like cforms II that makes it much easier to give feedback and ask questions instead of emailing informatics.i400@gmail.com.

Third, there are duplicate links in the Pages widget (“Home” == “Welcome…”), not to mention the Pages widget has the exact same links as the main horizontal navigation bar that is directly above it. What is the purpose of the blogroll and calendar widgets? The blogroll isn’t made up of blogs and has two links that could go in the footer. The calendar just links to posts from that day which doesn’t serve any immediate purpose that I can think of.

Back to the “Bios of Lecturers” page, it needs some sort of sub-navigation to make it easier to find each speaker. A list of names at the top that links to their section of the page or to a new page altogether would be nice. In fact, the entire site could use a more elaborate layout to accommodate all of the content that it is and will be handling. When Travis asked in class if anyone had read the other entries, no one even knew they could let alone how to. Look to sites like Ars Technica, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and the New York Times for inspiration on how to display and navigate lots of content.

I thought adding the RSS feed to my Google Reader might be a solution to managing all of the content, but it looks like it’s only feeding the last 10 posts. Is this the setting in the backend or was it only setup 10 posts ago? With 40ish authors posting weekly, this makes the RSS feed useless as of now.

I hope Travis, the capstone team, and even Mark Hill take some of this feedback to heart to improve the course this semester instead of waiting to retool it next year. If the capstone team is looking for another method of collecting feedback, I would suggest UserVoice that is used by a lot of beta/start-up sites.

I’ll start another post so Travis doesn’t think I’m filling my word count for this week’s assignment

I’ve really been struggling for ideas for this first project that’s a composite image of “an imaginary event, place, person, thing, etc.” My original proposal was to do something with album art maybe scattered across a desk, but now that really doesn’t sound too interesting. I also had an idea of having someone walk down a hall that’s covered with album covers sort of like the iTunes screensaver on mac.

Then just a minute ago I reread the ‘imaginary’ part and thought about a ‘Thugz Mansion’ composite based on 2Pac’s line:

Tell the homies I’m in heaven and they ain’t got hoods
Seen a show with Marvin Gaye last night, it had me shook
Drippin peppermint Schnapps, with Jackie Wilson, and Sam Cooke
Then some lady named Billie Holiday
Sang sittin there kickin it with Malcolm, ’til the day came

Maybe I’ll make a composite of those artists’ faces or album covers in a way you might think ‘Thugz Mansion’ like the 2Pac Resurrection album cover.

Tomorrow in lab I’ll have to narrow it down to one of these ideas. I’m still unsure how I’m going to spend 12hrs a week working in Photoshop on one image like the guide said to, especially when the images are just 800 x 600 most times.

Although I’m sure this violates some sort of copyright law, I was planning on using album art ripped from Last.fm and my iTunes library with tools like Gijsco’s Last.fm Desktop Generator. If I plan on going with something with a little more setting like a real desktop or hallway, I’ll probably look through free stock photo sites.

I’m a little nervous about how this first project is going to turn out. I’m not much of an artist and already having a creative block so hopefully everyone else in the class won’t show me up too badly.

I love IU. I think it’s a great university with many talented faculty members and endless resources for students. I’ve never regretted my decision to come here and pursue my degree in informatics. Just last month, the university announced that they had struck a deal with Adobe to provide CS4 to everyone for free! This is great because numerous departments offer courses utilizing this software and there are free workshops for learning to use the software as well. Once all of this great multimedia is created, most courses leave students without proper instruction on how to properly present it online. There aren’t any courses that offer more than the w3schools’ xhtml tutorials. It’s time for Indiana University to teach web standards that’ll prepare students for the professional world!

This “call to action” comes after reading Elevate Web Design at the University Level by LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN and my continued frustration from the last year of teaching outdated material, interning with a global top 50 company who didn’t know what “web standards” were, and now facing another semester of outdated and boring material anyone could learn by searching for free online tutorials.

I’ve only been in one class at IU that stressed web standards and it wasn’t in informatics or computer science! Since then I’ve been instructed to teach students non-standard methods in the computer science department and have even worked in groups where members argued against the importance of using web standards (he was a informatics/computer science major). I still haven’t found a class that goes beyond teaching the W3School’s XHTML and CSS tutorials. How are students supposed to compete in the job markets with no real web development instruction? Why hasn’t the School of Informatics addressed this when most of the capstone projects end up being web-based?

From the educational initiatives I read about in Brighter Horizons for Web Education by AARRON WALTER,I think the WaSP Educational Task Force and their WaSP Curriculum Framework sounds most appealing. The courses would already be designed so instructors wouldn’t need to invest a lot of their own time into making their own versions. Everything is being released with a Creative Commons license and as PDFs so these courses would be cheap for both the department and students. The Opera Web Standards Curriculum (Opera WSC) also sounded interesting, but by adopting the WaSP Curriculum Framework, you’re also adopting the Opera WSC.

“Incidentally, many of the WaSP Curriculum Framework courses will include Opera’s articles as recommended readings and will tie directly into the learning competencies, assignments, and exam questions in foundational courses.”

I know academia is slow, but if the WCF is released in March of this year how unrealistic is it to have a course or two setup by Fall 2009 or Spring 2010? The courses are laid out for the SOI so all they’d need to do is find someone to stand in front of the class to instruct. I agree with LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN who said:

We also need to let go of the idea that professors in these disciplines must hold a master’s degree. The reality is that many web professionals are self-taught. A person with solid experience and a proven track record should be considered an appropriate candidate to teach web design and development in higher education.

My entrepreneur class this semester is being taught by adjunct professor Mark Hill who is a respected entrepreneur in Indianapolis. Why couldn’t someone from the SproutBox team in Bloomington come in to lead these web standards courses or even a talented graduate or undergraduate student?

I have just over 100 days left at IU so it might be too late for me to start some sort of student-led evangelical movement. I think I will pass along these ideas to lecturer Matt Hottell, who heads the capstone projects, Richelle Brown, the Director of Student Academic Support, Jeremy Podany, the director of career services, and Cameron Schnick, who has been involved with the Informatics Student Association and also on Twitter. It’s time IU (and SOI) takes web standards seriously because people like Jeffery Dawald and companies like Media Works are the results of poor education on the subject.

What do Bill Gates, Kanye West, and I all have in common? We all dropped out of college.

Ok, I didn’t drop out of college yet, but it definitely crossed my mind today as I struggled to get through the day. My classes this semester are anything but challenging, and I’m ready to be done with college. First, I reviewed basic unix commands in a 400 level informatics class. Then, I had to take oral roll call and notes over a poorly done PBS documentary. Finally, I sat for 3 hrs in a computer lab watching weird japanese movies that were supposed to inspire me to produce digital art? I should have saved my tuition money and just googled “perl search engine”, “japanese internment”, and “photoshop tutorials” instead of enrolling in classes this semester.

Then my day turned around. I watched the Daily Show’s Inauguration coverage, LOST premiered, and then Gary Vaynerchuk made a timely, inspiring post entitled Stop crying, think, wipe your tear and crush it!. I’d received Twitter replies from both my roommates saying I’ve been complaining a lot lately, and they were right.

@maxbeatty you are complaining a lot these days. (tweet)

@maxbeatty i’m going to stop following you if you don’t stop complaining about your stupid classes and then posting links that i don’t click (tweet)

I’ve decided I’m going to roll with my high school level courses, stop obsessing about how ignorant I think some of my teachers are, and find something I’m passionate about to “crush” in Gary’s words. I know I hate being bored and having nothing to do. Most people are surprised when they hear how soon I’m starting my job after graduation, but I know if I sit around I’ll be miserable. I haven’t done anything productive in over a month and I’m going crazy!

I’ve started revamping my site and from there I’m going to start tackling my long tech-related to-do list. I may not have a Facebook up my sleeve like Mark Zuckerberg or even a TwitPic like Noah Everett, but I’m going to work it to keep a leg up on the competition!

Last week I started blogging for my digital art class along with the rest of my classmates. Our teacher put together a page of links to everyone’s blog, but I didn’t find that very helpful so I took it a step further by creating an OPML file I could easily import into Google Reader.

I’m lazy so the first thing I did was google for an OPML generator. Bingo! The Feed Show had a nice little goodie to create an OPML file full of RSS feeds. It allowed me to enter the URL to the blog list and returned a list of everyone’s blog. I went ahead and created the OPML file filled with just the URLs, and then manually edited the XML file to add on “feeds/posts/default” to the end of each xmlUrl. It imported perfectly into Google Reader and now I can read everyone else’s entries for digital art.

I wonder if the professor thought about doing this so it would be easier to read and grade our entries. I’m offering up the OPML file for everyone to download so anyone can follow along. If you need help importing it to your reader of choice, leave a comment and I can try to help!

There are some perks to only having class Mondays and Wednesdays. For example, when there’s a national holiday that falls on a Monday like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I have a whole week vacation! Over my mini-vacation, I got to thinking about how much paper is wasted during the first week of classes, not only at this university but nationwide.

The first week of classes has become dubbed “syllabus week” because you know every class is going to waste a day or the week going over the syllabus. It’s pathetic teachers still have to read it to the students instead of letting them review it on their own time. It’s downright wasteful some teachers still feel the need to print out syllabi to hand out like the internet was never invented.

At IU, we have an online collaborative learning environment called Oncourse that is so revolutionary it includes a built in tool for teachers to (gasp) post their syllabus! Why doesn’t everyone do this? Why aren’t they required to? Here’s one example from one of my classes this semester of how useful and thrifty posting the syllabus online would have been.

The professor sent out an email the week before class started with the syllabus attached. Good start, but it was filled with errors (i.e. Spring Break was scheduled in February) and it was attached as a Word document. Why couldn’t she copy and paste all that plain text into the email?

On the first day of class, she prepared 40 stapled copies of the same 4 page erroneous syllabus to hand out. Instead of relying on the competence of her students to manually correct her errors, she collected them all and handed out fresh corrected copies in the next class. Today, our third time meeting, she had us make another correction!

Instead of wasting 320 pages of papers, she could have simply written her syllabus in Oncourse’s WYSIWYG editor. If she makes an error or wants to change around some dates, she can do it instantly and send out an announcement that there has been a change to the syllabus. No printing off, stapling, and handing out another version or having me keep track of a packet of paper for 5 months to continually mark up with changes.

In the future, I hope she saves herself some trouble, saves the rainforest a few trees, and saves me the headache of trying to keep it all straight. Get smart, simplify, go green, and just put it online!

This semester two of my classes are requiring that I blog, but neither of them will allow me to use my existing blog. In true blogger fashion, I’ll be crossposting everything here. I personally think it’s somewhat idiotic I have to do this because I can easily categorize my posts, but it would be irresponsible of me to think my professors would be competent enough to make an assignment they actually understood themselves. 

1. For my Digital Art class (FINA D210), I’ll be posting here but crossposting with the category “digital art”
2. For my Entrepreneurship in Informatics class (INFO I400), I’ll be posting here (may be private to non-IU viewers) but crossposting with the category “entreprenership”

Supposedly, the I400 class is some sort of capstone project where I guess they are setting up and managing a WordpressMU install :: yawn (please let me know if it’s something more). There is really no excuse for my digital art class to have me post elsewhere (thought about submitting this URL and seeing if she knew the difference). The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that my teacher is originally from Taiwan and I know Blogger offers easy-to-use  translation tools. 

Bottom line, I’ll be blogging a lot this semester and I’m excited for that. I have quite a queue of other things I’d like to post, but haven’t found the time. Note to professors requiring their students to blog, let your students have some freedom (sure offer them a default like Blogger and Wordpress) and just use Google Reader or some other RSS reader to manage the class. It’s not that hard.

Today, a friend of mine asked if I would read over her personal statement for grad school and I wanted to give her solid, easy to comprehend feedback. I’ve never had luck using commenting in word processors and have seen annotations in PDFs before but never found a good program to do them myself. Luckily, I read Smashing App’s 21 Free Apps For Mac OS X That Are Absolutely Useful earlier in the day and had downloaded Skim to try out when I started getting reading assignments for class but now had a new use for it.Another friend who had been asked to review the personal statement couldn’t open it because it was a .DOCX so I exported it as a PDF in Pages for him (and me). I opened the new PDF in Skim and it felt a lot like Apple’s Preview, which is the default PDF viewer for Mac, except that it had an extra toolbar for making annotations.

The text notes were traditional text boxes of text you could place anywhere. The anchored notes were my favorite because you could attach the note to whatever text you selected to be clear about what you were talking about. I didn’t use the circle, box, underline, or strike out, but if I were a teacher giving rough draft notes they would be really helpful. I used the line and highlight to point to a few different instances where the same text note comment applied which was nice.

After I had spent the time to sufficiently mark up the document, I wanted to save them in a way that my friend could see them without having to also download Skim. I had to experiment with the Save As… and Export options before finding what I wanted. You can Save As… a regular PDF (plain PDF) and as a PDF Bundle (Skim file-type that includes all the notes). These weren’t what I wanted so I went on to the Export menu:

The PDF With Embedded Notes option made a nice new PDF with all of my notes, comments, highlights, and lines (I checked it by opening with Preview). An added benefit to this whole process- the original 118kb .DOCX is now a 78kb PDF with added notes.

This turned out to be a great tool today and I’m excited to use it in the future for schoolwork. I can’t say I always read every PDF a teacher sends out, but this tool would definitely help me take better notes. Teachers could use Skim, too, to add notes where something might be unclear or to add emphasis to a section. Best part about Skim- it’s FREE!

I’ve been unable to log into Duke Energy’s site for over 6 months so today it finally annoyed me enough to call them again about it. Before, they said they were having troubles with the site and that they would be fixed shortly. I assumed after all this time they just hadn’t fixed their site. It turns out that my account I had created wasn’t associated with my bills and that another account was. They gave me the password to the right account for my billing and I logged in to see this:

Requires 3rd Party Cookies AND Firefox!?

I was irked for both security and design reasons. First, they require you to enable 3rd party cookies. I learned the dangers of enabling 3rd party cookies a few years ago from my Informatics professor Filippo Menczer who showed us how he tricked students into giving him great reviews on sites like RateMyProfessors.com by having them follow links on his site that said they were doing something completely different. If the students didn’t allow 3rd party cookies, they didn’t leave a positive review, but most who did put his ratings through the roof. That’s a pretty harmless example, which was his point, but now this is my electricity bill where my bank account information and other sensitive details are going to be treated with the same level of insecurity.

Why can’t I use Safari? It’s one of the most standards compliant browsers out there and is only increasing its market share. A big FAIL for the developers who just gave up by saying, “This application doesn’t work with Safari browser.” I have nothing against Firefox, but I use Safari by default and it’s an inconvenience to have to stop what I’m doing to launch another browser because the web team was too lazy or incompetent to develop a cross-browser compatible application. Totally unacceptable!

Not a day goes by where one of my friends hasn’t created or joined one of those annoying “lost my phone, got a new one, need numbers” groups or events on Facebook. While it’s funny to read what dumb drunken act destroyed most people’s phones, it’s annoying they don’t use Facebook’s built in phonebook. It’s been around for over a year but I guess people still don’t know about it so to be clear:

http://www.facebook.com/friends/?phonebook

I know people used to not include their number in their profile because of the lack of privacy, but Facebook has evolved and now you can get super specific about who you share what with. Take a look at the “Contact Information” tab of the Profile Privacy settings page:

Contact Information Privacy Settings

Those are my actual settings and based on them I can enter a certain friend or stranger to see how much access to my contact information they’d be granted. Obviously I’d want my brother to have total access but restrict my crazy ex-girlfriend from high school. Here are the current available options:

• No One
• Only Friends
• Friends of Friends
• People at <<Network>> and Friends

You can go on to customize using friend lists and specifying individuals to include or exclude. Here’s a screenshot of the customize settings for my Mobile Phone number:

Mobile Phone Customized Settings

In my life, if I’m friends with someone on Facebook then they can have my phone number. Some other people may have friended too many strangers and don’t share this feeling, but the privacy features allow for everyone to share with who they want. The only improvement Facebook could offer is allowing users to export their friends’ numbers in a format that could easily be synced with a new phone. I luckily found FacebookSync before it got banned so my Address Book has all of my Facebook friends’ email, IM screenname, birthday, photo, as well as phone number. I can understand why Facebook wouldn’t want people pulling ALL of that info, but what about just phone numbers?

From now on when I’m invited to groups or events asking for my number, I’m going to paste a link to this blog entry, a link to Facebook phonebook, and tell them to start a group asking their friends to add their number to their profile instead of bugging me.

Adriana, I was going to write this before you sent me the invite. Anyone AFTER you will get the above treatment

My little sister received a few iTunes gift cards this Christmas and asked me if she could use them to buy a case for her new iPod. I was cautious to assure her because I had never explicitly heard of such a thing. I came home and explicitly read the exact opposite thing:

What can I buy with an iTunes Gift Card or iTunes Gift Certificate?

iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates can be used to purchase music, videos, TV shows, and audio books from the iTunes Store. At this time, iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates are not accepted for online Apple Store purchases.

The vice versa reads:

Note: Apple Gift Cards cannot be redeemed at the iTunes Music Store.

Both of us immediately questioned- Why? I thought Apple owned both the iTunes Store and their brick-and-mortar stores. That’s like saying your Walmart gift card is good in Sporting Goods by not in Electronics.

My only guess is that deals with media outlets that provide the music, videos, TV shows, and audio books from the iTunes Store are different from the vendors that offer all the non-Apple products from the Apple Stores. Shouldn’t they be able to handle this internally instead of making two different types of gift cards?

My other sister is saving up for a MacBook for high school and her grandmother gave her an iTunes gift card with good intentions to help her, but it turns out it’ll only help her buy more Taylor Swift albums. What’s the deal? Why hasn’t Apple addressed this? I’d say try to exchange, but that doesn’t sound plausible according to the Apple Support Discussions.

Another glorious Christmas has come and past, and once again my wallet is stuffed to the brim with gift cards!

My wallet is exploding from gift cards!

As my butt became extra sore on the car ride home today from Cleveland, it dawned on me that I shouldn’t have to carry so many gift cards or any at all!What is a gift card? Some say it’s a heartless generic gift for lesser known relatives and friends, but I love them. This year I received them from iTunes, Starbucks, and Subway which translates to more iPhone apps, more coffee runs, and more free dinners. Thanks distant relatives! Now whose to thank for the pain in my ass?

Yes, the plastic card is something to open whether from a card in the mail or on Christmas morning and gives the recipient the tangible “credit” card to bring to the brick-and-mortar store, but what happens when you get more than one card for the same store? You have to drag 8 cards to the store and manage remaining balances on 3 of them. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine the balances on all of your gift cards via the same website or phone number that’ll check their balances? Really make it easy for me by applying that balance to my account I have with that company already (i.e. iTunes, Amazon, Khols, or any other store that asks me if I’m a <<preferred customer>> at checkout). I guess iTunes already sorta does that, but it’d be way more convenient to click a URL from an email than scratch off and type in a code. If you don’t know my email address, why are you giving me a gift?

Which brings me to my next point- why aren’t all gift cards sent via email? I wouldn’t have something to physically open, but an email is just as fun, right? I don’t have a plastic cut out to drag to a store, but I could just as easily print off a barcode or spend it online, right? Wouldn’t I be able to instantly reply to my gift giver with a nice thank you note? Might be less meaningful than the handwritten 42 cent variety, but more than the auto-reply “thanks so much” after the first piece of packaging is ripped.

The environmentalist spin on all of this is the opportunity to eliminate lots and lots and lots of waste. Call me disingenuous, but I don’t archive my Christmas cards. What happens when you spend your gift card? The clerk asks if you want to keep it and my response is always, “Why? What am I going to do with it?” Think of all the paper and plastic that could be saved if gift cards were sent as emails!

What is a gift card? A code giving you credit towards a purchase at a store. Shouldn’t I be able to add these codes up to be represented by one card? Yes. Couldn’t we cut cards out altogether by sending the codes via email? Yes. Would it ruin Christmas? No, but Grandma’s house would definitely need WiFi to open gifts

About a month ago I signed up to be a twitterer for Magpie, an ad network for Twitter. Basically, they match keywords you tweet about with ads much like Google’s AdWords. They originally projected that I could make about 40€ per month if I agreed to let them insert ads into my tweet feed. Not bad for doing nothing but continuing to use a free service I already love! After a month of using the service, here’s my initial feedback and list of #magpie tweets. The site itself is very easy to use, much like Twitter. It took only a few minutes to set up my account. All I had to provide was my Twitter login, email, and address where they could mail a check to me. There were only a few customization options such as tweet/ad ratio (I chose 1 ad per 10 tweets) and customized disclaimer (I chose to put #magpie before all ad tweets). I also had the option to pre-approve ad tweets.

I could also refer new advertisers for additional coin (30% commission for the first year advertiser runs ads) using my personalized referral link. You might have noticed the badge I placed on my homepage. These became the most popular tweets I ran even though I chose to run them every other day.

#magpie Run your own ads in other people’s Twitter timelines- http://be-a-magpie.com/d6qubl

You can see all the #magpie ads and promotions I ran in the last month via this Search Twitter query. I only ran 3 real ads the entire month! They do a nice job of displaying when, what, and how much on your account page:

You can see that in one month I earned about a dollar (USD) for 3 tweets. I wasn’t able to attract any advertisers even though I gave about 18 tweets to do so. Was it worth it? Yea, I guess. A buck’s a buck.

I think Magpie has a lot of work to do. They never kept up with my moderate ratio of 10 tweets / 1 ad. The ads were pretty on-point, but generic nonetheless. As you can see from my TweetStats, I’ve been tweeting a lot more this semester and on a variety of topics so I would have thought Magpie would have had an easier time fulfilling it’s nearly 40€ per month quote. 

The debate rages on whether or not ads have a place on Twitter and what their role is, but that wasn’t the point of this post. Just my experience using the tool. I liked the initial idea of earning money by doing nothing, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to keep me tweeting for them. I have actually seen an increase in followers as opposed to driving them away with my ads, but I think that has to do more with me becoming more involved on Twitter.

I hope Magpie gets there act together and starts inserting more ads so I can earn more money, but that seems to be how everyone feels on their feedback forum. In the mean time, I’m off to continue playing Sim City on my iPhone!

Bloomington, Indiana is a great town but has a stigma of its residents (aka townies) not being very smart. You’d think a college town would have plenty of bright people to overshadow those of lesser intellect. For the most part that’s true, but all of those bright individuals need places to live which means renting and subleasing from locals. It’s criminal what local renters charge in exchange for the quality of housing and more importantly service as a landlord.

My landlord recently made an ass of themselves in the form of an ALL CAPS email sent out to remind tenants about the holidays. I fired back a smart ass response to them and nearly 400 of their other tenants they mistakenly didn’t blind carbon copy (BCC).

Here’s what my landlord’s incompetent secretary sent out to everyone:

NOTICE TO ALL TENANTS, THE HOLIDAYS ARE ONCE AGAIN HERE AND YOU WILL MOST LIKELY BE LEAVING TO GO HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS.  WE WISH ALL OF YOU THE BEST AND A SAFE TRIP HOME AND BACK.  JUST A FEW REMINDERS BEFORE YOU LEAVE,  BE SURE TO LEAVE THE HEAT ON IN YOUR APARTMENT, LEAVE THE CABINET DOORS OPEN SO THE HEAT CAN GET TO THE WATER LINES, AND DON’T FORGET TO PAY YOUR JANUARY RENT ON TIME.  IT HAS TO BE IN OUR OFFICE ON JANUARY 2,2009 OR IT WILL BE CONSIDERED LATE IF NOT RECEIVED BY 5:00PM. 

 

THANK YOU ALL AND ONCE AGAIN

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

 

FROM THE STAFF OF PAVILION PROPERTIES MANAGEMENT

Warm holiday tidings that came right in the middle of finals week. I couldn’t think of a better time to hit that ‘reply all’ button to teach them a lesson. It’s not like I could be evicted for being a smartass (or being right ) My reply to Brenda and almost 400 other tenants:

Thank you Brenda for sending that message in ALL CAPS. It was much more effective.  

You might look into sending future messages to almost 400 of your tenants using the BCC field so I can’t reply to all of them like this. You can read more here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_carbon_copy

Other proud PavProp tenants, would you so kindly take a moment to watch this YouTube video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgOiD5_wnFY – If my group receives 1 million views, we get an automatic A+! Thank you so much

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Haha good on ya for calling her out on it. I was just thinking the same thing. Hope you get the A +

THANK YOU MAX!  I even wrote them a while ago and asked them to use
BCC.  They didn’t respond.  

-ANOTHER PISSED OFF PP TENANT

haha… your email just made my entire daySent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with SprintSpeed

I’m glad I could brighten someone’s day during this stressful time of year. The last email I received was the most in depth:

Thanks Max, I wish they’d learn how not to be so….abrasive or lazy. Did they inform you about changing the furnace filters earlier this month? Or did they barge into your apartment without consent nor notification? I had sent Mark Hoffman an email asking him to update the message board with out names on it in Pavilion Heights and he said it was my responsibility (since I have a key to the locked board…not). Again, thanks for informing them not to give out all of our email addresses to all the tenants. I appreciate that. (Also, did you get a message under your door, in addition to the email, to pay rent and turn heat on “or else you are legally responsible for damages” even if its not our fault? Sounds like they have had problems with their buildings and like pinning them on us. Watch out for them.

Regards,

Fellow Neighbor Until My Lease Expires

I got a little lost in the middle about message boards and key to the locked board, but the overall message was clear – these guys think they can walk all over their tenants and demand anything with the basis of “if you don’t you’ll be breaking your lease“. 

Four great responses from other tenants who felt the same way. Who didn’t I hear back from? Brenda and the rest of PavProp of course. The sad part of it is almost all of my friends have similar stories about their idiotic, irresponsible landlords in Bloomington. There’s no stopping them. A few of the companies own most of the town’s rentals. Hopefully some day a realty management company will come along who cares about their renters. Maybe this blog post will start the revolution?

I would love for this to at least be sitting under Pavilion Properties in Bloomington, Indiana on Google so future tenants have a fair warning before signing their lease.

UPDATE:

Received yet another response so I thought I’d throw it in here:

Not too sure who you are, but this is awesome. Awesome. Awesome.
#210

Not too sure what #210 means, but awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

In May of 2007, I bought a 1TB external hard drive that consisted of 4 250GB hard drives that worked together for over $366. It was awesome and still works great.

Last week I bought a Hitachi 1TB SATA hard drive for $79.99 after rebate (it’s in the mail) and a SATA to eSATA & USB 2.0 External Enclosure for $19.99. The installation couldn’t have been easier and for $100 I can now backup all of my data. More importantly to me, I can drag 1TB of files around on one 3.5″ drive instead of a stack of 4.

Unfortunately, the deal on the enclosure has ended, but the $30 mail-in rebate on the hard drive is valid until the end of the month. You can always find similarly priced enclosures like this other one from Rosewill.

I should have taken some pictures of how easy installing the SATA drive was inside my enclosure. First, it’s screwless so the bay just slides out. The SATA interface inside just slides in like any plug to an outlet on the wall. I used two screws to secure it and slid the bay back in the enclosure. Couldn’t have been any easier.

The coolest part about the enclosures is that they support USB2.0 and eSATA. When I built my Vista box last year, my ShuttleXPC came with eSATA onboard but I had no idea how to use it. I finally realized that eSATA supports 3.0Gbs transfers! This has motivated me to make my Vista box work somehow or another over break so I can transfer data between the two 750GB SATA drives inside it to my new external. That’s right, I now have 3.5TB of storage at my disposal and that doesn’t include the 500GB inside my Apple Time Capsule or my two WD Passports (250GB and 120GB).

 Why all the storage? Why not? You can’t have enough backups. My DriveZilla gave an error a couple weeks ago and AirPort Utility said I should verify the disks and repair them if necessary. I’m assuming the stack is nothing more than a RAID 0 array which means if one disk fails all of my data is gone! I used to have a bunch of extra 120GB IDE external hard drives, but gave one to my step-mom for her to use as a Time Machine and I gave another to my brother so he could store his iTunes library on it. When something faster and better comes out, I can usually find someone to help out with my “old” toys.

I remember when I worked for ChaCha that Scott Jones had his entire DVD collection digitized so he could stream any movie he wanted across the network. Maybe I can setup something similar…

Maybe it’s the senioritis. Maybe taking that teaching class has made me cynical and arrogant about how my other classes are run. Maybe I’m always trying to find a better way to do things. Whatever it may be, something has to be changed in how grades are kept track of at IU. I’m taking seven (yes 7) courses this semester and in the last week of classes I have no idea what any of my grades will be.

I’m not one to stress over grades. I just want credit where it’s due. That’s how grading systems work. IU’s Oncourse is supposed to allow students to track their grades throughout the semester so that when grades are sent out they aren’t shocked to see they got a C in a class they thought they were getting an A in.

Unfortunately, Oncourse sucks. Ask anyone on campus and they’ll have plenty of horror stories ready to tell you. I could write a dissertation on the failures of Oncourse, but instead I’m calling out my professors for not using it’s limited ability to post grades.

My freshman level physics class does the best job of reporting grades this semester, but he doesn’t use Oncourse. He still uses the old Post’em system, which as you can see by their website, is as old as the internet. All it does is print out a huge unstyled list of every graded element of the semester. We meet three times a week and get points for attending and answering questions. We also have weekly homework assignments so by the time you list all of these out, it’s not that helpful. It is nice when the professor totals everything up for you so you don’t have to copy/paste the data into a spreadsheet to do the calculations yourself.

My flash class does the next best job in reporting grades, however he doesn’t trust Oncourse for submitting assignments. This means when I have a zero for an assignment I know I did and still have on my computer, I can’t point to Oncourse and say, “Hey there’s my assignment, completely uploaded for you to download, accompanied with a timestamp so you know it was turned in on time.” He still hasn’t filled in the first eight weeks class participation grade when it’s now the end of the second eight weeks. What’s taking so long?

My new media course has the same problem of not posting grades in a timely manner. At one point this semester, we were missing grades for over half of our assignments. There are three assistant instructors along with the instructor himself for about 100 students. By my math that’s no excuse to not post grades within a week of an assignment being due. This class somehow used an Oncourse default which set the maximum value of every assignment to be 95/100. At IU, A-’s and A’s are worth different values that affect your GPA. I’m not a GPA whore, but it affects the availability of some grants, scholarships, loans, jobs, and even other classes.

Out of seven classes only those three have posted grades for the semester. They didn’t do a good job, but at least they attempted. Two of the four non-reporters will base my entire semester grade on my final project so I can’t blame them for not posting anything. I can blame them for poorly designing their course, though.

So, how to make it better? Standardize it! Take away all those options for varying the grade book. I understand courses grade differently, different metrics, curving grades, but there are base conditions all assignments share. There should be an easy way to figure out your current grade in all of your courses so students don’t have to use this university calculator. iSocket just blogged about their new metrics box which is exactly how I’d like to see my grades.

Enough ranting and raving. I need to crank out a report that just got increased to 7-9 pages yesterday when it’s due today. Wouldn’t you know, it’s due for one of the classes that hasn’t reported grades all semester.

I was just checking out Digital Labz’ 19 Handy Twitter Mashups and Tools and saw they listed mail2twitter. “mail2twitter is a free service that allows you to post tweets through e-mail, and the most important, from any email-enabled mobile device.” That struck me as odd because if you have access to email wouldn’t you have access to the internet? If you have a mobile device, wouldn’t you just update with Twitter’s SMS number? I continued to read mail2twitter’s homepage and my SCAM alarm went off when I read how to use it.“Just send an e-mail to post@mail2twitter.com with your twitter username & password as the subject and your tweet on the body.” What!? I understand other Twitter clients such as Twitterific require you to provide your login info in order to post updates, but not in plain text over email!

The rest of the site just provides an email address to contact with comments, feedback, whatever and a short to-the-point terms of service that screams, “I will do whatever I want with your login information.” Are people seriously using this service? What’s the likelihood that some Twitter users out there use the same password for their Twitter account as they do for other accounts? If they’ve used this service, they’ve sent not only their preferred default password for all of their online accounts, but also their main email address! Whoever is behind mail2twitter is now free to troll every website they can think of with your email and password to see if they get lucky.

If people are really using this service, I’m off to register ‘mail2paypal.com’ where you can do everything on PayPal via email. Just include your email and password in the subject, but I probably won’t read the body so put whatever. In my TOS, there’ll be a small clause granting me permission to perform whatever transactions I want with your account information. There isn’t any difference between doing that and using mail2twitter.

The semester is winding down, finals are fast approaching, and students are trying to do everything they can to improve their grades. Professors are bombarded with emails as it is so making sure they read your email and act upon it, especially in a timely matter this time of year, can be tricky. Here are some tips I have from being a student and instructor that should ensure your professor notices your emails during the busiest time of the semester:

1. Put your course first thing in the subject line. Many professors teach multiple courses so if they can tell right away what the email is pertaining to based on the first 4 characters (e.g. A110) it is easier for them to prioritize. They don’t have to open the message, it won’t be confused for spam or some other request, and the rest of the subject will make more sense since the professor can put it in the context of the course (e.g. A110 – Missing grade for last assignment)
2. Be concise in your message. Younger undergrads love to spend time fluffing their sob story because they think the professor will be sympathetic towards their made up situation (ok not all situations are made up, but most are in my experience). Instead, be very short and to the point because professors don’t have time to read your essay about an essay. If you have a story to tell, do it face to face. Shorter messages usually mean shorter response time.
3. Include details in your signature. Your professor knows what course you’re in, the just of the situation, and now is looking for who it is in regards to. Do NOT just sign your first name! You are not the only Matt or Emily in the course. Include your first and last name as the instructor would see it in the grade book as well as your username and section number. Those three details can make changing a grade take 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Which do you think the professor, AI, TA, or UI prefers?
4. CC yourself to ensure delivery. Technology excuses are the new “dog ate my homework”. Send a copy to yourself so you can prove to the professor you sent them a message incase they say they never received it. As soon as the CC arrives in your mailbox, you know it’s also in your professor’s.
5. Attach ubiquitous file types. Even though everyone can freely and legally download the latest and greatest software doesn’t mean they do. Stick to the basic filetypes to ease the process of viewing your attachments. I prefer everything to be in PDF and most of my security conscious professors do, too. If you have multiple files, put them in a ZIP instead of something proprietary like 7zip or technical like tar.gz. Use the old Office filetypes like .doc and .ppt instead of .docx and .pptx. Also, make sure the timestamps on your documents match your story

In just three weeks, I’ll be done with one of my hardest semesters of college. I’m almost fi