Month: March 2009

Thursday, 12 March 2009

Pro Chair-sitter and Whiteboard Drawer

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Pro Chair-sitter and Whiteboard Drawer

PREFACE: This post was sitting in my drafts since July, and it seemed to go nicely with the co-working post, so I hit publish.

After we returned from a refreshing holiday weekend1 at the in-laws, Cooper asked why we came home.

“Grandma, Grandpa, and Papa all have to go to work on Monday.”

“Where is Grandma’s office?”, he replies.

“Remember we drove past her office on the way to the petting zoo and car show?”

“Why isn’t her office in her house?”

I’ve worked at home since before the kids were born. I prefer it to an office outside of the home for a number of reasons. Primarily, I have greater control over my personal comfort (temperature, lighting, chair/desk/table heights) in my home office than I do elsewhere. Secondarily, considering how abstract my work is, having a home office makes me feel like the kids have some notion of what I do2 (even if that notion is limited to ‘drawing on whiteboards’).

Related: Merlin Mann’s The Richard Scarry Book of the Future [mp3]

1. Including a late evening pontoon ride, a chilly swim in the Wisconsin River, and a fantastic dinner at the recently opened Red Eye Brewery. I highly recommend all three.

2. My dad’s work took him away from the house for the entire work week – I know my a good portion of my attitudes about work are a direct response to that.

Twin Cities Co-Working Conversation Re-Ignited

by Garrick van Buren 12 Comments on Twin Cities Co-Working Conversation Re-Ignited


UPDATE 27 May 2009
New url for this effort: TwinCitiesCoWorking.org

Earlier this week, I had a fairly thorough conversation with a St. Paul-based serial entrepreneur exploring starting a co-working business.

I’ve been writing about the “co-working” / “work club” concept off and on for a while now (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Bonus) and there hasn’t been any blips on my radar for more than a year. So, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from him.

The notion of having access a low-cost office-y space with some of the amenities of ‘bigger’ offices is attractive. Unfortunately – like flying cars and carbon trading markets – there are a number of reasons why it hasn’t caught on. Some of those reasons are obvious (Herman Miller decor) others are less so (How is it different than Kopplin’s?).

In one of my earlier posts, I talked about these third places as transitional places.

“The third workplace is inherently a transitional place – a place to go until. Until the home office is renovated. Until the go-to-the-office habit is kicked.”

I predict 2009 and 2010 will be banner years for small business starts and a transitional space is exactly what these new entrepreneurs need.

If you’ve got interest in or experience with a temporary, shared office space, leave a comment or drop me a line.

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Wonderlick “Topless at the Arco Arena” – Name Your Pre-Order Price

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Wonderlick “Topless at the Arco Arena” – Name Your Pre-Order Price

For nearly decades, I’ve been a big fan of anything by Jay Blumenfield, Tim Quirk, Sandy Smallens, or any combination thereof.

So, yea, I’m pretty excited about the new Wonderlick album available for pre-order.

Here’s the interesting bit:

“…anyone who winds up paying more than the average donation will get his or her name in the liner notes…”

Wonderlick isn’t suggesting a donation, so the average won’t be known for awhile. Pretty neat. Yeah, I gave them 50% more than I otherwise would have.

Update, according to Mr. Quirk himself:

“Average donation for Wonderlick album after 24 hours of pre-orders: $17.90”

Sunday, 8 March 2009

Introducing: RE07.US – The Greenest URL Shortener

by Garrick van Buren 5 Comments on Introducing: RE07.US – The Greenest URL Shortener

re07

According to a recent post by FuelInteractive.com, a link in Twitter is clicked for 5 minutes, then completely ignored.

That got me thinking about all the wasted short urls out there. So many tinyurl, culld.us, is.gd, et al, links just collecting dust after all that initial clicking.

Seems so wasteful considering “the current economic climate”. Maybe, we don’t need all those URLs. Maybe we should tighten our belts and limit ourselves to 1 short url – and continually reuse it.

With that in mind, I built HTTP://RE07.US. It’s 1 short url that we can all share.

All long URLs get shortened to the same link: RE07.US. And, it will be shortened to that – until someone else shortens their long URL to RE07.US. And so on and so on.

REDUCE. REDIRECT. RECYCLE.

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Deploying Sinatra on Joyent’s Shared Accelerators with Thin

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on Deploying Sinatra on Joyent’s Shared Accelerators with Thin

On Thursday afternoon, I had an idea for just about the smallest web app I could think of (since then, I’ve even cut out a couple features). It didn’t make sense to use all of Ruby on Rails for this considering how tiny it was.

Seemed like a great opportunity to try out Sinatra1

  1. Write the app
  2. Vendor Sinatra and Rack (that’s just good practice)
  3. Submit a ticket requesting a port
  4. Add a config.ru file to your app’s directory (for Rack) containing the following

    # PATH TO VENDOR-ED RACK AND SINATRA
    require 'vendor/rack-[VERSION]/lib/rack'
    require 'vendor/sinatra-[VERSION]/lib/sinatra'
    Sinatra::Application.set(
    :run => false,
    :environment => :production
    )
    require 'app'
    run Sinatra::Application
  5. Add a config.yml file to your app’s directory for Thin containing the following

    ---
    environment: production
    chdir: /path/to/app
    address: 127.0.0.1
    user: [USERNAME]
    port: [PORT]
    pid: /path/to/domain/tmp/thin.pid
    rackup: /path/to/app/config.ru
    log: /path/to/domain/logs/thin.log
    max_conns: 1024
    timeout: 30
    max_persistent_conns: 512
    daemonize: true
  6. Follow the Setting up and Configuring Lighttpd instructions on the Joyent Wiki (See update below)
  7. Add another Bootup Action for Thin
    Startup thin -s 1 -C /path/to/config.yml -R /path/to/config.ru start
    Shutdown thin -s 1 -C /path/to/config.yml -R /path/to/config.ru stop
  8. Follow the Proxying to a Port instructions on the Joyent Wiki

    9. 1. If the time I spent building this app was a cocktail, it’d be 1 part programming, 2 parts design, 3 parts deployment. That’s a huge part of why I wrote this post.

UPDATE: March 8, 2009
My gut says Lighttpd + Thin is redundant, so I’ve turned Lighttpd off.

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Introducing the Minnesota Pineapple Economic Indicator

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Introducing the Minnesota Pineapple Economic Indicator

pineapple

It’s March in Minneapolis.

The thermometer just broke 40°F and there’s still inches of snow cover. Winter sustenance in the upper Midwest traditionally comes in two forms: canned or hotdish. Not the most uplifting and exciting dishes to get families through long, grueling winters, but economical.

Citrus fruits were a rarity, rare enough for oranges to be included in the treat bags given out after the elementary school Christmas program.

And according to the news media – we’re working through one of the hardest, coldest, financial winters in a nearly a century.

Yet, right now, at the Cub Foods up the street kiwi fruits are 4 for $1, mangos are 10 for $10, and pineapples are 2 for $5.

Admittedly, this isn’t as scientific as the Big Mac Index, but it’s quite remarkable, that a selection of tropical fruit can be grown, transported from South America (or Southeast Asia) to the middle of North America, in the middle of March, in the middle of a global economic winter, and sold for one or two dollars.

For my money it seems a more substantial – and more delicious – economic indicator is in the produce aisle.

16 April 2013 – Related:

“…bananas were first available commercially to American consumers in 1876…and sold for ten cents. In today’s dollars, that would be the equivalent of $3.00 per banana, or 1,150% more expensive than the 24 cents I paid at the local Safeway a few days ago!” – Mark J. Perry

March Forth

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on March Forth

wecandoitposter

I’m proposing today as new American holiday.

A day of deliberate action.
A day of buckled-down confidence.
A day of bootstrap-up-pulling.
A day of To-Done-ed-ness.
A day of recovery.

The opposite of Labor Day – more along the lines of Independence Day.

Let’s go, there’s work to do.

March Forth.

“This country will be rescued by each of us doing what we can do in our own individual sphere of action as government works in its sphere of action. There are roughly 142 million men and women in the labor force. Their ingenuity, flexibility, energy, and confidence will make more difference than anything government does on an individual basis…In the free society, we rescue ourselves.” – Ben Stein

Monday, 2 March 2009

Device Agnostic Web Services

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on Device Agnostic Web Services

This morning I talked with John Vorwald‘s Multimedia Web Design class over at UW-Stout.

One of the great questions asked by the students was:

“Where do you see the internet in 2 years?”

2 years? Easy.

  1. Everything has a web server in it.
  2. The internet is accessible everwhere.

On my desk, as I write this, there are 5 devices that can have web browsers in them. At least two of them also have web servers in them. Only one of them is a “computer”.

Dave Winer’s Denon Receiver has a web server in it, as do other devices like Chumby, TiVo, Eye-Fi.

Though the contexts are different, and the interfaces need to be different, the same internet-based service could make sense across all 9 of those disparate devices.

Two years from now?
Easy.

Kindle 2.0 – 2nd Impressions

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Kindle 2.0 – 2nd Impressions

180px-amazbuck rio800

Dave’s “Decade of Ebook Arguments” post took me back a decade, to my first portable MP3 player – the Diamond Rio‘s 800 1

If memory serves, the 800 had 64Mb of storage2 – just enough audio for the walk from the apartment for the L ride into Loop. Not even enough for something new on the way home. I still have fond memories of manually copying files onto it from Panic’s Audion3.

I don’t remember feeling like the Rio changed my life.

I do remember thinking it was pretty neat for offering a small, small, glimpse into a what could be. Like future predictions of personal air travel, video-phones, or the Monsanto House.

The Kindle 2 has a lot in common with that old Rio 800.

The Kindle also shows us a future world – one of of direct-to-reader digital publishing and digital distribution. Dave’s post also brought to mind all the indie ‘zine & comic publishers I knew decades ago. They would have killed for the Kindle’s distribution channel.

But, like the Rio, the Kindle (and ebook readers in general) don’t have the ‘changed my life’ quality Apple is regularly able to ship4. There are 3 huge deficiencies I see with the Kindle after living with it for nearly a week:

  • The typographic capabilities are too basic. Simple conventions like italics, blockquotes, and a great number of typefaces would make the reading experience far more book-like (and actually usable for technical reference ebooks).
  • Navigating the Kindle is kludgy and unsophisticated. I mentioned this in my initial Kindle review. It’s annoying to navigate. It shouldn’t be annoying to navigate.
  • Getting new, free, independent stuff onto the Kindle isn’t as easy as it needs to be. No, I don’t think iTunes’ podcast directory should be used as a model – there are far simpler and equally sophisticated ways to handle this.

If there’s one reason why I’m happy with the Kindle, it’s that I’m a sucker for the glimpses into the future.

1. At the time, I was working for a startup funded by Diamond Multimedia.
2. Fast-forward to today, and on a normal week I download hundreds of Mb of audio from independent producers that’s only distributed digitally.
3. Still the friendliest, nicest, and simplest audio player for the Mac.
4. As you know, none of Apple’s products are first-to-market, and why I don’t expect to see an Apple-branded eBook reader any time soon.