Garrick van Buren – Page 123 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

How to Decode TinyURLs with Ruby

def reverse_tinyurl(tinyurl) require 'open-uri' require 'net/http'
url = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(tinyurl)).to_hash['location'].to_s end
This should also work for any url that is a known redirect whether it be a tinyurl.com, urltea.com, rubyurl.com, or what have you.

Prepare Your Pocketbooks

“Launching a paytoplay service in the midst of free alternatives makes little sense…But there’s a lot more to the conversation.” – Aaron Mentele

Heh. That’s why the next web app I launch, I’m charging. A pile. Get ready cause, I’m looking at your pocketbook.

Seriously, if you want to get in on the action early, show me the money. At least 3 digits. I’m not so much looking for angels as lifetime account holders.

I Still Don’t Care What Everyone Thinks

AideRSS (a feed-filtering service) is starting to pick up traction in my blogosphere.

“[AideRSS] analyzes the activity around each item in an RSS feed – Technorati hits, comments, Del.icio.us links, traffic reports, etc. – and calculates a score for the item. It then creates four feeds from the original feed, each set to a higher activity threshold.” – Matt Thompson

Centralized metrics are a great idea from the publishers perspective – potentially more comprehensive than both Technorati and FeedBurner. Now, do you see the problem from the reader’s perspective?
To paraphrase Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests – just because something is internet popular, doesn’t means it’s personally relevant.

A year ago I wrote:

“[T]here isn’t an easy way to glean the conversations, emerging and otherwise, within the comparatively small group of people I trust.”

It’s still needed.

License Recalled

Mattel Inc, recalls 9 million toys after recalling 1.5 millon.

All the recalled products are licensed – Barbie, Batman, Big Bird, Cars, Dora, Elmo, Thomas (shakes fist).

Back In My Day^TM, very few licensed toys were allowed in the house. I’m sure it was a combination of the ickyness of branding your child, the sensitivity of a developing imagination, and because I remember them being more expensive.

These days, I’m sure the products are subsidized by the license-owner’s marketing budget, making the toys cheaper, more plentiful, and hazardous to your health. Makes me confident in my position to severely limit licensed products in my home as well.

Rennaissance: If Blade Runner Wasn’t Drawn By Frank Miller

There are 3 reasons to watch cyberpunk animated film: the story, the animation, the gear. Christian Volckman’s Rennaissance is all about the gear.

Rennaissance starts very slowly. The first 45 minutes are all backstory, with just enough cool tech gear to keep you wondering when the story will actually get interesting. It does, at the hour marker. And the Frank Miller-esque stark black and white animation – often too dark to make out what’s going on – makes it a struggle to reach that point.

In fact, just watch the last 45 minutes, you’ll end the movie with some ethical issues to discuss. Not just happy that it’s over and wondering why it took so long.

Baby Talk Less

“The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos, and there is some suggestion of harm” – Frederick Zimmerman, University of Washington

While I’d like more info on the study methodology (phone interviews with 1K families in MN & WA) – it follows – when time with real, live, talking people is replaced with mumbling, sound-effect-laden non-sense, smaller vocabularies result.

Christmas (Funny) in July

Cayenne Chris’s Christmas 2006 Tekdiff episode [mp3] finally came up on my shuffled ‘Unlistened Podcast’ this afternoon. It’s one of the best Tekdiff episodes (23 4-star or great episodes in my library), from the Tiny Tree’s First Christmas to bizarre Holiday traditions in unnamed Eastern European villages.

Belated Yuletide Thanks Chris.

Gifted

“When a holiday is the pretext and the value of the gift is (possibly) linked to merit, we can self-deceive and believe that a small-valued gift simply represents a cheap gift-giver, or a friendship of uncertain strength, rather than our own lack of merit.” – Tyler Cowen

Ouch.

HomeMade Pizza Company coming to Minnetonka and Wayzata

One of the things I still miss from our time in the Central Street neighborhood in Evanston is the HomeMade Pizza Company take-n-bake pizza. Clean, open storefronts, amazing ingredients. Cooked up in the comfort of your own home.

My favorites are the Spinach Pie and the Savory Pie. Both are so much tastier than Davanni’s par-bake or the nastiness that is Papa Murphy’s.

Jen just called, reporting a citing of a bus ad for HomeMade, and their site confirms locations opening soon at Hwy 7 & Hopins Crossroad in Minnetonka and 830 East Lake in Wayzata.

Sure, it’s not in walking distance from my house (or I would’ve known sooner), but it’s here and will make the occassional trips to those neighborhoods so much better.

Systems Don’t Inherently Change Behavior

“One of the things I find most vexing is the implicit idea that acquiring a system is all you need to take care of a problem….that you’re going to be more organized because you have a PDA.” – Merlin Mann

MP3 of Merlin Man’s Inbox Zero Talk @ Google

And from the Q & A session:

“Everytime you start worrying about taxonomy, do 3 tasks.”

For my money, that’s a fantastic information architecture tip.

Elsewhere

“I’ve spent a lot of my life engaged in devising careful taxonomies that I end up never using.” – Sam Buchanan