About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
When people are sharing more and more with each other and strangers, when audiences are splintering, when the relationship between a company and it’s customers is far more measurable, spending millions of dollars on “brand awareness” would seem hilarious – if it wasn’t sad.
In other words:
Thanks to Hugh for sharing.
Jen and I go pontooning on the Wisconsin River and discuss river etiquette, a floating bar, and do a little fishing.
For about a week, the half inch on the far left and far right of my Powerbook’s trackpad were completely dead. Basically, it turned my 17″ Powerbook trackpad down to a 12″ Powerbook trackpad. These dead zones caused extremely flakey and erratic cursor behavior not to mention my mental image of the trackpad’s size was all messed up.
I was using SideTrack to add trackpad scrolling and had grown accustomed to placing my finger on the far left border (I’m left-handed) of the trackpad to scroll. These dead zones rendered that action completely useless. Thinking it might be SideTrack freaking out, I installed iScroll2. I got scrolling back, but only when my fingers were in the exact center of the trackpad. Way to awkward to actually be useful.
James from the Foundation suggested I open up the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences Pane and uncheck “Ignore accident trackpad input.” After un-checking, the entire trackpad became active again. Thanks James.
I think that option should be re-labeled “make trackpad smaller”.
One of the exciting podcasting-related conversations I mentioned in an earlier post was with Brent Gustafson over at the Walker Art Center.
We grabbed a coffee at the newly renovated Loring Park Dunn Bros and discussed some podcast-related services the Walker Art Center could offer.
As expected, some interesting projects came out of our time together. Brent mentions one of them in a recent post at the Walker’s New Media Initiatives Blog:
To me, podcasting gets interesting after the part about it being an alternative to broadcast radio – where it starts to extend and enhance a business in a way radio can’t.
“Don’t ever allow yourself to believe that there is only one way to make ideas real.” – Scott Berkun
Stated more traditionally, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
The great thing about roadblocks is they force an evaluation of goals.
For example, you’d like to publish a book and are continually rejected by publishers. Is is that you want to have a physical book on Barnes & Noble’s shelves or that you want to share your ideas with the world?
One answer says mold yourself to what publishers want and wait for them to like you. The other says start a blog over lunch.
The reception on my T610 has been awful lately. A month or so back the signal was so clear people could hear the birds in my backyard. Last week, I’d be lucky to make out words under the tidal waves of static. On road trips, the T610 lost it’s signal the moment the “Wisconsin Welcomes You” sign was in view. While Jen’s Samsung E310 always kept at least one bar.
As I’ve mentioned before, the I’m heavily using Apple’s iSync and BluePhoneElite to keep my phone and Powerbook playing nice together. T-Mobile offered to replace the T610 with a comparable model. None of their current handsets support iSync via Bluetooth let alone match my ideal phone – the opposite of a Treo.
Bryce Howitson suggested an unlocked Nokia 7280. The 7280 fills all my requirements, though I’m not quite comfortable buying an unlock phone off eBay…yet. This left the Motorola RazR and the Treo 650 in the running. Emails with T-Mobile customer service confirmed neither are available through them.
It was OfficeMax’s $299 after rebate price on a Treo with Earthlink Wireless finally sold me. Eight hours after taking it out of the box, Earthlink had ported my number. During that time, I quickly remembered all the things I loved about Palm’s OS and the awkwardness of HotSync/Palm Desktop on the Mac. The Palm OS itself has matured quite a bit in the 3 years since I ditched my Visor, those two apps seem to be frozen in time.
I’ve bumped up against some oddness; Bluetooth polling seems to be more frequent than necessary – if only because it locks the Palm up completely, it’s not obvious how to record just audio, and the ‘@’ key an option-click. I’d rather it be a shift-click (like other QWERTY keyboards) or better – a key all it’s own.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with the Treo. Just as Christoper Mark Brooder said I would be.
Not only does the signal stretch well into Wisconsin, I discovered there’s something both wonderful and wrong about checking your email from a pontoon boat.
Also, if anyone wants my USB phone charger, make me an offer.
This weekend, I caught up with a college friend in central Wisconsin. Starbucks recently opened their first storefront in Wausau. Given Starbucks’ consistency and my lack of knowledge of other options, I suggested we meet there.
“How about something local, like Jeannie’s Cafe?”, Tom asked.
I’m always up for tasting the local flavor and we planned to meet there.
Neither of us were aware that Jeanie’s, like the majority of downtown Wausau, is closed on Sundays. This reminded me of my time in Germany. There the shops were also closed on Sundays. While I agree, closing at 6pm during the week, noon on Saturday, and all day Sunday, keeps a designated time for personal and preferably family-focused activities, it only works best when everyone plays along. And when the economy isn’t based on retail sales. Conversely, not playing along hurts everyone and can make actually getting things done a modern day, dual-income family a really hassle.
In Wausau, the ice cream shop, chocolate shop, gelato shop, and the downtown enclosed mall were all open – with a couple of patrons in each. With a handful of shops open and the majority closed, I imagine the traffic for the open shops is dramatically lower than what they see on Saturday. The open shops don’t get walk-in traffic from non-open shops.
In the end, Tom and I drove across town to Starbucks, it was packed.
To me, this felt like small-town American example of the EU’s economic issues.
In response to unconfirmed rumors Procter & Gamble Co is cutting TV ad buys, Mark Ramsey asks, “What do you think this says about advertising from the perspective of a company that knows as much about it as anybody?”
Exactly. When a company with a 130 year history of advertising says something isn’t working, it’s time we all rethink our marketing dollar.
A while back, I offered an argument on the benefits of interruption marketing (only the good stuff is worth interrupting).
I’m a far bigger fan of product placement. Sounds like Mark is also. I think it’s far more representative of real life. For example, from where you’re sitting right now, how many items can you see with a name on it; books, cans, boxes, photos, anything?
(I stopped counting at 10, when my eyes hit the bookshelf)
All of that’s product placement. Is it obnoxious, disingenuous, and annoying? I hope not.
In my quest to make podcasting as easy as possible, I’ve hacked the dircast (turns a directory of mp3s into a podcast) to support getID3() (reads the ID3 tags; artist, album, comments, from an mp3 file). I’ve also cleaned up the code a little, making it easier to customize.
Download BetDirCaster from here
The first project using BetDirCaster is my fastcast experiment. In contrast to the long, conversational form of First Crack Podcast, fastcast will be more like voicemail. Very quick, unedited thoughts, under a minute. Messages rather than conversations.
I’ve set up Audio Hijack Pro to write the ID3 tags, when I stop the recording, Automator tells Transmit to upload the mp3.
Push the Future 2005 was held this week at the newly renovated Walker Art Center. This episodes of the First Crack podcast are bits of my conversations with Loretta Hidalgo, Push Singha, Ethan Zuckerman, Leif Utne, Tom Mandel, and Push the Future founder Cecily Sommers.
Listen to Documenting Push the Future 2005 [17 min]
Let’s Be Honest, also in the PodcastMN aggregator, covered Push the Future in their 5th episode.