About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
Last night, I was poking around Apple’s Dashboard Documentation and starting building a couple widgets. If you’ve upgraded to Tiger and interested in kicking the tires on them, drop me a line.
Widget #1 released 18 May 2005: The ProjectMaker Dashboard Widget
Despite my earlier prediction, Jen and I went to the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy this weekend.
Being a huge Hitchhiker addict since way back, I can confidently say it was: Good.
The intro dolphin song was a wonderfully amusing touch that stuck in my head all the way through. The screenplay adaption was 80% spot on the story I could in-fact recite from heart. I suspect this is because Adams had plenty of practice (original movie, radio show). As with any Hitchhikers retelling, the divergence from the original book was both interesting and consistent with the overall HH storyline.
Two things told me I spent too much time with this storyline as a child:
On the way out of the theater, I was pondering the giant human-powered computer similarity between Hitchhikers and the Matrix.
Jen just reminded me in the movie, the plans were “in the cellar”, not “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard” as in the book. Belgium. That’s one of the best lines.
Sam Buchanan follows up our home roasting with a cupping and tasting of the Indian Monsooned Malabar. He walks you through the cupping ritual and provides his impression of this unique coffee.
This message means the upgrade is complete.
Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for 2 machines.
The upgrade was an excellent opportunity to clean house and back up. Something my Powerbook was sorely in need of. After the install, the ease of copying my Home directory and a handful of required applications (NetNewsWire, Transmit, VooDooPad, BluePhoneElite, Skype, SubEthaEdit, Quicksilver) back to the laptop meant I was 85% back to normal almost immediately.
The tough part was getting the web development playground set up; I’ve still got a week left in the 21 days of Ruby, and I’m lost without a local install of PHP.
After un-commenting the PHP modules in Tiger’s default Apache install and setting the permissions on the items within the /WebServer/Documents directory to 666, PHP was working as expected.
After that, Ruby, Rails, and MySQL. For this, I highly recommend TextDrive’s About “Setting up a development environment on my Mac”. It walked me through everything and like everything at TextDrive – straight-forward and friendly. As of this writing, some of the items are specific to 10.3 “Panther” and I was able to skip over those with no consequence. Without it, I’d still be googling for a good tutorial on setting everything up. Now, I’m ready to rebuild my seemingly broken WishRSS.
I bought a car last week. We’ve been looking for another one for some time and not been real happy with what’s available (anything under 20 mpg just seems irresponsible). My father-in-law has a fantastic, nearly 15 year old relationship with a dealership. He’s purchased every car I’ve ever seen him drive there. When Jen and I wanted to buy our first car, we went there.
Jen found our new car online. We’d been looking at imports and this was a domestic. We were looking at cars twice as expensive. This was exactly what we were looking for and it was at this dealership. She asked her dad to check it out. He calls back with the whole story, everything sounds good. All we need to do is drive the 4 hours to pick it up.
Perfect.
Then, like the story Christopher Carfi quotes, the warranty salesperson got involved.
We don’t know him. We know the car salesman, we know he guys in the shop. We don’t know the warranty guy. More importantly, he doesn’t know us.
He doesn’t know the kind of drivers we are, what we find important, or that we wouldn’t be there without the aforementioned 15 year old relationship. Then he attempted to sell us an extended warranty for a car we all knew would be fine for as long as it mattered.
Everything else about buying the car was perfect.
Looks like First Crack isn’t the only game in town. Coffee-n-Caffeine puts the PodcastMN count to 18.
Recently, a colleague asked for a recommendation on an enterprise asset management system.
Frankly, I’ve only had bad experiences with enterprise level software. My major complaints have been;
I ask what this system will be used for; sharing digital photos remotely.
There’s a requirement to annotate the photos for easy searching, there’s a requirement to alert other team members when new photos have been uploaded. The photos won’t be at high quality – they just need to be higher resolution than a black and white fax.
First, how many photo sharing sites are there? a dozen?, including shutterfly, ofoto, smugmug, and snapfish, picasa and open source projects like Gallery. Not to mention sharing is built into Apple’s iPhoto. As a happy customer, my first instinct was to recommend Flickr.
Needless to say, this problem has been solved for Joe Everyman. If we consider thousands of disparate registered customers one big enterprise, these apps have proven to be stable, reliable, on a multitude of platforms. Flickr’s pro account is $25 per year. For 10 team members, that’s only $250/year. I don’t know of a more reliable, easier to use client-server enterprise application that costs less than $250/year. Seems like a small price to pay for an application that’s continually being updated and provides the same volume of capabilities.
Let’s not even look at photo sharing, in the text publishing side there’s TypePad, on the project management side there’s Basecamp, in the email list management side, there’s Campaign Monitor (happy customer).
None of these services were build with The Enterprise as an explicit target. They were built to make a task easier for everyone. As such, there’s a better than even chance someone in your enterprise is familiar with these or similar tools. The benefit to an enterprise is clear, employees already know how to use them.
And they don’t cost an employee’s annual salary.
Sam Buchanan and I roast up a couple of batches in my garage and talk about home roasting and coffee tasting techniques.
Oh, and I celebrate Uchenna and Joyce, the winners of CBS’s Amazing Race 7.
Scott McGerik and I discuss the best and worst of Twin Cities dining. Including:
I’d like to thank Julio Ojeda-Zapata and Leslie Brooks Suzukamo for the PodcastMN article in the Saturday Pioneer Press.
The article is right, a key challenge is to lure advertisers. I’m actually not confident the advertiser-publisher relationship we’re accustomed to in radio, televison, and newspapers will effectively migrate to podcasting.
As PBCliberal mentions in his recent ‘Finding my Niche’ show, the strength of podcasting is how effectively it can speak to a very small audience. The same is true of weblogs and websites as a whole.
The barrier to entry is so low with podcasting and the audience so niche, then there’s the fact that a show could be listeneded to the first time months after it was originally published. The traditional mass media ad models won’t work. Honestly, if the products of services the advertisers are hawking are actually compelling – then they should have their own podcast.
On the other hand, following the public radio model makes far more sense – I think ITConversations is setting an excellent example of how to offset the costs by bringing in donors and underwriters. Doug spells out the ITConversation business model here.
By the way, PodcastMN – the Sound of Minnesota is officially up. 14 podcasts, in a single site.
Listen to Sam’s Cupping of the Malabar