Podcasts for Learning Foreign Languages

Last fall when I was just getting into podcasting, I was enamored with the idea of using podcasts to learn a foreign language. I even commented on it in First Crack #6.

If you’re following my ThingsToDo list, you see I’d like to get my tongue around Dutch and bring my German back up to speed. Then there’s French. Always took classes as a kid. Never quite got it.

Anyway, my favorite Deutschlehrerin, Steffanie aus Stockholm, just wrote about the power of podcasting to learn a foreign language.

It looks like my German is still good enough to understand that Steffanie and I share the same views on this:

  • There are so many podcasts, you can find a subject that interests you in a language you want to learn. Like learning 2 things for the price of one.
  • The best podcasts are normal people, talking about normal things, in normal voices – ideal for understand how language is acutally used, and different dialects.
  • You can listen to podcasts over and over again. Picking up something new each time. I always keeps the good ones, and Steffanie’s.

How long does it take to build a website?

A year or so ago, I had this ‘Website-in-a-Weekend’ idea. Walk a group of people from nothing to a nice looking, easy-to-update, custom website in a weekend using WordPress.

Something like this;

  • Day 1: Install WordPress ( ), define categories, pages, generally get everything in place. Add some images and text.
  • Day 2: Edit the layout and CSS. Launch.

WordPress’ Themes are so much more mature in v1.5, so Website-in-a-Weekend is even more do-able.

Digging around the triple-dub this evening, I found some folks that, in the spirit of Scott McCloud‘s 24 hour comic, have raised the bar: Write an entire webapp in 24 hours, including Photoshop comps, CSS, & Javascript.

Considering the months- and years-long projects I’ve been involved in, this makes me wonder: How long does it take to build a useful website?

Learning Ruby in 3 Weeks

A year ago I dropped REALbasic. Since then, I’ve struggled to get my head around Cocoa and Objective-C.

With the recent hype around Ruby on Rails, I started looking at Ruby and found a Ruby/Objective-C bridge. To me, this means there’s a huge potential to have tightly-integrated desktop and web-based applications in a single, easy-to-maintain language. Therefore putting a different spin on REALbasic’s cross-platform promise, while still giving me platform-specific functionality.

With this in mind, I’ve picked up the ebook version of Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 days. I’ll be joining Al Abut in his effort to learn Ruby and blog along the way.

One Foot Forward, Repeat.

Last winter, I biked at least 10 miles everyday. From the home office to coffee shops and client meetings. Only missed 2 days due to awful weather. This winter, traveling to my clients wasn’t as convenient. Both my road and mountain bikes gathered dust all winter. This week, just in time for spring, I got out on the bike and made that ride downtown.

A couple summers back, Milo, Bob and I spent a week canoeing through the Boundary Waters. As you may have gathered from my Weekend in the Northwoods post, lack of mobile phone service makes me uneasy.

In the middle of a lake, exhausted from paddling all day, with the closest shore a few hundred yards away and still portages away from our day’s target, I came to the simplest of conclusions:

If you stop paddling, you stop moving, and you’ll never get there.

This afternoon, halfway through the ride home, I was winded. Done. Rusty from not riding for 3 months, my legs had enough. At that moment, 4 miles from home, near nothing, I remembered the simplicity of canoeing through the Boundary Waters and thought:

If you stop pedaling, you stop moving, and you’ll never get home.

Cars, buses, and the momentum of our working day often make arriving at our destinations inevitable. Out of our direct control. It’s unfortunate. There’s something refreshing when the only way to move forward is to put one foot forward and repeat.

Fake Data to See if Anyone’s Paying Attention

When putting together a prototype for usability testing, it’s best to use realistic data. If you’re evaluating the readability of a search results screen, put in the actual results. If you’re evaluating a check-out process, make all the information throughout the entire process real.

Then, after, tweak the data just slightly. Make it humorous, make it unrealistic, throw in a knock-knock joke.

I’m a big fan of this. It’s an excellent way to find out what people pay attention to and what they completely disregard.

In his post, Amazon’s Time Machine, Seth Godin ponders:

“Why don’t they slip in ridiculous items or funny descriptions? It’s not like they’re going to run out of shelf space or have a problem with inventory.”

It’s an interesting question. Ridiculous items or funny will polarize customers. Some will love it, some will hate it. It’s a big company that can walk away from disenfranchised customers.

Blogging for Business

(originally published at MNteractive.com)

Jim Cuene noticed Forrester has finally followed Jupiter Research into using weblogs to increase their analysts’ reputations and GoogleJuice.

I agree with 2.5 of Jim’s 3 suggestions for both Forrester and Jupiter. ‘Go out on a Limb’ and ‘Allow Comments’, both of these reinforce the ‘your readers know more than you’ notion. This notion builds a community around a weblog. Not only will the comments solidify the analyst’s findings, they could become an inexpensive recruiting tool.

In addition to commenting, I’d like to see these research firms offer TrackBacks. Whereas comments are internal to the weblog, TrackBacks are external and a very quantitative way to measure how much buzz a specific story has generated.

Oh, and Forrester, don’t forget the RSS feeds. Jupiter already offers them for each of their analysts.

Which brings me to the 1/2 point I disagree with Jim on. As far back as I can remember, Jupiter and Forrester made their money by selling research. I don’t see any reason for that to change. Just as I see RSS feeds as the compact disc for the 21st century, I think these research firms could charge for access to their blogs. These blogs would be their customer’s semi-private research channel, containing everything they publish on the topics purchased with special, semi-exclusive, in-depth coverage.

The real value in both these firms have is their customer list. With private blogs and commenting, Forrestor and Jupiter are in an amazing position to leverage Metcalf’s Law. How much would you pay to hear your major competitor’s reaction to the latest Jupiter report?

These research firms’ job is to start a smart conversation, for the real value is where the conversation goes. The question they need to ask themselves is: Are they in the newspaper business or the fish-wrap business?.

Elsewhere:
Jupiter’s thoughts on the benefits of half-using a weblog

The Object-Oriented Thought Process

On my way to better understand object-oriented programming ( ) and thereby check “Learn enough Objective-C to be dangerous” off my ThingsToDo list, I picked up The Object-Oriented Thought Process by Matt Weisfeld.

Not having formal training in software engineering, I found the book’s focus on the language-agnostic basics of OO extremely helpful.

Here’s what I learned from the book:

  • Classes are almost always nouns
  • A Class’s ‘Responsibilities’ are almost always verbs
  • In the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern;
    • Model = the application object, the data-model
    • View = the screen presentation
    • Controller = the user interface’s response to user input
    • (this wasn’t as helpful as I’d like, it may just need to sink in)
  • ‘is-a’ relationship = one object is a specific version of a more general object (e.g. Hamlin is a turtle)
  • ‘has-a’ relationship = one object has another object contained within it (e.g. a bicycle has a seat)
  • Patterns are general principles for solving programming problems
  • AntiPatterns are specific examples of programming problems solved poorly or solutions to redeem poorly-solved problems

Weisfeld was mostly language-agnostic, he uses Java ( ) for his examples. At times, the example code gets in the way of the illustrating the point. With the little I know about Ruby ( ) (100% object-oriented, simpler syntax than Java), I may have chosen that language to illustrate OO principles to novices.

If you’re looking for a non-programming book to wrap your head around OO, I haven’t found an alternative to The Object-Oriented Thought Process.

Phone Battery Dead No More

For a couple weeks straight, I kept forgetting to charge my phone overnight. A single charge is only good for a couple days, so I was stuck with a useless phone more than I’d like. With my addiction to BluePhoneElite, not having my T610 charged is like not having a phone at all.

One day it got so bad, I ran to the local Dunn Bros. and called Jen using Skype.

To prevent being phone-less again, I picked up Zip-Linq USB phone charger. Yes, like a miracle of modern technology, the phone charges off the USB port.

The package from Zip-Linq comes with a half dozen adaptors, for all the major phone brands. This means you can be even more popular at the office – by charging your co-workers dead phones off your USB drive.

I’m quite happy with it out of the box. If that changes, you’ll be the first to know.