Proponere

And remind yourself

Megan Casey at SquidBlog posted a few reminders that pretty much sum up the way things should work:

Tie a string around your finger

And remind yourself:

People online are real people.

If you send a nasty email, there’s a real human being on the other end who gets it.
If you flame in a forum, you’re wasting real people’s time.
If you spam someone, you’re really only making yourself look bad.
If you write IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS it sounds like shouting.
If you want something to happen your way, try asking instead of demanding.
If you give, you’ll probably wind up getting, too.
If you blog just to pick fights, don’t be surprised when people don’t trust you.
If you collaborate, say thanks.
If you’re independent, say no thanks.
If you like someone, tell them.
If you don’t, walk away from the computer.
If you’re giving feedback, lead with just one good thing.
If you’re getting feedback, realize that the person must care a lot to have sent it.
If you goof, apologize.
If you apologize, mean it.
If you smile, mean that too.
If you don’t like something, don’t do it.
If you do like something, spread it.

But far far more important:

Give people a break.
The break you probably deserve yourself.
People are out to do good, 99% of the time.
You probably are too.
Say thanks out loud and a lot.
Try making someone’s day.
Chances are they’ll make yours in return.

This list made my day today!

Posted at 10:16AM Oct 30, 2008 by Chris in Personal  | 

Just 13 years

In terms of public access to knowledge, has there been a more amazing period in the history of the planet than 1994 to today?

Posted at 07:59PM Jul 14, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Solar system objects bigger than 200 miles

This is a very cool image (click for the full size one):

It shows all the known objects in the solar system bigger than 200 miles in diameter.

Posted at 06:12PM Jun 08, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Google Voice Local Search

Google Voice Local Search (né Google 411) might be the most useful Google tool yet:

http://labs.google.com/goog411/index.html

To use it, just call:

1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411)

I've only done one search, but it was able to accurately decipher my request even on my sketchy IP phone. I'm going to try it out as my new standard 411 service for both home and on my mobile.

No more furiously typing searches into Google Maps on my Blackberry at red lights -- a shameful practice for sure, but one that I suspect will only become more common with the release of the iPhone in June. So, if Google Voice Local Search works as good as I think it will, I will only have to defend against those folks and not be one myself. Yay!

Posted at 08:21AM Apr 12, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Sunrise Earth

Posted at 03:12PM Jan 29, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

What in tagnation?

Fat Bloke tagged me, so here are 5 things you (probably) didn't know about me:

1) I started playing musical instruments at about 6 years old and have spent time as an artist, producer, and audio engineer with varying degrees of (very limited) success.

2) When one of the startups I worked for had financial issues and couldn't make payroll, I become a blackjack dealer for a short period of time. I wrote code at night to fulfill a large contract so the company could resume paying us and dealt blackjack during the day to pay the immediate bills. As a result, I can add up to 21 pretty well, as you might expect.

3) I won a National Association of Amateur Bowlers title almost 15 years ago.

4) "Almost died" is probably stretching it a bit, but I was in a very bad position, hanging upside down and underwater strapped into Honda Pilot when I was a teenager. I had gone over a jump, rolled in midair and landed upside down in a couple of feet of water from the runoff of a dirt bike cleaning area. I was able to get my mouth above water to breathe and thankfully a couple of people saw the incident and rushed down to flip the ATV over.

5) I worked on what the company claimed was the world's first Blue Book Enhanced CD (mixed CD audio and computer data) title, Prestige Studios of the World. I wonder now if it really was the first, but it was certainly at least one of the first titles available in that format. With the emergence of DVD, Enhanced CDs became less relevant, but that was a fun time to be working in multimedia. I also got a couple of trips to Skywalker Ranch out of the deal, which was nice.

Tagging:

Perley, Chris, Steviet (again), Tim, Jean-Etienne

Posted at 08:21PM Jan 25, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Tagged and still it

Posted at 04:31PM Jan 22, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Bring your own bag

Rocketboom had a nice piece today on the issues surrounding paper and plastic bags and the environment. I won't spoil the ending, but characterizing shopping bags as 'disposable' is probably not the best idea.

The whole shopping routine, aside from the environmental impact, is incredibly inefficient. I actually enjoy shopping (I'm talking grocery shopping here...typical mall shopping is not really my bag), but I strongly dislike the process of gathering everything into a basket in order to take it all out of the basket to put on a conveyor belt so someone else can put it in some bags and back into the basket so I can load the bags into my car and then unload them into my house and then finally unpack them and put everything where it belongs. I'm not even sure that run on sentence can get across how bored I am by the whole process.

But people are working on this problem! Motorola has an article about a system where users are issued portable scanners and are allowed to scan their own items as they place them in the basket. If you scanned and then put your items directly into bags (that you brought from home, of course!) you could add a bit of efficiency to the process. I've also seen other accounts (that I can't seem to find now) where RFID is being considered to allow instant checkout as your basket gets to the checkout counter. Pair that with auto-debit from my ATM card (with biometric approval so I don't have to remember a PIN) and we're getting closer.

But if we remove the steps where we take all of our goods from the basket, scan them, and put them into bags, we still have issues with loading all those bags from our cart into our cars and then into our houses. How do we solve that?

Ok, wait for it, it's good...

Use bigger bags.

Too simple, you say? Ha! Simple is good!

Is there any reason that shopping bags need to be so tiny? My guess is this: as originally designed to hold groceries, paper bags can only hold so much. Pair that with the facts that they didn't used to have handles, and a lot more food was sold in heavy metal containers, and it's clear that they were kept reasonably small so they could be carried more easily. With plastic bags (and some paper bags) we've added handles, but for some reason we've made the bags even smaller. I wonder why? Does it have something to do with the tensile strength of the incredibly thin plastic membrane the bag is made of? I don't know. Is it because we are too weak as a species to carry much more than can fit in one of those tiny bags? I doubt it.

So, the alternative is to bring your own bag from home and re-use it, which I think is great. Except the bring from home bags 1) aren't readily available (they should be!), and 2) are modeled after traditional grocery bags, hand bags, etc. and don't hold all that much.

So, my solution is this: provide at the grocery store, for a reasonable price, shopping duffel bags. Use RFID or self scanning to allow people to quickly check out (I'm guessing RFID would do a better job reducing theft), and load your groceries, or at least most of them, into one very large container. Obviously exceptions will need to be made for delicate items like eggs, bread, herbs, etc., but you can have a smaller bag for those. So, your shopping experience becomes this:

- Walk around store and put stuff in your bag.

- Walk out (ok, stop for a moment at the fingerprint scanner to pay).

- Put bag in car and go home.

- Pull bag out of car and unload.

Is this better than your refrigerator automatically ordering food for you as you use it and it showing up on your doorstep? I think so because most people like to actually pick their produce, meat, etc. With this method you still get the choices associated with 'manual' shopping, but remove a lot of the manual labor.

Sign me up.

Posted at 02:09PM Jan 19, 2007 by Chris in Personal  |  Comments[3]

Password strength

Google has what could loosely be called an "API" for a password strength checker algorithm. You can replace the text after "=" with whatever you like and Google will respond with a value from 1 to 4 on how strong the password seems to be.

I tried several passwords and didn't agree with the assessment on several of them ("mypasssword" is NOT a secure password!), but it's interesting to play around with. I wonder if Google plans to use this to enforce a certain level of password strength for their user accounts?

Mac OS X users have a nice built-in password strength meter in the "Password Assistant" available in System Preferences->Accounts->Change Password...->Little Key Icon:

The Password Assistant generates a list of suggested passwords each time you open it, so if you frequently need new passwords and have access to Mac OS X, this can be a nice source of inspiration. The button to launch it is a bit buried (if you're an OS X user, have you ever noticed that key icon? Or if you have, did you realize you could click it?), but it's still very useful.

Posted at 03:47PM Jan 08, 2007 by Chris in Personal  | 

Google Maps flight sim

Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! To pass the time while waiting for New Year's, try a light hearted flight simulator that uses Google Maps data. Quite fun and a resourceful use of the Google Maps API.

Posted at 05:06PM Dec 28, 2006 by Chris in Personal  | 

How many lights is that, exactly?

Better Homes and Gardens recommends three 100-light strands per foot of fresh Christmas tree. That's three boxes of lights per foot, so an eight foot tree should consume twenty-four boxes of lights. Seems like a lot. If you keep reading, you'll also notice that they recommend eighty boxes of lights for what they deem "showcase" lighting. That's 8,000 lights for that same eight foot tree. Seriously?

The article also mentions, and the packaging for my lights confirm, that only three strands of lights should be hooked together, presumably to reduce the risk of fire. How do you get power to eighty strands of lights?

The tree in my house is maybe seven feet tall and is about to have three strands of lights put on it. Yes, that's 300 lights for a seven foot tree. Better Homes and Gardens doesn't have a category for a tree that devoid of lighting, so I'm going to call it "ultra-subdued with a splash of not burning down the house." Not quite as catchy as "showcase" lighting, but maybe I'll be able to sleep this holiday season. Maybe.

Posted at 07:50PM Dec 05, 2006 by Chris in Personal  | 

Real-time satellite views

Google Earth is fantastic. I was an early adopter so I got to show it to many people who had never seen it before. Surprisingly, one of the most common questions I received was, "is it live?" My guess is that Google Earth is so beyond what many people expect that it makes them remove the (maybe artificial) limitations they put on their imaginations and they then jump to the next logical conclusion.

We're a long way from Google Earth being live, especially considering the compelling high res imagery of populated areas is taken by airplanes and not satellites. But, you can now see a live view of our planet from the Landsat satellites with the EarthNow! Landsat Image Viewer. And even when they don't have the live view active they do replays of very recent passes of the satellites.

It's a very cool thing to look at our planet from space in real-time. The only thing that disappoints me a bit is that I think it's designed to only show passes over North America. But even though we can't yet see the entire planet, everybody with an Internet connection being able to see these images in real-time is an amazing feat.

Posted at 11:08AM Dec 01, 2006 by Chris in Personal  |