- No Ridiculous Car Trips
Makes me want to visit Sweden even more now…
via No ridiculous car trips on Vimeo
- Coming Soon: Earbits Radio iPhone App
Earbits is a new 24×7 commercial-free, subscription-free free internet radio service that just launched last Friday. Once it’s fully baked, it’s going to have some really cool artist discovery tools and great utilities for bands who want to get their music heard.
I’ve been involved in the minor capacity of building the actual player used on the website and for embedded players on partner websites. It’s been a nice refresher of using my javascript skills. And now, I’m expanding my role into building the first mobile Earbits app for the iPhone. Since I’ve been trying to learn Ruby on Rails over the past week or so, I decided that I might as well also try and learn Objective-C and that whole mess too.
Keeps life interesting. But here’s the teaser shot taken right after the first time I actually deployed the radio app to my iPhone.
Hope to have a beta version done in a week or so, depending on API availability, and get it into the App Store sometime in September.
- Chart: A Very Productive Evening
This is what learning a new language looks like: 50% time writing code, 25% time using chrome for research, and 10% time in firefox running and debugging the app.
Clipped from RescueTime which is a fantastic freemium app that tracks everything you do on all of your computers and then does analysis of how you spend your time.
Pretty cool, huh?
- Psychology Research: How to Apologize
An interesting article looking at several different types of apologies and which apologies yield maximum effectiveness among differing groups of individuals.
Ryan Fehr and Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland have drawn on research in other disciplines, including sociology and law, to explore the idea that apologies come in three forms and that their impact varies according to the character of the victim
The three apology types or components are: compensation (e.g. I’m sorry I broke your window, I’ll pay to have it repaired); empathy (e.g. I’m sorry I slept with your best friend, you must feel like you can’t trust either of us ever again); and acknowledgement of violated rules/norms (e.g. I’m sorry I advised the CIA how to torture people, I’ve broken our profession’s pledge to do no harm).
The message, the researchers said, is that when apologising you should consider your audience. ‘This need to meta-cognize about what a victim is looking for in an apology is particularly important when victims’ and offenders’ worldviews diverge,’ they added. Of course, if in doubt about the character of your victim or victims, the researchers said that ‘detailed apologies with multiple components are in general more likely to touch upon what is important to a victim than brief, perfunctory apologies. Offenders should therefore offer apologies with multiple components whenever possible.’
I could see research like this leading to additional analysis modules in our Talent Scan product, since we already measure for things similar to empathy, individualism and teamwork to help companies communicate and understand their employees. Not a far leap to helping companies apologize to their employees (and maybe even customers) when things go bad.
- FolioHD – Free Online Portfolio
For those of you who are interested in a super-quick way to create an easy online portfolio, I recently launched a site called FolioHD to do exactly this. We’ve had about 100 people sign up so far and had over 2GB of images uploaded already. So, yeah. If you need a portfolio site, you should try this free online portfolio site and tell me what you think!
We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live. Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…
- UPS: Web-Mobile Integration Done Right
With just a few clicks, I can go from UPS shipment notification to tracking it on my iPhone through the UPS app. It’s really pretty slick.
- Joshua Tree Decompression
Sometime last week I decided that I needed to get away from the city for a few days. My old-reliable escape destination since I moved to LA has been Joshua Tree National Park. It has several distinct advantages over most every other destination within 2 hours of Los Angeles.
First, it is inexpensive. An annual pass to the park costs only $30 and I’ve had one for the past two years. Camping is just $10/night per campsite. I can say for a week at Joshua Tree for the same price as a single night at an inexpensive hotel/motel. And is an ice machine conveniently located just down the hall really worth 7x the price?
Joshua Tree’s second advantage is that it doesn’t attract large crowds of people. Last time I spent 3 days camping there, I only talked to one other person and only saw several people in total – it was fantastic. This time, even with the 100+ degree days and lack of most services (i.e. real bathrooms and running water), there were quite a few people visiting but still nothing like a state park on the ocean.
Third (and most importantly), it has basically zero cell coverage throughout the entire park area. This allows/forces me to really disconnect from the rest of the world. I get calls and text messages all day long (not to mention emails) and my morning routine before I even get out of bed is to 1) check email, 2) read facebook, 3) skim NY Times headlines and read any interesting stories, then 4) glance at twitter – only after all those tasks are completed do I even bother to crawl out from under the sheets. Not so during my time at Joshua Tree. You realize how long a day really can be when it’s not filled with constant attempts to “keep up” with various, often irrelevant, information. (more…)
- My “Return” to Cycling
Between the beginning of February and the middle of April, my mountain bike had been gathering dust in my office at work. It was living in my office because my car has no way to attach a bike rack (no trunk, no roof rack, no hitch) and because the office is closer to the beach than my downtown loft, it seemed like a great staging area. The only problem was that I never rode it and it never left my office for those months. I hadn’t really done any serious riding since my massive-ish wipeout at the end of last year and I was missing those beach at sunset rides. And eventually, as the weather transitioned from winter to spring – which is to say, went from the low 60′s to the high 60′s – I decided it was time to get back on the bike.
So I started riding on the super-convenient Ballona Creek trail which is very nearby my office and starts somewhere up in Culver City and goes out to the beach trail. My casual ride was about 10-15 miles depending on how much time I had. Best way to describe it was “relaxing”. After a long day of working in a chair in an office, I got to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and enjoy that proximity to the ocean.
At some point I got the crazy idea that I could commute on the bike.
I mapped it out on Google Maps and it claimed to be just 16 miles one-way. The terrain looked pretty much flat. And the first portion of the commute would take me on the familiar Ballona Creek trail. The rest of the ride was a road route that I knew very well because I would drive it when the freeways were jammed up. In the car, with normal traffic, the route took just under an hour. I estimated that it would take me about two hours on the bike the first time.
- find it on my way
Need to find something on your way to somewhere? check out FindItOnMyWay.com. If you need a starbucks on the way home, or need a FedEx on the way to the office, it can help.
- edahh – the social food suggestion site
edahh is a social dining recommendation tool. based on where you and your friends are eating, edaah will suggest a few places to try.
if you spend more than five minutes thinking about where to eat today, edaah will come to the rescue. by keeping track of where you eat, we can make sure you don’t repeat too often and can help to find a place your group of friends can all enjoy for any occasion.
we just launched the beta site – check out my page and then sign up for yourself.
