A Whole Lotta Nothing

Reddit vs. Metafilter, London pub quiz

It transpired that there was enough of us (about 22?) to make up 3 Metafilter teams and that being a spectator wasn't going to be an option. As I struggled to come to terms with this responsibility, a large group of Redditors arrived.

As I watched them file in, my heart sank. They had the confident air of people who were very good at Pub Quizzes. These were clearly people who knew a lot of trivia.

Their leader, Lowercase_Drawer, came over and introduced himself, and spoke to adrianhon. I didn't really catch what he was saying, but from his poise and deliberateness, it seemed like he was saying the kind of stuff a Bond villain says when they have the upper hand.

via metatalk.metafilter.com

I won't spoil the ending, but after the build up on reddit, I was pleased with the results.

SendTab: a great simple app for managing screens

For the last year I've been using my friend Ben's app Sendtab to manage all the different places I find interesting content. He originally built it as a way to send anything from his laptop to a mac mini attached to his home TV (he cut cable and was constantly watching online video). I started using it soon after it was built and it's become a killer app, as I use it every day on at least three devices.

I mostly blame Twitter for this very First World Problem, but I read Twitter each morning on my iPhone when I'm slowly getting out of bed. As Twitter has replaced tools like Delicious for link sharing, I've found friends sharing interesting links, articles, products, etc almost every morning. Whenever I think "wow, I need to check that out later on my Mac after I get up" I use Sendtab. Same goes for viewing Twitter on an iPad (especially if the link leads to some flash content I can't view right then and there).

Sendtab is a pretty simple thing, you just click a bookmarklet or copy a URL to an iOS app and you can save a URL to your pile to view later on other devices (and you can optionally direct it at a specific device). Why is this useful? For me, I can move anything interesting from my iPhone to my desktop computer and view it hours later. I've also got a GoogleTV attached to my living room TV so when someone points out an hour long lecture worth watching or a hilarious YouTube video I want to show my family, I save those to SendTab as well, pulling them up on my TV via GoogleTV's home screen bookmarks.

I know Instapaper is a good app for tracking articles among many devices, and Boxee enables you to "watch later" any video you find online, but I find SendTab is a nice simple silo for tossing everything interesting I want to check out on some other device. It's also handy for "I'm going out the door to the airport and want to keep reading that NYT article I'm halfway through" by letting you send links to specific named devices (the iOS app can fetch these and bounce directly to the URL). 

To date it's been a simple web app. Ben recently put out a real iOS version of it as well for 99 cents. I also use the Sendtab extension for Chrome that adds a nice big Sendtab button to my browser. If you read/watch the internet on a variety of devices throughout your day, check out Sendtab, it's good simple software that does exactly what it was designed for.

Pacific City Sunset

Credit scores are bullshit: part 2

So we've had a lively discussion about my previous post on credit scores, and an industry expert on credit scoring showed up to argue with many here. The New York Times noticed and published his side of the story as well. He urged me on Twitter to try out MyFICO.com which is supposed to be more accurate. Well, I ended up trying it tonight and got a whopping 2 point difference on my credit score, with it still below 700 (690 vs. 692).

The best part is when it is being explained to me what my problems are, as this image captures:

Gee, I guess 16 years, 3 months just isn't a very long revolving credit history. Heck it is a few years shy of half of my entire life and "FICO High Achievers" average a whopping 2 years and 9 months more than me, which is such an incredible drastic difference that I can see your justification for docking me points on that one. /sarcasm

Like I said before, I understand the need for credit scores and how they are used, but much of the advice the credit reporting agencies have given me turns out to be conflicting bullshit.

They tell me to get a credit card to increase my score, and it ends up reducing my score (because I didn't know about the unwritten rules on how much of your credit line you are actually allowed to safely use). Now they say it's because I haven't had credit long enough when my oldest account is only 14% less than their suggested stellar achievement rankings. 

In summary: still bullshit.

Warby Parker: the bees knees

 

The Internet's Pal Adam released this new commercial today for Warby Parker, the hip online eyeglasses company.

Four short years ago I wrote a guide to finding cheap eyeglasses online, and one of my principal takeaways was that for most cheap eyewear sites, you have to wade through hundreds-to-thousands of options trying to find something cool. My tips certainly help, but it's still quite a bit of work to find something good and you are risking a few bucks on an unknown.

A couple years ago, a friend (can't remember who, perhaps Lane Becker? Anil Dash?) said the next big wave in business was "becoming the Zappos of anything." What they meant was even though there may be a crowded market for whatever is sold online, the market is ripe for someone to come in and provide the absolute best experience possible backed by great customer service.

I tried out Warby Parker last summer and loved it, buying two pairs of glasses I wear to this day. I've been meaning to write up my experiences with it ever since. Adam's commercial reminded me that I should write it up.

Buying cheap eyeglasses online is challenging for the following reasons:

• there is too much selection at most sites
• you never know what you are going to get sight unseen
• it takes a lot of technical knowledge to figure out the sizes of temples, nose bridges, etc
• at most sites, stupid glasses you would never wear are right next to cool looking ones, which are surrounded by 200 ho-hum options 

It's as if the people behind Warby Parker looked at every weakness in the online glasses buying process and came up with a solution, turning the whole thing into a positive.

The selection feels (I hate to use the word, but it is apt) curated. Instead of offering 500 options, there are about 25 and they're all pretty cool looking. The 5 pair try-it-on offer is terrific, letting you pick from all their styles to see what actually fits your face before you commit to buying them. The try-on is also free, which is incredible. Finally, when you do buy a pair, it's a decent price about half to one-third of what a nice eyeglasses shop would charge, and you get great customer service in the form of personal emails to you letting you know when they are made and shipped, and they check up on you after get them to make sure you are happy. Every single bummer thing about my original eyeglasses article is solved by Warby Parker, plain and simple (oh, and they donate a pair to charity when you buy a pair on top of everything else).

Last year I picked out three or four different designs I thought were all hits, but after I got the try-on pack, only one frame looked right and was the right size. It fit me so perfectly I bought two pairs in different frame colors and I recently scratched my favorite pair right across my normal eye path so I have switched to the second backup pair since. I would say in the future, I can't see buying glasses online from anywhere else (the added price of $95 versus maybe $40 elsewhere is totally worth it for the time-savings), especially since they started opening showrooms in a few select cities. The try-on pack was pretty fast, but it was a small pain to mail it back in, and I can't wait to try on every design quickly in their store.

Warby Parker didn't give me money to say this, didn't give me anything for free, and never even gave me a discount. I tried them on a whim last year and I've been nothing but satisfied ever since. They truly are the Zappos of eyewear and totally worth checking out.

Giro di Portland

Every summer there are some crit races in downtown Portland and they are a blast. I missed last week's Twilight Criterium but got to see last evening's Giro di Portland. The racing was hot and fast, with some surprise results. The Cat 3 race was won by a 13 year old that won a race earlier that same day and won a race the day before. The final Mens 1/2 was won by a late breakaway from one of the oldest riders in the bunch. Overall, it was a great summer night of racing in downtown Portland.

Full set of photos is on Flickr

Credit Scores are Bullshit

A couple years ago as I was getting a credit report from Experian (I was about to buy a new car and wondered where I stood credit-wise), I signed up for one of their monthly tracking features. I justified this waste of money because I'd had a credit card number stolen and wanted to watch my credit records for a while. Over the past year, I've watched my credit score start low and go lower, and I've come to the realization that it's complete bullshit.

My credit history is pretty ordinary: I got one of those credit cards that come with a free t-shirt and frisbee in college, mostly because I was amazed anyone would give me credit. The introductory $500 limit quickly went to $2k when I put some ski trips on the card, and I always carried credit at about 35-50% of the card's limit. After college I continued to use the card and watched my limit go to $5k and then $10k (as I carried more and more on it), and a few years after college the card's limit was at $20k. At the same time, finishing my Bachelor's degree and getting a Masters racked up about $25,000 in student loans (in 2011, 4 years of college only costing $25k is quaint!). I also owned a couple used cars with small car loans I paid off in time.

After I moved to Oregon in 2003, I finally got serious about my ~$30k in debt. My previous years of carrying thousands in credit and paying things off in time (but rarely getting ahead) ballooned my credit score into the low 800s. This was great when it was time to get my first home loan, and my second a couple years later. Once I settled into a long-term home, I started paying off my credit cards and school loans aggressively. By 2006, I had no balance on my credit cards and my wife and I finally paid off our school loans. I started closing my unused credit card accounts and shifted towards buying things with my bank's ATM/VISA card instead, so that I never carried a balance and the money came directly out of my checking account. I also followed the Get Rich Slowly mantra and focused heavily on building my retirement savings and over the years of maxing out my retirement with the help of an investment planner, I have a pretty good nest egg going.

You can imagine what all this fiscal responsibility did to my credit score the past few years. It dropped below 800 soon after I paid off all my cards and started closing accounts. For a few years I had no open credit cards and no open balances. I paid off two car loans and was paying ahead on my house loan, and each year I'd watch my credit score fall in the 700s. A couple months ago my credit score was barely above 700, and the main negative flag on my account was having no open credit card accounts, so before I took a recent trip I decided to finally sign up for one of those personal airline cards my frequent flier program has been pitching me and use the card on my vacation.

Today I learned that my credit score dropped into the high 600s and my risk just went from low to medium. The culprit? The credit card account I opened had "too low of a limit" (it started at $5k) and I had "too high of a balance" on it as I used it on vacation (I paid off the card as soon as I returned, two weeks before the first bill even showed up).

Financially, I'm in the best shape of my life right now. My house will be paid off in about 5 years at the rate I am going, I have a great retirement portfolio that I contribute aggressively towards and it continues to grow, and my business is doing well even as we've expanded with a new employee and several contractors. 

I had the highest credit score at a time in my life when I was leveraged to the hilt and I lived paycheck to paycheck. Now that I have my own business, a healthy retirement, and can pay for everything I need/want, I have a low score and I'm dubbed a higher risk even though my ability to pay is very high. I used to think a credit score was all about your ability to pay, but it's clear now it's more about how profitable you will be to banks.

Some Hot Air Balloon Photos from a local event

A few days ago, I saw a mention of a hot air balloon launch going on this weekend locally, both on Saturday and Sunday. When I woke up around 6am after just a few hours of sleep on Saturday the thought popped back in my head, I threw some warm clothes on, grabbed my camera, and headed out. I was greeted with dozens of balloons in various stages of setup and flight. Walking around near each hot air balloon's base, I was pretty awestruck by the colorful beauty, the great early morning light, and the sheer size of them up close. The whole experience was overwhelming in a nice way and on the second morning I dragged Fiona along with me. Here are my favorite shots from the last two mornings:

The full set of shots is on flickr.

Why men blog their clothes

Via Put this On comes this waaaay-inside baseball men's fashion blogging discussion at Park & Bond about whether men are dressing for themselves or dressing for women or dressing for other fashion bloggers.

via www.sippey.com

Here's my pet hypothesis about men's style blogs: guys do it to get thanks and congrats from someone, anyone.

Hear me out: if you're schlubby 35 year old guy that wears t-shirts and cargo shorts, and you suddenly go out and buy $150 shirts that fit right and look nice and you start wearing tailored pants and smart shoes, barely anyone will notice. You might get some jeers from coworkers at suddenly becoming a dandy and/or your significant other might say you are looking nice, but for the most part, deciding to dress like a grownup doesn't result in much of any instant gratification, because HELLO: 35 YEAR OLD MEN ARE SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE ADULTS NOT TEENAGED SLOBS.

It's kind of demoralizing at first, because if you make a huge change in your life and you think you are looking better, you expect instant results and a night/day difference, but the changes are more subtle and take months to even notice. Strangers will respect what you say more, people in restaurants and shops will treat you better, and yes, possibly people will flirt with you a bit when they never did before. But it's not an overnight sea change, and might be too subtle for most guys given the expense and effort that goes into ironing your shirts every day and picking the right things each morning.

Guys in the US don't have a good culture of supporting each other or being comfortable in general with telling each other they look nice, so men's style blogs (at least the ones I've browsed) that show lots of photos of a headless guy wearing "today's look" and are filled with positive back-slapping comments serve a definite purpose: reassuring dudes that they are making the right choice, they look great, and yes, we noticed you are wearing those special french-made striped socks that you can only buy online.

It's a me!

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a reporter at the Willamette Week, asking if I was open to an interview before MetaFilter's 12 anniversary and I said sure. Then I got a note that a photographer would pop in during our interview and take a few shots. Then hey, you're done and have time, do you mind standing in front of this makeshift studio backdrop for a few more photos? We might use them next to the story. It won't be on the cover or anything. Ok, we need to ask a few more questions, the story just got lengthened. 

Then last night I got an email saying that my photo did end up being on the cover.

Here's the story on the Willamette Week's site. I like how it turned out (aside from calling my friend Anil, Neil, but they said they'd fix it) and it was fun to do.

Today I sat in a coffee shop and got interviewed for a research project by someone that had a copy of this on the table and it freaked me out to stare at myself the whole time.

Things that suck about a cast

- You probably remember a kid in your second grade class falling off the monkey bars right before school let out for the summer and how that kid's entire summer was ruined. Turns out at age 38 that's also true. I had tons of bike rides planned, a trip to the beach, a new waterpark opened in town, and I was hoping to swim at the Great Barrier Reef next month. I just cancled two long bike tours I reserved months ago. My summer: ruined.

- Typing sucks. Not impossible, but if you thought you'd have plenty of time to write while you try not to sweat in your new cast, you're in for a surprise.

- It's pretty much impossible to use a standard xbox360 controller with a left thumb locked in position. That was another way I thought I might pass time I'd otherwise be riding a bike in full health.

- A few months ago I finally up and decided to dress like a grownup for the rest of my life. Today before getting the cast off I had to take off a nice shirt I was wearing over a tshirt for fear I'd have to cut it off to get around the cast. Today's the first day in months that I've walked around as a 38 year old man wearing a tshirt in public and I feel both somewhat naked being so underdressed and I know I look like a complete slob without a nice shirt on. I can't believe how quickly I got used to nicer clothes and how I spent the last 30+ years of my life just wearing a tshirt and shorts or jeans every day in public. At least I wasn't the most underdressed while running errands today, there were 40-something dudes wearing tank tops.

- Given I tore some ligaments and didn't break the bone, healing means a slow process with therapy and my wrist probably won't ever be pain free afterwards. Surgery would make it worse, clogging my wrist with scar tissue that would restrict my range of motion. The whole diganosis for recovery reminded me of Louie CK's bum ankle and how sometimes parts of our bodies just never get any better:

 

 

Weird ringtones

I've noticed over the past few months at least three instances of someone's phone going off and playing a really odd song, something completely unexpected. In no particular order, they are:

• ~60 year old male. He was a carpenter measuring for bookshelves, suddenly the chorus from Michael Jackson's Billie Jean starts playing. 
• late 30s male, construction worker, building a house. Phone goes off with a jazz classic I've heard millions of times but can't name. Take the A train perhaps?
• mid-60s woman at a restaurant with her husband having dinner in the next booth. Silence was broken by Who Let The Dogs Out. Let me repeat that. The silence was broken in a restaurant when someone's grandmother (possibly great-grandmother) had their phone play Who Let The Dogs Out very loudly.

In every case I'm left with the obvious questions of What the hell? Why that song out of every song ever recorded? and Do people even buy ringtones anymore? 

Google's new design swagger

I can't help but notice over the last few days how great Google's suite of apps is looking these days. Though the top black bar threw me for a loop at first, I got used to it after a day and now that I've tried the new Gmail theme designs, as well as the new Google Plus, I'm kind of amazed at how well everything looks, works, and feels. It's kind of like that euphoric feeling the week after a new major OS update comes out for your favorite computer and everything just works better.

People thought it was Google hiring original Macintosh designer Andy Hertzfeld, but he set the record straight that his role was small and it was a whole team of great designers.

Here's my pet hypothesis: A bunch of designers at Google figured out a way to make their user testing reveal the benefits of better looking apps, sites, and pages. I don't know how they did it, either by honestly sharing better looking apps or subterfuge, either way I don't care because I love the end result and it's something I never thought in a million years would happen, but Google products suddenly look well-designed.

Yamhill County Jury Duty

I've been doing jury duty this month and so far I've been called in three times, sat for 20 minutes each time, and then was told to go home for the day as they would not need any jurors. It's pretty frustrating because I've had trouble keeping appointments and meetings all month as the jury instructions were to keep your entire month clear if you could, so I was expecting action. Also, I'd really like to do this, but I wish it was all more efficient: less people (50-60 people show up each morning when only 10-20 are needed), shorter time frame (1 week of daily actual jury stuff vs. 1 month of on/off stuff), and higher chance of actually serving on a jury.

Towards that strive to efficiency, I noticed my county recently started doing some of the jury stuff online, including filling out your availability in the summons and my favorite feature: getting your nightly jury reporting information online instead of having to call a number and listen to a 1 minute long recorded message. The website option is great because it takes two seconds to figure out if you need to report at the courthouse the next morning, but the URL is hard to find on the county site and whenever I google search common phrases, I'm dropped a couple levels above it and have to search and hunt for the jury info page.

So I bought http://yamhillcountyjuryduty.com/ and I'm redirecting to the specific, exact page on the county courts website that you need to check nightly to figure out if you have to report for jury duty the next morning. I don't know if it'll help anyone beyond me, but it's nice to have shortcuts.

Baby's first license agreement

A couple days ago while surfing the Family and Kids section of Netflix instant, I found a show I knew my daughter would love. We watched a couple episodes and it was then I noticed the small print in the Netflix interface: available for streaming until June 23.

It's a cartoon about horses and pretty innocuous, but I knew we would quickly have to have The Talk, you know the one, where you explain the Hollywood studio system, the complicated license agreements between online delivery services like Netflix, and the byzantine world of paying the creators of programs based on the slivers of monthly fees of Netflix customers. 

Tonight, perhaps I'll tuck her into bed and read from one of her favortes, the latest iTunes End User Software License Agreement.

Kevin Bacon Number II: The Wire Index

I've noticed many of the films and shows I've enjoyed over the past few years have featured actors that previously appeared in The Wire. Someone should build a site that calculates a number based on how many actors in a show or film previously appeared in The Wire. It could be calculated like so: 

(Actors in the work that were on The Wire / Total number of actors in a work) * 10

This gives you a number between 0 and 10, with 10 being a perfect total saturation of the cast (probably only in actual episodes of The Wire) and zero being not a single actor from The Wire is involved in the project. I'm curious what the highest number non-Wire show/film is and I have a feeling if I was about to watch something and it had a number hovering between 2 and 3 I would be almost certain the work would be enjoyable.

Developers: this seems like it'd be fairly possible to do with some IMDB api work and you could probably make some money off the site by throwing Amazon "order now" links to any DVDs mentioned. 

 

LOL Local Newspapers

One rather charming fellow, whose accent bespoke British through and through, said he had come to cover the festival for a London magazine. But he may have let his true identity slip when he indicated he was from the United Klingdom.

via www.newsregister.com

Oh puns.

Nanolaw with Daughter (Ftrain.com)

Watching the video I thought that it was wise of Major League Baseball to combine this sort of sentimental moment with mass speculative litigation. It kept brand values strong. I felt strangely grateful that I could have a moment to remember that afternoon. Surprised by the evidence of both copyright violation and father-daughter affection.

via www.ftrain.com

It doesn't get any better than this story.

The Banality of Evildoers

Though it was initially called a mansion, Osama Bin Laden’s safe house décor might better be described as Meth Lab Chic. (Not that I’m all that familiar with meth lab interiors, natch.) Rather than a set from 24, it's more the kind of place only Vibe magazine would choose for a shoot, no pun intended. His particleboard furniture looks like it was salvaged from a rural roadside free pile; a power strip is bolted arbitrarily to the wall; wires are strung higgledy-piggledy as if by an adolescent hobbyist; and this former heir to a multimillion Saudi fortune gets relegated to watching standard def video on a TV you couldn’t get $5 for on Craigslist. It seems only a matter of time before we’re told they found porn on his computer.All kidding aside: Our mythologies about the superpowerful and insanely devious OBL stem from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks. It just wouldn’t do for the culprits to be mere mortal miscreants; we had to build them up into a hydra-headed syndicate.

via www.sampratt.com

This is the smartest take on OBL and Al-Queda I've seen, and mirrors how I've thought of these guys for the past ten years. (via Sippey)

Meta-Who?

Treme, the HBO show by David Simon (of The Wire fame) is a show set in post-Katrina New Orleans and follows the world of musicians, chefs, and residents. Sunday night, the third episode "On Your Way Down" had this exchange where a jazz musician hip to the internet tries to convince a record exec to help promote him on places like "Facebook, Myspace, the blogosphere, MetaFilter..."

It blew me away to hear it mentioned on a show of such stature and I figured maybe one of the writers was a fan but we're lucky enough to have the music supervisor on MetaFilter who said he had nothing to do with it, and the show's writer was just trying to pick out an increasingly obscure internet references to reinforce the character's internet cred.

I'm glad I got to catch David Simon talking about Treme right before they started filming, on a trip to New Orleans a couple years back. Who knows if being in that audience lead to this (seriously doubt it).

Kickstarter tips from a fan of crowd-funding

I've been a huge fan of Kickstarter since they launched just two years ago. My friend Andy was one of the first employees, I got to put my money where my mouth is when I became a small investor in the project, and I do run a curated page of all MetaFilter members with Kickstarter projects.

All those disclaimers aside and though I've yet to launch my own Kickstarter project, I wanted to post some tips on having a successful project on Kickstarter from someone that has funded almost 30 projects. These are trends and tips I've noticed in watching a few dozen projects succeed and fail over the last two years. 

Have a compelling idea

I know, this is obvious, but it's worth stating that every successful project on Kickstarter starts with a great idea for a thing that no one has seen before and does something cool. You can get every other tip right and still fail if you mess up this core thing.

A compelling idea is unique, it addresses a need that nothing else does, and it helps if it does so in a clever way. Now that can be an iPhone tripod mount or a movie about BMX, but it helps if it adds to the world as being a new form of creativity.

Don't ask for too much, tell us what you need the money for

The number one reason I'd say projects fail is that they ask for too much money. I know product design and manufacturing doesn't come cheap but if you have a small little item you want to produce that will have a final price of maybe $20 or less, don't be surprised when you have trouble raising many tens of thousands of dollars for it.

Whatever you need in terms of money, be sure to explain in as much detail possible how the money will be used and what it will be used for. Sometimes I've seen too-high $ projects get more funding when the creators came back to explain how much equipment was really necessary and what the going rates were.

This applies equally to products as it does to things like film or music production. If you asked a random person on the street if <$5,000 was enough to record and engineer and album in this day and age, I think you'd get agreement. If you said you needed $25,000 to make a record, I think most people would say that is too much. I've seen a lot of film projects ask for upwards of $100,000 for paying a team of editors, but very few of those projects get funded and I think that's because people are used to seeing smaller films done in something like Final Cut or even iMovie and would prefer to see them done for much cheaper.

Structure your rewards carefully

Here's something I've noticed in a few projects: they have a great idea for a cool thing that I want to help fund (mostly because I want one of the things they will produce), and they are asking for a significant amount of money, but their rewards are structured in such a way that you get one of the things they are producing for a small amount of money.

So imagine you were making a thing and you needed $15,000 for it, but if you gave just $10, you got one of the things. You could offer more copies for $30, $50, and $100 pledges, but imagine that a normal person only has use for one of these things. Chances are, you're going to have trouble finding 1,500 people on the internet that want your thing in the month or so you run your Kickstarter campaign. If instead you were giving away the thing at $30, you'd need just 500 people to get you to your goal.

I find I fund most projects in the $20-40 range, which I consider a "what the hell" level equivalent to a single visit to an ATM (your mileage may vary on what you feel comfortable with). Given that level I hit most projects at, I feel a sense of doom for a project when I get a digital download or an item mailed to me for on $5-10. I've funded projects in the $100-500 range when there has been some sort of amazing reward attached to it (either a special edition version of an expensive item produced, a reward with retail value near that amount, or some special acknowledgement of my backing), so try and offer a range of rewards with the "sweet spot" in the $20-40 range. Also, don't forget to offer bigger rewards with more compelling, customized options. The more creative you are on the upper end, the more likely you are to get someone actually giving above and beyond the normal backing amount.

If you are producing an item that will eventually be for sale, by all means offer that item at a reward level slightly below retail. That way, people can not only back your project, they'll get one of your things, and on top of all that, they'll save a few bucks on something they already wanted anyway. It's win-win,-win.

Have a good video

I've watched a lot of Kickstarter project videos and I can definitely say that the better your introduction video, the more likely are to get funded. A good video shows off the product or creative work you intend to produce, explains where the money is going, and offers up some entertainment value. I am I is a great little uncut funny video about a movie production and Allison Weiss did a funny simple video at home that pushed her project to over 350% of her goal. The Loog Guitar video does a great job explaining what the project is about and relates the creator's passion for the project, pushing it over 400% of its goal with the most popular reward level being $150.

Even if you can't be funny or don't even want to be on-screen, just doing a voiceover video of screenshots and/or photos about your project can be enough if you explain what your idea is, what you'll do with the money, and what rewards are available to backers.

Other tips

The Kickstarter blog had a great 2-year anniversary post last week where they compiled stats on all projects to date. There are tons of lessons and tips there, like getting a previous backer to back your project being very important.

I tweeted the other day that I've been getting a steady stream of cool stuff in the mail to the point where it felt like Kickstarter was becoming a store. I've bought a lot of toys and things for my daughter on Kickstarter and the way I do that is by doing to the "Ending Soon" page. These are all projects about to be funded and I'll check that page about once a week and if something is fully funded and they have a cool reward in my "what the hell" pledge level of $20-40, I'll often kick in some money. It also means the month or two campaign time is cut to almost nothing, getting rewards into your mailbox that much faster.

Answer questions quickly and honestly as they get posted to your Kickstarter project. I've seen some project comments/questions languish as the creators were nowhere to be found, while I've seen other project creators relish the ability to keep their project up to date and answer questions quickly and fully when asked by potential backers.

Overall, I'd say if you had a project fail on Kickstarter, the best thing you can do is to try and cut your costs and scope of the project accordingly, and relaunch it. I've seen several projects fail at $10,000+ and come back in a slightly more limited form for less than $5,000 and get funded fully.

 

Sometimes you're old

Every time the singer turned the mic towards the crowd, everyone but me shouted lyrics in unison. They were at a concert, I was at a calculus exam in underwear.

Ev's assholishness is greatly exaggerated

There's been a bunch of stories lately about Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter upon the occasion of him leaving Twitter to do his own thing. Some are outright calling him an asshole. This Business Insider story of Noah Glass and Twitter's early days has a whole speculative piece on how Ev might be a calculating evil genius, cut from the same cloth as Monty Burns in the Simpsons, that cut investors out of the Twitter pie as soon as he could apparently by deceiving them about Twitter's potential (and mentions that an investor or two is thinking of legal action against him). That piece references the old NYT piece about Ev being "pushed" out of Twitter and recounts the whole Pyra/Blogger implosion at the start of 2001, which I was a player in.

I read all this stuff, and I have to call bullshit on quite a bit of it.

First off, I worked with Ev for almost a year and I saw him as a really amazing idea man and has the drive you want in an entrepreneur. His dream setup he talked of early on was building Pyra "Labs" where every awesome idea he came up with could be prototyped by a small team and spun off into products by other people or sold to other companies that are more into the execution side of things (Blogger was a spin-off from Pyra, the project management app). If you look at the past ten years, Ev's time after Google is much like that. Odeo was a good idea (I never got the appeal of phone-to-blog-post Audioblogger, Noah Glass' predecessor app) because podcasting was just taking off and I was most interested in the piece that let you record and mix audio using a browser instead of expensive audio software. Odeo went the way of the Dodo because iTunes simply added Podcasting natively and crushed it overnight. Ev went on to form Obvious, which seemed like another take on the Pyra Labs model, and Twitter was a product spun out from there.

Again, Ev is great at ideas, making prototypes and letting ideas blossom into things over time. He doesn't seem like a CEO type to me, and that's not a dig on him -- I'm a CEO myself, even though I'm not a CEO type of guy either. Running a day-to-day corporation with tons of employees is a lot different than being an ideas guy, and it requires different skills.

So Ev leaving Twitter to try something new didn't come off as unexpected when I heard the news from the man himself.

This is my own speculation, but I think the core issue on the Odeo/Twitter thing between Noah and Ev was that their personalities clashed. I remember meeting Noah and him being a pretty intense guy and Ev was a quieter, mellower dude. I remember being surprised when I heard they were rolling Audioblogger into something new together but then I remember they used to be next-door neighbors and I thought maybe I was too quick to judge Noah from seeing him at a couple parties.

One key point that deflates pretty much the whole Business Insider piece on Twitter and Ev buying out his Odeo investors is this: I've spoken with a number of Odeo investors and one mentioned to me that when they were offered the buy back plan, there was an offer to roll your shares into Twitter, though Twitter was so new, no one really knew the potential (seriously, twitter wasn't a killer app at first. I hated it. Merlin hated it.). Ev didn't "slow play" his hand and dupe investors so he could own more of Twitter later on, Ev gave them a pretty amazing offer of continuing their investment and if I remember correctly I heard that everyone but one or two investors took the cash offer out of Odeo and turned down the Twitter shares.

That's an important distinction because it means the investors in the story aren't pissed that they were hoodwinked by Ev, it's because the investors passed on Twitter and combined with today's 20/20 hindsight, it looks like a bad move by almost every investor to take their short term cash back.

Going back to the NYT piece from last Fall, I was a little bit bitter for the immediate few months after i was laid off from Blogger in 2001 because I knew Blogger was a much bigger idea that had so much world-changing potential I didn't want to see die on the vine. By 2002 I buried the hatchet with Ev and admired his drive and hard work at keeping it alive by himself, and eventually growing it into something Google snapped up and improved upon (The NYT story says that unnamed former employees got nothing out of the Google deal. I'm one of the folks they were talking about, and still, there's sincerely no hard feelings).

I look forward to whatever Ev does next because he has tons of great ideas and can build a prototype faster than you think, but one thing he isn't is a calculating evil genius asshole hellbent on screwing over investors.

That's just melodramatic bullshit.

Thank Bill Cosby for today's comedy boom

 

I have this crazy idea. Back in 1985, my family got cable TV for the first time and it included HBO. I think at the start they just played stuff from 5-10pm and eventually they played stuff maybe 12hrs a day, but I seem to recall they'd just repeat 2 or 3 movies a few times a day and whatever deadspots they had, they filled it by running Bill Cosby's Himself.

I watched Bill Cosby's Himself probably 2 or 3 times a week for a good several years in my early teens. I know the entire thing by heart and can quote you almost any line if you give me a couple words.

There's this popular held belief about the birth of Skateboarding:

In the mid-Seventies, two events coincided in Southern California that gave rise to skateboarding as we now know it. The invention of the urethane wheel and the drought that emptied the pools across the city allowed the kids to ride their new boards in an entirely new way

It was covered well in the movies Dogtown and Z boys and Lords of Dogtown. I mention it because I've been a fan of stand-up comedy for three decades now and we're in a boom these past few years that feels much like the brick-backdrop comedy TV boom of the late 80s. We have comedy podcasts galore, huge comedy communities like A Special Thing, we have an entire website dedicated to short videos of just comedy, and we have stuff like The Onion going mainstream with video on demand and their popular website. Not to mention popular late night comedy talk shows are joined by The Daily Show and Colbert Report, which meld comedy with news. Fans of comedy are getting their daily fix like never before.

So here's my crazy idea: the boom in comedy these last few years is due to two things that go together well, the internet, for making the dissemination, publication, and promotion of comedy way easier than waiting for a TV network to give you a show 20 years ago, and the fact that a generation of kids got to watch Bill Cosby Himself every day after school for several years before HBO figured out how to gather enough programming to stop repeating themselves.

Three phone tips for antisocial people like me that hate phones

In no particular order:

1. A friend recently got a new phone & number on Verizon, and neglected to set up his electronic voicemail account for the first few weeks. When you call, after 4-5 rings it goes to voicemail but the message is simply "This user has not set up their voicemail yet. Goodbye."

Now, this won't work for everyone, but if you spend a minimal amount of time being interrupted by phone calls and you have a stable job and relationships and don't need to get every single call that comes in, this no-voicemail thing is kind of awesome because it is one less inbox for this friend's life. I know when I get that message I'll either text, call back later, or just send an email. I'm envious and may not set up voicemail for future new phones I get.

2. In the spirit of Last Year's Model, my home landline is connected to a 11 year-old cordless phone we have no reason to replace. It works for the hour or so total talk time we use it each week, but since the phone sits in the cradle charging constantly, the batteries tend to go bad after a few years. The batteries are currently dying so the phone has to stay on the charger all the time, and when you do get a call, you get about 10 minutes of talk time before the batteries are dead and the call drops. 

Instead of replacing the rechargable battery pack, I've been enjoying this feature for a few months now. I know it's kind of asshole-ish, but it's really nice to be able to keep things short and sweet with everyone that calls my house. It's really handy and I don't spend hours on the phone chit-chatting because the phone simply can't do it, and I have no guilt about cutting a call short. I can always have a long conversation on my cell phone if need be.

3. There are several web services out there to answer the question "Who owns that unlisted number that just hit my mobile phone?" but my favorite is WhoCalled.Us. It's an awesome free service where people report details of who called them and what they wanted when they called, think of it as crowd-sourced telemarketer reporting. It's handy because you can safely ignore most calls to your phone after looking up the numbers at this site.

If a weird unknown number comes into my iPhone, I ignore it and look up the number later. 9 times out of 10, it was a sales call from a bank, a timeshare company, or a bullshit work-at-home offer. I wish it was integrated in my phone, so I could just hit a button to do auto lookups from the missed calls page on my phone, or if an incoming call had known records at whocalled.us, it could display the top three rated comments on my screen before I hit accept or reject.

Scarring Party west coast tour

Over on MetaFilter Music, I've fallen for a band doing sort of old timey pirate shanty stuff called The Scarring Party. They recently threw a Kickstarter fund drive for their upcoming west coast tour, and I went so far as to donate at the level where they had to write a song about me.

Here are their upcoming tour dates:

• April 22 at Empty Sea Studios (All Ages) with Erin Jorgensen in Seattle, WA
• April 23 at Alberta Street Pub in Portland, OR
• April 24 at Sam Bond’s Garage in Eugene, OR
• April 25 at Rainshadow (All Ages) with Deadly Gallows and Stabracadabra in Reno, NV
• April 26 at Disco Volante in Oakland, CA
• April 27 at Viracocha with Eliza Rickman in San Francisco, CA
• April 28 at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, CA
• April 29 at a yet to be determined space or residence in the Greater Los Angeles Area
• April 30 at Park Gallery with Martian Horses and Birds Ate My Face in San Diego, CA

Even though I only go out about once every six months to a concert/event, I actually have tickets to Donald Glover doing comedy the same night as their Portland date so I'll sadly be missing them in town (though I might try to catch them before/after), but if you get the chance do check them out.

Here's my song, Head Full of Birds they wrote for me:

03 Head Full of Birds

marble steps are pretty slippery

via www.flickr.com

I didn't post this for the laughs, it's just kind of an amazing moment captured by Tracey on Flickr.

Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet.

via b.aking.ca

The futility of the entire human condition, summed up in a single photo and caption

What? Fortuitous is back?

Everything I've learned about casual podcasting:
An exhaustive how-to guide on getting starting thinking about and recording, editing, and publishing your first podcast.

via fortuito.us

For the last few years, I've regretted letting my long essay/business tips blog Fortuitous go fallow, and I've been thinking of bringing it back many times whenever I feel the urge to write more. The other day I was helping a friend with his new podcast and I realized there wasn't a single resource online that contained everything I'd learned, so I decided to write it myself.

This essay is pretty much everything you need to know to get started podcasting with a Mac. I plan to do more of these, the next one will be on everything I learned after personally printing, selling, and shipping over 500 t-shirts in the past two years.

Maybe in a few weeks I'll return to more business-y topics too.

Happy Birthday Twitter

Twitter turns five years old officially today. I remember when it came out and that I hated it from the start, due to the precious name (it had the groan-inducing title "twttr" originally) and that I rarely used SMS on my clunky t-9 keypad phone. I recall that eventually I gave in sometime in October, and my experience with the still mostly-SMS service was so annoying (my phone woke me up buzzing at 2am when a friend went to Whole Foods and told everyone about it on Twitter) that I couldn't figure out a way to stop the SMS updates and eventually I had to email Biz personally to get it to stop. I found this fun email exchange with Biz and Jack in my Gmail archives:

My friend Eric had put my phone number in as someone to follow even before I signed up so the moment I did, I started getting his replies without any way to shut them off. The texts stopped after this email exchange with Biz, but the experience soured me on the service so much that I didn't return to redo my account until February of 2007.

It's weird that it started off so badly since I've been using it happily ever since. I'm glad they were in it for the long haul, because it wasn't until I got a iPhone in 2007 and custom iPhone apps came around in 2008 that the service really started to shine for me personally.

SXSW 2011

Clay Shirky, with sponsors

It's hard to believe I started going to SXSW eleven years ago, but for my ninth trip to Austin, I decided to do it up like an adult with a family and kids and only stay a few days instead of doing a 6-7 day drunken bender like years past. I landed Friday afternoon and headed home Sunday afternoon, so as a result I didn't get to take in as many panels as I had hoped, but overall it was a fun time. Some memories from this year in no particular order:

• The Old Timers Ball ("Web 2.Old!" -- Rex) was a great success. It was everything I wanted in a gathering: low-key, had the bar to ourselves, could hear ourselves talk, and I got to catch up with about three dozen people I never saw again in the masses. Huge, huge thanks goes out to Kevin Smokler for the idea and Kevin Newsum for organizing it, getting the bar ok, and basically doing everything (all I did was blog about it and enjoyed it). I hope this is a tradition, especially given the size of the event.
• BIG BIG BIG. Rumors were the total attendees were getting up to the 20,000 mark. There were over 1,000 talks over five days by 2k speakers. It seemed like any time slot had about 20-30 panels going on at once, in locations all over downtown Austin. In years past, it has felt too big and I've felt too anonymous but this year felt like it was twice the size of last year. Holy shitballs was it a big event. I might instead go to smaller conferences in leiu of SXSW next year. I wish the 100 people I know from SXSW that I like to hang out with would choose a smaller conference with me so we could actually see each other and interact. I honestly missed seeing at least two dozen close friends completely, since the whole event was so spread out and there were just so many people around.
• Last year I said Foursquare was a killer app for finding friends and finding my way around at nights, but this year it was all about Lanyrd (and their SXSW specific subsite). They started off by building the killer app I wanted last year, a way to see where/when all my Twitter friends were speaking, so right off the bat I could see a list of everyone I knew and what they were going to talk about, and build a schedule from it. Then using my friend network on Twitter, they could show me every panel that my friends marked off as interesting enough to track and/or attend. This whittled down the insane 1000+ options to about 2 or 3 cool options for every time slot (instead of 20-30). Thanks Leonard Lin and Andy Baio for marking off so many panels, I just filtered through their lists to find the diamonds in the rough.
  
  Lanyrd was also amazing because it required no setup, you just authorized Twitter and it was completely customized instantly for you. I also enjoyed their Chrome plugin to show SXSW schedules in user profiles. For the week leading up to SXSW, I could see many people's plans and talks and it helped filter out good stuff even more. I also was amazed with Simon and co's active development of the site at SXSW. By my second day I noticed a new mobile version of the site had a feature showing you every panel going on right now and how far away from each you were, as well as everything coming up next (if your current choice was boring you to tears). Lanyrd made this gigantic conference manageable and gave me the ability to navigate through the nonsense thanks to a couple clicks and the power of my Twitter friends.
• I stayed at Ben and Katie's house instead of a hotel and it was great. We got to have quiet slow mornings away from the hubub, and enjoy fine coffee and breakfast tacos without any crowds.
• Food was pretty great this year. I got to have a huge meal at my favorite Austin restaurant Parkside, and I got to eat a ton of tacos. The truck-based food world that hit LA and Portland was in full swing in Austin and gave lots of quick simple options. Sadly, I didn't get to hit my favorite Polvo's and sample their amazing salsa. Oh well.
• Bubble. Everywhere you looked around the convention center was a massive sponsored logo. You couldn't walk ten feet without noticing several people in matching t-shirts trying to give some free shit away. There was enough free food from companies that I know people went days without having to pay to eat. It was kind of crazy, and felt more like a NASCAR event than a technology conference.
• Pop-up shops were awesome. I love the idea of temporary storefronts and I've enjoyed seeing them in NYC before. I got both a Glennz tshirt and a new iPad from their respective pop-up shops. There's something cool about taking a traditional brick-and-mortar business model and making it agile and fun and light like the Internet. I hope future SXSW events have as many pop-up shops as food trucks.

That was about it. I had fun, I liked coming home before it was over, I ate well, and I enjoyed my talk. I also liked recording it and posting it and I hope more speakers at massive conferences record theirs at home so those that wanted to see it but missed it while trying to see 34 other panels at once can see what you worked on that was worth flying across the country to present. Overall I wished I got to see more talks, but I also got to sleep a bunch, but in the end the lasting memory really is missing seeing a lot of people I know because it's a bit too big. Sorry Shawn and Hugh, I know you work hard at it and it shows in being a great event everyone wants to attend, but I think we may have a case of too much success, especially for an old-timer like me.

Apple Keynote feature request: easy recording of your talks

Summary: It should be easier to film your talks when practicing at home. Not everyone can make it to a conference or meeting where you present, but it's really easy to share a video of your talk with the entire world on Vimeo or YouTube. Sal Khan has shown how one guy can change the world with some screencasts, and I'd like to see the power of that fall into the hands of anyone with a Mac. I wish Keynote made it easier, and hopefully the next version does. 

 

My last post linked to my SXSW talk that I recorded at home. A lot of people asked me how I did it, and it required the following steps:

- get two macs running ichat that can talk to each other (one computer was using my AIM screenname, the other my .Mac screenname). Disable all audio in/out on the second computer you don't present on.

- Start a video chat between the computers, then drag your keynote file into the lower half of the video chat window to start "iChat Theater" on the computer you will present from.

- Resize the video chat window to something around 1024x768 in size, then start screencasting software (I use ScreenFlow) to record the entire desktop and make sure to capture the computer's audio.

- Walk back to your presenting computer, give your talk.

- Walk over to your screencasting computer, hit stop. Edit out the beginning and end of walking between computers, zoom the video so only your presentation shows in the viewport, then save.

- Export video out (I used the 960x540 AppleTV size, and it took about an hour to render) then upload to Vimeo.

 

You can currently rehearse your talks in Keynote, but it creates a slides-only video with your recorded audio. Most macs all have iSight cameras in them, so I'd really like to see a single mac option to record a video exactly like the screenshot above, without the need for a second mac or complicated screencasting software. 

About the only change that would be necessary and is currently lacking is that I can't see my presenter notes when using iChat Theater. The presenter sees something like this:

You can collapse the small image of your current slide and just have the forward/back controls, but I really wish notes were in that panel, like so:

Overall, I think this would make a killer addition to the next version of Keynote, and let people share their knowledge much easier and to wider audiences.

My SXSW 2011 talk on lessons from 11 years of community

Lessons from 11 years of community (my SXSW 2011 talk) from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.

 

This past Saturday, I gave a talk at SXSW Interactive on some lessons in moderation and growing a community that was sparsely attended (I was half a mile away in one of the outlying hotels, no biggie -- it happens). People liked the talk and plenty of people that missed it asked for my slides but I use minimal text in my slides. 

So this is me doing my presentation in my home office. I miss the benefit of an engaged audience so I might sound kind of low-energy doing it alone and I do miss the live Q&A afterwards I'd get at a real conference, but if you have any questions feel free to ask them on Vimeo in the comment thread.

Here are all the tweets archived from the live talk, marked with #RWModeration:

North America - Western Europe equivalent latitude maps

When I first moved to Oregon I often heard local Pinot Noir wineries proclaim "we're at the same latitude as the best wine regions in France! That's why our wine is great here too!" Every weekend in the Fall, I get muddy in local bike races then go home to watch similar races taking place around Belgium, with similar weather and I've often wondered how my latitude compared with theirs.

Now I know that latitude determines length of daylight pretty consistently but isn't a great comparison to weather -- The west coast of the US has a cold ocean current and a jet stream to match while the Atlantic that makes up the west coasts of the European continent has a warmer ocean current and different weather to match. Still, it's interesting when making rough comparisions to know if Los Angeles is really like the south of France/Italy (it's actually in Northern Africa, latitude-wise), and I've wondered ever since a friend moved to Helsinki if that was as far north as our Alaskan cities (it is).

Today I asked on Ask MetaFilter and a GIS expert member whipped up exactly the maps I envisioned.

Here are major European cities overlaid on North America, corrected for the identical latitude (click to view full sized):

Here are North American cities, overlaid on Western Europe and Northern Africa at the identical latitude:

Pretty cool stuff. I never knew Paris, France was at a latitude farther north than Fargo, North Dakota, or that so much of Western Europe was farther north than the US-Canadian border.

Targeted Email Attacks

A MetaFilter member has told some wild stories in the past about the presence of malware attacks at their place of work, and is now compiling them all on a new blog called Targeted Email Attacks.

Before you click away, I want to explain how crazy this story is. The person that runs the blog works at a small non-profit that examines US-Asia policies and it's in the Washington DC area. In terms of government targets, they're pretty small potatoes, but if you browse the blog entries know that some group is not only targeting this small NGO by sending them virus-laden attachments but they often impersonate coworkers when attempting to get people to install malicious software (that would likely contain things like keyloggers and various methods of reporting home and giving attackers a way to get into this NGO's network and download data).

This isn't your garden variety windows virus junk going out to your entire address book on an infected system, this is straight-up spy-type shit, but the shocking thing to me is that someone is specifically targeting a tiny little non-profit and repeatedly doing some really crazy stuff like sending fake meeting minutes from the blog author's own boss, and if you get an email like that right after a real meeting at work, I think even I would fall for such a thing.

The crazy part is when you realize it is someone's (or many someones) job to know everything about a tiny group in Washington and to try again and again to trick them into exploiting their computers. Now imagine if you worked at somewhere like the Pentagon or a larger, more visible NGO that was in charge of lots more data and had lots more employees. I can't imagine the amount of training required to show people how not to fall for these very believable tricks.

If you thought the world of spying was over when the Cold War ended, it certainly looks like it changed gears a bit and simply moved more to the online world.

I hope this is on a plaque somewhere at Flickr HQ

I have to remind myself of this truism every so often so I might as well write it down for the ages:

When you have an old photo in your photostream with partial nudity in it, and it gets a new favorite from a random no-user-pic user, for god sakes, don't look at their other favorites.

Space Shuttle launch from a JetBlue flight

via www.flickr.com

Photo from the mom of Dens, the founder of the popular app/service Foursquare. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

Cats That Look Like Ron Swanson

via catsthatlooklikeronswanson.tumblr.com

So freaking great.

On paper, Armstrong likely doped

Mud, Gears, and Pain // Armstrong's TdF Victories

Lance Armstrong is either the most amazing genetic anomaly to have beaten performance-enhanced cyclists while remaining clean himself, or if you follow occam's razor, he doped just like his peers did. 

2,564 frames per second

via vimeo.com

It's incredible how different everyday actions look when slowed down to insane levels.

Innovation with Solitaire?!

Last summer I was bored one day and searched the app store for solitaire apps. I admit, this is like telling the universe you give up, you're so bored that you'd like to play the most boring game known to man, the game most synonomous with isolation and going it alone.

I started playing the free version of MobilityWare's Solitaire and realized quickly that the love affair I ended in 1999 with Windows 95's included Solitaire had been rekindled and I quickly paid the 99 cents for the "gold" version to remove ads. It was a fun way to pass time when I was bored but I also found it quieted my mind and was a great way to get to sleep, by playing 5-10 hands until I was so tired I was about to drop my phone.

Enter Game Center

A few months later, the game was updated to add features with Apple's Game Center, and they presented a list of 20 acheivements as part of the game. Funny enough, I had already done about half of them in my months of casual play but it was enough of a motivator to complete the rest that I started playing solitaire not just to cap off a day and get ready to sleep, but increasingly I found time during the day to chase goals. Three of them were quite difficult. One was scoring above 10,000 points on a hand and it requires not just a near-perfect randomly dealt hand but you have to learn how to do a speed run since points are increased for shorter times. As I was sitting there speed running solitaire games for hours a day waiting for the elusive easy hand so I could finish an entire game in about 60 seconds, I knew this was ridiculous, but a couple days later I surpassed the goal. The other two acheivements were playing 5,000 hands and 10,000 hands. I was somewhere around 3,800 hands when the app was updated so a couple weeks of playing it grinded me over the 5,000 mark and though the 10k mark seems far off (as I've gone back to casual play) I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,800 games played and I'm sure I'll hit ten thousand by the end of the summer.

They also added some social scoring via Game Center and at one point I was in the top 100 of all players for some metric and I was on the leader board, though the people near the top were a magnitude away from me in terms of games played and points scored, so this aspect never appealed to me.

Then it went all social

This week, the creators released a new version with something they call "Winning Hands" which will tell you when you're playing a new hand that it is indeed solvable and if you get stuck, you can replay someone else's method for solving that puzzle. At first, this sounded a bit goofy but I could see it coming handy when you get stuck with a seemingly impossible puzzle. I played a few games with the settings tweaked to give me more Winning Hands plays to check my skills against random previous players. I found I could solve them easily about 9/10 hands, but once in a while something would get me stuck and it was fun to watch someone else replay a hand, though it often included them making some crazy move when presented with a few options (where I took a more sensible path).

Another innovative thing is that you can click the "winning hands" indicator and be told what the fastest time, most points, and fewest moves was for that hand in the past. This has become a new motivator to keep playing as the feature is new and I can easily take a minute off the best time, score thousands of points more, and often save a dozen moves.

I never thought I'd say Solitaire makes for a fun social game, but the latest version is pretty impressive and knowing that I'm competing against others has changed the motivation to play completely. Knowing my process and moves can be viewed by others is also pretty cool.

With enough players and hands dealt, it seems like the creators of this app can very well exhaust every possible hand in solitaire, tell you which plays are solvable (I'm curious what the global statictics are on overall winning percentages), and show you the exact moves someone, somewhere used to finish it.

For a solitary pursuit, it's pretty amazing that the game developers came up with a way to record everyone's games, and let advanced players gain recognition for a job well done as well as use that play to teach less experienced players the tips and tricks for solving the seemingly impossible. I know it's just solitaire, but I could envision an app operating in much the same way allowing real-world impossible-seeming problems be solved by tapping social aspects of a large userbase trying their best, sharing the successes and showing the exact process of their solution, letting others build upon that quickly and easily.

Murk

Murk, originally uploaded by Dennis Calvert.

Damn, I wish I had a remote clue how this photoshoot was done. I get that it's a long exposure "light painting" but man, the results are totally surreal.

First double front flip on a MTB

Yesterday, the first double front flip was pulled on a mountain bike. Fast forward to about 1:40 to pass up the attempts and b-roll:

 

Pretty damn insane.

Google Chrome to Drop Support for H.264

Chromium's blog informs that Google Chrome will drop support for H.264 in the coming months and will only support WebM (VP8) and Theora codecs.

via googlesystem.blogspot.com

Google's latest news reminds of having a capricious boss that makes up new shit every few weeks that no one wants or needs. We've all been there, right?

"Look people, I know the linux mail server is perfectly functional and it only requires Bill in IT to look at for one hour each month, but I really think scraping it and deploying Microsoft Exchange will do wonders for our productivity. Once we get a couple MCE engineers hired, we're looking at a two-month deployment..."

There is no good reason for Chrome to drop a video standard that YouTube helped push.

come break bread with us at the Old Timers Ball

SXSW is coming up and as it has gotten bigger, it has gotten harder to find friends, so Kevin Smokler, Kevin Newsum, and I thought it would be nice to throw an "Old Timers Ball" for ye olde school webloggers to meet, greet, and catch up with each other on the first Friday night. It'll be at the Side Bar in Austin (map below) from 5-8pm. It's a no-host cash bar (you pay for your beers, basically) and we welcome friends new and old to come hang out.

RSVP at Upcoming, if you like, but we look forward to seeing you there.

Details:

Side Bar (602 E 7th)

Friday March 11

5-8 pm

 

(Featuring a UB the DJ set: bring your iPod, iPhone or mp3 player and we'll spin some of your tunes at the party)

 

View Larger Map

Said the Gramophone: BEST SONGS OF 2010

BEST SONGS OF 2010by SeanPlease note: MP3s are only kept online for a short time, and if this entry is from more than a couple of weeks ago, the music probably won't be available to download any more.

via www.saidthegramophone.com

I've gotten a copy of the entire "best 100 songs of 2010" in my quest to at least start listening to new (to me) music. So far I am loving this mix.

Standouts include the Titus Andronicus track (#27) that sounds like Guided by Voices sing over a Dinosaur Jr. song from the best era of Dinosaur Jr. I had heard the new Sade album was good but the track included (#96) is really great and making me want the whole record. The list also introduced me to the1shanti, an almost nerdcore rapper doing rhymes about various bits of technology. I also enjoyed the bits of world music making the mix that I certainly would have missed completely (#22, The Good Ones, from Rwanda).

Why is Boba Fett so popular?

Han Solo's the most badass character in Star Wars. Just don't give a damn, handsome as hell, rocks the vest to a degree that science still cannot explain, seduces the heck out of Leia, shoots Greedo without giving a FUUUUCK

via ask.metafilter.com

The whole comment is great, but "rocks the vest to a degree that science still cannot explain" rings incredibly true.

2010 Year in Review, Part 1: Racing & Fanhood - Competitive Cyclist

It’s amazing that blogs even exist any more. Facebook and Twitter are the Fast Food Nation of thought. Who wouldn’t rather take 15 seconds to spout something off instead of the hours it takes to write a decent blog entry? Bloggers are the resistance, and before they get taken into custody in the name of Vapid Über Alles they need props while they’re still with us.

via www.competitivecyclist.com

I love this passage from a long blog entry from a major online bike shop. I remember when blogs were the resistance from traditional long form journalism!

2010 at MetaFilter: that's a lot of stats

I've been doing MetaFilter for over 11 years now, and I'm almost always proud to share that with new people I meet that ask me what I do for a living. I get to live out my dream of goofing off on the internet and running websites and it somehow pays the bills. It took many years and lots of work to get there, and it takes even more to keep it going.

About the only time I don't like mentioning it is when I run into an old friend I haven't seen in some time and they ask me what I'm working on lately. "Still doing MetaFilter? Really?" is often the response I get, and I understand it may seem like I'm standing still these past few years given that I haven't launched a ton of new projects (beyond Fuelly, and releasing newish sections of MetaFilter).

A couple weeks ago I figured I'd compile some stats on MetaFilter to let old friends now how much of a monster the project has become. It's a corporation now with employees. We have healthcare and a 401k plan now. Also? It's a shit ton of work to do by hand, for the five people that help keep the site and servers sane. In the past few years I've been contacted by representatives at some major companies sniffing around for acquisitions, but when they find out the moderation and maintenance of the community is all done by hand and we have to talk to thousands of people like grown-ups instead of some amazing whiz-bang python script doing it all for us, the conversation ends and we go back to work.

Thanks to the hard work of Paul Bausch, Josh Millard, and Jessamyn West (and vacapinta!) we compiled a bunch of stats on usage of the site and community contributions for 2010. I threw it into photoshop and started making a monster sized infographic to share these interesting stats in an attractive package. I had to wait for December 31st to get final 2010 numbers, which I plugged in last night and published this morning. Click on the thumbail to see the whole thing.

Thanks as always to the excellent community that make MetaFilter great. Every day I get to wake up to dozens of interesting links and discussions and a handful of amazing questions and answers I thank my lucky stars I get to do this day in and day out.

The future of Microsoft

A lot of people seemed worried about Microsoft's future, given less people are buying computers running the Windows OS and their Microsoft Office cash cow could be threatened by free alternatives going forward.

But I have to say in the week I've owned an xbox 360, I can't believe how often I've used it (often for watching movies/shows on Netflix streaming) and how slick and user-friendly the platform is. The new Kinect is pretty amazing, going way past the cool intuitive approach of the Nintendo Wii with the simple controller by getting rid of the controller entirely. I threw the dance party kinect game up yesterday when some friends came over and everyone from age 5 to 50 enjoyed getting down to 70s hits.

Put simply, the xbox 360 is an incredible home entertainment delivery device, one that has already got me to spend $50 on xbox gold and $50 on xbox live points, about $250 on games, and this is in addition to the $300 unit I got as a gift. It's a pleasure to use, super handy for streaming movies, and the games are super fun.

Microsoft has a killer living room appliance and bridge to the internet that easily hooks up to your TV. If their business models around gaming are at all set up correctly, they should have no problem remaining a dominant force in the technology world.