A Whole Lotta Nothing

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.

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.

The Chokehold of Calendars

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

via weblog.muledesign.com

That's a glorious intro sentence, worth quoting here for posterity.

Facebook's Privacy Whiteboard

 

Last year, when Facebook started going lax on their default privacy settings (in opposition to how they'd always defaulted settings) I had this idea. It's obvious why Facebook would push their userbase in that direction, because it would mean more public outfacing pages to sell internal and external advertising on. If you're running a giant private walled garden, you can only sell ads to other users -- but when you open that page up to the world (and Google) you can sell ads to everyone.

So my thought upon seeing a major change in privacy at Facebook was there must be a whiteboard in a Facebook office somewhere listing all the changes necessary to their privacy settings in order to maximize revenue. I'd guess there are maybe 20 items on the list, and it seems every few months they pluck a couple off the list and make it live. Sure, they're also releasing other features to offset the bad publicity of further privacy changes, but this excellent blog post and infographic (one of which is shown above) demonstrate exactly how they've progressed on implementing their changes over time. I'd guess at this point, they're about 3/4 of the way through that list.

Now I'm just waiting until the day an engineer at Facebook is fed up enough to take a photo of the Privacy Nightmare Punchlist whiteboard and post it on the web for all to see. It has to exist, but I'd still like to see it.

My personal feedback loops

As a sort of companion piece to the previous entry, I figured it might help other web writers to know what tools are available to them, as well as to possibly fill in some gaps I have in my own process (I bet someone reading this knows how to find info on the things I'm blanking on).

So there are several communities I'm familiar with that might republish or comment on something I've created and they are as follows:

1. Twitter
   1. tweets mentioning my username
   2. tweets mentioning my full name
   3. my tweets retweeted
   4. my tweets marked as a favorite
   5. mentions of my blog posts in twitter
2. Tumblr (any mentions of my posts)
3. FriendFeed (comments on my blog posts and/or tweets)
4. Delicious links leading to my blog
5. Google Reader
   1. Number of times and who shared a blog post of mine
   2. Any "shared with note" of my blog posts
   3. Times someone hit "Like" on my blog posts
   4. Any comments on my blog posts
6. Facebook (any comments or likes on my photos, blog posts, and/or tweets)
7. Flickr (any comments or favorites on my photos)
8. Other blogs linking to my posts
9. Google's Buzz? (mentions of my blog posts, tweets, photos, comments on them)

Now, here's my toolset.

For Twitter, I check my "mentions" within various Twitter clients as well as a search for my username "mathowie" and my full name. There's a new "your tweets, retweeted" feature only available on twitter.com itself (is it in the API yet? I haven't found any other clients with this information). I'm a bigger fan of favorites than retweets and I usually find enough info from favstar, where I look at my recent posts with favorites, but of course that's an outside service that scrapes the content and it's not complete (I've tried 2 or 3 other twitter favorite trackers and they all report different # of favorites and often show different people). The service BackTweets.com lets me track a feed of mentions of my blog URL in any tweet and it does a pretty good job.

For Tumblr and other blogs mentioning my posts, I use an old citations search at bloglines set to search all RSS feeds for my domain. I do this for several domains where I write stuff. Here's the search for my personal blog URL. I've used this tool for almost five years and it still does the trick.

I have an account at FriendFeed, and it thankfully just emails me when someone comments on anything in my feed, which is handy and direct (but could get annoying if it was more than once or twice a day).

At Delicious, I follow a network of 63 people that mark interesting stuff and sometimes my own stuff shows up there. If not, I can do a backlink search and save the resulting URL to see how many people liked it enough to save it and if they said anything about it. I wish the backlink search let me look for anything with my domain in it, but it is specific to every single bookmark but something is better than nothing there.

For Google Reader, I'm pretty much in the dark. I once tried out the Firefox extension feedly and was taken aback by the tool's overlay on my blog showing tons of Google Reader activity on every one of my posts. My initial reaction was "who the hell are all these people and why didn't I know they were talking about my stuff before?!" I'd like to see some tool beyond a special browser plugin or bookmarklet hack for aggregating Reader activity on my stuff because it's currently a blind spot.

Facebook is much the same way. Once in a great while I look at web stats and I might see a bunch of facebook.com referrers and sometimes (if it wasn't followed from their main page) I can figure out where something I wrote was mentioned. This is another feedback black hole.

Flickr offers the wonderful Recent Activity page that I loved so much I copied it for MetaFilter. It's pretty much the ultimate tool for finding what has happened with your content on the network and I hope other services are watching and following suit. I would love to see an internet-wide tool that worked like this to track stuff people have said about my writing/photos as well as any followups on comments I left on any other blog. Many companies have tried, no one has succeeded yet.

Google Buzz is another new mystery. Given people can post links there, I have no idea where, when, how or what they've said.

Conclusion

That's about it, and I know there are other communities like StumbleUpon, reddit, and Digg that might rate and/or comment on my work, but I generally don't feel like tracking them and only occasionally see them pop up in web stats.

I'm aware it may seem like I'm sitting here pushing 25 buttons like a Skinner box every hour trying to figure out if people like my stuff, but really most of this stuff is automated as RSS feeds in Google Reader, so I can just pull up GR and see that maybe two new tweets mentioned my blog, four tumblr blogs reblogged something I said, etc.

If anyone has any tips on how to track your own URL mentions in Facebook or Google Reader (or Buzz), I'm all ears.

Broken feedback loops

Last summer I wrote this quick quip on twitter about my frustrations with Google Reader and Facebook comments:

Many years ago, people started building weblog ranking lists and then weblog search engines and eventually we had a rich set of tools that let you know what someone was saying about something you posted online. At first, these were often dubbed "ego search" and there were comparisons to navel gazing that early bloggers (myself included) were known for.

Over the years I realized tracking mentions of your work across the web wasn't merely for the ego stroke, it was quite a valuable bit of feedback. In addition to the direct feedback you might get on a post through your own comments system, following mentions in Technorati, RSS search engines (I still use bloglines' citations to do URL searches of my domains), and Delicious (which offers a simple backlink search) gave a broader picture of what people liked and disliked about your work. On places like Flickr that are more about sharing photos and sometimes about the nature of learning photography, direct feedback is key to becoming better at what you do.

Today Buzz launched and I realized my annoyance expressed last July was going to get amplified again as there was yet another new channel that could chop up any piece of micro-content I've produced and let people comment, rate, and share it without me having any remote knowledge of it unless I happen to follow someone that interacted with it. It's just like how Facebook doesn't inform me that this very blog post might be shared as a link there, and maybe 7 people hit the "Like" button and maybe there are five comments on it there that I can't answer because I don't know it exists. Google Reader, as much as I love it as a tool for reading blogs, suffers the same issues.

Let me be clear this isn't an ownership issue, it's not a frail ego issue, and it's not that I don't love remixing (I do!). My point is when there are half a dozen places someone can hit a like button or mark as a favorite or leave a comment that I have no knowledge of, the feedback loop is broken. 

When I think about the years I've learned to become a more concise writer and a better photographer by throwing shit online and gathering feedback, then repeating the cycle again, I'm dismayed to see all these new tools that lack appropriate feedback mechanisms that can relay information back to the original authors.

So to future application creators I ask that you simply respect the creators of content and help them improve by offering notification, search, and/or backlink capabilities so it's possible for someone to see where their creations end up. I know it's a lot easier to just consider it all "output" within your application, but the internet is a great communication medium not just for relaying information from anyone to anywhere on earth, but for also making it a dialogue between reader and writer. 

Don't break the feedback loop. 

Update: It might help other writers and photographers to know what tools I use (that you might not be aware of) as feedback loops. Here's a follow-up post about that.

Fun with Foursquare

I know I'm about two years late to this, but I'm really digging Foursquare. I remember meeting the guys behind Dodgeball in NYC before it was acquired by Google, and seeing how people used the service, but it seemed like an idea that could only fly in a densely populated place like Manhattan with its plethora of choices of things to do.

Fast forward a few years and I load up the foursquare client on my phone for the hell of it and notice that most of the downtown restaurants in my little neck of the woods an hour from Portland, Oregon are all listed with mayors, tips, and everything else. As I've driven around Portland and flown down to Southern California, I've been constantly surprised at the depth of coverage and wealth of tips available in larger cities.

The app is fun and using it is very much a game, but what I'm most interested in is how it's both a useful utility, but also has personality because it's basically crowd-sourced information from regular people. Similar services like Yelp feel more like a yellow pages with comments thrown in, where Foursquare is the exact opposite: it feels like a giant community blog with some maps thrown in.

As their database fills out, I'm interested in all the ways it could be harnessed for other applications. I could totally see a Fuelly/Foursquare mashup where you both check-in at a gas station you're fuelling up at and you can add your mileage stats to Fuelly at the same time.

Anyway, I know it's been around a while and is old news to every friend in San Francisco and NYC, but the app is useful even in the 'burbs and rural places now that more people are using it. I'd say it's officially hit mainstream.

Oh also: two quick tips. Connect your profile to Twitter and Facebook, but be sure to turn off automatic status update check-ins. Those are almost always annoying to your followers. Second tip: only add friends you've dined with in real life. The app automatically exposes your mobile phone number to your friends list which is a new level of intimacy for most social software. So unless you want to get rung up by random internet strangers from every other social network you're on, keep your friends list tighter than usual.

Notes from the Future: SSD instead of hard drives

I'm writing this on my Mac Pro that feels like a new computer thanks to the SSD (solid state drive) memory that replaced my existing hard drive. A friend of mine used to talk about this idea ten years ago -- that someday RAM and flash memory would get so cheap you'd be able to fit an entire operating system on it, making it magnitudes faster than current computers. Thanks to the past decade of ever cheaper and larger memory sticks, cards, and RAM, we're finally at that moment. SSD drives are now available in sizes big enough for boot drives (including your operating system and space for apps), are available for many laptops & desktops, and start at just a couple hundred bucks.

Today I finished putting a 128Gb Crucial SSD drive in my newer Mac Pro. It was simple and the results are amazing. The hardest part was dealing with a new 128Gb SSD drive compared to my current main 1Tb hard drive. Thankfully I had a spare 1Tb drive to move all the music, movies, downloads, and document files to in order to get the operating system and application files down well below 128Gb in size. Next, I took my new SSD drive out of the package, opened my Mac, slid out hard drives, plugged the drive into a spare optical drive connector, and put it all back. Then I used SuperDuper to clone my now smaller main hard drive to the new drive, set it as the new boot drive, and rebooted. I followed the basic approach outlined in this tutorial (ignore the use of apps describe there) and was done, start to finish in less than 40 minutes (attaching the drive took 5 minutes, data copying took 33 minutes).

Overall, booting up takes about 1/3 as long. Applications launch in a second or two (even the bloated ones). Everything feels amazingly snappy, in the way that replacing a 5+ year old computer with a new one feels. About the only tip I'd give is that 64Gb is probably enough for most people if you can get iPhoto, iTunes, and all your large file storage to a separate drive. My SSD is barely using 25Gb for the entire OS, about 10Gb of applications, and assorted other files sitting on my desktop. I bought a larger drive just to be safe but I'm not sure it was necessary.

Currently, I'd put preparing your computer and installing SSD at the fairly technical nerd level but given that laptops with SSD pre-installed have been available for the past couple years it's only a matter of time before desktop computers start shipping with them. To any of my friends considering this, it's totally worth doing.

UPDATE: Jon Deal wrote me an amazing email last night detailing how to move the home directory to a new location using some command-line mojo and a hidden advanced user account feature I didn't know existed. He put it online last night here. It worked perfectly for me and saves a lot of headaches. I actually could have done this before I installed the SSD and before I shrank down the files/directories on my main drive to fit onto a SSD.

Odd Technology

I discovered a new first world problem. I called a friend's mobile phone while he was at home and we were discussing things for ten minutes or so. Then his spouse arrived home from a trip to the store and parked the car inside their garage. My call ended suddenly and I was a bit confused.

Later, I found out that as the car entered the garage, my friend's mobile automatically connected to it via his stored Bluetooth profile. His spouse was suddenly hearing my half of the conversation on the car's stereo speakers. She panicked, and hit the call end button on the steering wheel.

It felt like one of the weirdest edge case technology problems possible.

Scalable personal IT for non-geeks?

Last month, I hung out with a friend from college that was impressed by the gadgets I carried and how I used them, but didn't have the spare time necessary to set everything up like I have (stuff like moving downloaded movie files to a TV for viewing, being able to check 5 email accounts on your iphone using gmail/imap, etc).

After each explanation of how I set things up grew increasingly longer, I realized there's probably a simple business model in place for a Personal IT staff kind of thing for regular users of technology that aren't uber geeks. I picture something that isn't the Geek Squad (they only do work piecemeal, right?) but is more like a subscription service, maybe $20 a month, where you as a customer can basically get your home computer and mobile phone updated remotely with the latest time-saving tweaks. I bet someone that reads lifehacker religiously, can do IT and PC Support work, and could figure out a way to do it remotely (either remote desktop sessions, or having customers' computers phone home to grab updates and configuration scripts) could build a pretty nice business off of it.

Is there anything like this out there today?