15 Aug 2005
Now that I don't work there anymore, I can point to this other blog I created/wrote for: http://www.gildblog.com. I think it came out ok, considering I know nothing about the "leadership development" field. But, considering I don't think anyone else in the company did either, maybe that's not surprising.
WebMailCompose is a fantastic Firefox extension. Now I can click on mailto: links and have them pop open a Gmail compose window. Quite handy when you're job hunting on craigslist.
Speaking of job hunting, I'm not really sure what I want to do. But I've found some interesting stuff out there, so maybe I'll get lucky. In the meantime, I'm probably going to try to get my blog to come up first when you search for me via google. Or at least close to first. So I'll throw a link into myself: Ryan Toohil.
05 Aug 2005
Not trying to bury the lede, but last week pretty much my whole department got laid off. Exciting times. Honestly, I didn't really want to be there, so it wasn't terribly surprising nor disconcerting. The writing was on the wall when they completely cut the funding for the project I had been brought in to work on. I'll write more about this someday. The events over the past 1.5 years are ripe for many a posting.
Still, I liked the people I worked with, so that part sucked. I decided to follow the example of one of my co-workers from my previous job, who had set up a Yahoo! Group so ex-employees could easily keep in touch. It works really well, and Yahoo! had bought out eGroups (I think that is who it was) and built up a little more onto the interface. And the price is right -- free.
So I set it up and invited some co-workers. Or ex-co-workers I guess. Smooth as silk. Then I say to myself "Hmm, I'd love to be able to add this to My Yahoo! page or my aggregator of choice." I do a few searches and lo! Yahoo! Groups support RSS! Fantastic. The help page says to go to the Group homepage and there should be both an XML and Add to My Yahoo! badge.
Negative.
I search around, try to figure out what setting I need to tweak. Finally, I stumble upon it -- in the Yahoo! Groups help section it mentions that if your messages aren't set to public, you can't get the RSS feed and cannot add to My Yahoo!.
That makes no sense to me. Surely the RSS feed can live behind authentication, just like 90% of the other Yahoo! features, right? Why can't groups with private messages simply have RSS feeds that require authentication. For 95% of users, they're going to access the feed through their My Yahoo! page anyway, so they will already be authenticated, i.e. they won't ever realize that they need to be authenticated to consume the feed because they have to be authenticated to use their aggregator anyway. For everyone else, if they're smart enough to setup an aggregator, surely they can figure out how to access a private feed. I mean, I can do it for my Gmail, why not for my Yahoo! Groups?
Anyway, I'm going to throw this out here and hope that Jeremy Zawodny or Jeffrey McManus are doing Pubsub or Technorati or Feedster searches for their names. I guess email would be the normal way, but I don't want to add noise to (what I assume) are already overflowing mailboxes.
26 Jul 2005
How's that for a lame title?
Anyway, big news yesterday in Yahoo! buying Konfabulator. Konfabulator is this nifty little dashboard tool where you can install little dynamic javascript widgets onto your desktop.
The recent rev of Mac OS X built Konfabulator-type functionality directly into the OS. Thankfully, the Konfabulator folk released a Windows version to supplement their existing Mac version. Then Yahoo! bought them and made it free.
As free products go, this is pretty amazingly cool. I've set mine up to emulate the dashboard feature of OS X, using the Konspose option of the Konfabulator. I hit F8 and get to see a nifty dashboard with a calendar, a rotating picture, some traffic, and some weather. I really want a traffic widget like the one Yahoo! built for the Mac dashboard. If I get bored (and it's not 100 degrees in my home office) I might try to build it myself.
It's pretty cool that companies like Yahoo! and Google are buying up these little apps like Konfabulator and Picasa and then just releasing them into the wild for free. I assume they'll have some sort of advertising model coming, but maybe the plan is just to try to achieve some brand lock-in, bringing folks over to their search engine, where they can rake in the advertising dollars. In any event, it works out pretty well for the user, getting all sorts of nifty tools for free.
08 Jul 2005
I'm a published author (well, co-author) and I didn't even realize it until today.
Win it for...: What a World Championship Means to Generations of Red Sox Fans
Page 128-129. I'm going to have to buy myself a copy.
08 Jul 2005
The company I work at now is sort of involved in the conference/learning area. We put on these big events (they refuse to call them conferences, but that's what they are) where they get some big name speakers to come in and give some keynotes, and then setup smaller sessions for more intimate learning. It's your pretty typical conference model.
I've never quite gotten why people really enjoy conferences - most keynotes tend to be pretty cold and mundane, minus the "local flavor" -- you know, where the speaker will throw in some mention of what group s/he's speaking in front of. The smaller sessions are certainly better, but they often run much more towards the subtle sales pitch -- "here's how you do X, which requires our wonderful product." For the most part, any enjoyment comes out of the networking and being in a different place.
With no segue, I move onto podcasting. I've been on the podcast bandwagon for a while. It's a simple idea and it just works, and now that podcasts are supported in iTunes 4.9, it's going to catch on with the mainstream.
How are these things related? Well ... there's a nice little site called IT Conversations, pretty much run by a guy named Doug Kaye. At that site is a whole bunch of keynotes, panels, meetings, and whatever you can think of that is related to the technology profession. In fact, there's a handful of keynotes by speakers who are speaking or have spoken at my company's conferences. What's so novel about this? The audio is free. You simply subscribe to the podcast (or just download the audio directly) and you get all of these great speeches for free. No travel, no cost, no BS. If you listen to a bit and don't like it, you don't have to feel weird about walking out in the middle; you just delete it.
Still, this is just sort of a blip on the radar screen. IT Conversations doesn't cover the whole gamut of disciplines. Enter Doug Kaye, part 2. He's recently announced plans to start recording and delivering audio from speeches, meetings, and conversations from wherever he can. Cross-discipline, cross-everything.
Basically, he's going to obviate the need to go to a traditional conference.
Sure, some speakers won't allow themselves to be recorded. But, over time, conferences are going to shift to the "unconference model", where the speaker isn't really a speaker, but instead a collaborator in a larger discussion. And when that happens, when that becomes the norm (and the success of Gnomedex makes that seem like it will be sooner rather than later), speakers won't be able to dictate those terms. They'll be invited to attend like everyone else and if they want to keep their standing as a thought-leader, they'll go and go willingly.
Some company is going to realize this and make a killing by starting to exploit these trends before they become commonplace. Rather than selling the keynotes as keynotes, they'll sell them as participants. It'll be "look who's attending" rather than "look who's speaking." Gnomedex already does this, and they sell out every year. But it doesn't seem to happen outside of the technology space.
Soon, you'll have the decision to attend a conference and meet and interact with these big brains, or participate online, or download and listen to it all later on your mp3 player. Someone (Apple) will probably even throw a nice business model on it where you can download speeches and panel discussions for 99 cents. Read a cool book by Malcolm Gladwell -- go download a couple of his keynotes/meetings and hear what he has to say on other topics.
I don't know. It all seems pretty obvious to me, which probably means it'll happen nothing like this.
27 Jun 2005
I've generally been happy with my Sprint PCS service. I'm on an older plan, and only on my third phone in about 6 years. I get enough coverage up here in the Boston area that I can not pay for a landline. It works out nicely.
I'd never really had a problem with service until the last couple of months. I've had a couple of higher phone bills. Now, most of these calls are to other Sprint numbers. Most people have unlimited PCS-to-PCS calling on their plans. I don't (or didn't), because my plan is an older one.
Anyway, I finally take the time to go to the Sprint site and poke around to see how much it is to add PCS-to-PCS calling to my plan. It's 5 bucks a month.
5 dollars.
Son of a bitch.
Now, this is my own stupidity. I will readily admit that. Here's the thing: really good companies will go out of their way to save their customers from their customers' own stupidity.
How hard would it be for Sprint to have noticed an uptick in my PCS phone calls, give me a call, and say "Hey, we've noticed some increased usage on your plan. You'll save a lot of money next month if you add this option to your bill"? Then I'd go, "damn, that's a great idea, please take more of my money each month", and then I'd follow that up and probably post this post, but with a positive spin about how proactive and helpful Sprint was in saving me from my own jackassishness.
Instead, I'm stupid. But I can legitimately call Sprint stupid too. Because they made an extra $50 bucks on me. They just better hope that this post doesn't cost them a single subscriber. If it does, they just made a negative expectation play.
20 Jun 2005
How did I miss the boat on this one?
It's probably because I don't take as many digital pictures as I used to, now that my digital camera is about 5 years old. At some point I'll shell out the bucks for a new one, but in the interim, I've just been using the camera in my cell phone to take crappy, random pics.
Back in the day, I used Firehand Ember to manage my pictures. It did thumbnails and made it easy to browse around. When I built a new computer, I didn't bother to get any image management software. I just drilled through the directories by hand, or used Flickr to manage my photos.
I'd heard about Picasa a bunch. About how great it was, about how it's the best photo management tool, and how it's free. Google bought it, rev'd it, and gave it away. I just never jumped on board.
So I'm listening to The Chris Pirillo Show podcast over the weekend. He's talking about his digital camera. Someone asks what software he uses to manage his pictures and he starts to talk about Picasa. Since I was actually at my computer, and not listening in the car or at work like I normally am, I downloaded Picasa with the intention of messing around with it.
Last night, I install it. The interface is pretty clean and looks really nice. But then the magic happens. After it grabs all of my images, I'm able to scroll through thumbnails of thousands of images in just seconds. There's no lag. The rendering is nearly instanteous. The email integration is insanely cool, especially if you use GMail.
Honestly, it's such a simple application that I should be geeking out over it so much. But it's awesome. It does what it is supposed to do, and it does it extremely well, with a really good interface and really good performance. There is so little software these days that does that.
I'm hoping to mess around with some of the labeling features and explore the rest of the application to see what other features are waiting for me to discover.
Anyway, it's rare that a software application comes along and gets you to want to do something more often. Picasa's made me think about throwing some new batteries in the old DC240 and taking some new pictures.
20 Jun 2005
How did I miss the boat on this one?
It's probably because I don't take as many digital pictures as I used to, now that my digital camera is about 5 years old. At some point I'll shell out the bucks for a new one, but in the interim, I've just been using the camera in my cell phone to take crappy, random pics.
Back in the day, I used Firehand Ember to manage my pictures. It did thumbnails and made it easy to browse around. When I built a new computer, I didn't bother to get any image management software. I just drilled through the directories by hand, or used Flickr to manage my photos.
I'd heard about Picasa a bunch. About how great it was, about how it's the best photo management tool, and how it's free. Google bought it, rev'd it, and gave it away. I just never jumped on board.
So I'm listening to The Chris Pirillo Show podcast over the weekend. He's talking about his digital camera. Someone asks what software he uses to manage his pictures and he starts to talk about Picasa. Since I was actually at my computer, and not listening in the car or at work like I normally am, I downloaded Picasa with the intention of messing around with it.
Last night, I install it. The interface is pretty clean and looks really nice. But then the magic happens. After it grabs all of my images, I'm able to scroll through thumbnails of thousands of images in just seconds. There's no lag. The rendering is nearly instanteous. The email integration is insanely cool, especially if you use GMail.
Honestly, it's such a simple application that I should be geeking out over it so much. But it's awesome. It does what it is supposed to do, and it does it extremely well, with a really good interface and really good performance. There is so little software these days that does that.
I'm hoping to mess around with some of the labeling features and explore the rest of the application to see what other features are waiting for me to discover.
Anyway, it's rare that a software application comes along and gets you to want to do something more often. Picasa's made me think about throwing some new batteries in the old DC240 and taking some new pictures.
14 Jun 2005
Dave Winer (man behind RSS and a bunch of other cool stuff) has been talking about OPML and outliners for a while on his blog. He's been slowly leaking details about his outliner application, including posting images of simple dialog boxes recently.
Why am I mentioning this?
Because I'm utterly fascinated by a product that I have no frigging idea of what it does.
I kinda grok the whole idea behind OPML. Right now, it's predominantly used to carry RSS subscription info, but from what I've been able to gather, it really is just a general XML format for carrying outline data. Nothing terribly sexy there.
I get what an outline is. I use them almost every day. So the idea of an outliner is pretty familiar. Again, nothing sexy here.
But what feels new and interesting on this whole thing is the slow leak of info. It's not a completely transparent process, but it's close. The general public isn't getting snapshots of code to play with, or even a quick little screenshot demo to understand how it all works together. Instead, we're getting a drip-drip-drip of interesting snippets. Stuff about buddy lists and random dialog boxes and collaboration and subscribing. For whatever reason, this particular marketing method (and really, that's what it has been, even if that's not the sole intention) has completely captured my attention.
I feel like I've caught the trailer for a new movie or the synopsis of the season finale of The Shield. I'm dying for more info ... some spoilers on what might be coming. I can't wait to find out more, and that's really a great way to market a new product.
Then again, I was always the kid who ransacked the closets to find out what I was getting for Christmas. So maybe this method of marketing just particularly resonates with me--seeing the drip of info flow through my aggregator is like finding random toy ads hidden around the house. Each bit gets me more determined to find out more.
04 Jun 2005
Holy crap, Lake Tahoe is gorgeous!
