Joe's video, etc.

Financial reports big as a phonebook

2009-07-30T15:29:00.002-04:00

Click to Play

Today I in the mail, I received a dose of the financial reports that I've come to expect from various funds and stocks that I'm invested in. The one from Barclay's Captial just offended me. It's as thick as a local phonebook and has densely printed prose, tables and graphs on every page. My question is, who on earth is going to read any of that? This is a horrible waste of natural resources and simply denudes forests to fill up landfills. All this information is undoubtedly online but the default seems to be paper mail. I'm guessing there's some law about disclosure that requires financial firms to publish these tomes. It wouldn't suprise me if it was sponsored by the paper lobby!

Here's your snow, @Danacea :)

2008-02-22T16:01:00.001-05:00

Click to Play

My Twitter-friend @Danacea (Danie Ware) is always wishing for "proper snow" where she lives in England, but never seems to get her wish. So, since we're having one of our relatively infrequent snows here on the shore in Connecticut today, I thought I'd make a little video for her amusement. Enjoy watching me slave away moving that white stuff Danie!

The Boulevard Diner, Worcester, MA

2008-01-24T19:04:00.001-05:00

Click to Play

Today, I was privileged to join Diner Aficionados Scott Monty and CC Chapman on a very fun road trip to Worcester, Massachusetts to visit The Boulevard Diner on Shrewsbury St.

The Boulevard is an authentic old railroad diner car built right in Worcester (Worcester Lunch Car Co. #730 built in 1936). I and my fraternity brothers used to visit the Boulevard, a 24 hr, 6 days/wk, establishment in the wee hours after parties when I was an engineering undergrad at WPI in the late 60s. That's right folks, I used to go there 40 years ago, and it is almost exactly like it was those decades ago.

In those days, my favorite order was an Italian sausage sandwich and a chocolate milk. I ordered the same today and, except for the price, it has also changed very little. Still hearty and delicious. Scott had the steak and cheese, and CC went for his diner touchstone meal, the meatloaf.
Scott and CC's diner blog is Nothing Could Be Finer Than Being in Your Diner and I also posted a photo set on Flickr

A couple of suggestions for improving Seesmic

2007-12-30T14:04:00.000-05:00

Loic,
First off, congratulations on seesmic's popularity. It's certainly attracting a lot of attention and a lot of users, myself included.

But as a developer and former CTO myself, I think seesmic could become even more successful if its implementation was simplified and its basic utility filled out a little better. Here are two suggestions I think might make a big difference.

Ditch all the Flash except for video rendering

Yeah, the rotating lists and animation are fancy, but all that "flashturbation" devours processor cycles and memory. While on seesmic, my browser will frequently pin the processor at 100% for minutes at a time, and gobble up nearly 120 megabytes of page-file usage.

Except for the video rendering and its play/pause controls, you would make a LOT of friends by going to an XHTML/CSS/javascript implementation. Memory usage would be reduced and performance would certainly improve, perhaps dramatically. Forget all the cute list animation. Those lists frequently screw up and overwrite, or stall and lock up the browser.

Include some way to find users so I can follow them

It's nearly impossible to locate a user's account page unless you can find a post they've made in the public timeline.

Finding a user could be done several ways. Here are two:

A search window.
Something like Twitter's convention of recognizing a simple URL that contains the users handle. (i.e., http://twitter.com/joec0914).

Thanks for listening!

What are your most visited Social Networking Sites?

2007-12-15T09:38:00.000-05:00

I'm doing a little research and would like to know what your top social networking or social media sites are. I especially want to know about sites that have some concept of "friend" or "follower" or "contact". That is, sites that let you create relationships with other people on the site. I'll give you my faves for starters:

* Twitter
* Flickr
* Seesmic
* Facebook
* YouTube

You can reply in the comments to this post, on Twitter by @ or DM to "joec0914", or by email to joec0914 [at] gmail.com. All respondents will get an invitation to test a new site in a few weeks.

Thank you!!

Wanted: Rails web designer/HTML coder

2007-12-05T17:21:00.000-05:00

I have a little social media/network project of my own going that I'm building in Ruby on Rails. I am a veteran software engineer, project leader and former CTO of a successful medical imaging company. I can design and code circles around most anyone, and have been doing object-oriented design and architecture since the term was invented in the 80s. I have taken multiple product ideas from initial prototype to product. But... in all my years of work, I never really had a talent for web page design or learned the ins and outs of CSS, client-side scripting, etc. That always seemed to be someone else's job.

If you know Rails, you know that building the "view" pages requires graphic design talent, a good knowledge of HTML/CSS and just a smidgen of Ruby/Rails to call the controller functions to fill out the content. The controller and model code is something I am very comfortable with, although I'm still learning Ruby. But creating a decent looking, easy-to-use web page that works for all browsers is something I have neither the artistic talent nor the time to pick up from scratch on my own, although I would love, love to learn about it.

I am looking for someone who does have those design and HTML skills to work with me on this project. In a sense, I'll trade my programming knowledge, if you care to pick it up, for your page and site building knowledge.

Make no mistake, this is a no-pay, sweat equity, bootstrap proposition. In return for a reasonable share in whatever may come of this idea, I need really no more than a few hours a week of your time to carry the ball on the design and HTML end. I have no VC nor angel funding, nor do I want any at this time. I can afford to work for myself and finance an initial alpha site for a while, but I need your design and HTML expertise to do it.

If you're interested, email me at joec0914 [at] gmail.com and have some examples of your work that I can take a look at.

Making chili

2007-11-18T19:21:00.001-05:00

Click to Play

I make a pretty mean chili, and since it's Sunday in NFL season, and the Patriots are playing tonight, I thought I'd make up a batch. If you watch the whole thing, you'll find out what my secret ingredient is.

The Power To Un-Follow

2007-11-17T07:49:00.000-05:00

From the "What Hath Twitter Wrought?" department, we offer a few thoughts on the ability to block someone out of your on-line life, and the effect this has on both individual and community behavior.

In Twitter, as in other on-line social media/networking communities, you can choose whose messages you see and whose you don't. There are also features to hide what you say from anyone you don't specifically befriend and to completely prevent someone from sending you anything, even a form request to befriend you. These features give users complete control over who they listen to, and who can listen to, or even contact them. It's completely opt-in. No one has any "right" to throw anything at you that you don't want.

This has led to a quite enjoyable environment, and an evolution of groups of people who mutually befriend each other, and share the same sense of proper behavior. There aren't any "haters" on Twitter that last longer than a couple of days because everyone else simply stops following them.

Now, you might argue that this leads to groups who only agree with each other and shut out what they don't want to hear. To an extent this is true. Most of the people in my group of roughly 220 followers/followees I think tend to be politically liberal and tend not to discuss religion or politics. But it is not so much what you say on Twitter as how you say it. We were just commenting last night that we do have a mix of political and religious sentiment across the group, but people tend to not rant, accuse or polarize discussions. That isn't to say it doesn't happen from time to time. I'm probably one of the worst offenders, to tell the truth, but we all endeavor to keep our emotions in check and cut each other considerable slack, realizing that every once in a while something will touch a nerve and we just have to blow off a little steam. I can tell I've done that when almost no one replies to what I've said. The silence is a pretty good indication that you've gone a bit overboard and need to watch what you're saying.

The worst fate on Twitter is to not be followed. It's the online equivalent of the Old World practice of shunning. I've lost a follower or two in my time and it's not a pleasant experience.

And companies that try to join Twitter, befriend a zillion people and then spam them with output-only announcements never make it out of the batter's box. Almost nobody follows them. So, this has the effect of companies not even trying to spam, because it's just not worth the effort.

So what I've discovered from Twitter's "rules of engagement" is that giving people absolute control of what they hear and see is good thing. It's not a sin to be able to shut out people who act badly. It makes people a little more considerate and well-behaved. I think it's the answer to blog comment spam, too.

Twitter Survey

2007-11-04T23:34:00.000-05:00

Would you take a minute to comment on these questions/opinions? I'm thinking if we get enough inspired commentary we might actually get some answers out of Twitter about why they have such a hard time just keeping the service running.

1. I find the current lag in postings to be very detrimental to the whole concept and usefulness of Twitter. If there is a 20 minute delay between the time I post something and everyone else seeing it, then it's at least 40 minutes before I can see anyone's response to what I say. This can be particularly debilitating when we are relying on Twitter at conferences or to stay in touch when meeting up.

2. There are parts of Twitter that eat performance but in my mind, serve no useful purpose. The matrix of tiny avatars to the right of the Tweet listing is of no use to me because they are not arranged in any useful or understandable order and it doesn't show them all anyway. I'd say get rid of it if it would help performance.

3. Do you have any information about why Twitter just can't seem to make their site work properly and with good performance? This is not exactly untrodden ground. There are lots of very smart people who know how to performance engineer a site so it runs fast. Is it the SMS gateways that are the problem? WHAT IS IT? I so wish they would just level with us.

Please comment on these questions or add your own thoughts. What would you like to see changed, added, improved or removed?

PodCamp Boston 2

2007-10-28T23:57:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Just a little bit of video from PodCamp Boston. I thought the venue was great, with lots of mingling area right outside the meeting rooms. Who is that kookie girl mugging at the camera? :)

Boston Startup Weekend 2007 - Saturday afternoon

2007-10-21T10:29:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Over the course of this weekend, a group of people of varied talents and experience are attempting to build the first version of a for-profit website. It's called Startup Weekend Boston.

They started Friday and are still working as I upload this on Sunday morning. I know a few of the people involved, so I drove up Saturday afternoon and spent a little time getting some video tastes of what's going on. It's impressive what you can do in a few hours when you really put your mind to it, and most importantly forget about all the organizational and political bullshit that goes on in most corporate development. When everyone is most concerned and personally committed to getting things done rather than polishing their own apple, things happen quickly.

The first job was to come up with the product idea and give it name. They chose DeskHappy and have the site up and running now at DeskHappy.com It will remind people to take periodic stretching breaks and lead them, using video and text, through a short yoga routine at each break. Startup Weekends take place in different cities. Check it out at StartupWeekend.com

Why can't Twitter get its act together?

2007-10-09T21:36:00.000-04:00

I've blogged here about being a Twitter addict and it's true, I am. I love Twitter for the spontaneity, the friendships, the fun, and the coerced brevity. But honestly, why can't they make it work better? I've been on Twitter since early this year. I think I signed up during SXSW, when a lot of others did. So that's about 7 months. And in that time there have been almost no improvements in performance or reliability. I still get the "bluebird" page many times a day, indicating their servers couldn't respond.

There are still stupid little bugs that would take almost no time to fix; for instance, the long-tweet-with-no-spaces-bug. When someone posts a Tweet that is long and contains no spaces (or possibly other delimiters) it causes the page to extend tweet text under the sidebar on the right.

And how about the long-festering no-update-on-follow bug? That happens when you follow someone, but the page never updates. You get the perpetual busy-cycling icon on the top right of the page. Refreshing the page fixes it. That seems to me to be a simple Ajax bug.

C'mon guys, that's like a couple lines of code to fix. Why are you monkeying around with format, font and style sheet changes when there are real problems to fix?

Why can't you get the performance and reliability stabilized? This is not rocket science, guys. Sites like google mail, amazon, and facebook are much more complex in data structure and demanding in functionality, yet they perform with virtually no downtime or lost inputs.

I've analyzed and modeled your information structure. It's not that complicated. You seem to have engineering cycles to redesign your UI and add new functionality. Why in the world can't you just do some simple performance optimization instead of futzing around with surface appearance?

You've got a great concept here, Twitter, just please make it work.

Breakfast today

2007-10-06T12:29:00.000-04:00

My Twitter peeps seem to enjoy my describing and photographing the food we make at home. We put a lot of design time and then money into making our kitchen a place where you could be comfortable cooking. So, here are some photos I took this morning of us preparing scrambled eggs with seared kielbasa and scallions, with a side of pumpkin bread my wife made last night.

Click To Play

They say a restaurant doesn't sell steak, it sells the sizzle, so I included a little bit of video of the kielbasa and scallions cooking. Enjoy!

In go the eggs!

The finished product. Yum!!

Social Media Breakfast 2

2007-10-05T10:41:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

I got up really early in the morning to drive up to Boston (Waltham, actually) to go to Social Media Breakfast 2. Here's a little video I took of the crowd mingling at the start, and some of Larry Weber's talk. Larry is CEO of Digital Influence Group, who sponsored the event and made their very nice office available for us. Thanks DIG!

Also here are some stills I shot that are posted over on Flickr.

Julia Roy livestreamed the breakout session with Dave Cutler in the adjoining conference room.

Bryan Person has a real talent for thinking up great meetup ideas. Social Media Breakfast is one of them. Good on ya, Bryan! Can't wait for the next one.

Email after Twitter

2007-09-19T17:56:00.000-04:00

This in response to topic #81 on Chris Brogan's blog post today. Some stream-of-consciousness, Twitter-like, rough-cut gems on how the Twitter experience might lead to a new email.

<=140 chars and no spam has really taught us something.
there is life without unsolicited messages
pithiness rules
My friend Jill never reads beyond the first line, anyway
one to one message vs. blog post. what's the diff?
expectation of immediate response
interruptability, we live interrupt-driven lives. Didn't used to be that way.
multi-processing by interrupt - the modern way.
leads to abuse of the interrupt
leads to abuse of the channel
leads to abuse of the commons
the first-contact problem - is it really a problem?
spammers will abuse and try to exploit every open first-contact channel and eventually ruin it.
it happened with uunet news and it's happening with email.
are pure white-lists (ala RSS) the only answer? That's how twitter works.
can we survive without the ability to send a message to someone who doesn't already know us?
on twitter that's restricted to a "friend-request". No content, just canned message.
it's all very web 2.0. you can't "push" your message anymore.
everything's RSS, it's pull-only. People find out through friends and FOFs.
in a pure whitelist system, you are very careful about what you send because you don't want to be un-friended
you see? it's not just the properties of the channel, it's how people use and react to them
do you miss out on people you'd otherwise know? maybe, but are they worth knowing anyway?
Is anyone who has to contact you without prior introduction EVER worth talking to?
How did it work before email?
People didn't get interrupted.
They worked on things they thought important until they decided to switch.
You couldn't interrupt them with the expectation that you'd get immediate service.
How did contractors work before cell phones, which allow you interrupt them?
Big question: is instantaneous interrupt-communication really more productive?
could we build ships in 90 days like they did in WW2? I doubt it. That takes concentration.
How did anyone work before telephones? What about the answering machine?
In addtion to asynchronous telephone communication, it also provided spam (ie, telemarketer) screening.
should all telephone service be billed like cell service so telemarketers can be blocked?
At bottom, is there any value to unsolicited communication?
Can you live and thrive with only info you actively seek?
Is advertising or unsolicited communication worth anything?
would newspaper ads or TV commercials be sufficient?
new soc-net messaging is white-list only. No spam, people LOVE it.
no, douche-bag, adding me doesn't mean I'll add you. Fuck off.
are people are realizing, in the web 2.0 world, you don't need advertising? it's unnecessary?
people listen to their friends, not to unsolicited advertisers.
spam taught us that. that's why soc-nets don't allow it, and why people love them.

conclusion: a new email that was white-list only would probably be successful.

Visit with Len Edgerly at Ocean Park, Maine

2007-08-27T23:41:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

We visited with Len Edgerly at his oceanfront cottage in Ocean Park, Maine, which is just south of Old Orchard Beach. Len, you were the perfect host, and we thank you for your hospitality.

Open source - a purer meritocracy?

2007-08-15T03:29:00.000-04:00

One effective way to combat insomnia and get back to sleep is to read technical articles. Tonight I was engaged in this exercise reading an article called Why Ruby on Rails Succeeded. If you don't know, Ruby on Rails is a web application framework written in the programming language Ruby. Both Ruby and Rails are open-source projects, meaning they're free to use and the source is openly distributed under a license that requires (not just encourages) that modifications be similarly distributed and never charged for.

So you might ask yourself why anyone would ever pour massive amounts of effort into something without getting paid to do it. The answer is simple, because they can do what they want to do, not what some manager, bug review board or marketing suit told them to. They can do what they think will be good for users (which they frequently are) or will make the code simpler, faster or easier to maintain. If what they do really is better, as proved by it being widely adopted and actually used, then their personal stock rises in the community and their worth as a for-pay programmer rises as well. But more importantly, their own self-respect rises.

This is one thing that open source programming shares with on-line video, podcasts and blogs. People do it because they enjoy it and because it makes them feel good about themselves.

And I think this unpaid, create-for-free open market of ideas, software and entertainment is a purer form of meritocracy than the for-profit, rapaciously competitive corporate world. Why? Because it's not controlled by money, it's controlled by quality. Good things become popular because they're good, not because they have a multi-million dollar ad campaign behind them, or because their producer paid a cable company or search engine to give it top billing.

And if nothing else, it's certainly a much more pleasant place to spend one's time.

Boston/NYC Tweetup BBQ - Part 2

2007-08-13T06:43:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Continuing with the pile of video I took at the BBQ on Saturday, Aug. 11. This is a discussion of groups on Twitter. 5 mins.

Boston/NYC Tweetup BBQ - Part 1

2007-08-12T19:39:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

This is the first of probably three posts of video I took at a most excellent BBQ Tweetup at my house on Saturday, Aug. 11, 2007. In attendance were Rod and Joy Begbie, Jesse Baer, Critt Jarvis, Jack Hodgson, Adam Green, Laura Fitton, Bryan Person, Cathleen Rittereiser, yours truly and my wife Barb.

The conversations around the table were great, and ranged from of course, techie stuff, to baseball and golf. A spendid time was had by all, I think. Adam Green even brought some fresh corn which I put everyone to work shucking. :)

Hoping to make this an annual event. Unfortunately, I unwittingly scheduled it the same day as Vloggercue in New York City. Maybe if I coordinate a little better, we can have a bigger turnout of NYC peeps next year. And who knows, there may even be an autumn meetup with chili and wings next at my house.

Thanks to all who came and made it a kick-ass Tweetup!!Â

Roomful of Blues in Mystic

2007-07-31T19:14:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Roomful of Blues is great band that is based in Westerly, RI, right next door to us in Stonington. Last night they played a free concert in downtown Mystic at the Riverwalk, a little park right on the Mystic River. The Mystic drawbridge just happened to go up during the concert. Hope you enjoy

Boston Tweetup July 24, 2007

2007-07-25T11:27:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Last night there was a meetup of Boston-area Tweeters (and a couple non-Tweeters) at Boston Beer Works, followed by a free sneak preview of "No Reservations". Thanks to Chris Brogan for orchestrating a last-minute venue change and getting us hooked up for the movie. Thanks also to CC for the clue-in to the movie screening.

It was a really fun crowd and I got to meet some great people for the first time. Doug Haslam, Clarence Smith, Laura Fitton, nice to meet you all. Got to know CC Chapman and Kroosh a lot better, had a nice chat with Steve Garfield at the movie theater, and got to meet Amy Carpenter, whom Steve invited. I'll admit to being a bit star-struck with Amy. I was too shy to engage her in conversation. I've admired her art and video for a long time and always wanted to meet her. I did catch the last half of her wild quitting-her-job fantasy on this clip.

Dave LaMorte also showed up toward the end and some others, too. Was a really fun time. After the food and drink we went to the movie and then five of us who were really thirsty decided to go for a little after-meet meet at Boston Billiards. Some great conversation ensued there. What a lively, smart and creative group of people muh Twitter peeps are!

8 Random Things About My Office

2007-07-23T12:04:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

I did an 8 Random Things About Me blog entry after getting tagged by CathleenRitt on Twitter with that latest little meme.

Then, surfing around today, I saw GoldieKatsu's vlog on 8 Random Things About My Desk. I thought that was a fun idea, so I made one of my own.

8 Random Things About Me

2007-07-22T21:00:00.000-04:00

My Twitter friend Cathleen Rittereiser tagged me with this meme. Here goes...

1. When I was two years old, I was attacked and almost killed by a hive of bees in a rock pile in back of the apartment where we lived. I can still remember sitting in a pan of hot water while my mother put compresses on the stings.

2. I have a scar on my left cheek. Women sometimes ask me about it. I think they imagine I got it from a jealous lover. I should be so lucky. In fact, I just picked at a scab from some kind of cut I got playing in the yard as a kid.

3. I love cranberry juice. In fact, I'm going to get another glass now...with ice.

4. I saw Jimi Hendrix live, went to college with Jay Giles, but didn't make it to Woodstock.

5. I can't wear rings. I get a form of eczema underneath them.

6. I endeavor to have absolutely no superstitions. I don't believe in God, ghosts, UFOs, astrological fortunes, lucky golf socks or black cats. It is a most liberating, simple and easy way to live. You should try it.

7. I don't like broccoli, which is one thing I agree with George H.W. Bush (the elder) about. I suspect he may also share my opinion that his son is a wise-ass frat boy altogether unqualified to be President.

8. I cook a mean bowl of chili. Good scrambled eggs, too.

Need ideas for Silly Social Networking Sites

2007-07-13T07:01:00.000-04:00

I loves me muh Tweeps (Twitter peeps) because they always have something witty, zany, crazy, kooky, kinky or funny to say. So I'm hoping they, and anyone else who reads this blog, will help with some ideas for Silly Social Networking Sites. Don't need a ten-slide PowerPoint, just the basic concept. For instance,

Blather - like Twitter, but each post has to have at least 10K characters, and contain no new-lines, and a maximum of three sentences.

Dickr - Photo-posting site, but all pics are of Richard Nixon.

LockedIn - contact network for inmates.

You get the idea, right? Let's hear yours. The simpler, the better.

My letter to the FCC about Net Neutrality

2007-07-08T09:14:00.000-04:00

A big shout-out to Gabrielle, the Tech.Chick.Blogger for publishing this link on her links post today. The Bush Administration's minions in the FTC are ready to abandon net neutrality and hand the Internet over to the likes of Comcast and Cox Communication.

What does this mean? It means that if you like the way you have to take 20 home-shopping channels to get The Travel Channel or The Science Channel or you can't get a channel you want because that channel won't pay enough to the cable provider, you'll love a world without Net Neutrality.

I went to SaveTheInternet.com and wrote my own little letter to the FCC to support the preservation of Net Neutrality. Here's what I wrote:

I am a career software developer with over 35 years in the software development business. I have see the Internet grow from a fledging technical curiosity to the most potent force for political, economic and social change and innovation the world has seen since the invention of the printing press.

At this time, large and powerful corporations with a completely self-serving agenda are attempting to control the content and flow of information on the Internet the same way they do on cable television. The FCC should not and must not allow this to happen. Please preserve the open, free and untrammeled access to the Internet we all now enjoy by preserving Net Neutrality.

You should do the same. Write what's in your gut and tell the FCC to preserve this wonderful thing we call the Internet.

Thanks....!