Yesterday I was chatting with the guy in the bed below mine. He’s a baby boomer who grew up in Montana, served in the Navy, and has lived in Switzerland for the past 3 years. As a classical artist who paints and draws we got talking about art and design. He knows enough about computers to use Photoshop but isn’t a geek by any means. He admittedly knows nothing about web design but had some insight about color contrast from an artist’s perspective.

As we were talking about the use of color he started ranting about things that people do wrong on the web. He went off about how his formerly favorite art website kept adding more and more to its design until it was just a mess.

“Sites need to focus on what’s important and get rid of the rest,” he said.

I couldn’t have agreed more. This guy gets it.

Then he mentioned sites need to be fast. This really got my attention.

“Sites need to load as quickly as possible. If sites are slow I’ll just leave and go somewhere else. Get rid of all this extra junk and just let me use your site.”

Wow, this guy totally gets it.

People aren’t stupid. They don’t need to know technology to understand that performance matters. If a website is slow they’ll leave. Make sure your site is fast.

All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform.  Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.  In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.

I’ve seen speculation that this will be like Opera Mini, with server-side page rendering which significantly improves performance at the cost of crippling interactive sites that use JS. The way I read into it is that it’s more likely Amazon Silk will function more like an optimization proxy, combining and minifying files, caching static files on Amazon’s services, and possibly using SPDY for delivery. If done well this could be a great service, speeding up mobile browsing without impacting functionality.

I have high hopes for Silk. Amazon has gotten very serious about web performance in the past few years. So long as they don’t cripple sites, which I think is unlikely, this could be a very successful browser.

Edit: Amazon released a basic Silk FAQ. Looks like it will support Flash, SSL, and won’t cripple sites.

Meet with other web site system administrators, developers, designers and business people who’re interested in making their sites work fast to get better user experience, lower abandonment rates and more money. (shamelessly borrowed from the New York Web Performance Group)

If you’re in the Austin, TX area join up! We’re aiming to have our first meetup at the end of September or October. Feel free to submit your topics.

BidOnMyDay is simple. Anyone can bid to have me fly to them and do nearly anything. While I’d like to focus on tech related work, I’m not restricting it. Cleaner, courier, driver, teacher, whatever. The goal is to travel, meet new people, and have some interesting experiences. I’m also doing a video and blog post about each job on the site. Oh, and bids start at $1.

There’s a lot of risk in this. I calculated my fixed and average variable costs at around $100 per day. Every winning bid under $100 is a short term loss for me. I’m hoping that by the end of the BluePass (November 22nd) bids average out above $100. I’m also hoping that by doing videos and blog posts about the jobs I can bring steady traffic to the site, offering alternative revenue stream opportunities.

So go check out BidOnMyDay and place a bid. Any and all feedback is welcome!

A big pile of scam (image used under Fair Use)

Update: Groupon refunded both Harmony Balance-Band deals shortly after the San Diego one ended. Congratulations Groupon!

I’ve been a fan of Groupon, from a consumer perspective, since it first launched. While I haven’t been buying many of their deals I’ve been monitoring each new city as I travel to see if I can find some good local deals. Yesterday I was disturbed when I found the deal for San Diego was for Harmony Balance-Bands. You may have heard of these scam products, a rubber bracelet with a hologram stuck on it. The companies promoting these products all claim they improve your balance, with Harmony Balance-Bands stacking on some additional pseudoscientific claims. The fact is these are nothing more than a $0.10 bracelet made in China. They have no special powers. They don’t improve your balance. The demonstration many of the companies use has been thoroughly debunked. ESPN also showed they do nothing. The biggest promotor, PowerBalance, admitted they do nothing and refunded customers. One group in Australia stepped up and created Placebo Bands, inexpensive knockoffs that clearly show how they are nothing more than a placebo.

With the facts about this product well-established, I was surprised when I saw Groupon promoting it. Promoting a scam tarnishes their brand. Of course they’re making money from the suckers that buy the product, so perhaps they feel the money they make is worth the brand damage. When I saw the number 2 in the URL I realized this isn’t the first time Groupon has promoted this scam. It was also promoted in Toronto a week prior, selling 3,306 bands at $15 CAD each. Assuming Groupon is taking 50%, that’s a cool $24,795 CAD! Combining that with the money from the San Diego sale, they’re well over $30,000.

I decided to contact Groupon to request they take down this scam product. I left two comments on the deal page and send a comment on Twitter. The deal page comments were moderated and never showed up. We wouldn’t want the public to know the product is a scam would we? They might not purchase it. They responded on Twitter to email support@groupon.com, which I promptly did. I received a generic response that basically said if I didn’t like it, wait for the next deal. This clearly indicates to me that Groupon doesn’t care the product is a scam, the money is just too good.

I’m sick and tired of these pseudoscientifc scams being pulled on the unknowing public. I’ve filed a complaint with the FTC against Pro Peptides Inc (the company behind the bands) and Groupon Inc. I doubt it will be investigated but I can always be hopeful. I urge you to also complain to Groupon through Twitter, email and leave comments on the deal site.

The contest was being managed by DailyBurn’s community manager, Kate Brown. I emailed Kate on March 17th to ask a few basic questions, including if I could have friends join me instead of coworkers. She responded promptly, indicating friends would be fine and included a DOCX file with complete contest info and a registration form. I contacted a few friends to see if any were interested and recruited one. We got the necessary info together, named our team Rochester Techies, and were ready to go! I was really excited about this and dedicated to doing my best at winning.

Let The Fun Begin

On the 19th I sent our contact info and DailyBurn account names to Kate. To be sure I wasn’t late I asked if it was fine to register on the starting day. Kate responded two days later on March 21st, indicating it was fine and that I could add additional people if I found more who wanted to join us (I didn’t). The next day she sent us a link to our contest on DailyBurn’s website. We would be tracking our weight on DailyBurn. The top teams would be the ones who proceeded to the voting round.

Over the next month I busted my ass. By the time our 30 days were over on April 21st, I had lost almost 10% of my weight (driverdan) and my teammate had lost almost 6%. At the same time my strength and muscle mass went up. I was really happy with my results and knew we’d have a shot at being one of the teams that made it to the voting round. The voting round was to start the next day and run through May 5th.

The next day came and went without any contact or info about voting. Nothing was posted on their blog or Twitter. Then the next day passed an the next. On May 7th I contacted DailyBurn on Twitter to find out what was going on. I received the following direct message:

You won, dude! Awesome! I’ll email Steelcase and then let you know how we are going to ship the walkstation to you. – Kate

I had won! I was excited, shocked, and confused all at once. I never saw anything about voting taking place. But Kate said I won and that was good enough for me. I figured that maybe we were the only team to complete the contest and won by default. I never asked though because you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth right?

Waiting Is The Hardest Part

This is when the waiting game began. Weeks went by without contact from DailyBurn. Having worked at a company that specialized in sweepstakes and contest web development I knew how contests were supposed to work. Companies are obligated to adhere to the promotion rules, which DailyBurn was not doing.

On May 28th I contacted DailyBurn on Twitter, trying to find out what was going on. I received the response

Hey Dan! How are you? Yes, we need to get that workstation sent out to you. Will you send a pic when it is all set up?

I said yes, I’d be happy to share a pic of it setup. I again heard nothing else. No affidavit or W9 forms were sent. No requests for my mailing address. We didn’t even receive the upgrade on our DailyBurn accounts.

On June 15th I finally sent an email to Kate. In it was was courteous but blunt. I wanted to know what was going on and when we’d receive our prizes. She responded the next day, indicating she would contact Steelcase that day and have DailyBurn employee “Stephen” upgrade our accounts. Again, nothing happened. No account upgrades, no Walkstation. Kate had continued to lead us on. In July my teammate told me not only had she not received the upgrade but she couldn’t even log into her DailyBurn account. On July 30th I sent a direct message on Twitter again trying to figure out what was going on. I received a response:

Hi Dan, thanks for checking in. I will check on the status of that for you. – Kate

She also asked “what happens when @copperlegend tries to sign in?” as if she was trying to help solve the account problem. This was the last time I was contacted by DailyBurn.

The End?

So, as it stands DailyBurn broke contest laws by not fulfilling the prizes for this promotion. They continuously led me and my teammate on, acting like they were going to provide the prizes and never following through. No Elite account upgrades, no Steelcase Walkstation. Kate still works at DailyBurn. DailyBurn is apparently still running contests, albeit smaller than Revenge of the Office Worker. I’ve moved on to using Lose It!, a free website and phone app with similar functionality to DailyBurn. I’ve gotten at least a handful of people to switch.

I guess the lesson for startups is to rip off your users if you think you can get away with it. DailyBurn’s founder, Andy Smith, sold the company around the time the contest ended for an undisclosed sum.

Image via Wikipedia

Early this year I made the decision to travel more. I was rarely leaving Rochester and when I did I still stayed within the confines of the northeast. I needed an escape. To fill this wanderlust I committed to traveling outside my city every month. This was made possible when I left my job to take on freelancing full time.

From February to May I took mostly weekend trips. Things fell into place around April. I realized my lease would end in May and that I’d be attending two conferences and speaking at one in June. I also wanted to check out Austin, TX as a new place to live. So why not leave Rochester and travel for a while? I had already done the research into costs and knew it wouldn’t be much more than my current living expenses (hostels + public transport = rent + car). So I decided to get rid of nearly everything I owned, keeping only a backpack of stuff, and hit the road.

Fast forward to today, almost two months later. I’ve stayed in eight cities and towns, including Sydney and Melbourne Australia. Originally I thought I’d settle into a new place in Austin at the beginning of August. After month I knew this is how I want to live. I’ve extended my plans through August to include DEFCON in Vegas and then on to San Diego. More about my future travels later.

Work On The Road

I’ve been working on projects the whole time, balancing life between work, exploring, and fun. Most of the time I’ve worked from whichever hostel I was at, with a few coffee shops thrown in. I’ve spent a few days coworking but that just hasn’t cut it. Before traveling I had been working at Coworking Rochester. I miss working next to peers and friends, helping one another and discussing important topics such as caffeinated cakes and why I love to hate Apple despite owning thousands of dollars of their products.

Around this same time I decided I wanted to get a motorhome/RV to live in and travel around the US and Canada. Suddenly it hit me: cross country coworking. There must be others who feel the same as me, other freelances, consultants, and location independent workers who’d like to travel while they work. This could also be great for a small startup, allowing them to work closely together and have an experience like no other. So why not travel together, forming a mobile coworking space?

Cross Country Coworking Beta

The idea is simple: buy an affordable RV/motorhome, equip it with your regular coworking amenities, and hit the road. Everyone takes turns driving, slowly making our way between cities, national parks, conferences, whatever. Visit startups and investors, network, attend meetups, check out new stationary coworking spaces. My back of the napkin calculations say this can be very affordable, not much more than the cost of a hostel in a big city. Food can be made on board and bicycles can be carried for free on location transportation. If we got really ambitious we could tow a car, but maybe that’s for version 1.0.

See the country and cowork for about the same cost as your current living expenses. Interested? Send me an email, dan at driver dan dot com. Leave comments and ideas below.

There are plenty of tests that could be created for node-XHR that would ferret out these small bugs. If you’re interested in getting involved but don’t know where to start send me an email, dan at driver dan dot com. I’d be happy to guide you.

I wrote the code a while ago but hadn’t tested it. In the process I also changed the path used to load CSSess. Instead of loading directly from the raw source on github it now uses github pages. It seems github changed the way it loaded raw files which sometimes caused issues loading the CSS file, resulting in everything loading unstyled.

I recommend updating the bookmarklet path in your bookmarks. Either delete your existing bookmark and replace it with the one found in the README or edit it, replacing the current URL with

http://driverdan.github.com/cssess/cssess-min.js

github pages loads JS and CSS using the correct mime type which should help prevent loading issues. This also allows updates to the code base that won’t be reflected instantly in the bookmarklet, providing a better opportunity for testing before release.

Viewing Bug

Unfortunately there’s a bug that may prevent viewing your data on Jdrop. Since CSSess depends on jQuery it can only run after jQuery has loaded. The Jdrop view page attempts to load the data immediately. If jQuery is cached it may load. When I have the opportunity I’ll update the code to have a call buffer, similar to async Google Analytics works.

If you’re in the bay area but aren’t attending Velocity let me know. I’m hanging around until I leave for Australia on June 24th. I’ve never been to California so I decided to travel around the region. Much of the time will be spent in San Francisco but I also want to check out other cities. Thanks to BART and CalTrain it shouldn’t be a problem.

If you happen to have a free couch get in touch with me. Besides saving money I like couch surfing to meet new people and get to know more about new places.