Scott Watermasysk

AirPods – Only One Ear

2017-03-17T13:25:05Z

I am a big fan of Apple’s AirPods. They have worked flawelessly since the day I got them.

My only gripe has been the inabiltiy to use just one of them at a time (see below for why).

Turns out the issue was with how I was testing using just a single AirPod. By default, when you take an AirPod out of your ear, your music/etc stops playing. However, if you only take one AirPod out of the case at a time, music will keep playing as long as the other is in your ear.

Just in case you are wondering, why one ear?

I call this the kid mode. This allows me to listen to a podcast/book while still being able to easily hear the kids.

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Podcast Recommendations – Friday Feb 24

2017-02-24T13:54:00Z

A couple really good episodes I listened to recently:

Noah Kagan’s interview of Jason Fried– I could listen to Jason Fried interviews all day. (note: it does not seem possible to link directly to a specific podcast. For those in the future it is episode #5).

Bill Simmons interview of Kevin Durant – I love KD’s honesty. A basketball interview unlike any you have ever heard before.

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Number 1 Company Blog Frustration

2017-02-07T18:36:23Z

Here is something that drives me nuts….company blogs which do not provide a clear way on how to get to the main company site.

Here is an example: http://blog.clearbit.com

Today, I received an email from the good folks at ClearBit (and they are good folks). It catches my attention, I click the link, and like what I read.

I say to myself, ‘self’, I wonder what else they have added to the product recently. I then spend time clicking on the header, the blue icon on the side, the little slide out menu in the header, and finally a scroll to the bottom to look for some helpful links.

What do I find? Nothing. It is just a trap.

Unless the only goal of your blog is to have a visitor only read your posts, make it easy to get to your main site. I guarantee you are leaving money on the table.

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Hemingway 3.0

2017-01-18T14:58:42Z

One of my favorite writing apps, Hemingway, got a nice upgrade.

It does a lot of interesting things, but my favorite is it highlights words which are not necessary. It is a good visual reminder to only write what is necessary.

Check it out.

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Lessons Learned 1

2017-01-13T16:29:14Z

I am trying to get in the habit for wrting things down when I learned something new. I am sure I learned a lot more this week, but here are the couple of things which I managed to write down:

Haberdashery – What a fun word. This was from the movie the Hateful 8. Not sure if I loved or hated this movie. Either way, Minnies’ looked like a nice place to visit before…(well, I don’t want to spoil the movie).

DENSE_RANK – a rank with no gaps.

iTerm keyboard navigation – control+a and control+e are great, but can be really slow for a long line. I finally found a workable solution to speed things up. Under profiles -> keys I changed the right option to ‘+Esc’. Now I can right option + f (or b) to jump by word.

Kill the query – I have been tuning some of the bigger KickoffLabs indexes on and off for the last couple of weeks. I recently made a mistep and deleted an index which appeared to be unnecessary (it was actually unnnecessary, I just needed to make a secondary fix as well). Anywho, once I realized the issue I quickly deployed a fix. Unfortunately, I forgot to kill the long running queries which had originally had drawn my attention to the issue.

Instapot – my instapot is one of my favorite recently kitchen purchases. I made a turkey breast eariler in the week which came out excellent (note: 6 lbs bone in is ideal for the 6 qt version). I also made a roast beef which came out too dry for my tastes.

Emoji Keyboard Shortuts – not sure how I did’t know this before (comamnd+control+space)

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Don’t A/B Test

2017-01-10T15:44:41Z

…well, at least don’t A/B test at the start of your business.

This sounds like a crazy statement. There is article after article about the joys of an affective A/B test.

Unfortunately, without significant traffic, A/B tests are not worth the effort. Even a 10% conversion rate increase will not move your business’s needle if you average 100 daily uniques. (BTW, you will not get a 10% improvement )

Young businesses do not die because of minor changes on your key pages. They die because you did not reach enough customers to ever have a chance in the first place.

Do not waste time agonizing over minute details to test on. Instead figure out what it will take to get quality leads to your site in the first place.

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The Difference Between ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and DENSE_RANK()

2017-01-06T14:44:51Z

I had just been playing around with these three functions this morning and for the life of me I could not remember what DENSE_RANK provided.

The Difference Between ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and DENSE_RANK()

Hat tip to the excellent DBWeekly for the link.

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Your Content – Medium and Twitter

2017-01-06T14:37:24Z

Medium announced they are Renewing Medium’s Focus. The short version, they aren’t making anywhere near as much money as they are spending and the investors are getting antsy. See DHH’s post Venture capital is going to murder Medium.

Twitter, who I love dearly, can’t seem to figure out who they are, what they are or what they are supposed to be building. Hell, even the CEO is hedging his bets with a second gig. It’s only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft swallows them whole and craps out something that vaguely recesembles what made Twitter so great from the start.

Way too many people (me included) have given up on writing outside of Twitter and Medium and I am afraid that one day they are going to wake up and realize they have lost everything.

A month or so ago, I started to make a concious effort to post anything I thought I might want to refer back to (or others may) to this site. Blogo has made this just about as effecient (see) as using a Twitter app directly (can’t speak for Medium). There really is nothing wrong writing a sentnce or two about why a link is worth reading and sharing that instead.

As we begin 2017, I recommend you start doing the same as well.

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Growth

2017-01-05T16:57:25Z

You lost me at “Growth”

Does this stuff really work for people?

I have no objectsions to a cold email/intro/etc, but have some guts and try to actually sell yourself on something tangible.

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Icons

2017-01-05T14:21:32Z

Very odd icon choice by Apple. I get that this represents my ‘shopping bag’, but clicking on it is the only way to login to your account on the home page without scrolling to the footer.

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