Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog. Mostly because it’s easier to tweet, but also I haven’t had anything to blog about…
Until I remembered the potential of Google in terms of sociology studies. I’ll be taking a sociology class this semester as it’s something that I’ve always wanted to study. Then I was inspired by this tweet:
The link can be found here and it really does show the difference in men and women and what they expect out of relationships. But I decided to take it one step further and analyze what people in general ask the web for advice, so I started with some pretty generic questions, the first being “How can I…?” and these were the results:
What’s interesting to me that the top result is “How can I keep from singing lyrics?” and a slight variation in the question is featured later. What does this say about our culture? Clearly there is a creativity in people that is shunned in some circles. When did this become frowned upon?
Moving on, the next question was “How should I…?”
The top results for this question has to do with hair. As a culture, a hairstyle can help define who we are as a person. It’s interesting that the web has become the source of advice in such matters. Typically a barber or hair stylist has helped out in making this decision, perhaps turn to the web as to not waste time when they do get their haircut.
The next question posed was “How often should I…?” and these were the results
Interestingly, the number of responses were equal in terms of human and canine maintenance. This comes as no surprise given how vain some people can be about themselves or their pets. Overall these results were par for the course.
The last question I posed was “Where should I…?”
I hope you have enjoyed this post, feel free to comment with your finds!
Whew! Where to begin with the amazing discussions that transpired at the March NetSquared New Orleans meeting. There were two presentations with two radically different approaches to the same thing: employing the creative workforce.
The first presentation was from Kurt Weigle with the New Orleans Downtown Development District. The main focus was bringing and keeping the creative class in New Orleans. He had several justifications: quality of life/cultural uniqueness, lower cost of living, and opportunity for progressive growth. He introduced the idea of place based economics, which means workers are now choosing where they want to live not because the job is there, but because they enjoy the location and how easy it is now to telecommute. Digital industries are developing in New Orleans for a few reasons. The first being the newly instituted tax break incentives offered to companies that establish and sustain business in Louisiana. The second reason is that the cost of living is 40 – 70 % lower as compared to major creative meccas (example: New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, etc). The major cities have effectively driven out the creative class because it has become too expensive for the workers to live there. It is important for New Orleans to embrace the new digital industries because it will help the city to move forward and decrease its dependance on the oil/gas & hospitality industries.
Chris Schultz’s discussion was radically different and on the surface almost contradictory to Kurt’s presentation. His topic was Outsourcing 2.0. Understandably this is a sensitive and controversial business practice that invokes mixed emotions. What made Chris’ approach unique is that he believes outsourcing can go both ways. A client could be in London but the contract workers are in New Orleans. So in that way, you’re actually contributing to the local economy as well as the global economy. With higher global education standards and the maturity of the internet, it’s possible to work or hire workers anywhere in the globe. Concerns were voiced from the audience about the quality of code (when it came to software development) and Chris explained that all code is put through rigorous standards that are checked by other programs and everything is commented in English. Another benefit of outsourcing is the ability to find skilled workers to complete a project on tight deadlines that wouldn’t be possible on a local scale. He realizes this model will not work for all industries, in fact he has referred potential clients to local businesses because it made more sense for them to work locally. Chris’ perspective is unique and I personally hope that more people can learn to embrace this business model instead of perceiving it as a threat to local jobs.
Overall, it was a great discussion and another successful NetSquared meeting. If you’re a citizen of Lafayette, Baton Rouge, New Orleans or the surrounding areas I highly recommend you attend these meetings. The topics and presenters are always interesting and there’s even free drinks! It’s held every first Tuesday of month at the Bridge Lounge (1201 Magazine St) and you can become a member by joining the meetup group at http://www.meetup.com/net2no/ you can also find out more information on their website at http://www.net2no.com/
A friend of mine recently purchased an iPhone and was asking for application recommendations. I’ve had the iPhone 3G since day one so by now I’ve accumulated quite a collection (5 pages! That amounts to about 1 GB!!) As I was writing my recommendations I realized others might find it useful so here they are (no particular order, I was thumbing through the pages)..
[also, assume that all the apps are free unless I say the price]
Say Who – Voice dialing at it’s finest. Press the button, say the name, wait a few seconds and it’s dialing. Great tool when you’re driving or multitasking.
Twitterific – An obvious one, it’s free with minimal ads and has a clean interface and plenty of functions. Especially great because of its integration with twitpic
Facebook – Very easy way to access Facebook, upload pictures, change your status. Great time killer app!
Sportacular – Easy way to check the up to the minute sports scores and standings.
Datacase (pay app) – turns your iPhone into a thumbdrive! Instead of using docking cable it uses a WiFi connection. You can also setup an adhoc network on your computer if there isn’t a nearby router.
iTalk – great voice/sound recording application. Incredible quality and easy to use.
Wikipanion – Need to look something up in wikipedia very fast? Look no further!
Pandora – Streaming radio on the go! Sounds great with 3G, iPod like interface, great app if you want to listen to music that isn’t on your iPhone.
WunderRadio (pay app) – Mad that the iPhone doesn’t have a FM tuner? Well turn that frown upside down because with WunderRadio you can listen to thousands of online streaming radio stations as well as police/fire/EMT scanners!
The Weather Channel (TWC) – A little bit more accurate than Weather.app also gives video forecast updated daily based on your geographical location.
RotaryDialer – Ok, this app isn’t that useful but it is cool looking. Allows you to make phone calls with a rotary dial.
Fring – Skype and other chat services on the go. For skype it’s chat only on 3G/EDGE but WiFi allows phone calls. Great for when WiFi reception > cell phone reception or calling long distance.
Light – Very simple app, turns the screen white. Very useful when it’s dark.
TouchMines – Mobile version of the windows classic Minesweeper.
Backgrounds – Tired of the same background? Download tons of stock images to spice your background up. Sol Free – Mobile Solitare! Another great time killer.
PAC -MAN lite – Pac man on the go! w00t!
Tiltsnake -anyone who owned a Nokia phone back in the day can appreciate this updated version of Snake
Google Earth – Just like the google app but on the go!
Shazam – Ever heard a song and wondered what it was or who it was by? Wonder no more. Simply let Shazam record 10 seconds of music, allow it to process, and you should have an answer shortly. Great for settling bets on who sang that song.
Remote – Remotely control an iTunes library, great for changing the songs if the computer is in the other room.
SnapTell – Ever wanted to get more info about a CD, DVD, or piece of software but didn’t want to type in the information? SnapTell allows you to take a picture of the item and it will give links to amazon as well other retailers to get comparison prices and description. Also a great app for making a wishlist as it will save the last items you snapped.
AroundMe – Great app for finding points of interest in a city. Maybe you’re travelling and want to know the nearest sushi restaurant. AroundMe takes your GPS location and compares it to their database and gives you the information you need.
PhotoSwap – Bored? Want to see what life is like for other iPhone users? With this app you can literally swap pictures! Take a photo and submit it, after you have submitted it you will get a photo in return, you can choose to reply to the photographer or keep taking pictures. Very cool app for seeing what it’s like around the world.
Lightsaber – turns your iPhone into a motion sensitive lightsaber, nerdtastic!
Last.fm – like Pandora but also scrobbles (check out last.fm’s site to find out more about scrobbling) your streaming station. Disadvantage: longer buffering times.
MochaVNC – VNC client to control computers while away from the desk. Not particularly fast but works if you’re in a pinch.
TouchTerm – SSH client for the iPhone, great for checking stats or running commands while away from the servers.
Echochops (pay app) – Takes your ambient sound and allows you to put a delay and effect the distortion of it, very interesting experiment in sound.
Units – Great app to convert units of measurement, area, currency, speed, etc.
More Cowbell – because everyone needs more cowbell in their life!
Flixster – check on movie listings and the latest DVD titles
Brain Tuner – Bored again? Want to sharpen your brain a little bit? This app is a lot like the math portion of Brain Age. See how fast you can complete the problems.
iSlots – Want to play some slots but don’t want to lose all your money? Look no further!
Scribble – Paint for iPhone. ’nuff said…
iBowl – Bowling for the iPhone, similar to Wii Sport’s implementation, just make sure to hang onto your iPhone!
Drinks Free – Want to look up a drink recipe quickly? Drinks Free has thousands of drinks so you can look up the ingredients you need while at a store shopping for cocktail ingredients.
Hope this helps! If you have any apps to recommend, send me a link to them: mike (at) mikebaldwin (dot) org
Haven’t posted in awhile, I’ve been busy working on an Ubuntu server named Squiggle. Squiggle is currently running Drupal, and a few monitoring/administration apps. The plan is to start backing up our Administrative server, and then transfer the duties to Squiggle to be the PDC as well as our internal Drupal server.
I met a few people at the Acadiana Open Source meeting the other night and one of the guys recommended I check out this site: http://drupaltherapy.com
They have a lot of great resources that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of. Of course Google is also an amazing tool for research and information gathering. I can’t forget to mention Kris Wotipka and Adam Melancon who have been incredibly helpful in getting the server online, much props guys.
What else? Still learning Visual Basic, and a bit of general computer troubleshooting in school. AT&T should be shipping me my DSL modem very soon (ie Tomorrow!) so I’ll have internet at the house again…That’s all for now, if I think of anything else I’ll edit the post.
In short, nowhere new. Just school and work, haven’t had a lot to blog about. ACL was a blast, big props to Chris H. for letting me crash at his place in Austin I had waaay too much fun.
Today was CampFiber here in LFT, in short I think it was a success and I really hope to see more events like it in the near future. It almost inspired me to become a developer but I think I’d be showing up a little late to the party with little to offer. I trust the local brains to do what’s right for the community. If it looks like they’re not going in the direction they should be I’d step in but I doubt it.
To see Terry Huval conversing with local developers about potential uses of the fiber network is pretty inspiring to me. You don’t see that kind of thing normally. Certainly Verizon would never send their CEO and members of the team to some town in South Louisiana to talk about settop boxes, fiber rollout, etc. So that in itself was pretty cool. It was also cool to see developers share their applications and talk about the industry as it exists now and will be in the future.
Didn’t really meet too many new people, a couple on twitter but I never got as far as to saying Hello. Had to jet out early, work and such, but very inspirational nonetheless, props to Geoff Daily, Abacus, and LUS for putting it on.
So it’s been awhile since I’ve posted…Sorry…Haven’t had much to write about.
I started to write about Cafe Culture a couple weeks ago, but I haven’t been inspired to finish it.
School starts tomorrow, work has been going well, I’ve been doing a lot more work in Linux on MySQL, PHP, and other web technologies. I’m currently alpha testing PHPMotion (youtube clone) on the server right now. FFMPEG is giving me some problems so uploading of videos isn’t working too well. It’s also not loading all of the images correctly so I’ll have to work on that this week.
Edit: I started this post much earlier than when I’m posting it, so now it’s like sunday evening thoughts…So overall life is good, can’t complain, just working and now starting school again. Anywho I’ll update this again later…
I said I’d review the iPhone and I’m going to do that…sorta…I will say I absolutely love everything about it. I’ve drained the battery daily. Which I guess is a testament to the weak battery and draining aspects of 3G but it’s all good.
Speed: 5/5
3G is damn fast. Now that it’s rolled out in Lafayette I can surf in the fast lane. I’ve loaded all my favorite sites in a matter of seconds, way better than EDGE. WiFi works well too, have only used it a couple times..Bought a song on the iTunes music store. Very easy to navigate, quick download…
Usability: 5/5
Apple really hit a homerun with their UI. It’s slick, fast, and sexy. I can call, e-mail, chat, surf, play music, record voicenotes, etc all within one package. That’s amazing. Name me one other company who has put a product that can do so much at once. With the SDK came a myriad of great apps. I personally use Twitterific, Facebook, AIM, Pandora, PhoneSaber, and Band a lot. They were all free except for Band (which was only $10, totally worth it)
Affordability: 3/5
Although it has come down a lot in price, you still won’t see this in everyone’s hands anytime soon. I’d like to see the iPhone nano but I doubt that will be coming out anytime soon.
Overall: 5/5
It’s great, it does everything I need it to do, the only features I wish it had was Flash/Java support, a clipboard (is it really that hard?!) some sort of word processing app, video recording/chat capability, and skype. Some of these will be forthcoming, some won’t but I’m okay with that. Like I said, I drain the battery daily, I use the heck out of it, and it was worth every penny!
So I just got my iPhone and I’m STILL waiting for it to activate. I downloaded the latest version of iTunes just like Apple told me to and yet I’m waiting on this thing to become useful…
Aggravating…Oh well, guess I’ll just twiddle my thumbs. Updates to come…
I think a lot of graphic/web designers strive for good design. But what is good design? To me it means something that is sleek, functional, and lightweight. If it’s a website, it should load just the same in IE6 to FF3. This can be a challenge but with the right skillset it’s totally achievable.
If it’s graphic design, I think it should be just as meaningful to the average consumer all the way up to the corporate executive. Good design applies to everything if you think about it. This blog, your car, the computer you own, the coffee shop you frequent, design is everywhere. Good and bad. As an editor, I strive for a good workflow and a polished product at the end. This means I don’t cut corners, I don’t take shortcuts, and with this day and age I can edit anywhere. That freedom alone is worth a lot to me.
So what is good design? You could say it’s in the eye of the beholder. What I consider good design, someone might consider crap. So in some ways it is subjective. I think the more something is adopted and simulated into culture speaks to good design. But in the end, it’s whatever you make of it.
