I guess that is pretty logical, but the busy times are probably the most interesting. This week has flown by because I can’t find the time to get everything done. I have a huge backlog of videos to edit, and we are beginning to work with some new clients whom we have to build new products from scratch. The creativity is fun, but I am pretty thin right now (time-wise not waist-band).

I have found that creativity can be very frustrating when you have to have it. It is delightful when you are blessed with a great idea before you need it. More and more, I need creativity before it happens naturally. Forcing creativity gives me a headache. I am getting over a headache tonight.

You Look Nice Today

Originally uploaded by rcarver

There is a podcast called You Look Nice Today. It is one of my favorites. It is put out by three guys who found each other through Twitter. Each found the others tweets interesting and more importantly, funny. They got in contact and decided, why not spread our mirth to a wider audience, a listening audience. The world would be a better place after all. Hey, and we all wear glasses, and we could always talk about that, though they never have.

The podcast normally consists of three lads: Merlin Mann, Scott Simpson, and Adam Lisagor. Also pictured here is Jonathan Coulton, you ought to Google him now…his music delights, and a man who we all know and have grown to love, sitting down in front is John Hodgman, but you may know him better as ‘PC’.

Apparently there is a brand-new You Look Nice Today podcast out or coming out soon that features all these fine fellows. I may not be able to sleep.

If you are of the Podcast persuasion, then get on over to iTunes and subscribe to You Look Nice Today…today. You will not be disappointed.

I know these blog entries are exceedingly boring to you, but these are always a chance for me to test out the new software from Wordpress to see if there are any noticeable changes.  So far I don’t see any changes.

There is one change I hope they have made.  I hope they have fixed the bug with the softare that doesn’t allow you to insert an image into the blog post and have the text wrap around the image.  You can move it to the left or the right, but the text insists on lining up at the bottom of the image.  Now, before you cry NOOB, I have been doing web stuff since 1998.  I have wrapped plenty of text in my time, and I am sure without much searching you can see that I have successfully wrapped some text in previous posts from the past.

I only complain because it would be so much simpler on me if I could just insert the image, have the text automatically wrap, and not have to monkey with the code.

It is patently obvious to you that there is an image at the beginning of this blog post.  As I am writing this entry, I haven’t actually added the image, but since you are in the future, and I am stuck here in the past, I can’t see its outcome.  If the text is wrapped, then my problems have been addressed. If however, the text begins at the bottom of the image, then well, my woes continue.

The problem may exist in how my template handles images.  I haven’t checked that, and honestly, I don’t know if I will be able to muster the energy to do that.  I may just change the look and feel.  I will have to check and see how long I have had this template up.  Is it getting tired?

I loved these guys back when I was in high school. It has been years since I listened to them, and last night, I did some searching on the internets on Grooveshark and found these guys again. I hadn’t forgotten them, but I just hadn’t listened in a while.

I just went to MTVMUSIC.com, another really cool site that allows you to search and FIND videos to almost any song…heaven. I found a video for Blister in the Sun and thought I would share it here. It has some clips from Gross Pointe Blank which is a bonus. It also has the lead singer taking a shot at a presidential cat, that was weird, but I still loves the song, and the Femmes. I am old.

But a few of thoughts have come to mind now that the dust is starting to settle.

Thought #1

What would our world look like if McCain had gotten the nod back in 2000 rather than George W. Bush? I don’t have an answer to that question right off the bat, but it is indeed interesting to think about. What do you bet we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq? I am sure we would still be having troubles in the economy due to normal undulations and cycles in the market but would it be this dire? I don’t know. One thing I am pretty sure of is I bet our standing in the world community would be better than it is right now.

Thought #2

A lot is on the shoulders of Barack Obama right now. The hopes and dreams, fairly or unfairly, rest squarely on his shoulders. He did ask for it after all.

There are many who have pointed out his relative lack of experience. Two years from now we will have a much clearer understanding on how that plays out, but that is something to keep an eye on.

Thought #3

I am growing exceedingly tired of the media’s portrayal of the South as being exclusively racist. I take extreme exception with that. Yes, there are racists in the south, but the fact that black men and women find it hard to hail a taxi in New York City proves that we haven’t cornered the market in that area. I think the bigger reason that McCain won the day in the South was the evangelical vote. Church is big in the South. I would bet there are way more conservative Christians than there are out and out racists in the South, and it seems to me that that is the real reason for the vote count down here.

My biggest outrage of the coverage on CNN last night was when one of the pundits called the south “The Confederate States”. Rarely does something make my blood boil, but that was an unfair stereotype and seemed driven by ignorance. We, as a country, have made great strides in righting the atrocities of our past, and name-calling and finger-pointing needs to stop, and stop now. We have a long way to go, but man have we come a long way, and rhetoric like what I saw on CNN last night only slows the progress. CNN don’t bring that lady back!

I will be watching with great interest at Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. It will be very interesting to see what he does to set the tone for his first term in office. Has he learned from Clinton’s mistake in going to far, to fast? We will see.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t remark on John McCain’s speech. It was one of the most gracious and hopeful concession speeches I have ever heard. My opinion of John McCain has only grown. He is an exceptional man, and too bad we didn’t have him as president these last eight years. Unfortunately for him, it was simply time for us as a country to have change. Timing is everything, and he got swept under that bus.

I don’t blog politics much, and I don’t think I will much in the future, but last night’s election was historic and a giant step forward in moving our country forward in the area of race. Hard work lies ahead for Barack Obama, Godspeed and good luck. If nothing else, it is good to let the other side see if they can do any better.

I have been spending all my creativity at the office, and how many people can say that? Probably not many. How many people go to work dreaming of the day that they can start their own business or move to another position that better suits their passions; probably most. I get to do what I am passionate about nearly everyday. Yeah, there are days that are slogs, but most aren’t. Also, I work on a small team that trusts me. That means that a lot of the time, it is my vision, or I have a big say in what is created.

I have had the opportunity to do some jobs that are completely up to the client, and the final product isn’t what I would have done, and that is pretty excruciating. I can only imagine how hard it is to be the art guy at a t-shirt shop or somewhere where you spend your days creating the imaginings of customers who have limited or no vision. Ewww.

I am always impressed with the people who can do that without blowing up and becoming so frustrated that they lose their job. Or, maybe I pity them because maybe they have just given up; passion gone, just turning the wheels.

If you are there, I challenge you to sit down and make a list of the things that you are good at and you absolutely love and start making progress towards crafting your job to look more like that. You are surrounded by people who are passionate about the things that you hate. Give those jobs away. Find ways to be a part of the things you love. Ask to help out. Donate your time to fulfilling pursuits. You will find that over time, you will start having to donate your time less and less as you become an expert.

I am an artist at an organizational development company. We help companies develop their talent. Most companies like ours don’t have an artist on staff because they don’t believe that they can afford them. In the past, that was true. Now however, the cost of computers, cameras, software, and other tools of the trade have dropped so much in price they may be surprised at what is possible.

Ten years ago, I would have had to work at a magazine, television station, or design shop to do what I do. Not anymore. The real surprise here is that since I am not on a huge team of creatives, I have huge variety in my job and I get a major say in what it looks like.

I have a degree in Transportation and Logistics. I should be in the trucking industry. I am not passionate about that. I have no official training in art. (Though at times that would be handy…) I just started to do what I was passionate about more and more and started dropping the things I wasn’t passionate about. I got noticed and hired. Now I am in my own personal bulls-eye. It is possible. Do it.

I just learned about something that is extremely disheartening and down-right scary.  There has been a practice on Wall Street that I just learned about on This American Life called naked short selling.  It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back for The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy.  They were engaging in naked short selling in the hopes of bringing their company out of dire straits.

Here is how it works.  Let’s say that you are interested in purchasing 1000 shares of IBM.  I tell you that I will sell you those 1000 shares IBM with the promise that I will deliver them in 30 days.  Here’s the deal. I don’t actually have those shares.  I have lied to you.  But, here’s my plan.  I sold you those shares on the hope that they would appreciate in value so I took your money, and bought the shares and now I am waiting for them to appreciate and the difference I take as profit.  I plan to short sell your stock, and I am naked because I don’t actually own the stock I am selling…thus the naked short sell.

Now, if the price I sold you isn’t enough to purchase the shares I promised, I am screwed, and I default on the sale, but that is ok because all I have to do is avoid your calls for a while.

Bells should be going off in your head right now!  Wait a second, you are selling me something that you don’t have, and in some cases, never intend to deliver.  Isn’t this fraud?  Isn’t this illegal? The answer to the fraud question is yes.  But, hold onto your hats, the answer to the illegal question, at least until lately is no.  WHAT?!?

Apparently, this practice stems from back from the day when there were no computers on the stock market, and traders send their assistants across the floor with wheelbarrows of paper stock in order to close a sale.  Obviously this would cause a traffic jam and would bring the entire market to a stand-still, so the practice of a gentleman’s agreement that the stocks would indeed be delivered came to be accepted.

Flash forward to today were the entire Stock Market is driven by computers.  Stocks are represented by 1’s and 0’s that flit about from one database to another at the stroke of a key.  We no longer wait for a wheelbarrow of paper to close a stock trade.  The stock now appears, as if by magic, in our accounts.

In this day of light-speed communications the arcane practice of naked short selling should have been eliminated a long time ago.  We just don’t need that apparatus because of computers.  Yet, it persisted.

Now, the Fed is closing this down, but that leads me to ask, what other BS is going on out there? People, it seems, will do anything if they make money and they won’t get caught.  They will even believe that fraudulent activity is not only ok, but indeed a cornerstone in the proper functioning of the Stock Market. The Fed should have jumped in long ago to stop this practice.  There may have been ramifications and short-term issues, but if our economy is depending on shaky, fraudulent practices, then its failure is sure.  Once trust is lost, all is lost.  Shame on you Fed for not stopping this earlier.  This is ridiculous.

Photo Courtesy of www.exploreshop.com.

I know, I know… You’re WELCOME!

Hurricane Ike hit Galveston and Houston with some ferocity. There were reports of inland flooding and wind damage, what you would expect from a hurricane making landfall. As soon as Ike was ashore, it almost immediately turned northeast and sped towards Arkansas. It only took 24 hours for the center of Ike to get from the Houston area to Northwest Arkansas.

Like I said before, I have experienced many hurricane remnants so I thought nothing of Ike moving through. I viewed weather reports warning of high sustained winds with a considerably large grain of salt. But sure enough, I awoke at 1:00 AM to the sound of sustained howling winds.

In the NWA, we are used to thunderstorms moving through. They often have high winds. Last night was different. The winds started at 1:00 and didn’t stop. It was constant. I am sure it was a mere hint of what they experienced on the coast, but wow.

At 2:00 AM, I was awakened by the clicking sound of every electronic and electric device in my house shutting off. The electricity has never been knocked out by the remnants of a hurricane, but last night, my electricity was out for two hours.

This morning we got our first chance to see the damage, and sure enough, there are a number of limbs down and leaves everywhere. I was in southern Louisiana just three weeks after Katrina a few years ago to help in the cleanup effort. NWA looks nothing like that, but again I can’t remember ever having any damage from hurricane remnants.

It was a noteworthy storm.

Wow, this gives me ideas.

I see a day very soon where we look back and laugh at the “8-track” era of e-readers.  This is a video from Demo demonstrating a new e-reader called the Plastic Logic Reader, a super thin touch version of an e-reader.  We shall see how it is reviewed once people get their hands on them, but from this demonstration, this new device at least merits interest.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

If you want to create one your self, go to www.wordle.net.

If you are a fan of clean, functional design that gets out of the way of the task at hand then you might have just found your new browser of choice.  It has it’s limitations, but man, does it have its strengths. I don’t have the time to do an exhaustive rundown of all it can do, and really, there have been a million stories written on the ‘nets that do that.

I just want to talk about one feature that blew my mind a little. But before that I do want to do just a little background on how Chrome came to be.  It is one of those programs that I LOVE, because it is built well after the fact, but profits from its ability to learn from what came before.

God bless the pioneers.  They have the toughest life.  It is exciting to be the first to survey a new land, but also, unfortunately, as a pioneer one has to address the inevitable questions and issues that arise.  With little experience and even less time, new ways to handle problems are devised.  Over time, people come to accept those schemas as, well, how they are done.

It is much the same for the person or team charged with creating a new genre of program. This happened with video edting software, something that I deal with on a daily basis.  When editing video was first introduced on the computer, computers were woefully underpowered to handle the task. The teams that designed the first editors were very crafty and clever in getting them to work at all.  Their craftiness and cleverness along with established workflows in the old-fashioned linear editing world established some schemas that stuck.  As computers got faster, the old way of doing video editing persisted which left silly, superfluous steps that slowed down the creative process.

Along comes Sonic Foundry who looked at the whole process of editing video and streamlined the process down to its essentials and thus speeding up the editing process immensely.  The product was called Vegas Video. The name later changed to Vegas and then Sonic Foundry’s whole line of products was purchased by Sony, but that is another story. 

The same thing has happened here with Chrome. Google had the luxury of being able to soberly assess the successes and failures of browsers as they stand today without the pesky hassle of keeping legacy features that only matter to a few.

Google Chrome from the ground up to function, and function acceptionally well on the Internet as it stands today, an Internet filled with applications. Which, brings me to the function that blew my mind a little and drove me to write this lengthy entry.

When you are using an online app such as Gmail, or Google Docs, click the button near the top right side of the Chrome window that looks like a sheet of paper.  That opens a menu where you can create an application shortcut. It is pretty simple actually.  All it does is hide all the browser buttons and makes the online app more like an app that is native to your hard drive. Not only that, it also creates a shortcut that will open that online app directly, thus eliminating the multi-step process of opening the browser, clicking in the address bar, typing an address, and then finally arriving at the online app.  Now, click one shortcut and boom…done!

Simple I know, but my mind was blown a little. Cloud computing became a little more real for me today.

Super awesome. I bet you can’t just watch it once.

FAA computer problems cause flight delays - CNN.com.

I think I have posted something here to the effect that I am looking into the best to do list creator for me, if not here is the short version. I have an iPhone. iPhone doesn’t have a to do list, (I know, crazy right?). iPhone now supports applications. I want the best third-party to do list for me.

There are a number of options out there from the ultra lifestyle changing options like the GTD Model and OmniFocus, to simple to do list apps in the iPhone store that simply make a list on your phone and that is it. I got a number of ideas from people about what they use, but more on that later.

My needs for a to do list fall somewhere in between those extremes. I want a to do list that is synced to the web and is accessible whether I have my phone or not.

Toodlelo: What I like

Right now, I am in week two of using Toodledo almost exclusively. I haven’t bought the paid version which will unlock some extra functionality, but so far its free version does a lot to address my needs.

The list lives on the web which means I have access to my to do list wherever I am as long as there is an Internet connection. Toodledo has a fairly serviceable web app page that makes using it pretty good on the iPhone. It is a little sluggish on the phone, but I suspect that that will be dealt with in firmware updates to the iPhone.

Toodledo allows me to categorize my to do list in folders, contexts, and with tags. All of these are handy because they open up uses for toodledo lists that the creators didn’t even think of. That also means that it is flexible enough to meet the needs of different users.

Here is how I am using the folders, contexts, and tags. I have created a folder for each stakeholder to whom I owe something. In other words, all the jobs that need to get done for Jim (Jim is a fictional character, any similarities to existing Jims is purely coincidental.) goes in a folder called Jim.

I use contexts to establish the where. Everyone has to do lists for work or school and home, and very possibly more. Right now I have two contexts. Work and home, although I see adding more in the very near future. Having contexts allows you to focus on what is important at that time, where you are while back-burnering things that don’t make sense in the current context. In other words, I can’t mow the lawn while I am sitting at my desk at work.

As for the tags, here is where you can really get creative. Last week I was needing to be able to classify whether a job was in process or not. There were some jobs that weren’t going to be finished, but I needed to signify that there was work being done, but were waiting on contingencies. Toodledo didn’t have that function baked in, but then it occurred to me that I could use tags. On all the jobs that were in process, I used the tag ‘in process’, I know, clever right? That way, I could do a search for ‘in progress’ and see all those jobs. Tags open up a whole world of flexibility.

Toodledo has another interesting trick. It allows you to print your to do list and using a pair of scissors and some origami, create a neat little business card sized booklet of your to do list. One section is devoted to all the to dos in your list, and the back is devoted to what it calls the Hotlist. Those are the to dos that are due soon or are rated as very very important. It is a cool trick even if it is a little confusing to fold the booklet the first time. For those of you out there who have an affinity for paper and it flexibility, this is a cool option.

Things I don’t like

I know this is picky, and highly subjective, but I would love for there to be a site redesign. I don’t love the current look of the main site. It gets very cluttered when you have everything open. The site gives you the option of hiding notes, and that helps, but honestly, I need to see those. I wish that the interface had a more cohesive, app-like appearance that wasn’t overly colorful. There are color options, but those don’t address the clutter issue.

This is a small nit-picky issue that isn’t driving me a way from the site, but a slick experience would be a big draw for me.

What’s Next?

Thankfully for me, the user, switching costs are low when it comes to to do lists. I plan on giving Toodledo another couple of weeks and then look at the options again and see if there is something out there that works better. I bet using an online to do list for an entire month will illuminate issues I need to take into account when finding my final to do list choice.

So as I was reading my news feed on Google Reader, some images from this guy (Joshwmc) popped up that blew my mind.  This guy does fan art around superhero movies, and it is extraordinarily realistic and good.

You need to check it out!