THE DREAM IN ACTION

The next few months are going to be crazy. I just moved out of my apartment, then I’m heading to San Diego for Christmas on Wednesday morning. I’ll be out in SD until January 6th spending time w/ family, meeting my San Diego based Twitter “friends” and hopefully getting some sweet stuff for Christmas. Then in January I’ll be living with some family friends in the Milwaukee burbs so I can avoid paying rent for the month I’ll be in China; I’m headed to Shanghai in February. After I get back from China I’ll be back here in downtown Milwaukee.

Because of this, I’ve spent the last 3 days moving out of my apartment. I’ve been largely offline with minimum interneting (as my gf would say) and it’s been kind of nice. Pretty much all of my work involves being online and starring at a screen and I think sometimes its good to close the laptop and get out and work…you know manual labor. I’ve spend much of my time last few days out working in the snow and something about working in the cold really makes me feel like a man. Can anyone relate?

*click on the pic to watch live

This afternoon I watch the BearHug Camp hosted by Steve Gillmor.  The event was focused on the progress of the micro-blogging space. One of the main topics of conversation was around live search of the Twitter data. Currently there is nothing that is “real time” and for political purposes among others this service is much desired.

Evan, Biz, and Alex from Twitter came just before lunch and they really took a lot of heat. Many of the comments online stated that it seemed that Steve set this group up to “gang” up on the Twitter crew. My perception is that this is probably true. The guys were put on the spot big time about how they will listen to the developer community going forward. Alex’s response was that his email is an open door for suggestions, comments, concerns (alex@twitter.com).

In attendance from my point of view (online) was Loic Lemeur (Seesmic), Leo Laporte (TwiT Army) who livestreamed the event, Dave Winer (Scripting.com), Ari Steinberg (Facebook), Kevin Marks (Google Open Social), Angus Logan (Microsoft), identi.ca guys, among a group of developers in their respective fields. There was a lot of talk around XMPP becoming just as common as HTTP so that the web can be much more LIVE!

My take-aways: This event was interesting but the stubbornness of Steve Gillmor and the politically motivated conversations took away from the event. The best part of the event that I enjoyed the most was the time that Evan, Biz, and Alex were there. The conversation although tough for them was the most focused that it had been all day. I see a huge push for the web to become more and more “live”. The web used to be static, now it’s updated, next it will be live!

Here is a slide presentation that I found interesting. The quotes are quite funny and the predictions are scary accurate.

| View | Upload your own

I’ve just added the MyBlogLog widget to ActionsTalk. Be sure to join the community so that you can know who else reads ActionsTalk and we can begin to connect.

To go along with my recent acceptance of Twitter, I noticed that Twitter is the 5th largest Rails app. This is an interesting ranking of apps that use Rails. Check out (http://rails100.pbwiki.com/). Being some what familiar with the +’s and -’s of PHP, I’d like to learn more about Ruby and the Rails framework. If anyone out there is great at using the Rails framework I’d love to hear what the experience is like. Why would I use it over PHP or any other language? What flexibility does it give you? Lets keep this discussion going in comments…

This is a project is a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. This video is yet another example of an awesome application of a mash-up of technologies. It will be fun to see the final product.

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008

Aren’t you getting tired of hearing people talk about the Work – Life balance? I am, and it’s mostly because I don’t understand the concept. It’s not that I work 80 hours a week, or than I don’t have a social life, because I do, I have a great one. The confusion is derived from my confusion around what we are balancing. Things need balancing when they are opposites right? Black and white have grey; good and evil have, well, humans. But why do work and life need balancing? If your work and you’re life are such polar opposites you are definitely in the wrong line of work. If you hate your job so much that you don’t consider it part of your life then we have issues.

People wonder why they’re not performing well at work, Peter Berner, author of Career Moments would tell you, “You’re in the wrong job!” Somebody can do a job without actually doing anything, but nobody can do work without doing anything. If you find a career or work that you enjoy it can become your life and that is OK! Believe it or not you don’t actually have to hate your job.

So, forget trying to balance your work and your life. Let your work become a part of your life and something you enjoy. Enjoy your life. I guarantee that when you find work that becomes your life and that is enjoyable the rewards will be exponential. The largest of those rewards may even be financial rewards which can also improve other aspects of your life. All of a sudden when you begin to enjoy your work the need to balance is gone.

Follow-up post 4/2/08:

This is this weeks Career Moment from Peter Berner. I thought it applied well to the work life balance struggle that many people face.

GETTING THE JOB YOU LOVE
People think that finding a job you truly love requires a sort of divine revelation where one day the master plan for our career fulfillment is revealed to us. That rarely happens. No, for most of us the work of getting to a job that you love is a long, slow process of exploration, expectation, and inspiration. It requires that one listen to the urges and passions that call them to do certain types of things. It demands that we discover what gives us pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and purpose beyond the paycheck that meets our daily needs. Getting to the job you love is often more about the journey itself than the destination. As long as you are moving in the direction of your dreams you are on the right path. A life spent getting closer to what you love to do, even if you never get all the way there, will always beat a life of wondering what it would have been like to try.
Take great care of yourself- and your career! Peter Berner

There is something that I’ve been struggling with a great deal recently and an article I read tonight by Paul Graham made the struggle even worse. The issue originated from my decisions surrounding what I should be reading, how I should be spending my “develop Ryan time” and what sort of further education I should pursue. The struggle I’ve been facing is this, “is it more important to know how to do or to do.”

This struggle also ties back to the motivation behind my other blog ActionsTalk. Often times I find myself discussing ideas, learning how to implement new ideas, and working to further develop those ideas but not as often do I find myself acting on those ideas. Maybe action is the significantly more important piece.

The example that comes most easily to mind is a web app. I always seem to have great ideas around new web solutions for all kinds of different life and business problems but I much less (almost never) find myself trying to develop (in the coding sense not the growth sense) these new ideas/applications. In this scenario I often question if I’m spending my time wisely. Just because I’ve read about hundreds of start-ups, tested hundreds of start-ups tools and apps, and could easily tell you all the do’s and the do not’s of starting a start up company doesn’t mean I’m any closer to starting one.

Paul Graham’s conclusion in the article was disturbing in that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand many of the how’s and what’s of the start-up process such as how to obtain funding, how do I choose a language and what are the capabilities of that language, and what are the most profitable idea industries. I haven’t spend as much of my time learning the languages, writing the code or actually “creating” anything. Paul’s contention is that you don’t need to know “business” to succeed in this process. You don’t need to know the process before you dive in. Well I’ve been spending much of my time on understanding and learning the process. If Paul is right, then that’s scary.

Maybe it’s time I stopped worrying about the start up industry. Maybe it is time that I pick up that PHP/MySQL book by my bed that’s practically unopened and begin to dive into the doing, the coding, the ever so important creation phase of this process. The learning will not stop it will just change. Now I believe the learning will be more applicable and a bit less theoretical.

Anyone who has gone through the process of transitioning from “reading about” to “doing”, I would love to hear your feedback on the experience and what conclusions you drew on Paul Graham’s theory.

The Nokia Research Center is working with the Cambriage Nanoscience Centre to develop nanoscience technologies that will bridge the latest and greatest in emerging technologies with the ability to benefit the end user. The idea behind this is (I know I say this a lot) absolutely market changing. This will change the word “product” forever. This technology allows the end user to combine many products in one. From watch, to clothing, to cell phone, to food tester, to health/bacteria scanner, and so on, this design/concept has the ability to do, it would seem, almost anything!

Here are some of the other many benefits of the technology:

• Newly-enabled flexible and transparent materials blend more seamlessly with the way we live
• Devices become self-cleaning and self-preserving
• Transparent electronics offering an entirely new aesthetic dimension
• Built-in solar absorption might charge a device, whilst batteries become smaller, longer lasting and faster to charge
• Integrated sensors might allow us to learn more about the environment around us, empowering us to make better choices

See some other pics.

This movie is a bit long but it will show (with drawings) some of the capabilities of these technology applied to products that will change the end-user (US!) ’s life. This will truly blow you away…

click to play

I apologize for the feeling that ActionsTalk has been very Gizmodo’esk’ but I’ve recently been super excited about new technologies that I’ve been exposed to. Enjoy.

Reading is the only way to get enough experience in one life time.  A few months ago I read A Long Way Gone – memoirs of a boy soldier  by Ismael Beah and it is one of those books that really makes you thankful for the life you’ve had.  Whether you were raised in upper, middle, or lower class you probably had a better childhood that Ismael. He retells the stories of being separated from his family at the age of 9 and fleeing the attacks of rebels at the age of 12.  He fought for the government army and describes the experiences of being totally drugged and committing acts of violence that he never thought possible.  Eventually he was set free to a UNICEF rehab center and was put into contact with his uncle’s family.  He describes the process of re-entering society and trying to deal with the horrible memories of war.

A Long Way Gone  is a story of hope and encouragement. Ismael overcomes huge challenges and shows the journey to hell and back.  I highly recommend reading this book for a change of perspective on you upbringing. It will  make you feel lucky.

Here they are. These are the best and brightest web sites out there right now. What do they win? Nothing… but maybe they’ll get a few new visitors when this hits the presses. Check them out, and leave comments!

Netvibes has become my homepage of choice as of late. It competes with iGoogle and PageFlakes in the personalized homepage space. Netvibes wins out because it looks cooler (I’m into visuals) and it has a ton of useful widgets to choose from. Some of my favorites are Google Calendar, Facebook, Weather, Twitter, and Gmail. You will begin to see that everything is connected on the web these days… netvibes does a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

Facebook is a major game changer. Never has a social network been so useful or prolific. Everyone shook their heads in amazement (including me) when Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly turning down $2 Billion offers to sell. Now the company has a valuation of $15 Billion!! It’s worth so much because it has so many users. It has so many users because it’s so addicting and useful. Yes, it will waste your time – a lot of your time. But it will also allow you to stay connected (even if minimally) with many, many people (which can be bad too). It’s become a one stop shop for checking in on everyone, and letting your friends see what you’ve been up to.

Say what you will about Wikipedia. It’s an encyclopedia that literally anyone can edit. The results could be disastrous right? Poor information could get spread all over the web… I look at it like this. Even though there’s a high probability that everything on there isn’t correct, it gets me a hell of a lot closer to the truth than I’d be without it (and quickly too). If nothing else, it points me in the right direction. One thing I always keep in mind when searching Wikipedia is how polarizing is the topic? If you’re looking up Hillary Clinton, or the Iraq War for example, who the heck knows what you’re going to get… This is a case where you’ve got passionate people on two sides of a topic (conservative and liberal), and they’ll be constantly overwriting each other on Wikipedia.

I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr for about two years now. I use Flickr so much, that some of my friends even call me Flickr. There are plenty of photo sharing sites out there and people often ask me what makes Flickr the best. I think if you love, photography (and I do), the community is what makes Flickr so good. You get to see amazing photos by people from all around the world. You can ask them what they did to get the shot. You can even see what camera they took the picture with in most cases. Flickr is the gold standard right now if you’re interested in photography.

Google knows what’s up when it comes to web applications. They either build the best or buy the best. I’m pretty sure they built Gmail from the ground up. Gmail is so smooth and easy to use, I almost hate using it because I have to use an alternative at work. It’s easy to search (Google is pretty good at that by now), and it’s easy to set up automatic rules. Even though it’s the best, they are still rolling out improvements. Google probably knows everything about me by now (since their computers are crawling my email)…should I be worried? I’m not.

Meebo is a problem solver. I’ve got friends that use multiple instant messaging clients, and it would be a huge pain to sign into all of them at once. That’s where Meebo comes in. It let’s me sign into Google Talk, AIM, and MSN all from one spot. It’s also completely web based, which means I don’t need to download anything to use it. They’ve even announced video chat for up to 6 people at once. I’ll probably never use that…but I could.

Popurls is where I go daily to find Interesting stuff on the web. I used to go to Digg for this, but I’m not impressed with the quality of info on Digg lately. Popurls (think popular urls) brings in the top stories from a ton of sources (like Google New, Del.icio.us, Digg…). I get to see it all in one place and the interface is very clean.

I wasn’t sold on the value of del.icio.us when it first came out a couple years ago. It’s a website that lets you store your bookmarks online. Now I use it as my repository for anything new and interesting. Every time I find a new site that I like, I plug it into del.icio.us and tag it with meaningful key words — this makes it easy to find later with a simple search. I’m also a big fan of the way it can separate your tags into different RSS feeds/pages. For example, here are all of my bookmarks that have been tagged “Belgium”

Simple GTD is all about Getting Things Done. And that’s what I like. It’s an online To-do list tool with everything you need and nothing you don’t. You can easily create multiple lists and drag items from list to list. I usually have this open all day at work and it keeps me on track. If you want something a little more robust, try basecamp. If you want something a little less robust, try pen and paper.

Google Reader is, hands-down the best RSS reader I’ve ever used. If you don’t know what RSS is, or why it’s important, click here for an explanation. Google reader lets me quickly browse top stories from all of my favorite sites in one place. If I find something good, I can “star it” and it becomes easy to find at a later date. It also has a slick e-mail sharing feature that lets me send stories to people quickly. The interface with my Gmail account automatically brings in my contacts, so I only need to type the first few letters of someone’s name and it finds their email address. I also really like the shared RSS feed feature. This allows me to share my favorite stories with whoever wants to subscribe to them.

Honorable Mention:
Mint is a great tool for managing your finances in one place. It would be a top site if it was better at categorizing my expenditures.

Deezer let’s you make music playlists that you can post all over the web (like this one).

Meetup is a great tool for finding people with common interests around you. It helps you find events in your area, and it will even export the even calendar automatically to Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

Mango offers a ton of free foreign language courses on the Internet. Nothing beats learning a language one on one with another person, but this is about as good as it gets on the web.

Geni is a great Family tree building site. It let’s you post photos of family members and will send you email reminders when someone’s birthday is coming up.

Sketchcast is a tool that let’s you draw out diagrams and record your voice at the same time. It’s great for creating lessons on something, or explaining material over the web. After you create a sketchcast, you can post it on your blog, etc.

see more of Blake’s post here.

As I write this post in response to a post on tadfad.com about Public Transit I am sitting on the northbound redline train of Chicago’s elevated train system.  The CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) is imposing rate hikes within the month and the trains seem to be getting slower and slower and at least in the morning on the way to work and coming home during rush hour the trains are literally cattle cars. Each train has roughly 5000 people and a new train comes every 3-6 minutes, during rush hour.  After thinking about Chicago’s public transportation system, a combination of trains and buses, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 5 main characteristics to a successful public or mass transportation system.  

Those characteristics are:

• Reliable

• Quick

• Safe

• Cost Effective

• Well Funded

Reliable.  The transportation system must run with reliability everyday and must be there within a reasonable amount of time.  Ex: If a person shows up for a 7:45am train it better be there within 10-15 minutes of the promised time or passengers will no long use that source of transport.Quick.  The transportation must work reasonably quickly; it must be reasonable relative to alternate means of transportation. Ex: If I can drive to work and in 20 minutes and the train system takes more than about 15 or 20 minutes more than that it would not be worth taking. Safe.  If the transportation system is not safe for all people to ride it will not be a popular option.Cost effective.  If the transportation system is not cost effective for the passengers it will not be used. Ex: If the train is not the cheapest option of transportation it will not be widely used.Well funded.  I think this is probably the most important point. In Chicago the number one issue for the train service is the fact that it is under funded. As I said before, rate hikes are coming soon to CTA passengers and there are many improvement projects already underway that need more funding. An example of the results of poor funding is Chicago’s blue line train. This train runs from the Loop to O’Hare Airport and the CTA decided last February to slow the train down in order to “get more life from the tracks” rather than to spend the appropriate money and repair the tracks.

In conclusion, a successful public transportation system is a cheap, quick, reliable, safe, and well funded one. Chicago’s CTA train system is the best that I’ve experienced, however, it leaves much to be desired in the well funded category.

This topic is a bit disterbing, you’ve been warned.

Why are mom’s on facebook? Mine is and its a bit wierd.  I understand that facebook is one of the most popular websites on the internet and is used as a very effective tool to stay in touch with friends and family, however I definitely liked the facebook of old, when only your college friends had access to those pictures of you with roughly 15 beers down.   Now that facebook has changed it has opened up the tool and made it much more appealing for investors and Zuckerberg but to the facebook old timer it’s lost it’s appeal in many ways. 

 Old folks (people in generations before ours) have never been known for their ability to adapt to new technologies. Their generations are much more comfortable with sticking to what they already know.  It is the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality and it seems to work for them. Facebook has changed all that. This new technology seems to not wait for the older generation to come to it but it seems that it is going after the older generation.  At least that’s the only explanation that I can come up with for why mothers (and fathers) are joining facebook like crazy.  I guess I just have to learn to except the “new” facebook with newsfeeds, status updates and moms.

 Use the comments to let us know if you mother is on facebook and how you feel about it.

Is it just me or does everyone have a huge hard on for Steve Jobs? Chill out about it.  Today the iPhone hit the 1 Million in sales mark which is pretty impressive, however, there are a lot of other great products and companies out there and frankly I’m kinda tired of reading every other article on tech blogs about the new iPhone or new iPods.  Its seems to me that if you have the word “iPhone” in your heading you’ll probably make it to the front page of ‘Digg’ (thus, the title of this post).  Can everyone start getting excited about something new…please!