I hate being stuck anywhere, but I simply can’t imagine being stuck in an elevator…for 41 hours. The New Yorker posted a time-lapse video of Nicholas White, who was stuck in the elevator of New York City’s McGraw Hill building for nearly two days. The video was recorded by the elevator security camera, which has to make you wonder who is really watching these things?

My favorite part of the video (if that is fair to say…it is actually hard to watch) is the very end when they casually place a sign in the elevator that I can imagine says something to the effect of “Not currently working.” When I studied Ancient Greek literature, we often came across a certain rhetorical device called litotes which is an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite. I would say the placement of that sign would fit right into many of the Greek stories I used to read. Litotes indeed.

This morning was the start of my switch back to mornings for running and exercising. I realize I shouldn’t say that so fast after just one successful morning, but I have enlisted the help of a friend to meet me each morning. Hopefully the accountability will compensate for the lack of habit at this point.

Running in the morning feels great. It’s dark and peaceful and no one is up but the birds and some other fellow runners. Not to mention the sense of accomplishment you already have by the time you start the rest of your day.

As we were running today, I told my friend how I was not a runner at all growing up. I never thought I could run and so I never really tried. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I tried running more than a mile and was surprised that I didn’t keel over right there on the spot. Ever since then I have loved running and have made it an important part of my life. I actually run enough to consider myself a runner, a thought that would have been laughable had you known me in high school.

So as I was telling the story of my running beginnings, I started to think about how I treat other things like I used to treat running. There are a number of things that I don’t consider myself good enough to do and so I don’t attempt them much. Or I will only attempt them with moderate levels of risk, which doesn’t really help me get past the hump of feeling like I am proficient at it.

At the top of the list of those things I don’t do is Writing. I don’t consider myself a writer. I have never written much and have never really tried very hard to regularly write anything that could be viewed publicly. But I realize this is really no different than my running. I have a pretty good feeling that if I keep writing regularly (more than a blog post once every two months), then I won’t keel over. Maybe I’ll even get to be good enough that people will start reading what I write. Maybe I’ll get even better that some people will stop reading.

So let’s see if I can start two good things in one day. I have a friend to keep me getting up in the morning and I have the the RSS readers of about four people scattered throughout the Midwest to keep me going here. What’s the worst that could happen?

Last Thursday, I needed a break between tasks so I posted an entry to ReadWriteWeb’s contest for describing a Web 2.0 technology that I thought was exciting. The prize was a ticket to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I took the opportunity to write about Dipity, a service that lets you create and discover timelines online. A few hours later Richard MacManus sent me an e-mail letting me know I had been chosen randomly from the entrants. Now I am at the airport in KC waiting for my flight to San Francisco. Since the trip was unexpected, I still have a lot of work to do while I am out in California, but needless to say I am pretty stoked about the conference.

Thanks Richard and ReadWrite Web!

We released Brownbook just over a year ago. Since then, thousands of people have been scheduling tens of thousands of appointments with the simple scheduling system that Brownbook provides. I am proud of how we have been able offer a simple tool that provides big value to our customers. We did not set out to be everything to everyone, but had one simple goal: let small businesses and individuals accept online appointment reservations from their customers.

Over the last year we have received all kinds of great requests from our customers and have implemented many of them along the way. However, there are also a number of great features that we wanted to offer that worked best if they could all be tied together. This meant taking a step back and taking a broader look at where we are going. We’re glad we did.

We believe that this next release of Brownbook is going to offer just the right mix of features for managing appointment reservations, with the simplicity you expect from Brownbook.

That’s all for now. I know it is not much of a peek. I just had to share some of my excitement for what is ahead. Stay tuned for the upcoming previews.

I had been hosting with Textdrive, now Joyent, since early 2005. They were one of the very first hosts that allowed, in fact encouraged, you to host a Ruby on Rails site when Rails was just a young sap trying to get its roots. For the most part, the Textdrive has fulfilled my needs pretty well over the last couple of years.

There is a nice post over on the Mpix blog showing how bonded hard cover books are made. Mpix has already announced that bonded hard cover books are on the way, but they give this teaser post as a reminder that they are close. This is a much more fun way of telling people than just sending out some specs about the books.

I have seen these books already and I am personally very excited about them. There are a number of options out there now for creating your own book, but few have the premium paper options and level of quality that Mpix has. And the bonded hard covers are a nice addition to the standard black hard cover books that Mpix has already been offering.

Tomorrow morning I will be joining the rest of the Mpix team to go to the PhotoPlus Exhibition in New York City.

I am pretty excited for a few reasons. First, despite all the traveling I have done, I have never actually been to New York. Although I will not have time to do much other than be at the show and eat dinner with the team, I cannot wait to experience this great city.

Second, I am excited to meet some of our Mpix customers. I have been working on the Mpix site redesign with the programmers and marketing team for the last four months and am excited to meet (in person) some of the people who use the site every day for their business or pleasure.

Finally, I made the video for the booth (with the help of their great designer, of course) where we are exhibiting. It is the first video of this sort that I have made and I am curious to see how it goes over. Here’s one of the frames from the video:

Mashable has a great roundup of online calendars and calendar resources that are available right now. The usual suspects are there along with some lesser-known calendars.

Of course we all know who the leader is still (at least until Yahoo releases their new Ajaxy calendar – or Brownbook 2.0 :):

I was most interested, however, in some of the ancillary services that are coming out to tie some of these services together. TwitterCal is definitely my favorite and serves to confirm my suspicion that Twitter will eventually become the command line for the Web.

On another calendar note, Brownbook is close to getting its next major release. Most of the interface has been overhauled and there are numerous new features based on feedback from our customers. We are very excited. Our baby is finally growing up.

There have always been sites that allow you to configure products the way you like them. One of my favorites is Timbuk2’s Bag Builder. There are also the standard sites like CafePress, Zazzle, or Mpix, that allow you to make products like prints, books, and shirts from your own media.

Well, why can’t I create my own tour-book keepsake that has Gwen Stefani’s professionally-captured promotional pictures mingled in with my own photos from the show that I went to. This is exactly what I have been looking for.

It is fun to see how user-generated content is making its way into mainstream products that are typically pre-configured to be the same for everyone. With the cost of on-demand printing of both photographic and press products decreasing, having customized products on this level is becoming less of a barrier. I wonder if we’ll start seeing kiosks at concerts that allow you to insert your flash memory card from your camera so that you can configure and print your tourbook before you go home. I would be all over that. No doubt.

Ever since I switched to using Mephisto for this site, I have been using the Hemingway theme, which was the default theme it came with at the time. This is a nice clean theme which served me well. However, I have decided to simplify and and brighten things up a bit. I will soon be adding more to the site, such as a list of recent projects. But until then, I’m happy to have a new face to Blueroot Studios.

(Sorry for any double posts in the migration process. I also updated the mephisto code to the latest version while I was at it and it may have republished a couple of my posts in the new feed.)