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Telescopic Text

2008-09-01T03:30:00Z

I love it when I am drawn in by simplicity.

Another reason to always carry a cell phone

2008-05-27T13:23:00Z

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.

On running, writing, and not keeling over dead

2008-05-06T12:55:00Z

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?

The unexpected trip to Web 2.0 Expo

2008-04-21T20:50:00Z

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!

Brownbook 2.0 is right around the corner

2008-04-18T06:28:00Z

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.

Bye Bye Textdrive. Hello Rimuhosting.

2008-02-16T05:10:00Z

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.

Needs change.

First, I really wanted to get on a VPS solution rather than a shared host so that I can have more control over the fine tuning of things. I have used a VPS solution on other projects for some time over at the excellent Rails Machine. In fact, I would recommend Rails Machine to anybody who wants the absolute simplest way to get up and running with a full Rails stack and robust deployment strategy in a very short time. However, after reading some great reviews of Rimuhosting, it sounds like it is a comparable service that gives a little bit more bang for the buck. Of course, I am cheating a little bit. I am using the railsmachine gem to get my projects started with the same efficiency as I was getting at Rails Machine.

Secondly, I wanted to have better control of my e-mail. Since my DNS settings were hosted with Textdrive, I was a little limited on how my mail could be set up. I use Gmail as a POP client and if you have ever done this, you will know that it is not the best solution. Gmail only updates when it wants to (or you can go in and manually tell it to update) rather than on a set schedule of every so many minutes. I also never really liked the “Sent from Gmail” that it leaves in the from address when you send an e-mail (it doesn’t always do this, but I could not figure out how to control it).

So now I am on a shiny new VPS installation and am hosting my mail with the free Google Apps. It’s looking good so far.

How hard cover books are made

2008-02-06T19:48:00Z

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.

Off to New York

2007-10-16T19:50:00Z

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:

Online calendar roundup is, well, all calendars

2007-10-08T15:53:00Z

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.

You, me, and Gwen Stefani

2007-08-28T15:30:00Z

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.

A Hemingway Exit

2007-08-13T13:12:00Z

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.)

Simple, but invalid

2007-07-20T18:31:00Z

I decided to check out BlinkCart, which lets you embed a shopping cart into your Web site or other social sites like MySpace, MSN, etc. The service seems very smart and the sign-up process was effortless. They seem to be doing a lot of things right.

However, they seem to not want me to get back in:

I guess I could just keep signing up for accounts to get logged in again.

Bring your own storage

2007-07-17T05:34:00Z

Back when I worked on electronic portfolios for colleges and universities, there was always the issue of who was going to store all the files that students were uploading and how much each student was going to be able to store. Should each student get a fixed amount and have to pay for more? Should the school provide/fund storage if they are requiring a large amount multimedia files? Furthermore, every program we worked with was a little different in both their needs and their capabilities to provide services. It wasn’t easy to come up with a single policy that worked for everyone.

I always thought a nice solution would be to let students have multiple storage repositories: school FTP server, personal server space somewhere else, and, of course, storage that could be purchased through the portfolio software itself. Multiple storage sources could be added managed separately and files could easily be transferred between sources. That would make it easy for students to migrate all their assets off school servers onto personal space when they graduated, without having to disrupt all the files they linked to in their portfolio. Store anywhere, manage centrally. Perfect, huh? Unfortunately, I moved on before I had a chance to champion such a cause.

I was pleasantly surprised today to see this concept being used in Bandwagon, a service for storing and syncing your iTunes files. They aptly call it a “bring-your-own-storage service” and allow you to easily integrate with any FTP server or Amazon’s S3 service. There are a lot of services out there whose APIs allow for tying a storage source to an application, but it is nice to see someone make it this easy. I’m looking forward to seeing more services like this in the future where all of my digital assets aren’t tied into the service that I am using. It might not be the right solution for every service, but it seems like the perfect option for services whose value isn’t dependent on having a total stronghold on the user’s file-based content.

Doin' Time

2007-07-10T14:39:00Z

I have always been an advocate of trying to get the most out of tools that you are already using. Therefore, when it came time for me to need to track my time for billing, I wanted to use my calendar as the basis for entering billable time. For some time I had used Apple’s iCal for tracking time and I think it is a simple, elegant solution. However, with the new job also comes the need for mobility and thus the need for a Web-based calendar. For this reason, I chose Google Calendar.

The next step is to find billing software that will import my iCal feed from the Google Calendar and turn that into billable time. Upon searching, I found only one calendar system (I’m sure there are others), TimeLog, that would import iCal data. However, this is one of those instances where iCal is referring to the Apple calendar rather than the iCal (.ics) calendar specification. So here I am back where I started.

Fortunately, since Apple’s iCal naturally supports the iCal specification, I can import my calendars from Google into iCal and then into TimeLog. Now this doesn’t defeat my need for mobility as the only thing I use Apple iCal for is to import time for billing.

So here is the architecture.

1. First, I create a separate calendar in Google Calendar for each client. I can then enter a description of the billable time for clients on each respective calendar.

2. Subscribe to each individual Google client calendar through Apple’s iCal. Google provides private feeds for each of your calendars, so you don’t have to expose this information to the world just to get it syndicated to your computer.

3. In Apple’s Address Book, create a company for each one of your clients. This step has nothing to do with calendars, but TimeLog also integrates with Address Book and uses this information to build you client list.

4. In TimeLog, go to preferences and select which calendars from Apple’s iCal you want to track for billable time. Now all the events you had on these calendars will be imported as billable line items and can be associated with clients, projects, and categories.

The rest of TimeLog works as you would expect billing software to work. It allows you to enter billable time through simple entry forms as well as import data from tab-separated text and iBiz files. You can analyze and report on your data and also export it to a CSV if you want to get it into a spreadsheet or another program. I have been happy using it so far and I haven’t even explored all of its features yet.

I have one small complaint about this setup. Once I import billable time from iCal, I can’t edit the description of this billable time. This is less due to TimeLog as it is to the way that iCal is set up. When you use Apple’s iCal to subscribe to an external iCal feed, you are not able to edit those calendar items from iCal. They are read only. Therefore, TimeLog is also not able to edit those calendar items as they do not make a copy of them during import. This means that if you want to edit the entry, you have to go to the original source, which for me is the Google calendar. This is a minor drawback, and for those who use Apple’s iCal for their primary calendar, this isn’t even an issue. I’m interested to see how the new changes to iCal in Leopard affect this workflow, but I am not holding my breath on being able to edit events from iCal feeds.

Overall, I am happy with the workflow and the convenience of being able to just enter my time into one place, turning appointments into billable time. Now back to that billable time…

Pittsburg, not Pittsburgh

2007-06-11T15:39:00Z

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of spending the entire day talking with people at the Miller’s Professional Imaging’s original lab in Pittsburg, Kansas. Having worked as a consultant with Miller’s from as early as 2001, I was quite familar with their newer, all digital lab in Columbia, Missouri, but the trip to Pittsburg gave me an even greater appreciation for the scale and complexity needed to run a succesful digtial imaging company today.

To give you some background, Miller’s was founded in 1939 by William S. Miller, a successful and respected professional photographer. Over the years it has continued to offer the highest quality prints and products to professional photographers and is regarded today as the premier source for digital imaging products and services for the advanced amateur and professional photographer.

The Pittsburg lab has undergone many changes and additions over the years as the business has grown and the industry has transformed itself from being film-based to predominantly digital. Currently, the lab continues to fulfill orders for its mainstay professional customers as well as for the growing advanced amateur market, who are served through Mpix.com. Although the lab used to see millions of rolls of film pass through for processing in a single year, it has really been a pioneer in offering digital image services to its customers as photographers have made the switch away from film. However, it was impressive to see their traditional film operations operating at a solid pace as they are committed to serving all their customers regardless of the medium.

More than anything else, the sense I had when left Pittsburg was the overwhelming sense of how much the people working there really cared about what they did. Everyone there has to master multiple skills and adapt to constant change as dictated by the ever-increasing products and new equipment coming in. It may sound cliched, but they really understood that the customer is first and that quality and service matter above all else.