Drewidia

I’ve never understood the hotel turndown service past the free chocolate, but recently the Starwood hotel chain (Westin, W, Sheraton, etc.) has taken this somewhat forgettable amenity from unnecessary to ob-no-x-ious.

This is apparently a recent and not only national but international change to their standard service offerings as I witnessed it in both NYC and Amsterdam.

The change in question? They turn on the radio for you. An ostensibly forgettable action until you consider this that the Starwood radios are not only completely unintuitive but differ from hotel-to-hotel like snowflakes. Finding the “off” button can be an exercise in patience in not unplug the friggin’ thing from the wall.

Also, the selected channel is either the standard Starwood relaxing New Age music (the same playing when you turn on the TV) or soft rock. In NYC, they seem to enjoy the soft rock option. The following songs have been playing over the past month when entering my hotel room:

• Like a Prayer – Madonna
• The Dawson’s Creek Theme
• Desert Rose – Sting
• Rainy Days and Mondays – The Carpenters
• Iris – The Goo-Goo Dolls

Cringe-worthy. Now, if the Go! Team was playing instead of these it would be a much different story.

On top of that, if you get home in time to put your privacy sign up (i.e., on vacation) they leave a note under your door saying that they appreciate your privacy and if you want turn down service, just call. No problem, dude; if you want someone to come to your room, turn the radio to an unfortunate station, straighten your bed and leave a known cavity-causer just before bedtime, just give us a call.

I fell in love with this park over the past week while vacationing in Amsterdam. A surprisingly fun afternoon can be made of picnicking at the park followed immediately by sleeping under the sun. Anyway, took some lazy videos over a few days time while being a big hippie in the park.

UPDATED: Had to take this down a few weeks back because of a visibility situation at my client. Since my last two weeks start Monday, I figured it would be fine to put back up.

For those who don’t know, I’m leaving my job on July 11 to work full time on my own projects before I move to Bloomington August 20 to start grad school.

That’s just a little over a month to get everything done that I want; professionally, academically and extracurricular… ly. I’ve created this Quittin’ list of everything I wanted to accomplish before the move. Each major workthread (professonal, personal and academic) will be completed more or less concurrently.

Major Professional Goals After Quitting

• Get PayOwe Facebook app up and running (3 days)
• Finalize PayOwe and get it beta-ready (6 days not including the Facebook component)
• Get secret Craigslist project completed (4 days)
• Redesign Drewidia (2 days)
• Redesign Inkitecture Blog (1 day)
• Begin iPhone App for PayOwe (4 days)
• Start on secret Flex finance project (8 days)

Major Personal Goals

• Complete a century (100-mile) ride on my bike (daily Chicago trail training, targeting August 19 for all-day ride)
• Give up coffee UPDATED: Okay, realism; drink less coffee. Maybe only on Sunday’s.
• Work out at Quad’s Gym daily (starting July 11)

Major Academic Goals

• Refresh understanding of Flex, Flash (12 days including secret finance project)
• Read required HCI/Informatics books (2 days)

Of all of these, I have the greatest doubt of completing a century on my bike. I’m going to give myself all day to complete the century when I think I’m ready. My friend Dave tells me this is a difficult thing to do less from an endurance reason, but moreso from a logistical reason (tremendous amount of calories and water on the day of). We will see. Indeed, we will see.

Meet the Specialized Allez Elite ‘08.

It comes stock with a Specialized A1 Aluminum frame with FACT carbon forks, steerer, inserts and seat stem.

It is loaded with Shimano 105 shifters, mechs, cassette and a Gossamer MegaExo crankset.

I love it more than my family.

I never thought I’d spend more than a few hundred on a bicycle until I started riding semi-seriously on my hybrid. I purchased the bike because my employee program pays for half of any major exercise equipment purchase. I originally purchased a hybrid because I wanted a nice bike that could be used for both exercise and a bit of off-roading.

So I started riding: 5 miles. 10 miles. 15 miles. Then I got up at 3:30 AM to bike downtown to participate in Bike the Drive ‘08. That day I rode 36 miles by 6:00 AM. My hindquarters were hurting something fierce.

After spending what can be considered an unhealthy amount of time on my hybrd, I realized that I should have just bitten the bullet in the first place and purchased a full-on road bike. Everything about a road bike is tailor-made for efficiency: the aerodynamic position of the cyclist, the thin tires, the ultralight frame. All of these elements combined with a human driver create the most elegant combination of man and machine the world has ever known.

If this sounds like borderline-obsession then you’d probably be right. I think about cycling almost all of the time. Since I’m only home on the weekends, I plan all of my activities around cycling (“It’s supposed to rain on Saturday but not until 1, so i can get some solid miles in before noon”).

Do you know what killed the seminal German electronic band Kraftwerk? Not drugs, not ego, but cycling. Don’t believe me? Check it out

Hütter saw cycling as more than a mere leisure pursuit, something closer to a political statement: “No, it’s not for holiday. It is the man machine. It’s me, the man machine on the bicycle. Holidays are an alienation, a consumption concept. To relax ourselves, we ride the bicycle, it’s enough. We are liberated from holidays.”

Hütter and his large collection of bikes, either shimmering chrome or jet-black, were featured in a French cycling magazine, with not a single reference to the fact that he was a member of a seminal electronic pop group. It is obvious that the high technology associated with bike frames, components and training regimes held a fascination for musicians who had started out designing and building their own synthesisers and other sonic gadgetry. Just like a recording studio, a bike is made up of parts that must be designed and tuned to work in harmony. It is always possible to upgrade a component in order to reach ever greater heights of performance. Hütter points to many parallels between the Kraftwerk vision of cycling and their music: “Speed, balance, a certain freedom of spirit, keeping in shape, technological and technical perfection, aerodynamics.”

...

The original plan was to record a whole album inspired by the Tour De France but Bartos and Flur we’re not keen on the idea. Moreover, tragedy had come close when Hütter was involved in a bike crash, in which head injuries left him in a coma for two days. Perhaps confirming Bartos’s view that the cycling obsession had gone too far, Hütter’s first words on waking are reported to have been “where’s my bike?”. The injuries took time to heal and the Tour De France LP project was shelved.

I’ll make a promise that it won’t get that bad on my end.

A bike’s-eye video montage I filmed whilst participating in Bike the Drive 2008. Fun little video, if I do say so myself.

For those unfamiliar, Bike the Drive is an annual Chicago event whereby Lake Shore Drive, the lake-adjacent road leading through the city is shut down to cars and only bicycles are allowed. Very cool!

Plans for next year include helmet or road bike-mounted cam.

Long story short, I somehow got staffed in NYC.

Yes, I’m only at the firm for a couple of months, but the project in question was having trouble finding someone “skilled technically, client-facing and unassailably handsome” and said they would “take [me] until [I] left the firm”. I won’t go into further details about the project except it’s in Manhattan and the team is a great group of folks.

Anywho, some thoughts on the big apple juice that never sleeps:

Pros

• Restaurant choices everywhere, in every variety, footsteps from your door (hats off to the chicken and rice cart on 53rd and 6th , right next to my hotel)
• Incredibly diverse culturally. I’ve never seen such a mixture of people in one place
• Lots of attractive people, but frighteningly-thin women. Free brownies in the office often go uneaten!
• You can shove the elderly in public and no one will bat an eye

Cons

• Rat racers seem to be constantly trying to keep up with themselves. Getting vibes of jealousy, pretention and unnecessary ruthlessness all at once
• Worst regional accent ever; “Jaayyrrrreeee, come and see the baaayyybeee!”
• Longer work hours than other cities (Madison seems to check out at 4:30, Chicago around 6, NYC anywhere from 7 to ???)
• Slow moving tourists (see elderly shoving comment above)

Neutral

• Suspiciously few homeless…
• Nobody says “please”, “thank you” or “excuse me” but then again, nobody expects it
• Wearing all black to work means you’re fashionable, not a goth

I was perusing Brad Gessler’s conden.se blog today when I came across this article – How to Hire a Rails Developer . Lots of swearing aside, Brad brings up an important question that every developer, rails or not, should ask themselves: “Why did you choose Rails?”

Rails is a technology de jour. They all come and go; even Rails will not escape this fate. Be sure to ask your developer, “Why Rails?” In fact, if you are looking for a Rails guy and you’re starting a project from scratch, you should probably also be asking yourself that question!

When you ask your developer this question, don’t accept the answer, “because it is so easy!” or “It makes me more productive!”. Why is it easy? How does it make you more productive?

At Condense, we chose Rails because unlike most of today’s web frameworks, environments and testing are a forethought; not some shit that is tacked on to a framework after it was shipped. This paid off at a TECHCocktail when our internet connection was down and we had to copy our application to an iPod, move it onto another machine, and fire it up.

Without automated tests, we’d just be dead. There is no way in hell we would be able to deploy new features with confidence. For Rails, it was really the thought of the workflow around all of the development that had us at “hello”. Automated tests have proven so important and valuable to us at Condense that we consider them a competitive advantage.

So Why Do I Use Rails?

My answer is much less technical than Brad’s. I don’t really have automated testing or systems environments in mind. I like rails because I can quickly get my ideas to prototype.

Professionally, I work with Java most of the day on highly enterprise-y applications. Java is at the other end of the webapp spectrum when it comes to doing stuff fast. Yes, it can handle the load better and yes, it’s more mature but when it comes to taking an idea sketched on a cocktail napkin and creating a prototype all in the same night Java can’t stand up.

PHP does a good job of bridging the gap between scalability and speed-to-market. There’s an ongoing PHP-is-better-no-Rails-is-better debate going on within the nerd community. One major argument is that the same MVC framework and LISP-like functions Rails uses can be applied to PHP with some simple framework/library modifications. As well, many developers argue they can prototype just as quickly in PHP as Rails.

Glad to hear PHP works well for you, but PHP feels like a chore to me. It takes me time and energy to load in those libraries, make sure the config is set up correctly, test, debug, blah. When I want a new rails app I do this:

 > rails newApp 

What matters to me is getting my from napkin-to-prototype quickly. I have a full-time job (~50 hrs/wk), I travel every week and am expected to also have some semblance of a social life. I don’t have time to mess around with configuration, libraries, JARs and other odds-and-ends involved with more production-worthy languages.

At the heart of it all, I am a business technologist, not a computer scientist. Handling scale is all well and good but it doesn’t mean squat if the project cannot be produced quickly. Rails empowers the business-minded developer with the flexibility to develop, test and deploy web applications without the cognitive friction involved with setup and configuration.

As of late I have been asked the same basic question with a fairly consistent regularity, “What have you been up to?” and “I never see you any more, are you married?” and “Why don’t we have any grandchildren yet?”.

The answer to most of those questions can be answered with PayOwe.com . PayOwe is a way for people to keep track of their everyday, friend-to-friend loans and debts. It works through Twitter, the online social networking site.

How it works: Essentially, you send a message through Twitter with the amount someone owes you and why (“Bob owes me $4 for lunch”). This debt is received by @PayOwe and added to the database. An balance sheet of accumulated debts can then be viewed/managed through PayOwe.com. If the person who owes you also uses Twitter, it will show up on their balance sheet as well (pending their approval). This allows both parties to control the state of the debt which I guess makes PayOwe a social networking site.

PayOwe is the first offering from Inkitecture , which is Jay, Kunal and myself. Jay came up with the original idea for PayOwe and it’s underlying architecture to be based off of Twitter and Jabber messaging. We’ve found Twitter + Jabber messaging to be an excellent means of sending/receiving messages.

The site is in it’s alpha phase right now, and we’d greatly appreciate any feedback on the site. Please check it out and let us know what you think -> info at payowe dot calm.

Just accepted my offer to the IU Informatics/HCI program in Bloomington. In honor of IU’s greatness, I would like to post the biggest IU emblem I could find:

Today I checked my mail for the week and found two new pieces of mail: one was a set of coupons for Chicago businesses, another was a credit card offer. The problem was my trash bin was full (mostly with credit card offers and coupon mail).

I recalled an article written by Maddox called Junk the Junk in which he advocates stuffing junk credit card offer return envelopes with junk coupons. It was time to put the rubber to the road on this one.

• Step 1: Organize Your Junk Mail

It’s like getting money in your mail.

• Step 2: Stuff Credit Card Return Envelope with Coupons

• Step 3: Add a little something special

Options include candy wrappers, whitening strips, used tissue

• Step 4: Mail

Today is a good day for freedom

For your reading pleasure; Patrick Kroupa's opus "Voices in My Head - MindVox: The Overture".

No one has been able to condense the 20-some years of early hackerdom like Kroupa (Lord Digital). He and Bruce Fancher created MindVox, one of the first and best ISP's in NYC circa 1992-96. 'Voices' acted as a press release of sorts catapulting MindVox into the mainstream consciousness.

I've read this thing more times than I can count. Granted I never learned to count past 29 (base-10) or 11011 (base-2), but it holds a special place in my heart. It's a stubbornly real account of the cyber landscape of the 80's and 90's, those involved, and their reasons for being involved.

My favorite part:

       Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
       thing,  is  the  trail that led up to it.  You are there for some
       reason, or usually a very complex series of  reasons,  that  have
       shaped  your  life up until that point in time, and caused you to
       become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
       tion  you  are  locked into in the consensual reality that we all
       physically inhabit at present.  In other words, the "real  world"
       isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.

       Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits,  dropouts,  acidheads,
       phreaks,  hackers,  hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
       say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight  face  and  really
       mean  it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
       of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
       and kingdoms of Cyberspace.

       As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a  lot  of
       the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
       new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain  and  dissatis-
       faction.  When I first became an active participant in this elec-
       tronic nervous system that was just beginning to  experience  its
       awakening;  I  was  a little over ten years old.  My early under-
       standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a  handful  of
       people  whose  skills  I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
       lives I felt great pity and sadness for.

This is about the time of year when my insomnia really kicks in. It usually starts around Christmas time and ends around April/May when the snow thaws. I think Winter puts me in a state of worry. I attribute this to Cabin Fever and poor blood circulation.

Enough about that. My car was towed 2 hours ago. $170 – blah. This is not important.

The important thing is that my secret project is nearly completed. I’m not joking; this is going to rock the ass of the web world. As usual, Jay Zeschin is involved.

More to come. Let’s just say I’m finally getting use out of my many domain names.

That is not to say I’m not done purchasing domain names, because I recently acquired AndrewMcKinney.com. This is notable because drewmckinney.com was taken by “Mr. Haircut” Drew McKinney the real estate salesman. DrewMcKinney.net was also pissed about this fact (also a consultant, also an open source supporter).

Lots of work next week. The reporting service (not ‘Reporting Service’) must be standing up within the next three weeks or else. Or else what?

Alright, so I see some point(s) to second life:

1. The ability to create a virtual world, mostly in an architectural form, that others can explore
2. The ability to chat with like-minded individuals in said virtual worlds
3. A medium to inexpensively market to a captive audience

The first point is a fair one. The user is empowered with the flexibility to create buildings, vehicles, clothing and accessories of all shapes and sizes. Character customization offers a great deal independence in comparison to other life-simulators like The Sims. But let’s be real, here: it’s essentially playing with Barbies in a more flexible and ‘adult’ way.

The second point is what irks me a bit. From a social networking perspective, SecondLife is essentially a scaled-down version of IRC. In SecondLife, one can ‘Teleport’ to different ‘Places’ (essentially islands) pertaining to a particular theme or interest (e.g., “I teleported to Goth Island because I love Joy Division”). In IRC, one can ‘Join’ different ‘Channels’ (chat rooms) pertaining to a particular theme or interest (e.g., “I joined the Ubuntu Linux channel because I luuuv Linux”).

The chatroom dynamic is where SecondLife falls short. A user can only be in one place (chatroom) at a time. The user can only chat with people near them. While the user is chatting, they can pretty much just stand there and stair like a crash dummies or perform one of many predefined actions, like goofy dancing or whistling. The problem is that SecondLife attempts to simulate real world human interaction, but fails in the actual interaction portion. Real people use voice inflections and body language to communicate. Granted, real-time voice communication is limited by internet speed, but this is still a major hurdle.

The third point is, well, undeniable. And if you enjoyed the movie I, Robot, then maybe SecondLife is for you.

This is an assessment I completed for an Ada, MI school on the feasibility of using Johnny Lee’s wiimote whiteboard for daily in-class use.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Kevin Makice (HCI IU) did a write-up on the video, summarizing the assessment in much more eloquent language than my own.