Dystopian Paradise

I attended Gary Hoover’s presentation on the “History of Retail” last night and there was one thought he expressed that really jumped out at me. He said something to the effect of

“There are no new ideas anymore, only new combinations of existing thoughts.”

His examples were rooted in the retail world for this presentation, looking at how Sears, JC Penneys, and so many others had built on the backs of giants by doing what was in affect a social experiment.

“What would happen if we allowed shoppers to come in and look around, with no recourse if they didn’t purchase anything today?” “Could we sell just a few items, at a low margin, in small one-man stores and be profitable?” “What if we included public restrooms in our stores?”

These are just a few of the types of thoughts some of the titans of 20th century industry had along the way. So, I’ve been mulling that over in my head since last night and it occurred to me that in programming there’s a strong correlation. There are very rarely new ideas for how to create software, only the application of existing principles in new combinations.

So now it’s got me thinking…where else does this theory apply?

So I’m about to get a hiring bonus for recruiting some friends to come work for the great company I work for, Bazaarvoice, and I’m trying to decide what to do with the extra funds. We’re still HDTV-less, a feat growing quite rare here in the US, so that’s almost a given, but what I’m really thinking of doing is getting a new laptop.

The big question is whether to get some big iron that can do my photo and video editing, or a simple netbook fr what I do most: web browsing and email. Thoughts?

This is the first post from my new iphone. With a new wordpress app for it I should be able to write posts from anywhere, meaning more posts.

Here’s a recent photo of Kaden so I can test the photo upload functionality. The picture is from a recent trip to the Oasis while Mom and Amy were here a few days back. We had a nice visit and now Kassy and Kaden are up in MO for a cousin’s wedding.

Wow, I had no idea we were even up for best blog of all time, but apparently CNN is already selling shirts saying so.

I stumbled across this new feature of CNN.com early this morning, where they allow you to buy a t-shirt ($15) with one of the day’s top headlines printed across it, like this. The funny thing is that I also noticed that the URL was not protected at all, and so it allows things like this, that, or more deviously these.  I had a lot of un with it and couldn’t help but share the love.
Hope you enjoy!

If the rest of these videos are anything like the first one I watched, I’m going to be a busy man for the next few days.  Why do I even need TV anymore.  Now, granted it is summer re-runs, but we haven’t even seriously turned on the television in I don’t even know how long.  To make it worse, we recently moved the TV back downstairs into our main living room and so it’s much more accessible, but still nothing.  Sure we’ve watched some movies, and I finished playing Halo 2, but that’s been about it.

When the fall lineup kicks off, I’m sure there’ll be some more stuff I’m interested in watching, but for now, I’m officially tuned out.  Of course, Halo 3 drops in just a few short weeks, so I guess I just have my seasons.

So, I’ve been a big fan of Digg for some time now, although I go through effectively sinusoidal phases in the frequency of my visits. Yesterday I stumbled onto intriguing ways to visualize the data that’s being collected by Digg.

Swarm & Stack are two ways Digg has created to show which articles are being “dugg” by users. Each has it’s merit, but I think Swarm might be my favorite.

Swarm shows Digg users as they move from one Digg story to the next. This is interesting as you can follow the stream of conciousness of another human being as they read their news. Also, you can see stories that tend to congregate users around them if you watch long enough.

Stack has it’s own quirks, as diggs fall from the top of the screen onto the story and pile up as you’re watching. They stories are color coded for how many diggs they have, but as the stack grows taller you know that in the time you’ve been watching that this story has been dug much more than the others. It’s something like viewing the acceleration of one story over another, something Digg has had in some form for quite some time.

I guess the things I found most interesting about all of this was the possibility of visually mining information. It’s intriguing to me because Digg presents this information in two very easy to digest forms, and allows one of the human brain’s most evolved functions, pattern recognition, to really show off.

P.S. I’m trying to get better at this. Let’s see how long this lasts. :) Two days in a row.

Please tell me that multitasking is not the same thing as ADD, because I was just looking at the list of books I’m currently reading, and well…Tell me if I’m crazy.

• “V for Vendetta” – Alan Moore & David Lloyd (Just finished, technically)
• “No Perfect People Allowed” – John Burke (our lead pastor, a book about our church’s formation and growing a community of acceptance and love in the church)
• “Getting Real” – 37 Signals (Business book on how to develop software better)
• “The Parables of Jesus” – William Barclay (This is what our small group is reading right now, it’s so-so)

That’s about enough to kill a horse I’d think.

OK, so those of you who know me, know full well that I have a caffeine problem, but I’m not willing to admit that yet, so I don’t have to start down any recovery process (yet).

So a few months ago someone suggested creating a Myspace account for the Uprising and so on a whim, I created a page for myself. I found one of my friends there and added her. A few days later a friend living in Dallas found my page and added me. Then, nothing. I didn’t do anything more than putting just a bit of basic info onto my page.

This past Wednesday, I found out how to change the look/feel of my page, and a whole bunch more friends, and now I know why this is referred to by many as Crackspace. The fun of finding other friends and linking to them, posting comments on their page, tracking down your favorite band and adding their music to your page will have you consistently coming back. Tweaking, adding to your bio, looking for more friends, it’s all just too much fun.

I’m sure I’m not doing it justice…but I guess you just have to try it yourself.

On an unrelated note (to this post), I found yet another old friend on Myspace last night, and enjoyed reconnecting with him briefly over myspace messages. Hillarious!

I bought an Apple product yesterday. My first ever. I’ll give you all one guess what it is. Yep, given the slurry of press, and it’s recent release it is probably completely obvious that I bought an iPod nano. Technically, I had purchased a iPod mini about two weeks ago, but I returned it (heh, less than 30 days. Yes!) and got the nano instead.

I was already in awe over the great interface that the iPod mini had, not to mention the functionality of having a 4GB hard drive that easily fit into my pocket. Now, I have all that plus a color screen (woot!), nearly 200% better battery life (double woot!), and it’s ridiculously (shiny)tiny. I’ve been showing it off a bit (too much) at work, and nearly everyone who’s seen/touched it has said that they want one, and several have vowed to get one soon.

This is the flash based MP3 player that the market has needed for quite some time. I’m sure the shuffle has it’s place among some, but the nano has all of the shuffle’s flash based goodness, plus a very usable screen. To give it some perspective the screen is almost identical in size/resolution to my cell phone’s.

It’s funny. The thing that finally caused me to cave and get an MP3 player, was in fact the driving factor into getting an iPod based player. Podcasting. If you haven’t already fallen into this rabbit hole, I strongly suggest that you jump. Head first. Now!

Seriously, my drive time has moved away from meaningless banter between the gaggle of morning show radio program hosts, and to a system where I am delivered fresh content of my choice (how novel?!?) during my commute. No longer need I listen to theories on why Brad and Jennifer are calling it quits, instead I can learn about AJAX, new topics in Java, the skills of a successful manager, new gadgets that are just hitting the market, etc etc etc (the list goes on for quite some time).

In addition to all of this, there are quite a few Christian podcasts out there. So far, I’m not terribly impressed with any of them, but there is one, Dev4Gamers, that has been interesting occasionally. It’s billed as “Devotions for Gamers,” but I don’t really see how it has anything to do with gaming. Ultimately, it’s a very nice, short devotional that I typically listen to as I’m getting to the freeway. It just tends to remind me to focus my day on God, instead of myself, which I so often need reminding of.

To wrap this all up, I just want to add that I haven’t “drank the Koolaid” just yet on the Apple products, although the Mac mini has caught my eye a couple of times. Only time will tell.

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I’ll be attending the NFJS conference this weekend. I’ve been looking forward to it for several months, I really hope it will be a good chance to get caught up on the state of the industry in Java. I’ll be blogging the conference along with a few coworkers. Really not much of an entry, but I wanted to mention it here.