A favorite quirk of mine is how pronunciations change wildly and seemingly for no reason. For example:

For more English fun, you can't go wrong with contronyms.

It was quite eye opening to see the scale that we operate at. Here were a couple of my surprises:

1. It was huge! We're using 100,000 square feet of the total 300,000 square feet.
2. To get to any server room you have to get through at least an iris scan and sometimes a vascular one.
3. It was quite warm! In my experience (long ago), the server rooms were generally frigid and you couldn't stay in there for too long without preparation. These were at least in the high 70s and possibly mid-80s.
4. We probably won't need to expand past our current usage for several years due to advances in server technology. We can densify the racks in lieu of needing new ones.

After the tour, I got to speak to a group of Northern Arizona University students pursuing their CIS and CS degrees. It was rejuvenating to boil down why I love working at Go Daddy so I could explain it to them.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of GoDaddy.com, LLC.]

1. Wat: it's practically programming standup, poking fun at some of the "quirks" of Ruby and JavaScript. Plus it's four minutes long, shorter than an Ignite talk.
2. Inventing on Principle: this one's longer at 54 minutes but so incredibly inspiring. It's a talk about life in the guise of a reconception of human-computer interaction. After watching it, I immediately started following him on Twitter and checked out his amazing Web site.

If there are any awesome talks you'd like to share, I'm very interested and my email address is over in the right side bar.

So I deleted one of those apps, leaving an odd and disconcerting Dock. I'm hoping that that irritation will provoke me to actually fill that spot.

Google as a company operates at a scale that allows many on the Internet to conclude that normal rules don't apply and believe that it operates services out of some sense of public duty. It is routinely taken for granted (e.g., see the outcry when they started charging for Google Apps) by people who have no idea how much it costs to offer these products.

Usually it can give these applications away for free because they can pay the costs of development and operation from some other source like ads. But there is no significant money to be derived from RSS and feed reading—I'd imagine that Google needs to reap tens of millions to make something like this worthwhile.

If it has tens of millions of active users, then charging them directly is not an option:

30MM active users x 0.01 willing to pay = 300K or $33/year

That 1% willing to pay drops precipitously at $33 per year, which makes the economics even worse. And people who actually use a feed reader are not predisposed to respond well to ads inserted into their feed reading experience.

Feed reading is a niche market and will survive as such because it serves a very valuable service for the people that use it.

I've been asked repeatedly about what alternative people should use. I think it's too soon to tell: every option out there right now is swamped by the deluge caused by the announcement. It's going to take a couple months to address the influx and achieve a rough parity to make a more compelling product. I advise waiting until May at least and then seeing what's available.

And be prepared to pay. If it's a service worth using, you should want to support it at a reasonable price.

Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

That's from RFC 1855, people. You think you're better than an RFC‽ Come on!

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.

Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.

— Arnold Bennett, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day

My own reading is quite slow because of all the pregnant pauses, but this quote is a great reminder that I need to mull more. I would also recommend Henry Hazlitt's Thinking as a Science, which is where I discovered Bennett's book.

There are a couple objections raised in various fora:

1. This guy's just a Web developer. How could he have succeeded where all these vested interests have failed?
2. His concoction is missing the mark on our nutritional needs and he's a goner.

As a fan of the idea behind the product, I want to address these without commenting on his specific solution since I haven't tried it and am barely familiar with the field of nutrition.

I think that this type of product hasn't really been tried outside of medical supply firms. If you look at the field of convenience foods, they typically compete on quality, taste, or price. I have to think that the market for a simple, plain drink that addresses extreme laziness is pretty limited. Most people I know like cooking, variety, or mouth feel. Most people, when learning of Soylent, recoil at the idea of eating the same glop every meal.

So it doesn't surprise me that this market hasn't developed and it doesn't surprise me that someone like me would have created this.

But has he gotten it right? He claims to have read a nutrition textbook and looked on the Internet for the necessary nutrients. Naturally, this has people in an uproar—forgetting that people eat a lot of junk, many exclusively so. The human body is pretty forgiving about what you shove down your mouth hole.

In my original blog entry, I suggested that "People Chow" should take a solid form. I think this is probably a better direction than Soylent because of the need for solids to keep the muscles involved in peristalsis from atrophying. Plus, the idea of adding milk to the solids could provide some variety.

At any rate, I am excited that there's some progress on this front. I signed up to be a beta tester and will document it here if I make it in.

• Lost: I swore off Lost entirely after the series finale. I thought it was a terrible end to an outstanding television show. I decided back in January to re-visit the entire series and see if I still felt the same way. I don't. There are still a maddening number of unanswered questions, but I'm at peace with that and just enjoyed the amazing ride.
• The Cabin in the Woods: this is one of those great movies that are easily overlooked. I'm not going to describe anything about it because the less you know, the better. It's an amazing twist on the horror movie genre, like Scream ostensibly was only more clever.
• American Reunion: I liked the earlier movies for what they were, but this was just terrible. It lacks any of the simple pleasures of the others, and it really felt forced.

• The Raid: Redemption: this is a super-violent action movie from Indonesia but it is possibly the best action movie I've ever seen. Jackie Chan's best is better—his style of comedy pushes it over—but this is jam-packed, non-stop action. Beautiful action, at that.
• Ted: having been a longtime fan of Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles, I thought this would be a sure-fire laugh riot. It was mostly a raunchy groaner but the scene of partying with Flash Gordon was funny.
• Wreck-It Ralph: good fun for the whole family. It wasn't particularly memorable but it sure beats the deplorable Madagascar 3 or inane Ice Age movies.

I have had this as my mantra for as long as I've been developing software professionally. Tonight we released a new version of my product and so I tweeted it in celebration.

That got me to thinking: did I coin that phrase or did I read it somewhere? I often forget some clever tidbit that I've read, so it wouldn't have surprised me to find it in a Google search.

But there were no matches! I therefore claim its origin.

So it looks like I'm going to have to step it up a bit by doing the No S Diet and some Urban Ranger. I got a FitBit One for Christmas and that'll give some quantification to my walking.

I really like the No S Diet because it's easy to stick to and doesn't force you to get rid of the food you have on hand. Many a diet was wrecked by the latter:

I got to thinking that it'd be handy to listen to my Instapaper items. I remembered the developer's blog entry touting his accessibility improvements and that got me to thinking: why not use VoiceOver? This seemed like the ideal use since the Instapaper-stored content is primarily textual and simplified.

Sure enough, it was easy and performed beautifully—enabling me to listen to an article or two while I did the dishes. Here's how to do it:

1. Set up the triple-tap of the Home button to toggle VoiceOver.
   1. Go to Settings.
   2. Tap on "General."
   3. Scroll down and tap on "Accessibility."
   4. Scroll to bottom and tap on "Triple-click Home."
   5. Tap on "VoiceOver" and save your setting by going back.
2. Open Instapaper and the article you want.
3. Triple tap the Home button.
4. Swipe downward on the screen with two fingers. This starts the actual reading.

The neat thing about this is that Instapaper automatically saves your place and syncs it with all devices, so resuming where you left off is easy.

[UPDATE (12/18/2012): Other options brought to my attention include Instapaper to Podcast, Voice Dream Reader, and Readomator. I still like my way best for the time being because it's free and uncomplicated.]]]> http://bbrown.info/2012/12/build-your-own-audiobook.html http://bbrown.info/2012/12/build-your-own-audiobook.html Getting Things Done High Geekery Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:28:17 -0700 Today's our EAI at work: we're going to have lunch at Food Truck Friday and then go cruising through the desert with Green Zebra Adventures. I even get to drive the Go Daddy Van for the first time.

It rained last night and this morning so I bet that's going to make the offroading even more exciting!

[UPDATE (12/17/2012): I had a really great time. Driving the Go Daddy Van—a Dodge Sprinter, I believe—was a lot more nerve-wracking than I expected. I felt a lot of responsibility to not injure my co-workers and the steering was a lot more squishy than on my MINI Cooper. Food Truck Friday was a big hit even though there were fewer trucks than I thought. Green Zebra Adventures was terrific! We drove two to a Tomcar and my passenger gave me explicit instructions to go nuts. I don't think I disappointed: I drove that sucker hard and even scared myself a couple of times.]

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of GoDaddy.com, LLC.]