Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Ten secrets to success (or, ten things that I aspire to doing regularly)

1. Send a postcard.

2. Go for a walk.

3. Use the library.

4. Keep your inbox at zero.

5. Find a group to go to lunch with regularly.

6. Say thank you.

7. Keep track of what you do.

8. Keep track of what you promise to do.

9. Always carry something to write with.

10. Get enough sleep.

I wish I could say that I do all this, but at least it's something to aim for. And I wish I had the infinite patience to hyperlink all of these, but I don't, so take it on faith that I've thought about and written about them before.

Technorati Tags: pnb, lists

slimtimer - observing what you do, so that you can report on it later

I need to be mindful of what I am doing all the time, so that things get done and I don't just wander off into cyberspace. (Cyberspace, remember that, data gloves and VRML and the metaverse and all that? Yeah. There.)

There are two fundamental issues in time tracking for me: accurately logging the start and stop of each task, and determining which bucket of pre-assigned tasks it goes into (or determining that a new bucket needs to be allocated to describe that task).

There is a great interview of Caterina Fake by Tod Maffin on CBC Radio, back when Flickr was in Vancouver BC and new and hip and was Canadian content, and Caterina talked about Flickr's use of tags in this way:

"The way that most systems had worked prior to this sort of tagging system is that you would in advance of knowing what you were going to categorize had to put together a category list and that involves a lot of cognitive overhead that you really don't want to engage in at the time uploading photographs and labeling them makes tagging so successful add tags on the spot you know beach sunset fire sand enter"

it's a rough transcript, but I've listened to this piece dozens of times and the phrase "cognitive overhead" sticks in my brain. I don't know where that piece is online, but it should be....

so, slimtimer. "beach sunset fire sand" then start the timer. never mind that you hadn't planned in advance to go to the beach, you'll account for that later.

Technorati Tags: slimtimer

Kanban; or, management by post-it note

I wrote a few years back about a mini-kanban that John Hritz had put together to remember to refill washer fluid. There are a lot of colorful sticky notes around my workplace these days, so I thought I'd read up on how kanban-inspired systems are being used for process management in the software development and other non-manufacturing worlds.

Some inspiring examples (with post-its to illustrate):

Corey Ladis on Kanban systems for software engineering:

A perfect state of flow may be very difficult, or at least uneconomical, to achieve in a robust product development process. But we can get pretty close with a well-tuned kanban pull system. We have managed to combine most of the flexibility of craft production with most of the control of a pipeline. Work-in-process is limited, and cycle time can be managed. Most importantly, it is a highly transparent and repeatable process with all of the right conditions for continuous improvement.

oh, wait a second, this is starting to be spooky: Jim Benson's notes on the new people at his Modus Cooperandi:

Corey Ladas - Corey has been a proponent of iterative and evolutionary design methods since the early 1990’s, and was an early practitioner and vocal promoter of Agile methods at Microsoft. Corey began collaborating with David Anderson at Microsoft in 2004, united by a common interest in the application of Lean, Theory of Constraints, and Statistical Process Control methods to software development. In 2007, Corey joined David at Corbis to implement kanban systems for the development of enterprise IT projects.

Time to talk to Jim...

Technorati Tags: kanban, management

Novelty and collective attention / Huberman and Wu

If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/45/17599

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman*

Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304

Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.

(via dragomir radev)

Technorati Tags: attention, novelty, digg

for short attention spans and expansive minds

oh, so that's what I look like from the net (via metro mode media)

Ed Vielmetti is Ann Arbor's pied piper of Web 2.0 new urbanist geek culture and all round swell guy. A relentless networker and vital strand in the social and high tech spiderweb of A2 start ups and up starts, his blog is really more of a free-for-all of interesting links and informational tidbits. For short attention spans and expansive minds.

The difficult part of this for me is the "short attention span", because I feel like I have a long attention span (measured in years) though it might not have a long time in any particular day. for instance:

from my review of Edward Hallowell's "Crazy Busy" in 2006:

The first half is a series of anecdotes about how the world has gone mad with fragmented attention spans, so that people have environmentally-induced ADD. The second half is self-help on coping with that world, and a few really neat exercises to improve your concentration.

from an interview with Maira Kalman in Library Journal: (2005)

Describe your thought process. For example, what inspired the image with the dog ("Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in")?

My very poor attention span allows me to jump from thing to thing with childish abandon. I chose the sentences only on the basis of what I liked. But once I narrowed down my choices, I wanted to be literal and true to the sentence. So, for instance, for the phrase "The temple of Isis" [see image, far left] I found images of the actual temple, which is on a small island on the Nile and rendered it with some characters sprinkled in. I tried to do this as often as possible. A reasoned madness.

my 1999 review of Blur on Epinions

This would be a great book to take out from the library and browse through hunting for ideas about the fast pace of modern life. If you have a short attention span you can even pick up a page, snag something quotable or at least interesting, and put it down again. But buy it to read it straight through...can't recommend it for that.

and from a quote file:

Turnaucka's Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.

Technorati Tags: attention

Macbook flickery pixels - diagnosing and fixing a screen hardware problem

I have a Macbook, it's partially broken right now.

There is a stripe of pixels top to bottom on the screen, about 1/8 of the screen, running top to bottom that is flickering. It's not what Apple calls a "pixel anomaly", since it's not a single isolated spot; rather, it's a big stripe. It starts at the middle of the screen, and goes to the right from there.

I have Applecare (whew).

I ran TechTools Deluxe, their self-help diagnostic CD; all of the hardware that it tests checks out OK, including the video ram.

I double-checked the video issue at multiple screen resolutions, and it appears that the same screen stripe is fubar independent of resolution, which suggests that it's a problem with the screen itself and not the circuitry driving it. The external monitor looks fine.

@bdimcheff on Twitter noted that he had a similar problem which was "the bottom set of input circuitry on my LCD was falling off".

On hold to Apple Support right now (1030am EST), estimated wait 15min plus. I can still work. "Please continue to hold for the next representative".

I'm not going to fix it myself (did I mention Applecare)? But here are some people who did replace a Mac laptop screen:

Replace MacBook Screen - A Tutorial - Tweak OSX

A client of mine sent me a MacBook with a broken screen. It was his daughter’s computer, and she had accidentally broken the screen. I told him I couldn’t help him repair the screen, and he should look to Apple to make the repair for him. I turns out that the repair is 90% of the cost of the computer itself.

"Clear to me right now that it's a hardware issue; don't have to worry about it because it's a hardware issue. Need to send this one to our Apple Depot and have it fixed; the turnaround time is 5-7 business days. Genius bar doesn't have the parts to be sure and have it in stock, but you can ask them. Box delivered by DHL, just the computer into it; they will deliver it back to us; call them if it's ready for pickup. Box valid for 30 business days; always back up the files."

(sigh)

The next problem is to figure out a transitional period where I get a laptop for 5-7 days to work while my system is in the shop, and enough data and code on that laptop to make it work. Without going into an exhaustive search for rentals, it appears that the value of a machine for one week as a rental is in the $250 range.

Technorati Tags: hardware, mac, macbook, sad-mac

Things done, things not done

Moliere: “It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”

Anglican confession: "We have done the things that we ought not; we have left undone the things that we ought to have done."

Event promotion with Twitter and Google Calendar "Quick Add"

Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.

1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".

What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.

6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.

Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.

Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.

When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.

To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.

UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter

How to search your Basecamp from the Firefox search plugin bar

All your basecamp are belong to us. (slacker manager)

Here's how to find something in your basecamp.

Follow the instructions on my Superpatron blog for installing a Firefox search plugin for your book finding system, and instead of adding a search to your local library, have it search the page at
https://yourbasecampnamehere.clientsection.com/search
or more generally the "Search across all project" box at the top of your browser tab.

Voila: no more navigating when you need to search for something on a project you're working on, just drop down a menu, select your Basecamp as your search engine, and type in your query. Most of the time, you'll get back an answer.

Human Computation: Luis von Ahn at STIET, Thursday Oct 18 2007

STIET Seminar (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions)
Thursday, October 18
4-5:30 pm, 1202 SI North, 1075 Beal Ave.

Human Computation

Luis von Ahn

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Students are invited to a pre-seminar meeting at 3:00 with Luis in 2295 SI North. A background paper can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/research.html More information is available at http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/node/141

Seminar Description:

Construction of the Empire State Building: 7 million human-hours. The Panama Canal: 20 million human-hours. Estimated number of human-hours spent playing computer solitaire around the world in one year: billions. A problem with today's computer society? No, an opportunity.

What if this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people could play computer games and accomplish work without even realizing it? What if billions of people collaborated to solve important problems for humanity or generate training data for computers? My work aims at a general paradigm for doing exactly that: utilizing human processing power to solve computational problems in a distributed manner. In particular, I focus on harnessing human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet solve. Although computers have advanced dramatically in many respects over the last 50 years, they still do not possess the basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual capabilities that most humans take for granted. By leveraging human skills and abilities in a novel way, I want to solve large-scale computational problems and/or collect training data to teach computers many of these human talents. To this end, I treat human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation. Unlike computer processors, however, humans require an incentive in order to become part of a collective computation. Among other things, I use online games as a means to encourage participation in the process. In this talk, I will describe my work in the area of Human Computation.

Seminar Speaker Bio:

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Popular Science Magazine's "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments.

Technorati Tags: luis-von-ahn, stiet, google-talks, human-computation, go-urgently, recaptcha, umich