Year: 2008

Notes for 8/4/2008

In keeping with tradition here are my weekly notes, posted on Holiday Monday:

From The Onion:

EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.

I love The Onion! Look for Gore to make a splash at the DNC later this month.

The New Delicious

delicious On July 31st, the new Delicious.com finally launched. I consider myself a fairly heavy user of the service, with over 4200 bookmarks and 3700 tags. It’s something I use on a daily basis, so I noticed the new version almost immediately. My first reaction was “wow” but after using it for the last few days, I’m not so excited about it anymore.

What it all comes down to is that there just isn’t anything new, besides a fresh coat of paint. At least the Delicious team didn’t try to hide that in their post about the changes:

The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.

They dropped the dots, cleaned up the UI, and made the backend faster. I appreciate all of those changes, but I’m somewhat disappointed that there’s nothing new and exciting for me to play with. The “new” domain has actually worked for a long time now, and the old domain will continue to work, so that’s not much of a change. The new layout and UI can be best described as “long overdue”. I guess I’m happy about the performance improvements, and I have definitely noticed it, especially when searching.

Apparently the changes will allow the team to make improvements faster, but only time will tell if that is actually the case. I think Delicious could definitely use some work around the social networking aspect of the site – starting with allowing me to specify a profile picture! They could also probably do a lot with recommendations and trends, to help me find things I might be interested in.

Even though the new Delicious has launched, I feel like I’m still waiting.

Zip.ca is better offline than online

zip.ca A few weeks ago, Sharon and I signed up for the free trial at Zip.ca, which is Canada’s equivalent to Netflix. We rent movies fairly regularly, usually at the local Blockbuster. The appeal of Zip.ca was the larger library of titles – Blockbuster’s selection is pretty limited. When our free trial expired at the end of last week, we decided to pay for the 1 DVD plan which costs $5.95 per month. Why? Not because we fell in love with Zip.ca, but because it will save us money.

You can fairly easily break the Zip.ca experience into two parts – the online part and the offline part. The former is where you search for titles, select the ones you want to rent, and pay for your account. The latter is receiving the DVDs in the mail, watching them, and then returning them. In my experience thus far, the online experience sucks and the offline experience rocks.

Where should I begin with the website…it’s slow, awkward, confusing, and worst of all, it’s inconsistent. Depending on where you are on the site, you’ll see either the old look:

Or the new one:

The logo, navigation, colors, and page width are all different between the two – it’s very annoying. Another thing that bugs me about the site is the rating stars (sometimes they are yellow, sometimes they are red, sometimes mousing over them changes them, etc). Like everything else, they are confusing and seem inconsistent.

zip.ca Thankfully, the offline experience is much better. Our DVDs arrived quickly, and the packaging was simple and effective. It’s lazy but quite enjoyable to have movies simply arrive at the door! Sending them back is a breeze too – just stick them in the already prepared envelope and drop them in the mail.

New releases at Blockbuster cost $5.97 to rent, and “favourites” cost $4.19. Then on top of that you’ve got to factor in gas prices and the fact that they may not have the movie you’re after. For $5.95 at Zip.ca we get two movies with free shipping, and as many additional movies as we want for $2.49 shipping and handling provided we only have one DVD out at a time. Combined with the larger selection of movies, it’s simply a better deal.

Rob recently wrote about Zip.ca at Techvibes, pointing out that the four-year-old company recently shipped its 10 millionth DVD. Quite an accomplishment, I agree, but Zip.ca is still no Netflix.

Until something better comes along however, I’m happy enough with Zip.ca.

Experimenting with Evernote

evernote For the last week or so I’ve been using a new application called Evernote. Actually, the term application may be misleading – Evernote is more of a service with the lofty goal of helping you remember everything. From the about page:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

So far there’s a web interface, and clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile, and iPhone/iPod touch. I’ve been using the Windows, web, and iPod touch clients.

My initial reaction was to compare Evernote to Microsoft OneNote, and while there are some similarities, I think the comparison is unfair. OneNote is far better than Evernote at taking notes – the interface is more fully featured, ink is properly supported, and it feels more like traditional pen and paper. Evernote on the other hand is better at organizing information and making it accessible no matter where I am. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

So far I’ve been using Evernote as a collection of digital post-it notes. Instead of jotting something down on paper, I create a new note inside Evernote. The advantage, of course, is that I can access it on any computer or on my iPod touch when I’m on the go.

There are other ways to use Evernote too. The desktop client contains a “clipper” feature which makes it easy to take a screenshot or copy text from an application. There’s a “web clipper” for your browser, which makes it easy to save items you find on the web. And there’s integration with Outlook, which makes it easy to save email messages.

Evernote is fairly impressive already, but I think there’s lots of room for improvement. I’d like to see richer note editing, better support for importing from Word and other applications, and improved Tablet PC support. Coming at it from another angle, I think it could be interesting to add some social networking aspects to the site, to make it easy for me to share things with other Evernote users.

If you’d like to give it a shot, head on over to the Evernote website. You can also check out their blog, their FriendFeed page, and their Twitter account.

Passionate about coffee in Edmonton: Transcend

transcend coffee I’ll admit it – I like having my cup or two of coffee in the morning. I especially like Starbucks (the brand perhaps more so than the coffee itself), and I do my best to visit one in each new city that I travel to. I enjoy coffee, and some might say I’m passionate about it. But I’ve got nothing on the guys at Transcend Coffee! They really are passionate about all things coffee.

On Friday night, Sharon and I finally made it over to Transcend for one of their monthly coffee tastings. I say finally because we were registered to go in May, but had to reschedule. I think everyone has heard of a wine tasting before, but I had never heard of a coffee tasting until Sharon asked me to go. Turns out there’s a special name for such events – a coffee tasting is also known as a cupping. The New York Times wrote about the trend recently.

CuppingWe were the second couple to arrive, and were immediately offered wine and cheese. Turns out the founder, Poul Mark, is also fond of wine! Assisting him for the evening was Transcend’s Chief of Culture, Andrew Legg.

Once everyone arrived, Poul welcomed us with a brief introduction and then we filed into the back for the first event – a profile roast and tasting. As you can see to the left, they roasted beans six different ways – light to dark. They made sure to point out that the darkest roast is still far lighter than anything you’d get at Starbucks. After steeping the grounds, we were invited to slurp a spoonful of each cup, to compare the light to the dark. I was surprised to find that you could really taste the difference! I liked the darker ones. We learned the correct etiquette for cupping: take your slurp, but hold your comments until everyone is done.

Next we moved on to the roaster. Poul got it working, explaining everything as he went along. He told us that Transcend roasts about 13 pounds of coffee per day. While we waited for the beans to roast, Andrew explained the various coffee regions of the world on the big map. In addition to being incredibly knowledgeable, Andrew is extremely personable – it was immediately clear to me why he’s the Chief of Culture and spends his time talking with customers.

The final part of the evening was a world coffee tasting. Each cup was made in the Clover, and instead of using coffee mugs we had our samples in wine tumblers. As we drank we talked. The group kept peppering Poul and Andrew with questions, and they always had answers! After tasting three or four different coffees, we each received a half pound of our choice.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the coffee tasting, but I ended up really enjoying it! As with anything, if you’re surrounded by people who are passionate about something, their passion and enthusiasm is going to wear off on you.

I think Transcend does a great job of sharing their passion, both offline and online. They host the coffee tastings obviously, and they travel abroad too, both to industry events and to “the source” – the places where the beans are grown and picked. They are also quite active on the web, with an attractive and up-to-date website, a regularly updated blog, an email newsletter, and a Flickr account for photos. I’ll have to try and get them to join Twitter!

My photos from the evening are here. Coffee tastings at Transcend are $25 per person, or $45 per couple – you can find more information here.

Notes for 7/27/2008

Can you believe it’s almost August already? Here are my weekly notes:

Just use OpenDNS

warning! Unless you frequent tech publications on the web, you’re probably not aware that a critical flaw in many DNS system implementations was found recently (DNS is what translates http://www.google.com into an IP address – learn more at Wikipedia). On July 7th, news of the design flaw that researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered started to spread. The next day, many vendors (including Microsoft, which hosted the press conference) participated in a coordinated release of patches. A few days ago the first exploit code started to appear, making it even more critical that DNS systems are patched soon.

As of today, many major ISPs are not patched and remain vulnerable. You can see if your ISP is vulnerable by visiting Kaminsky’s site and clicking the “Check My DNS” button on the right side.

Or, you can just switch your DNS servers to OpenDNS and be done with it. I came across OpenDNS on the day it launched two years ago, and have used them on some machines ever since. Turns out that OpenDNS is one of the few that were unaffected by this flaw:

I’m very proud to announce that we are one of the only DNS vendor / service providers that was not vulnerable when this issue was first discovered by Dan. During Dan’s testing he confirmed (and we later confirmed) that our DNS implementation is not susceptible to the attack that was discovered. In other words, if you used OpenDNS then you were already protected long before this attack was even discovered.

Switching your DNS settings to OpenDNS is really simple and takes about two minutes. To get started, just visit http://www.opendns.com/start and follow the instructions. Or if you know what you’re doing, then the nameservers you want are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

As always, make sure you have installed all of the latest patches for your computer (that would be Automatic Updates for Windows users).

I want some of whatever Union Square Ventures is smoking!

meetup I cannot recall when exactly I happened upon Meetup.com, but it seems like a long time ago. I thought it was a neat idea and signed up. I never got much use out of it though, as there weren’t many other users in the Edmonton area. I forgot about it for the most part. Eventually I checked the site out again when they announced that it was no longer free to organize a meetup. It’s been on my radar since then, but I still don’t pay it much attention.

Today they announced that they have accepted funding from Union Square Ventures:

So why take an investment? Because the world needs more Meetups — and more powerful Meetups.  We’re at-risk of living in front of screens, endlessly Twittering and not forming powerful local community groups. There’s endless possibilities to make Meetup  better able to help people self-organize powerful local groups! With a shaky economy, it’s best to secure and strengthen Meetup for the future with an investor.

I feel obligated to point out that “endlessly Twittering” can in fact lead to worthwhile and enjoyable face-to-face meetings with others, both individually and with a large group such as the EdmontonTweetup.

The justification for the deal makes sense from Meetup’s point-of-view. Frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t taken funding until now. The justification from USV made me do a double take though:

Organizing people online to make a difference offline has been the central mission of Meetup since the beginning. The team there has always understood that there was a difference between collective intelligence and collective action.

So we are thrilled to be an investor in a company that has been organized since its inception around the key insight that we believe will drive the next several years of innovation on the web – the need to solve real problems in the real world for real people.

I’m confused. A company that charges $19 a month in exchange for a glorified mailing list is going to “drive the next several years of innovation on the web”? I don’t think so.

I agree with the argument that Tim O’Reilly, John Battelle, and indeed USV themselves are making about harnessing collective intelligence on the web and using it to make a difference in the real world. I get that.

What I don’t get is how Meetup is supposed to help us accomplish that, nor how they are supposed to drive innovation on the web while doing it? Last time I checked, we didn’t need Meetup to organize the EdmontonTweetup, or DemoCamp, or BarCamp, or Northern Voice, or smaller meetings for drinks, or coffee, or lunch. I don’t think any of the major fundraising initiatives (such as the CIBC Run for the Cure) use Meetup, though all of them certainly use the web.

Granted, there are certain niches that Meetup is very successful in. As Brad points out, the company “organizes over 2300 moms Meetup groups in 1100 cities in 11 countries.”

Still, I’m confused. Meetup is taking the money basically to stay afloat during a shaky period in the economy, and hopefully to grow. USV is giving them money to make a difference in the real world and drive innovation on the web. Something doesn’t add up.

Either Brad and Fred know something the rest of us don’t, or they’re smoking something really good.

The Dark Knight

There’s no question that the must-see movie of 2008 is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It took in over $150 million in its opening weekend, breaking the records for the opening day and opening weekend, and also the opening weekend for an IMAX film. It has a 94% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 9.6 out of 10 rating at IMDB. The Dark Knight is pretty much the only thing people are taking about lately when it comes to entertainment.

the dark knight

I’ve seen the film twice now. I saw it in IMAX at midnight on Thursday the 17th (technically the 18th) and again at 10pm in the normal theatre on Friday. I had advance tickets for both, but of course still lined up three hours ahead of show time to ensure good seats. As most of my friends know, I had been looking forward to The Dark Knight for months. I tend to have one movie a year that I really want to see, and this year that was The Dark Knight. So I had high expectations going in, and thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed.

Yes, Heath Ledger is fantastic. His performance will be talked about for years to come, even if he doesn’t win an Oscar for it. Yes, Christian Bale once again proves he can play both the troubled caped crusader and the billionaire playboy at the same time. Aaron Eckhart surprised me with his performance as Harvey Dent/Two-Face. Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman are all spectacular as you’d expect. And even Maggie Gyllenhaal was pretty good, though I agree with Sharon that almost anyone could play the role of Rachel Dawes.

The action sequences in the film are amazing. Even the second time I couldn’t believe my eyes! There are car chases, explosions, daring stunts, and much more. And a main character dies. There’s a definite wow factor in the movie.

I think there are a few things that take The Dark Knight from great to superb. One is the cinematography. Nolan and his team always seem to pick the most interesting perspective for the shot, and the lighting is appropriately eerie. Another thing is the pacing – neither time did it feel like I had been sitting for two and a half hours. The cuts seemed natural and appropriate. A third thing is what I’m going to call “attention to detail”. Everything looks so great in the film! I think Nolan’s desire to avoid CGI and go for the realest shot possible definitely made a difference.

As for IMAX versus regular screens, I have to say that the IMAX does indeed make a difference. It felt like we were going over the edge of the building when the camera did, and the sound and vibrations from Batman’s Tumbler were definitely impressive. If you can, see The Dark Knight in IMAX.

In the theatre on Thursday, a group in front of us started talking about the Batman movies of the 90s. One girl asked how the story in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight fits in with the previous movies. Her friend stood up, and very strongly said “as far as you’re concerned, the first Batman movie ever made was Batman Begins. Forget about the rest of them.” I couldn’t agree more. Nolan has definitely created something special.

Can’t wait for the third installment now!

Notes for 7/20/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • I’ve tried both of the new Vivanno drinks at Starbucks – the Chocolate Banana and the Orange Mango Banana. I have to say the latter is my favorite.
  • Sharon and I went to check out Capital Ex tonight. No rides, but we did have mini donuts, a corn dog, wandered around the grounds, checked out Sip, the Birdhouse Factory, and of course the fireworks.
  • I have seen The Dark Knight twice already, once in IMAX, so I did my part to help it set the weekend box office record. It took in $155.34 million this weekend, and broke a bunch of other records too such as opening day and the total for an IMAX film. I’m going to write about this week.
  • Here’s the article on Obama that goes along with that very provocative New Yorker cover. It’s long, but worth the read.
  • Should everything taste like Bacon? You can make it so with Bacon Salt.
  • No surprise here – the Nintendo Wii has surpassed the Xbox 360 to become the best selling game console in the US.