Making an effort to use sleep mode

sleep mode Events like Earth Hour raise awareness about our “planet in peril”, but as I’ve said in the past, they don’t have a positive impact on the environment. You need to do the little things to truly make a difference. I try to do my part. I always take a stainless steel mug to Starbucks in the morning, for example. There’s always room for improvement though.

For a little over a week now, I’ve been trying to break one of my worst habits. I don’t know how it started, but I’m one of those people that never turns the computer off when I’m not using it. For some reason I just got into the habit of always leaving it running. Laptops are a different story, because you shut the lid and it goes to sleep, but I’ve always left my desktop on for some reason. I’ve always had it configured to turn the monitors off after a while, but never the computer itself.

I guess I like having the computer immediately available when I want to use it. Really though, waking up from sleep mode doesn’t take very long at all. Slightly longer on my desktop than on either of my laptops, but still not bad.

I’ve been really good about using sleep mode for a week now, and I think I can keep it up. I’m going to kick my “leave the computer on” habit for good.

I have seen the future and its name is FriendFeed

Slightly dramatic title I suppose, but FriendFeed has been causing quite the stir on the interwebs lately. And for me personally, it’s where I have been spending an increasing amount of my online time. Along with Twitter (well, when it’s working) I find myself keeping a FriendFeed tab open in my browser at all times. Both services are quite addictive!

What is FriendFeed? Essentially, it’s an aggregator for everything you do online. After you create an account, you add services to it – Twitter, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Google Reader, etc. FriendFeed keeps an eye on your services, and makes items from them available in your feed. For example, nearly as soon as you bookmark a page in del.icio.us, it’ll show up in FriendFeed. Here’s my little FriendFeed bio card:

Then FriendFeed takes the next step and lets your friends comment on or “like” your items. This alone has caused a lot of controversy, because it means there’s a lot of discussion happening on FriendFeed about blog posts that isn’t displayed on those blog posts. It’s incredibly valuable though. I can visit your FriendFeed page, and comment on pretty much your entire online activity.

For more on what FriendFeed can do, check out this excellent post by J. Phil at scribkin. He goes into more detail on how FriendFeed can filter and group items, and more.

Like many others, I think FriendFeed is a game-changer. Here are some of the ways it is impacting me:

I visit Techmeme less frequently. Most of the same stuff comes into FriendFeed, and generally it does so much faster. If you want to keep up-to-the-second on stuff, there’s no better way than FriendFeed (except maybe Twitter).
Sort of related the above point – FriendFeed is becoming my new entry point. No need to visit Flickr, del.icio.us, and Digg separately to see what my friends are up to because it all shows up in FriendFeed.
I often “like” something on FriendFeed not to show my love of the item, but to make it easy for me to find again later. FriendFeed has a page for your comments, a page for your likes, and a page for both. Want to see what I’m paying attention to? Check out that last link.
FriendFeed Rooms are a neat way to connect with people on a specific topic. I’ve been pretty active in the Twitter room so far (surprise, surprise).
The search functionality in FriendFeed absolutely kicks ass. Want to know what people think about something? Search FriendFeed for it. Both FriendFeed and Summize are raising the bar for search as far as I’m concerned.

There’s a ton of other goodness in FriendFeed that I haven’t really played with yet, like the API (which appears to be surprisingly complete). I discover new things that I like about the service almost every day. And like Twitter, the more people I follow, the more interesting it becomes (to a certain point anyway).

Of course, it isn’t perfect. Here’s a quick list of things I’d love to see added:

Ability to post to del.icio.us when I share a link using the bookmarklet, much like it can send replies to Twitter.
Some sort of XMPP interface so I can use it like Twitter, via Google Talk. And while they’re at it, why not add an SMS interface too!
Built-in statistics.
Timestamps in the UI. I think the simple interface is great, but I’d love to see some times beside those comments.
More services. Currently there are 35 supported, and I understand they’re working on API functionality to allow other services to add themselves.
An easier way to add friends. Import from other services or something.
A proper iPhone interface (though Benjamin Golub’s fftogo is working quite well).

I like FriendFeed so much at the moment, that I’ve integrated it into my blog! On newer posts, you’ll find the FriendFeed bar just above the comments showing how many people have liked or commented on the post in FriendFeed. This is done using Glenn Slaven’s FriendFeed Comments plugin. I’ve also added the FriendFeed Activity Widget to mastermaq.ca, so you can see a summary of what I’ve been up to. Not sure if I’ll add it here or not yet.

I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot more about FriendFeed as the service matures and I get even further addicted to it. Like every where else, my username is mastermaq – add me!

xkcd in the New York Times

As a kid I loved Calvin & Hobbes, but that was about the only comic strip I ever read. I think I have all the books except maybe one or two. I still don’t read comic strips, but I do occasionally enjoy reading xkcd, a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” It was profiled in the New York Times yesterday:

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)

Here is one of my favorites:

A new comic is posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The author, Randall Munroe, is only 23 years old! He’s one smart cookie. He also writes a fairly interesting blog. I think this entry from November 2007 is my favorite:

I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around.

Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room.

That’s right, he has a ball pit in his room (click through for photos). Freaking awesome! And in February, he quintupled the size of it.

My congratulations to Randall on the coverage! Definitely check out xkcd if you’re looking for something fun and interesting.

Notes for 5/25/2008

Good news and bad news about my wisdom teeth. The good news is that the swelling has gone down dramatically, the pain has almost disappeared, and I have only very faint bruising. The bad news is that I ran into caffeine withdrawal in a bad way today.

I only took two pain killers today, and one was very early this morning when I got up for the race. So this evening was the first time since Thursday that I was relatively drug free. Around dinner time I wasn’t feeling great, so Sharon and I went for a walk. The fresh air seemed to help, and I had a few small sips of her iced coffee. We got back, I ate some soup, and we were watching Spider-Man 3. Then I crashed. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but I had shakes, chills, a throbbing headache, and just felt terrible. I’m sure Sharon thought I was going to die.

I didn’t know what was wrong at the time, so I took my second Tylenol-3 of the day. Only after did we realize that it was probably caffeine withdrawal. So I’m okay for now (just a headache at the moment), but I better have some coffee or something in the morning.

Anyway, enough about my addiction, here are my weekly notes:

I’ve started using FriendFeed quite a bit. I’m going to post more about it this week, but in the meantime you can find me here.
The NYTimes launched their TimesMachine this week, which lets you browse 70 years of New York Times archives. They’re using Amazon’s web services to do it. Very cool stuff.
In case you hadn’t heard, wikis are now serious business.
David Crow has a list of startups that use .NET. I’m sure there are more. We need a directory for this sort of thing.
Here’s a funny idea for Twitter’s business model.
Can we live in public? Absolutely. Should we? I don’t see why not. No matter how much detail about your life you put online, the simple fact is that most people could care less. Sure someone could become a stalker, just like you could get hit by a bus today. Humans are social creatures, both online and in real life, stalkers and buses be damned. Just remember to look both ways before you cross the street.

What if Twitter had been built by Amazon.com's Web Services team?

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now, and I can’t remember a period of downtime quite as bad as the current one. Features have been disabled, and there’s no ETA for when everything will be back to normal. Who knows, maybe it won’t ever be. Which got me wondering about why Twitter’s reliability is so terrible. Is it the nature of the application, or is it something to do with the people behind Twitter?

What if Twitter had been built by a different team, a team with a pretty good track record for high-availability services? What if Twitter had been built by the Web Services team at Amazon.com?

I think it’s safe to say that things would be quite different:

Reliable, redundant infrastructure
Twitter would be run inside Amazon’s high-availability data centers. We would never know (or care) that Twitter’s main database was named db006, nor would we ever wonder whether it has a good backup. We’d just know that if it’s good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for us.
No wondering, “is Twitter working?”
Instead of wondering if Twitter is working correctly or waiting for Twitter messages or blog posts that explain what the problem is, Twitter would be part of the AWS Service Health Dashboard. We’d be able to see, at a glance, how Twitter is working now, and how well it has worked for the last month. This is what transparency is all about.
Twitter wouldn’t be free, but we’d be cool with that
Twitter would have had a business model from day one, and we’d all be cheering about how affordable it is. A pay-as-you-go model like all the other web services from Amazon would work quite well for Twitter. You get what you pay for, right?
Premium Support and SLAs
Speaking of getting what you pay for, Amazon would likely have realized that there are lots of different types of users, and they’d react accordingly. We’d probably have Premium Support for Twitter, to service support requests more efficiently. We’d also have Service Level Agreements.
We wouldn’t call it Twitter…
Of course, the service wouldn’t be called Twitter. In keeping with Amazon’s other services it would probably have a name like “Amazon Simple Messaging Service”, or SMS for short. Though I suppose that acronym is already taken!

I am a huge Twitter fan, and I really do hope that Ev, Biz, Jack, and the rest of the team get things working and fixed. With every passing hour of downtime though, I lose a little bit of faith. I wonder if Twitter would be better off in someone else’s hands.

Of course, if Twitter really had been built by AWS, there would be far more differences than just the items in my list above. The service may not be recognizable as Twitter!

That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t adopt some of these items as improvements, however. I’d love to see an official Twitter health dashboard, for instance. One can hope.

Twitter doesn't know what's wrong

Even occasional Twitter users will no doubt be familiar with the service’s frequent downtime. It’s a rare day when I don’t run into at least one or two “something’s technically wrong” messages on the site. That has prompted a lot of discussion about how to improve Twitter, and also some discussion about how things could be so bad.

I’ve been willing to cut them some slack. They’ve grown exponentially, and continue to do so. Then on Wednesday, Twitter founder Jack posted this on the official blog:

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.

Transparency is great, but surely they must have some idea about what’s wrong? I don’t know much about their architecture or systems, but it seems odd to me that they’d be totally stumped. It suggests to me that their architecture was never designed, and was instead thrown together over time. Now they’re in too deep to start over.

Twitter developer Alex suggests that the main problem is the system was originally put together as a content management system, when in reality it’s a messaging system. If that’s the case, fine, but messaging systems are not new. They must be able to examine and learn from some existing stuff right?

Posts like the one Jack made don’t inspire much confidence that they’ll be able to turn things around, but I sure hope they do. I really love Twitter. Maybe the $15 million in additional funding that they recently secured will help.

Edmonton International Airport launches new brand

eia - we'll move you The Edmonton International Airport’s (EIA) new “we’ll move you” brand actually launched earlier this month on May 8th, but I didn’t see a commercial for it until this week. I haven’t had to fly anywhere either, so I’m not sure if the new brand is prominently displayed at the airport itself or not.

The new brand is meant to bring awareness to the fact that EIA is growing:

The new brand and airport expansion program reflect EIA’s shift from a small, regional airport to a medium-sized international airport serving Northwestern Canada. EIA is Canada’s fastest-growing major airport for two years in a row and now serves over six million passengers annually, a nearly 50 per cent increase in just three years.

The “we’ll move you” philosophy also underpins the $1.1-billion expansion program and current initiatives to incorporate industry-leading technologies, including common-use, self-serve check-in kiosks, Pay & Go parking stations, the expedited customs clearance program NEXUS and a host of others.

The expansion is expected to be completely by 2012 and should enable EIA to service nine million passengers annually. A key aspect to the expansion is a brand new control tower. Our airport is finally getting some food outlets too, including another Tim Horton’s and two Starbucks.

In addition to the branding, they’ve got a new URL: http://www.flyeia.com. It simply redirects to http://www.edmontonairports.com. Reminds me of Edmonton Transit’s http://www.takeets.com address, which I find far easier to remember than anything else.

I like the new logo and colors. Fresh and bright, the new design definitely makes EIA feel more modern than the old navy blue and red.

You can learn more about the changes happening at EIA here.

My Last Supper

They do great work, but I am never happy when I have to go see a doctor or dentist. I’ve never really had a bad experience or anything, I just prefer to avoid medical clinics. Maybe I don’t like the idea that there’s something wrong with me. Anyway, tomorrow I am going to get my wisdom teeth out. I’m hoping to recover very quickly, but I know I’ll most likely be without solid food for a few days.

So Sharon came over tonight to help with my “last” supper:

She calls it “the kitchen sink scramble,” because we basically put all the leftovers from the fridge in a skillet with some egg and cooked it. For dessert (okay okay, and as an appetizer) we had banana muffins. Yum!

I think what I’m most worried about is caffeine withdrawal. I probably won’t be allowed to drink Coke Zero or coffee or tea or anything like that. Withdrawal shakes and headaches, here I come!

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton2

Tonight was Edmonton’s second DemoCamp – an opportunity for local startups and entrepreneurs to show the community what they’ve been working on. The venue and overall vibe of the event tonight was a bit different than the first DemoCamp, but I think it’s safe to say that DemoCampEdmonton2 was a success.

Again, we had six demos:

Boris Djordjevic from Frontier Solutions
Jack Newton from Clio
Bruce Johnson and Scott Montgomerie from Zigtag
Scott Winder from Boreal Systems
Toby Spendiff from nForm
Patrick Lor showed us a.viary.com

Frontier makes a product called SiteGears that helps companies bring products to market by integrating with businesses at all levels of the product lifecycle. Clio is a practice management service targeted at small law firms. Zigtag is in the social bookmarking space, and see themselves as the “future of search” in the long-run. Boreal Systems make an operations management application for companies in the energy industry. nForm makes a SharePoint add-on called Midori that helps small teams manage projects. And last but not least, a.viary is bringing the power of Photoshop to the web.

My “demo of the night” goes to Clio, with honorable mentions to both Boreal Systems and nForm. Clio’s app is very slick looking, and you can tell they’ve done their homework. They’re focusing on lawyers right now (Jack said that roughly half of the 1.2 million law firms in North America need something like Clio) but it’s easy to see how the app could be applied to other types of practices (like accounting). What I liked about Boreal was that although their app didn’t feel very modern at all, they had good reasons for doing everything they did (such as keeping the concept of a whiteboard schedule). And finally, nForm actually changed data live. They showed Midori actually working…that rocked!

Here’s more on DemoCampEdmonton2 and the participating companies:

My initial headcount was 61, but I suspect the final number was closer to 75 as people continued to trickle in all evening long.
Two demos used Windows XP, two used Windows Vista, and two used Mac OS X.
Clio, Zigtag, and a.viary are all hosted/SaaS solutions. Boreal Systems and Midori are both traditional host-it-yourself solutions. SiteGears is a combination of both.
SiteGears is primarily Java, Clio is Ruby on Rails, Zigtag is primarily Java, Boreal is almost finished migrating from PHP to Ruby, Midori is ASP.NET, and a.viary is Flash and Flex.
Again, we had a very diverse crowd. John Bristowe and Patrick Lor made it up from Calgary. James Matsuba, who won the Student Business Plan competition at this year’s VenturePrize, was in the crowd. Investors included Spencer Ord and Ken Gordon. Was great to see lots of new and familiar faces alike!

As I mentioned, the vibe was a bit different than the first DemoCamp which was held at the U of A. Choosing a bar as the venue makes for a more comfortable evening (with food and drinks) but it was a little harder to hear the presenters and questions. Another downside was the lack of free wifi, which kept me from liveblogging the event on Twitter.

One of the highlights of the evening was when Patrick Lor got up to present. Cam shared with everyone that Patrick was the driving force behind DemoCamp in both Calgary and Edmonton, so it was good for him to receive a round of applause as thanks from the Edmonton crowd.

Speaking of Calgary, Patrick mentioned that BarCampCalgary is happening on June 14th, so mark your calendars!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight – see you at DemoCampEdmonton3! You can see some more photos of the event here. This post also appears at Techvibes.

UPDATE: For a more descriptive recap of the demos, check out Eric’s post.

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