Doing More With Less Since 1972

Tag: Twitter (Page 1 of 3)

Daily Reading List — January 10th

AT&T launches IoT starter kits for AWS and Raspberry Pi – As a friend of mine likes to say…
Hmm…Interesting.

How Do You Know If You’re Beautiful? – I like to think you’ll know when the dog chooses YOU to let her out in the middle of the night.

Off-the-beaten-path innovation could rejuvenate Twitter – We need Twitter enabled cookware, plates, and silverware. That way we can automatically know what everyone is having for lunch.

Train Ugly – Random training over perfect reps. Unopposed rugby must die!!!

How to fix agile teams that are notoriously bad at hitting release dates – Looks like a lot of this depends on finishing enough projects, or at least stories, to have a big data set.

To Lead a Digital Transformation, CEOs Must Prioritize – “It’s about creating an agile organization that can detect what type of change is essential and respond quickly with the most competitive solution.”

A Call for a New Strenuous Age – Take the time to read the whole thing. Then start training for a marathon. Or going to cross fit. Or training jiu jitsu. Or playing rugby. Or rock climbing.

Get your ass beat. Often.

Why Is the United States So Divided? Simple, It Was Never United at All.

Daily Reading List — November 17th

Touch Surgery Surgical Simulator

What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class – It's important to me that our kids understand that we're multi-generational working class, and that we don't lose sight of that.

That's one reason I drink "Old Man Coffee". "Old Man Coffee" is made in a regular old coffee pot (or press) from a can that is bought in bulk. It doesn't come from a Starbucks or a single serving made-especially-for-me-by-a-machine cup.

"Old Man Coffee" was good enough for my old man. It was good enough for his old man too.

It's good enough for me.

Google Play Music starts using your location & activity to recommend tunes – Needed. Why should I have to search for my "Sunday Morning Coffee" playlist every Sunday morning while I'm making coffee?

Why should I have to search for my "Old Man Rolling" playlist when they know I'm at the gym during jiu jitsu class.

Can't wait!

The Great Fall of Chyna

Microsoft Flow Is Out of Beta, Ready to Challenge IFTTT’s Automation – Microsoft does its products well. But they always seem to be late. Now I need a reason to switch from IFTTT, and charging me $5/month for something I'm already getting somewhere else for free isn't a good reason to switch.

BTW, this post was bookmarked in Pinboard by me. IFTTT automatically tweeted it with a link to the article on my behalf (without all this commentary), and it also made an appended a draft version of a blog post that continues to grow until x number of entries have been made, then automatically publishes out to my blog, which is where you're probably reading this.

This didn't take very long to set up, but why would I want to bother doing it again?

How To Clean Burnt Stains off Enameled Cookware – Works so great, I wish I'd taken before and after photos. Next time.

Who Wins in the Gig Economy, and Who Loses – "There’s no way to avoid the truth that fundamental changes in the ways we work are here to stay and are creating a new set of winners and losers. But the proliferation of new opportunities in the gig economy to choose how, how much, where, and when to work is one big win for all."

Was listening to Joe Rogan's podcast the other day, and he noted that the whole corporate structured way to work is a pretty new phenomenon. If you look at it over the course of history, it's just a blip. An anomaly.

Says the guy with a full-time job.

The Elimination Of Reason – Vote today with the 2020 election in mind. #MakeAmericaAgain

Daily Reading List — October 24th

Entity Framework and Setting Primary Keys on Views – Trickery!

The Rise and Fall of the Army Surplus Store – There was a day when a man could get a good pair of boots and a durable pea coat at a good price at the surplus store.

Resistance Band Training for Jiu Jitsu – That Paloff Press exercise is a dang good 'un.

Build A System To Play Your Rasslin’ Entrance Music When You Walk Into A Room – Oh.
Hell.
Yeah.

Handy tool to scare the crap out of you when a hurricane is on its way. #matthew

Microsoft is killing Yammer Enterprise plan in January 2017, will start integrating Office 365 Groups first

If Google buys Twitter, there’s a perfect spot for it in YouTube – I called this for Q2 I believe. Can it happen before the end of Q4?

PODCAST: What the Generational Cycle Theory Can Tell Us About Our Present Age – Added Neil's book to my WishList

Daily Reading List — September 12th

The Launch Meeting – This couldn’t be more pragmatic.

  • What are the six things most likely to go wrong?
  • What will lead us to go over budget? Over schedule?
  • How will we communicate with one another when things are going well, and how will we change that pattern when someone in the room (anyone in the room) realizes that something is stuck?

A Bunch of Kids Adorably Mistook a ‘Game of Thrones’ Character for Elsa From ‘Frozen’ – A really cool addendum to this story…

Carrie is a friend of our niece. When they left the event, she came over to our kids’ birthday party (at a climbing gym). Those little girls were so ecstatic to see “Elsa” walk through the door for their birthday.

Big thanks to Carrie for making their day really special!

4 Unavoidable Steps To Building An Entrepreneurial Organization – That’s it. Just do these four things and you’re done. Can’t argue with any of these, but they are much easier said than done for sure!

The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball – Not sure about this. If enforced at all levels (big “if”) batters will catch up pretty quickly. I actually like the idea of using technology to analyze umpire/referee performance after the fact, but the instant replay stuff during the game is horrid. The call is the call.

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Life – Definitely outsourcing oil changes. But I do most of my own stunts otherwise.

Tweet Activity Analytics – Twitter’s analytics tool is super cool. But…yeah…probably not going to change the way I use Twitter at all.

Kuddle – Kid-safe photo sharing app. We’ve been reading the “Little House” series, along with some biographical information about Laura Ingalls Wilder. My offspring are keen to document their childhoods. Great tool!

Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive – Yes please. More please. Faster please.

Daily Reading List — January 17th

NCAA Welcomes Women’s Triathlon – A little bit of a different view here from me, but I can't imagine why you'd want the NCAA involved in your favorite sport. Stay away from my beer pong.

Steven Lord Blog: The Rhythm Of Life (and drafting) – I see people drafting in races all the time. And I really don't give a ladybug if they do it. Eventually, this is going to result in a really big pileup in a really big race. Besides, virtue is its own reward.

From Victim to Villain in a flash – As they are fond of hollering in East Tennessee — "Git off the rowed!"

I <3 Trainerroad.

6 Simple Habits To Keep You Consistently Happy Every Day – All very easy to do. I'd add another–Just.Slow.Down. That probably falls under disengagement.

Narcissists tweet more often and crave followers on Twitter – So younger narcissists are more likely to post to twitter, and middle aged narcissists are more likely to update Facebook.

Unanswered questions here: what about middle aged people who update twitter a lot? Was Instagram even considered in the narcissism scale, out did they run out of space to measure it there?

10 Tips for Dating a Single Mom – Hilarious. Read the comments first, then go back and read the article. The comments are pure gold. Gold Jerry!

Van Halen’s 1984 Turns 30 Today — How Does It Hold Up? – Best quote from this whole (incredibly good) post:

"Does it ['Panama'] hold up? Embarrassing question. Yes, it holds up. It might be holding this entire goddamned country up."

Happy People Count Their Current and Future Blessings – "View living a spartan lifestyle as temporary, merely a prerequisite to joining the ranks of the socioeconomic achievers in America."

This is Sparta!

Daily Reading List — August 6th

Monotasking Is The New Multitasking – In other words, turn off email and Twitter and only check them on a schedule.

The Case for Replacing Family Dinners with Family Breakfasts – We do both. Plus lunch too on lots of days. Then there's the afternoon communal green smoothie. Studies would predict that my kids will all win Nobel prizes. Me…not so sure about that. 🙂

How To Tap Into Fat For Your Fuel – Working the program, taking a lot of trust. I bought a case of Gu a couple of weeks ago and haven't touched it yet.

Working From Home? Boss May Be Peeking Over Your Shoulder – Shoutout to @simplysql. 🙂

So Use Google Plus

From Miguel Silencio

I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving those emails with ‘FW:” in the subject line. That’s why I continue to lose interest in Facebook. It has increasingly become a place where many people post everything from the ‘net they deem neat.

I remember telling someone 4 or 5 years ago how Facebook was so great because it wasn’t all spammy like MySpace. That and, “your mom isn’t on there”. Guess where your mom is now? And feel lucky if people are posting the forwards on Facebook instead of continuing to email them. My prediction is that it’s about to get a lot worse…wait and see what Facebook’s earnings are today. Now that they’re beholden to shareholders, something’s going to have to be done to increase their revenues.

There will be ads. Lots of ads. Right along-side all that useless content.

Invest a week into really using Plus. I mean really using it. It doesn’t disappoint.

Well…unless you want them to open up the API. Tick tock.

Your Gateway To The Pocket Chainsaw and More

Pocket Chainsaw – Genius! Please develop a pocket band saw and forklift as well please.

A Marathon of Measurements – I’m glad someone wants to do this. Wish there were more of these guys.

2:16 Marathoner Says He Can Break 2:00 – If he didn’t have to work. I could do it too…if I didn’t weight 200 lbs, had a coach and dietitian, and more flexibility in my hips. Oh yeah, I’d like a shoe sponsor as well. Geesh.

Custom themes in Gmail – Add photos to your gmail theme…cool!

The Libraries, Studies, and Writing Rooms of 15 Famous Men – Counting down the days to the time when I will take the room I want for my office!

Choose, Lace, and Replace Your Running Shoes Based on How You Run – Hopefully this will make a bigger difference than the podiatrist did.

Twitter moves toward the news system of the future – Or, as it is known in many circles, Google+

Better With Age – This is comforting

Thinking of going this route – FIRST marathon training plan

Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City – Awsum.

A Simple, Responsive, Mobile First Navigation

Google Semantic Search: Bad for SEO, Good for You – Make your SEO money now!

Why Some Twitter Threats Can’t Be Taken Seriously

Lots of the threats documented here seem to come from people who think when a defendant makes bail means a case is closed. I’d bet the majority of these folks fall into one of the following categories.

  1. They’ve never been charged in the criminal justice system. If they had, they’d have a lot better understanding of how it works. So they probably aren’t the “violent criminal” type, despite what they try to portray themselves as on Twitter. Eazy E said it best, “I never met an OG who never did shit wrong”.
  2. They were too lazy to get a free education when it was placed in front of them on a silver platter. If you’re too lazy to do that, you’re probably too lazy to get off the computer long enough to engage in any sort of physical altercation with someone. This is in line with my theory that you are perfectly safe running in the dark in the early mornings, when criminals who are too lazy to work for a living probably aren’t awake.

Carry on.

Sorry…I just had to post what I saw on Twitter today:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/JoseCanseco/status/127435700441321472″]

Um…sure. Ok.

Actually, this response was much better:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/CaughtOffBase/status/127436411858194432″]

Lucrative Twitter Niche Identified!!!

Twitter is still growing every day, and it’s harder and harder to get noticed and recognized there. No matter what niche you are trying to target with your marketing efforts, it seems like it’s more difficult to build a following among anyone other than the people who are also marketing in that niche.

I was looking over my “New Followers” emails over the weekend and checking out the profiles of some of the people who looked like they may have a motive for using Twitter other than selling me something. There weren’t many to be found. But I did find a new niche. It was serendipitous!

The untapped niche on Twitter is…

People who are just being themselves and not pushing a sales pitch until I want to vomit at the thought of the idea of owning whatever they are selling.

If you are moderately interesting, I’m going to be much more likely to pay attention to what you are trying to sell me when you finally, after gaining my trust, try to sell it. I’m a tightwad, so I won’t pay that much attention, but at least I’ll pay more attention.

If you are really into fitness (or web applications, or politics, or music, or fill_in_the_blank), that’s awesome. Me too. But I don’t want to hear someone talk about one single subject all the time in real life. Why would I want that on Twitter? If you can’t talk about anything else over a cup of coffee, you are probably obnoxious and boring.

And so is your Twitter account.

Google released a +1 extension for Chrome last night. Big news? I guess, but maybe not that big.

I’m surprised at a couple of things. First of all, I can’t believe it took Google this long to push this extension out. It’s nice, but nothing that Facebook can’t do for “Like”. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an official “Like” extension out in the next 24 hours. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook acts like this isn’t even happening.

*UPDATE*

Here’s Facebook’s extension, less than 24 hours after….I should do this for a living.

*END UPDATE*

What I really can’t believe is that the +1 button hasn’t made its way to the Chrome base install yet. That’s something Facebook can’t do unless they build a browser and capture market share like Google has. Extensions are great, but they still require people to install extensions, and I’m not convinced that’s something the average user is going to go out of their way to do.

Now…when is the API going to be exposed so that my blog posts can show up in Plus automatically? Twitter has it, Facebook has it.

Well Google?

Get Off The Sidelines, Google + Button Update Coming, and Netflix for Kids

These link dumps every few days make it nice for me to keep some fresh content coming, even when I don’t have a ton to say. Of course, if you follow @sadcox on Twitter, you get this stuff almost-real-time…for FREE!

You Can’t Become a Man From The Sidelines – Join your local rugby club this season. Or learn to play an instrument. Or grow and kill your own food. Build a house. Paint a self-portrait. Anything is better than just watching other people live their lives.

Van hits, kills bicycle rider near DeLand – This is Sara McLarty’s father. Be careful out there.

Google+ Share to Specific Circles – Big news for publishers…you’ll be able to decide what images and descriptions are shared with Snippets.

Twitter Based Hedge Fund – Has someone finally found a way to tap the emotions of the market? I’ll stick with logic.

Tenured Professors: Get Out While You Can – This doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility to me. “Get out while you can” may be a little strong, but contingency plans are never a bad idea.

90’s 411: Music, Fashion, Timelines, Movies, TV and More – I’ve perused this site to see if I can find the phrase, “Congratulations Possums on your 1998 Midwest Championship…” Nothing’s turned up yet.

New Swype Keyboard Makes Tweeting And Mapping A Breeze – Best text input method for Android gets better!

Netflix, Now For Kids – Out Netflix is already set up “just for kids”. All of the suggestions are for kids’ shows, because that’s pretty much all that gets watched. Seriously, this is a cool feature!

(GooglePlus != Twitter) && (GooglePlus != Facebook)

Ok nerds. I’ve seen a lot of discussion over the past few days about what Google Plus is trying to replace, what it is going to “kill”, why it will never work, etc. The truth is, Plus is it’s own thing, and that’s cool. Nothing has to be killed for Plus to succeed. Let me state this simply in a language everyone can easily understand:

Switch (SocialNetwork){
 case Twitter:
     //You put info out, and I choose to consume it
    if (iFollowYou)
          MyStream.show(theStuffYouWrote);
    else
          returnToWork();
  break;

 case Facebook:
     //We agree to consume one another's information
     if (weAreFriends){
          MyStream.show(theStuffYouWrote);
          YourStream.show(theStuffIWrote);
     }
     else{
       MyStream.show(constantSuggestionsWeBeFriends);
       stalkSomeoneElse();
     }
 break;

 case GooglePlus:
    //You decide info I see, I decide info you see.
   if ((iAmInYourCircle) && (youAreInMyCircle)){
       MyStream.show(stuffYouSharedWithCirclesImIn);
       YourStream.show(stuffISharedWithCirclesYoureIn);
   }
   else if ((iAmInYourCircle) && (!youAreInMyCircle)){
       MyIncoming.show(stuffYouShareWithCirclesIAmIn);
       YourStream.show(thingsISharePublicly);
   }
   else if ((!iAmInYourCircle) && (youAreInMyCircle)){
       MyStream.show(theThingsYouSharePublicly);
       YourIncoming.show(thingsIShareWithCirclesYoureIn)
   }
   else
     returnToWork();
 break;
}

It should now be clear, though I’m not 100% sure that will compile. Feel free to correct my code in the comments. It won’t be the first time someone has shown me a better way to do something.

Now for the verbose comments…

Unlike Twitter, Google Plus makes you decide who can follow you unless you post everything publicly. I guess if you post everything publicly, Plus could be a little like Twitter. But it seems like pushing things out publicly all day long could be dangerous because not everyone wants to use Plus like Twitter, even if you do. There is a “block” feature to take care of that,  I for one plan on using it liberally.

Unlike Facebook, Google Plus doesn’t force you into a mutual relationship with people and put the onus on you to later define the parameters of that relationship. You start by defining your personal parameters and can choose to open up more later. Or not. You can even choose for relationships to be completely one-sided. So it eliminates the “guilty-friend-add” situation that happens all the time on Facebook.

Consider this situation: someone adds you to their Circles and you get the notification that they’re sharing with you. You don’t really want to share with them very much and don’t care much about what they are sharing, but you worry about hurting feelings or looking like a jerk. The easy solution is to just add them to a Circle you won’t ever share anything to so that they’ll get notified you’re sharing with them. Later you can remove them from that Circle so that you don’t have to read what they ordered at Starbucks or that their cat ate their kid.

Now. returnToWork();

Use It How You Want To–Another Plus of Google+

I’ve been noticing lots of the people I follow on Twitter have been connecting up with me on Google+ over the last few days. Some of these folks are using Google+ in the same way they use Twitter and putting out a steady stream of status updates. Of course, it’s kind of Twitter in reverse. Instead of “following” the way you do on Twitter, Google+ lets you choose who you want to “Share” with.

It seems like over-share in the beginning, but when you think about it, it’s kind of nice. Because Google+ lets you decide who you want to share with, it also lets you decide whose updates are going to make it to your main stream and which people who are sharing with you are going to get chucked into the “Incoming” bin.

Not that I don’t care about these people and what they are up to. I do. That’s why I follow them on Twitter. But I may not care so much that I need to be notified if they’ve said something new. Twitter is nice in that way. If I choose to go back and read their full stream I can. But for me, Twitter is more about what’s going on in real time, and I seldom have the urge to go back and read any stream history.

And for the Twitter folks I follow who I’m not sharing with on Google+, there’s no reason to feel rejected. The stuff those folks would care about is still flying out publicly on Twitter (and maybe even on Buzz). I promise, I’m not sharing anything on G+ that’s earth shattering or ground breaking. It’s mostly stuff I don’t like putting on Facebook. You know–stuff that people who have known me personally for years may care about.

My favorite thing about Google + so far is that I have yet to receive a notification that someone got a high score on Farmville, a flood of happy birthday wishes from people who would have no idea when my birthday was if they weren’t forced to know, or an invitation to find out what my cat’s stripper name is.

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