MarketWatch
- Flight home is 2 hours delayed from New York. Other flights are getting cancelled. I’m screwed.
- Ridiculously frustrated at the lack of WiFi at LGA.
- A lot of people rebooking for tomorrow. 🙁
- Flight cancelled. On 6am flight tomorrow. No hotel rooms. Going to Frost & Nixon, then an all-nighter.
- Got Frost/Nixon ticket. Luggage checked at nearby Marriot. Good for next 4 hours. 🤞
- In cab to friends couch. Gave up on the “romance” of staying up all night in Times Square.
- Frost/Nixon was great.
- So happy to have shelter.
- Settled down enough to go to sleep now. Up in 4 hours.
- Up and dressed. Time to try this airport thing again. Thanks Hadar and Lois!
- Just got a Northwest departure notice via email that says my flight is on time!
- Observing that in fact NY does sleep.
- Not sure which is scarier: a taxi driver in clogged traffic or on the open freeway.
- Through security and at gates. That went way faster than I expected.
- Flight is boarding!
- Landed! This saga ends.
Drinking amazing espresso roasted yesterday at Jim’s in Linden Hills.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Finished cleaning most of the dog puke in minivan.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Tammy declares that I cannot wear my new fishing shirt to work, citing that “there has to be a line somewhere”.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Stranded in New York Tweets
See also Stranded in New York.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Starbucks people are using wireless headsets. Getting too close to McDonalds. 🙁
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Maybe I should drink less coffee.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Pouting after Jim hurt my feelings.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Wanting something…
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Wondering if Jim has had coffee.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Riding on school bus with Mazie.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Playing with Market Perception product on MarketWatch. Pretty cool!
Introducing my Robot
A couple of months ago I heard about Twitter for the first time. I logged onto it, created an account, and pretty much instantly decided that it served no purpose. Honestly, I just didn’t get it at all. A friend of mine, mostly on a lark, decided that he was not going to let Twitter die so easily and started using it. This slight encouragement got me to the point where I finally “got it”. Now I find that I really have fun with Twitter and am using it fairly regularly (who knows for how long). We even have a Twitter use case at work, where we make all of the MarketWatch breaking news bulletins available to Twitter users.
About a month ago I had an idea for an additional use of Twitter. I have a lot of things at home that I use a variety of scripts to monitor, or use tools like cacti to graph them. The problem with these is that they are typically never looked at after a while, and have no way of reaching me other than email. Thus my robot was born. Through Twitter, I created another account for thinglesBot. This account is the personification of my robot.
Initially my robot was obsessed with temperatures. Four times a day he provided the temperature outside the house. He also provided updates on the internal temperatures in the house, including the attic and very popular utility room. (Said friend above monitors the temperature in my utility room with glee.)
I’ve now made him a bit smarter, adding more event-based things. He now tells me when our solar panels turn on and off, provided there is enough sun to get them going. This is a great feature for me, and helps me feel better about all the investment into alternative energy. He’s also dipped ever so lightly into my office giving an update on how many emails I have in my inbox at the end of each day.
In reality my robot only exists via Twitter. He is nothing more than a collection of scripts that run on a handful of computers and post messages via curl. However, Twitter allows him to exist as “him”, and be friends with me, and oddly, other people as well. Two people that I’ve never met, and don’t even live in the same state as I do, have made friends with my robot. Why they care to know the temperature outside my house is beside me, but cool nonetheless.
Welcome to the world, my robot.
PS - As an interesting aside, and a possible extension of my robot into the physical world it would be fun to have a Nabaztag WiFi rabbit as my robot’s familiar. He could speak through the Nabaztag. Hmm….
Updated with new robot icon and current features.
Really missing espresso. Really. Badly. Brew is just no substitute.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Photo Storage Article Published
I sent my Digital Photography Storage Explosion article to our editorial team at MarketWatch to see if they would be interested in an article version of it for our site. They said it looked interesting so I wrote up a much smaller version and it was published today. I got a byline! 🙂
This version is much abbreviated and less “research paper” like. If you find it interesting, check out the original, unabridged version.
Just Typing
Sometimes I just feel like typing something on this here website. I guess that’s the advantage of being the site operator, author, editor, publisher and everything else.
This has been a busy week. I’ve been completely absorbed with this project at work. We finally got it launched today and I really think it’s one of the, if not the, most amazing thing we’ve done. If you are curious, go to MarketWatch when the market is open (M-F 9:30a to 4:00p ET) and look at news stories, quotes, etc. You’ll see the quotes are streaming at you. We did this ourselves, and it was a massively challenging and fun project. I was literally unable to sleep, waking at 4:00a most days, my mind whirring with ideas. I’ve gotta take some time this weekend and decompress a bit. I put some especially peaceful music on my iPod so when I wake up in the middle of the night I can try to listen to that to help me sleep.
I sort of took today off, even though Mazie and I went into the office for a couple of hours and I was email for a couple more hours at home. We had furnace contractors, roofing contractors and our landscaper over today to discuss projects. I pulled the trigger on the furnace one so that is going forward. I need to decide on the roofing project soon so that I can let the solar guys (we are also looking at solar heat and electric) know what is going on.
We are starting phase 3 of our landscaping project. First phase was the front yard, 2nd was some hardscaping in the back yard, and this final phase is the conversion back to native plantings for the undeveloped area in our backlot. It was completely filled with invasive plants, and we are now getting ready to transform it. It will be perhaps the most challenging and interesting of the projects, but the least visible, at least from the curb as it were.
I’m debating the whole solar thing. I’m not sure what I think about having 4’x6’ black panels sticking up off the top of the house for heat. The solar electric stuff is much less obtrusive, but has a lot higher cost.
We are heading to Wisconsin for a family weekend with Tammy’s side of the family. I expect it to be a blast. May pack up the telescope since we’ll be in darker skies. I feel a little bad that I haven’t given that the time it deserves. I really do have too many hobbies. It’s just that everything is so interesting! 🙂
Google Web Accelerator, Just say NO!
I’ve got a ton of respect for Google. They do an amazing job with search. Products like Google Maps make my jaw drop. It’s innovative, works exceptionally well and does things that many wouldn’t think you could do in a web browser without client-side software. Their stock, GOOG, has certainly performed well thus far. I think they have a great approach to technology. They push the envelope!
The Google Web Accelerator is one of the newer products from Google Labs and it frankly concerns me. The pitch for the product is to save you time on your web browsing, sounds great right? Well, to do this you assign Google as your proxy server and then funnel all of your web requests through them. They compress things, prefetch things and do a number of other tricks to make browsing faster. This sounds great right?
Well, take note that everything you do in your web browser goes through Google. They say they are not using this information in any way, but I simply wouldn’t trust any company with that much information. The allure is just too much to resist. Google could track every thing you ever look at on any website. They can track how much time you look at each page. They could even take the opportunity to alter the content from the publisher before it gets to you.
Actions like this on the part of Google make the Googlezon story sound more and more realistic. Add to this products like the My Search History from Google and you see a real cauldron of privacy issues starting to boil at Google.
MarketWatch Acquired by Dow Jones
News hot off the wire! MarketWatch is being purchased by Dow Jones. Still very early. It’s great news on many fronts with lots of open questions still to be figured out.
Death by Meeting
While I was on vacation I wanted to read a light-hearted business book. I like to have something to spin around in my head during the downtime. Death by Meeting was recommended to me and it fit the bill just right.
First of all, this book is a business fable and some may find that really annoying. It’s a very fast read. Even though it weighs in at over 200 pages you flip through them very quickly.
The basic premise of this is that most meetings are not worthwhile and the author suggests how to make them more productive. To cut to the chase he suggests that meetings neet to have an intent that is more defined. Ultimately coming to four types of meetings that a company or division should have on different schedules. It’s interesting and I know I have personally seem many of the problems that the author points out about existing meetings.
I found it particularly interesting to read this after reading Agile Software Development with Scrum. I found a lot of what Scrum talks about to be more of a discussion of the dynamics of people in the workplace, and much of what Death by Meeting goes over is similar – both in problem and solution. For example, Death by Meeting suggests that teams meet every day for a 5 minute “check-in” meeting. This is identical in nature and intent to a daily Scrum meeting. Similar problems, similar solutions.
I won’t go into great detail on the book. Like I said, it’s a quick read and if you find the topic interesting I think it’s worth reading. I may try to take some of the concepts proposed and try to bring that into our environment at MarketWatch.
