Jeff Miller's Big Idea Creativity seeking form

Interview with Scott Brinker: This is a good three-minute interview with Scott Brinker about the emerging role of the “marketing technologist.”  Scott has popularized this term, and he explains it in this video.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott last week in preparation for a talk at the eZ publish Partner Summit I’m giving in Lisbon next week.  Great guy, with some great insights.

Handed over two projects this week. One that I have worked on actively for 4 years — an active blog + an active community that I found myself no longer having time to take care of. The other one was a website that I have started almost 12 years ago — was enthusiastic at first, but the whole thing just slid into the limbo land over the last couple of years.

There’s a bit of sadness in me, but on the other hand I was glad that they were over. Hopefully both projects will continue in safe hands. Hopefully.

Consumers ignore most apps on their smartphones: This confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time – we’re creatures of habit with phone apps, and we really consistently use very few.

Of smartphone owners, 68% open only five or fewer apps at least once a week, finds a survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Seventeen percent don't use any apps. About 42% of all U.S. adults have phones with apps, Pew estimates.

"The novelty wears off," says Pew researcher Kristen Purcell.

Right now I’m thinking about jumping ship from Android to a Windows Phone, so I took inventory of what apps I would have to have to make the switch.  I only came up with three: Spotify, Runkeeper, and Evernote.  (Not coincidentally, I’m a paying customer of all three.) Every other app I use is just assumed to be in there (browser, email, calculator, etc. – the “core” apps) or something I tried but didn’t stick with.

I think games are an exception – people tend to cycle through those a lot.  But for every Angry Birds there are dozens that get played once or twice and then tossed.  And I can’t think of any phone game that would prevent me from switching phone platforms if other reasons dictate a need.

Whenever anyone raves to me about all the apps available for their new phone, I have to stifle the urge to say, “That’s great, but let’s see how many of those you’re using in six weeks…”

Top Italian Scientists Who Failed to Predict 2009 Earthquake Now Face Manslaughter Charges: Here’s a short but thought-provoking article about Italian scientists who publically stated that the risk of a major aftershock to an Earthquake was low.  A few days later, an aftershock killed 300.  They’re now being charged with manslaughter.

Local citizens claimed they had been planning to leave their homes after the smaller quake, but had changed their minds after the committee's comments. In August 2009, the citizens filed a formal request for investigation, and earlier this month the chief prosecutor stated that his office had enough information to indict the individuals named in the case.

Suffice it to say that this would have a chilling effect on science.  And I think there’s a real difference here between just being wrong, and being clearly negligent.  I’m thinking of the British scientist who allegedly published fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism – that seems like another situation entirely.

Interestingly, another scientist did predict the second Italian quake, but no one took him seriously.

Twitter tattle and the trouble with twitchforks: Great commentary here on what’s a very genuine problem.

[…] social networking militates against thinking for yourself. As the Twitterati jumps on the day's bandwagon, we are increasingly seeing the unedifying spectacle of what's been dubbed "twitchfork mobs" – and it can get ugly. Social media is a wonderful tool for networking and communication, but the flip side is that it encourages laziness of thinking. The need to verify information also seems to have been forgotten.

I’m automatically very suspicious of any militant bandwagon  that comes through social media.  Even back to the days of email forwards, my default setting was “it’s not true.”  That applies even more with social media.

So, if you haven’t been closely following the Boyink Family life for the past year and a half or so let me catch you up.  In December of 2009 we made the decision to take a year-long RV-based family road trip.  As part of that I sold my hobby vehicle, a 1964 CJ6 Jeep that I had invested countless hours in.  That Jeep was the latest in Jeep ownership that stretched from the time I turned 18 and included a 1966 CJ5 and a 1952 Willys Wagon. 

Fun in the garage wasn’t limited to just vehicles.  I’ve also made tandem bikes, a quadcycle, and a small junkyard sculpture.

Since coming back from our trip I’ve found myself restless and antsy - especially when the evening hours roll around and I’m done with the days work, am tired of looking at screens and don’t want to read a book.  I think I was driving the family nuts with my frustrated pacing and desire for something to go do.

I was missing an offline hobby.

So last week I hopped in the truck and made a visit to the local metal recycle yard where I grabbed a bunch of scrap metal in various shapes.  I had no preconceived notion of what I wanted to build - but rather just figured something would present itself from the bits I had gathered.

It didn’t take long to see a cat’s head in one of the shapes and car rim suggested the arched back of a angered cat.  With that idea the build was on. Some automotive “A-arms” provided easy legs, a box of nails supplied whiskers, eyebrows, claws, and a spiked tail.  1/2 of a garden rake became the mouth with fangs coming from the ends of some railroad spikes.  I found myself with help at times, with my son doing some of the welding (and even turning down friends at the door to do so).  My daughter dubbed it “Dumpster” and I added the junkyard zombie cat as that’s what came to mind as it came together,.

Enjoy!

Sketchy Skechers.com: Today’s DailyWTF is a pretty good one discussing the horrors of the Skechers website and how it’s delivered as XML then transformed via XSLT right in the browser.  Standard WTF stuff, really.

But – lo and behold! – the head of the Skechers web team leaves a comment…and it’s a good one.  He sets forth some of their reasoning, and it starts to make sense.  I’m not totally on-board with all of it, but he makes some great points and it’s totally worth reading, especially if – like me – you have an irrational hatred of XSLT.

[…] here's the great thing about XSLT-- it's cacheable on your browser. Instead of browsing from page to page to page, each time getting 25k+ of html, we can frontload a lot of that by having you download the XSLT. Once you've downloaded the file once, you have the layout for the entire site already cached, and the next page you go to is 2k of XML.

[…] My original thought was-- your desktop machine, and very quickly your phone, have just as much CPU cycles available as a commodity server. Why not shift as many cycles to the client as we can while still making it a relatively fast experience?

[…] IE7 and IE8 actually have better support for XSLT transformations than Firefox does.

[…] Is it any more insane than hunting through Struts code, or JSF, etc etc? Now, both our front-end CSS/Javascript developers, and back-end Java (now Scala) coders understand Xpath now, so we don't run into the "I don't want to touch that Velocity template" problem.

I really commend this guy for jumping in, and I have to respect his desire to try something new.  Did he succeed?  Well, I browsed the Skechers site and it certainly seems fine to me, so I certainly can’t say he failed.

And serious props to him for jumping into that conversation without being a douchebag and turning it into a constructive discussion.  What a great sport.

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?: This is an epic answer at Quota to the question of my software development estimates are so consistently poor.  The author has a running analogy of a hypothetical hike from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which looks simple on a map, but is not so simple once you’re on the ground.

OK, that line is about 400 miles long, We can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night. They can't wait to see us!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan day one. We take a look at the map. Uh oh […]

US Online Ad Spend to Close in on $40 Billion: Interesting.

This year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?: When Skynet goes self-aware, this is going to be a real problem.

The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.

What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.