Perpetual Adolescence

August 8, 2009 – 12:17 pm

I turn 31 years old today.

This video sums up what I’m finally realizing about America and our youth-centric culture.

Watch “Craig Ferguson – Youth” on YouTube

Don’t get me wrong! I still think youth is precious, beautiful, and important. But as I grow, I’m continually shocked at how little I change, how culturally acceptable that fact is, and how often I think about my high school and college experience, wishing at times that I could rewind the clock and go back.

I shouldn’t be going back, I should be going forward. There are riches ahead that the young can’t fully appreciate.

So don’t fear working hard at your job. Don’t fear having a career, even a career people don’t think is interesting or cool. Don’t fear getting married. Don’t fear being a parent. Don’t fear that day when you no longer care what’s in the theater or what’s on the radio. Maybe it’s not just that you’re tired or no longer “get it”. Maybe it’s that you’ve found something better. Something that the young just don’t have the experience to understand. It’s not their fault.

Let’s take some strides together, grow up, and move beyond all that.

By josh | Posted in Personal | Tagged , , , , | Comments (6)

How To Not Abuse Your Twitter Followers

July 25, 2009 – 11:23 pm

Anytime someone expresses an opinion about how others ought to do something, they risk coming off as an insensitive, egotistical jerk. I hope I can diffuse that problem in this post while allowing us to discuss the issues at hand. Your patience is gold to me, friends. I hope this whole thing doesn’t come off as cranky. I’m shooting for helpful, mostly, and angry only where it really needs the teeth.

I’m pretty opinionated when it comes to Twitter. I use Twitter a lot. I’m coming up quickly on my 7000th tweet on my personal Twitter account, and I’m often annoyed by Twitter almost as much as I’m delighted by it. Because of that, I’ve built my own little list of personal rules over time, and I’d like to share those rules with you now.

My four rules: Favorite Freely, Don’t Retweet, Go Private Quickly, and Don’t Use Me.

  • Favorite Freely. When you see a tweet you like, take the time to thank the author by marking it as a favorite. You don’t have to be too reserved with what you mark. Think of a favorite like a laugh or a pat on the back. Freely given, but never forced. That will dictate how many you should give. Thanks to Twitter’s built-in individual favorites pages (here’s mine), and 3rd-party services like Tweeteorites, favorites are meaningful, first-class citizens of the Twitter world and not a silent afterthought.
  • Don’t Retweet. Controversy! I hold this rule for three reasons:
    1. I’m following you for your tweets, not the tweets of your friends. If I wanted to read theirs, I’d follow them. It’s not offensive, it’s how the system works. Please don’t break the system.
    2. If it’s a “social justice / I have to spread the word” kind of thing, you can always take what they say, put it in your own words, and post that to Twitter with “via” attribution. Easy, and much nicer. Doing less than that feels lazy and abusive of your followers’ attention.
    3. If I want to see the tweets you really like, I’ll just subscribe to your favorites. No need to force me to see them by broadcasting them.
  • Go Private Quickly. If you’re publicly conversing with someone, tweeting back and forth repeatedly, consider taking the conversation private if it adds little or no value to those who follow both of you. It gets spammy really quick if you’re exchanging details about something that isn’t likely to be helpful or interesting to other people. That’s lazy and inconsiderate. So, one reply? No problem. Five? Way too many.
  • Don’t Use Me. This is the Golden Rule of Twitter. Don’t consider me and your other followers to be part of a force that you can bend and manipulate to increase your respect, fame, and fortune. I follow you because I’m interested in what you have to say, not because I want to make you rich or fulfill some ego-centric dream you have. If you’re going to sell me something, it had better be a rarity and it had better be a sincere endorsement of something you personally and deeply love. The more you push your money-making, notoriety-making schemes on me, the closer you get to becoming a… well, I won’t use the word here. It’s distasteful, and this is a family show. In short: be a person. If you have something to sell, open another account for that. If people don’t follow that account, take a hint.

If you have additional rules that don’t seem to be addressed here, add them in the comments, or feel free to agree or disagree with me there.

Happy tweeting!

By josh | Posted in Personal, Technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Lewis Baby #2 is Due in December! Woo!

July 3, 2009 – 12:21 am

We’re pregnant! Yes, really! Steph is 15 weeks along now, and the baby is due in mid-December. Steph has written her own entry with her thoughts on her blog, if you’d like to read it. I recommend you do.

So far, what we know is that the baby appears to be very healthy and normal. In fact, the doctors tell us this kid’s activity level is unusually high. They’ve already wished us luck when we have to take care of this one and Caleb at the same time. We could definitely use your prayers in advance. Thanks.

We don’t know the gender of the baby yet, but if the kid cooperates, we’ll know in a month or so. We’ll tell you as soon as we know.

I wasn’t sure if this world could handle even one of my spawn. Prepare yourself for two, World.

By josh | Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Twitter Follower Email Notices – New Feature Request

June 27, 2009 – 2:35 pm

Recently on Twitter, I wrote a very confusingly-worded feature request. I later realized the idea made no sense after being compressed into 140 characters, and I figured I should probably just write about it here. I think it would be really useful, and I hope they implement it.

When a person follows you on Twitter, they’re telling you that they’re interested in what you have to say. When you follow them back, you’re sending them the same message. The difficulty is, it’s hard to know who is worth following. Twitter tries to help a little by sending an email with some information about your new follower, but it’s not enough information to be very helpful.

Let’s say Steph (@stephlewis on Twitter) decided to follow me. Before sending me the email notification Twitter sends, it could compare the list of people I follow with the list of people following Steph, and just show me the number of people in both lists. Because of the inherent meaning behind following a person, having more people in that special shared list tells me that some of the people that I find to be interesting also find @stephlewis to be interesting. It’s a built-in recommendation of @stephlewis. Showing the list of all their Twitter names would be even better than a number, but a number would be a good start.

To clarify, I wouldn’t care if @stephlewis followed the same people I followed. She might be interested in the same people, and that might be useful to know. But she might also be a spammer who is following thousands of people in order to artificially pump up that common number. It’s easy to fake. But being followed by people I follow isn’t easy to fake. It’s trustworthy and meaningful. Facebook does something similar by showing “mutual friends” with new friend requests, and we all use it all the time to make decisions on names we don’t quite recognize or remember.

I hope the folks at Twitter might consider adding this one tiny bit of extra processing to the emails they send. I’d be happy to get the emails a couple minutes later if it made them this much more useful.

By josh | Posted in Technology | Tagged | Comments Off

The Genius of Pogo – New Creations from Old Creations

June 17, 2009 – 11:35 pm

I recently stumbled upon an amazing new artist called Pogo, and I want to share a couple samples of his work with you. His mood and insight take my breath away.

Pogo makes music by reusing pre-existing material. He samples and loops and clips and layers. Sometimes he adds his own drums or an original bass line, but in general, what you’re hearing in his music is a collection of sounds from other music. Occasionally he’ll even find music in something that was never intended to be melodic. He takes it a step further, though, by taking each song’s collection of samples from another single work. For instance, one song’s clips might be taken from one particular movie.

Without further ado. I present to you his take on Alice in Wonderland, and Mary Poppins. Take a deep breath, sit back, tune in, and discover beauty you never knew was there.

By josh | Posted in Art, Entertainment, Technology | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Soundboard For Everybody!

May 18, 2009 – 9:39 pm

I just had a really odd idea for a fun social web application, and in classic form, I’m just going to hand it out rather than make it myself. Call me lazy.

No, go ahead. Call me lazy. I’ll wait.

OK, my idea: you may have seen things called “soundboards” before. Arnold Schwarzenegger has quite a few. (Here’s one.) Other celebrities have them too. The idea is that you can insert quotes in the celebrity’s voice into a conversation or play them at appropriate times in context, and hilarity will ensue. I mean, the “Who is your daddy…?” button on the example board I provided is awesome all by itself, right? Sometimes people use these to make prank phonecalls and record the calls. You get the idea.

What if you could easily make a sound board of yourself? Like, in 5 minutes or less. And your friends could then use the web application to record themselves having a “conversation” with you in which they could make you say almost anything they wanted, depending on which quotes you provided to them. Then of course, their creation would be shared with you, and you could get your revenge by making a conversation with them using their soundboard. It goes on forever and ever. Perhaps there would be conversations between three or four people simultaneously with version 2.0.

I really think this has legs. It would require flash to tie directly into the person’s microphone (or webcam, even?), but it would be so much fun seeing what people would come up with.

I’m tempted to post my own sound bites in raw form here and see what you all do with them, but I don’t want to go too far this early in the process.

By josh | Posted in Entertainment, Silly, Technology | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Saving Money on Amazon with CamelCamelCamel

May 6, 2009 – 11:56 pm

Occasionally, I’ll see a price on Amazon and wonder whether it’s really a fair price or not. Did Amazon recently hike it up? What about the 3rd-party vendor prices for new and used versions of that product? It’s hard to tell.

I found a site today called CamelCamelCamel that does exactly that, and it really impresses me. For those of you who are savvy to JavaScript bookmarklets, you’ll know what to do with this little puppy I hacked together tonight: View Amazon Price History. If you’re not familiar with bookmarklets, don’t click that link yet. Just add it to your bookmarks and I’ll show you how to use it in a minute.

The idea behind CamelCamelCamel (whose obvious logo I love like a guilty pleasure) is fairly simple. If you wonder whether the Amazon price or the 3rd-party vendor price of any product on Amazon’s site is a little fishy, you can look at the item’s price over time, in a handy graph, and find out whether now is a good time to make your purchase. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed and watch the price change, or get an email alert when the price drops below a certain level. Useful! They also have lists of popular products and products with the biggest price drops in the last few days.

OK, let’s try it! If you’ve saved the View Amazon Price History link as a bookmark, you’re ready to go.

Let’s say you’re shopping for a good Digital SLR camera and you come across the Canon Digital Rebel XSi. Once you’re on that page (or any product page) you can click the bookmarklet you’ve just saved and you’ll be automatically transported to the corresponding page on CamelCamelCamel. The graphs will tell you that Amazon’s price is just below average right now, but it was a lot lower in early April. (I found it surprising that Amazon changes its price as often and as much as it does, both up and down, on brand-new products.) The 3rd-party new cameras are also below average, and certainly below the recent highest price. The used version, however, is near the peak of the highest price, so if you’re buying used, it’s probably best to wait a week or two and save $30 or more.

It’s a great little web application with a solid business model (kickbacks from purchases you make via their links). I just couldn’t help but share. Enjoy!

(Footnote: I know that CamelCamelCamel is supposed to be spelled with all lowercase letters, but how could I resist using camel case?)

By josh | Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Comments (10)