Caleb, Josh and Steph make easter eggs. (Note: stay for the surprise ending!)
Easter Eggs from Steph Lewis on Vimeo.
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March 31, 2009 – 12:12 pm
I just noticed this recently, and I thought I’d shoot a little movie about it. Enjoy!
Can’t see the movie above? Watch it here.
In God We Trust
March 23, 2009 – 12:07 am
A couple weeks ago, I told this story to a close friend of mine. I made it clear I didn’t have plans to share it publicly. He exhorted me to share it with all of you. I don’t share this in order to puff myself up or put myself on any kind of pedestal. It may do the opposite, I don’t know. I share it in the hopes that it will help or encourage somebody, even a little. Most of all, I hope it glorifies God and spreads the truth.
The two weeks following the loss of my job in mid-January 2009 were the darkest of my life. I did a fairly good job of keeping up a confident face for the world to see, but internally I was mentally and spiritually in shreds from constant worry. My thoughts were a stream of this type: What happens when the little money we have runs out? How will we feed ourselves? Will Caleb suffer due to decisions I’ve made? Will Stephanie suffer due to decisions I’ve made? What happens if we lose our house? If we sell this house now, won’t we lose money due to the state of the economy? If so, we won’t be able to afford to get another one, will we? Will I live with my parents for years to come? Shouldn’t I turn the heat down and just endure constant cold to save money? Shouldn’t we go hungry a little to save money? Is this the beginning of the end? Have I made some mistake that I’m being judged for, and there’s nothing I can do to save myself and my family now?
Everything everywhere was covered in a thick layer of doom.
I went out and purchased thermal pants (i.e. long johns). I wore them every day under my jeans. That’s the state of mind I was in. It was almost as though I was afraid I would freeze to death somehow. (In my defense, it really was extremely cold outside for those two weeks, but I agree the fear was entirely irrational.) At the time, I was desperate for anything that would reduce my worrying to any degree. If I had to find a dozen little anti-worry solutions that were highly effective when taken together, I would do that. Having interviews for new jobs helped. Talking with loved ones helped. Watching anything (especially funny stuff) that pulled my focus off our dire situation helped.
When Steph would ask me what would make me happiest, my answer was something like, “a big, fat, consistent paycheck.” Whichever job offered me the most money and seemed reasonably enjoyable, that’s the one I would take. Emotionally, that’s where my trust was. Money would make everything better. If only I had money, I would be happy and I wouldn’t have anything to worry about.
I’m writing this entry to convey one thing: those thoughts about money are horrible, devastating lies. I believed them, and I placed my trust and my security in money. Losing my job hurt me so deeply because it cut off my bi-weekly flow of security. That’s why the worry started, and that was the root of my problem.
I have a feeling I’m not the only one who has struggled with this issue. Think of it this way: pull some American money out of your pocket if you have any. Bills or coins, it doesn’t matter. You’ll notice every single piece has one phrase in common: “In God We Trust.” Why do you think, of all the places that phrase could be written, they chose to put it on money? I don’t know why they did, but I think it’s both amazingly wise, and incredibly ironic. Wise because that is the one place in which that reminder is most desperately needed, and ironic because it is true of so few people. For most, including myself at times, it is a total lie. (I honestly don’t care whether they keep the phrase written on American money or not. I care most whether or not we keep it written in our hearts.)
For me, the moment of testing came down to my job acceptance process. I had two job offers: one from a large, well-established, for-profit company, and one from a small, new, non-profit. The for-profit company was offering me more security than the non-profit, but the non-profit’s work was extremely exciting to me, I loved the people, and it seemed to be the closest to ministry I would likely get while still using my Computer Science degree every day. Something about that lit a fire in me, and I took the job with less security.
Listen, I am not saying this to toot my own horn. Please, if you’re getting stuck on that, you’re missing my point. My point is that I’m still here. I survived the decision, and God is taking care of me and my family. God is our security in a more real way than ever before. Does that mean I’ll be perfectly wonderful forever? No, especially not by American cultural standards (which, take note, are not the same thing as Christianity). What it means is that I’ll always have everything God wants me to have. When I’m in the midst of difficulty, it’s brought by God. A lack of money or health or anything is brought by God.
I think I can live with that. Worry-free.
How Twitter Will Make Money
March 19, 2009 – 12:57 pm
The topic of how Twitter might make money is so popular these days that people are writing Onion-like parodies of news stories announcing Twitter’s plans. That particular story was a really popular link on Twitter today.
But the question remains: how will Twitter make money? I think I know at least one of the ways they’ll do it, and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this.
I discovered a service called I Want Sandy a year or two ago and became a user almost immediately. The gist of the idea: Sandy is your virtual assistant, reminding you of tasks and appointments as you like. The interesting part wasn’t just that Sandy kept your calendars and to-do lists organized, but that she did it all through a human-readable text-based interface. I could send Sandy an email saying something to the effect of, “Remind me to buy milk tomorrow at 5pm” right in the subject line of the email. (I believe she also had an IM interface, and of course a web interface.) And sure enough, tomorrow at 5pm I would get an SMS message (if that was my preferred method of communication) that reminded me to buy milk. Simple. Human. Useful! I found myself being confident to take on tasks and make promises knowing that I wouldn’t forget things. Sure, I’ll ping you next Tuesday about that. (Send message to Sandy.) Oh, your birthday is when? (Send message to Sandy.) You get the idea.
When Twitter came around, the folks at I Want Sandy were smart enough to register the ultra-short @s Twitter name and allow people to send messages to Sandy through that interface. I was already on Twitter and it was a convenient way to augment the service. I could be reminded of events and to-dos through Twitter direct messages too, instead of just SMS and email.
Fast-forward to November 2008. The company who runs I Want Sandy, Values of n, announced that they were purchased by Twitter. And the CEO, Rael Dornfest, became a Twitter User Experience engineer. Aha! I Want Sandy went offline in December 2008 and is no longer functional.
It seems nearly a sure thing to me that if Twitter has acquired all the intellectual property behind I Want Sandy that they’ll be integrating it with the service. It seemed to work so well that I’m not sure how they’d improve it besides tightening and deepening the service’s integration with twitter.com, but we’ll see. I’d love it if they offered it for free to make Twitter more palatable and useful to more people, but I could easily see paying $1 / month to get reminders from Twitter over SMS (or whatever) because I personally know how useful they were to me, and I know the gaping hole their absence has left. Twitter has stated that they won’t be reducing the value of their service by charging for Twitter features that are currently free. This would certainly be something over and above what is built into Twitter, and offering it as a premium, for-pay service wouldn’t reduce the value of Twitter in anyone’s mind.
So that’s my guess on at least one way they’ll make money. We’ll see if I’m right!
iPhone OS 3.0 – Accessory Ideas
March 19, 2009 – 8:53 am
The iPhone OS 3.0 presentation that happened on Tuesday really got me thinking. There were a lot of exciting announcements that are being loudly touted by the press: the arrival of a rather elegantly designed Copy and Paste to the OS, Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) support, CalDAV support, new application payment models, and device-to-device interactivity are a few favorites. These are all pretty big announcements. But the biggest announcement of the show wasn’t the addition of Copy and Paste, but something Apple is just calling “Accessories.”
Let me explain briefly what “Accessories” means for those who don’t know, and then I’ll tell you what I see in this idea’s future.
Up until now, the iPhone has had only a short list of ways in which it could interact with other devices. You could sync it with iTunes, pair it with a Bluetooth headset for hands-free phone conversations, or plug it into a music speaker system with a dock connector. It’s a simple, highly-focused list.
But what if the iPhone could talk to other kinds of hardware? Any kind of hardware? Apple gave a very safe example for starters: a custom application that would allow the iPhone to control a hardware equalizer built into a particular iPhone-compatible music speaker system. But later in the presentation, Apple showed the idea is much bigger than that. The iPhone could soon connect to things that aren’t necessarily music-related or phone-related at all. They asked us to imagine medical devices being assisted by the iPhone. Like a blood pressure cuff wherein the traditional display (which sometimes requires its own cart and custom computers) is replaced with just a cord and a dock connector. Custom software on the iPhone would display all the relevant readings from the cuff (on a large, high-resolution color screen no less), just like the current stuff does. But since the iPhone platform is so powerful, why stop there? Record the readings over time, advise the patient based on trends, and wirelessly send the collection of reports to a doctor from anywhere in the world with a click of a button. Now we’re talking. None of the blood pressure monitors I’ve ever seen could do that.
Keep in mind, also, that these new accessory connections work with both the dock connector or a Bluetooth connection, depending (I assume) on your application’s bandwidth and latency considerations. The cord doesn’t necessarily have to be there.
So what else could be done with this? I’ve come up with a few ideas. I’d love to hear yours.
Mobile Magnetic Strip Reader
It’s not easy to process credit cards wirelessly. If you want to sell something to people without a big Point of Sale cash register system and store walls around you (like, say, at a garage sale) it would seem you’re limited to taking cash. Not anymore. Hook a magnetic stripe reader up to the iPhone, write some software, and take credit card payments wirelessly from anywhere. I would be shocked if Apple wasn’t using these by November of this year in their stores to increase the number of points of sale and mitigate holiday shopping congestion. I think they’ve previously (embarrassingly) had to use Windows Mobile to do this.
Device Firmware Updates
Ever had a device whose software could be updated, but you never bothered to do it? My TV has an update to its software right now that I haven’t applied. The instructions require you to hook your PC’s serial port up to the thing with a custom cable (note: it’s not Mac compatible), run some software, etc, and you just don’t want to lug your machine downstairs, get out the cable, and go through the whole thing. What if you could just deliver the device firmware over Bluetooth through the iPhone? No portability problems, no cable, and a nice multi-touch experience that trounces whatever they created for the PC. Suddenly, all your devices can add features and fix problems by using the iPhone as the conduit to the Internet. Devices of tomorrow might come with some minimal additional hardware (Bluetooth, a dock connector cable, whatever) that leaves their future functionality a bit more open and flexible, just like the current flexibility of your computer or iPhone. They don’t now, but they will. And when they do, we’ll really start to see how things can change quickly. There’s no reason you can’t update your coffee maker or your toaster.
I understand these things were functionally possible before. But no one does them because it’s a pain and it’s hard. When Apple steps into these kinds of areas, industries change. Why do you think Congress only started to have opinions about locking cellphones to certain networks when the iPhone came out, when it was a practice that was many years old? Buzz is worth a lot, and the iPhone has it by the truckload.
Internet-connected, Highly-portable Barcode Scanner
Remember my old idea about using the iPhone to price compare? Well, the iPhone’s camera isn’t good enough to scan an average barcode in a store. Android has several apps out that do this now, but the iPhone requires that you enter the barcode digits in manually in order to provide similar functionality. Yuck. But that’s over now. Someone will definitely be making a barcode scanner that connects to the iPhone and talks to a specialized piece of software. If it’s cheap and small, it’ll be very interesting. Not because it hasn’t been done, but in part because it’s on a popular device.
Augmenting Standalone Devices
The Canon digital camera we use most around our house doesn’t have GPS built-in. It’s a bummer, because knowing where photos were taken is a powerful and useful feature (supported by iPhoto ’09, no less), but to me, it’s just not worth paying thousands of dollars for a new camera that has built-in GPS. So why not write the camera’s software to tether to the iPhone (wirelessly or not) and get that data from the phone while pictures are taken? I get GPS data on my photos without having to build the cost of GPS into the camera. Everybody wins! Except people who own cameras today. OK, no plan is perfect.
My Driveway & My Job
February 9, 2009 – 8:28 pm
At the risk of being overly-metaphorical and seeing symbols where none exist, I’d like to show you my aforementioned driveway. During my job search, I’d occasionally go out with a shovel and an ice pick and work on it a little. There were a few days, like today, where the weather warmed up and made a bigger difference than anything I was able to do with my puny ice pick.
I wish I had a “Before” shot from even two days ago, but this is what it looks like today:
During my job search, I came upon an early-stage startup called The Table Project that really excited me. I found myself wishing it already existed so I could use it immediately. I interviewed with them, they felt like a fantastic fit, they offered me the Lead Web Developer position, and that’s what I’m starting this Wednesday, February 11th.
I cannot believe how blessed I am to be spending my days at the intersection of the Church and social networking. I’ve always loved writing code, but who’s ever heard of sanctified code? God never forgot me in the midst of the deep darkness of the last few weeks. In fact, I think this job is why I lost my last job. Does that mean it’s a guaranteed success? No. That just means it’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. It’s more than I deserve, and I am so thankful.
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow,
Praise Him, all creatures here below,
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen.
Your Favorite Funny Movies?
January 25, 2009 – 11:53 pm
Steph and I have had a bit of the January doldrums lately. It’s dark and cold outside, we’re kinda poor, and we could use a good laugh.
What are your favorite comedies that are available on DVD right now? Leave a comment, and we’ll Netflix the ones that sound good. Here’s to a whole month of laughs!
