I read the Christian Science Monitor’s story on “What’s behind Chicago’s high-crime summer?” & curiously found no mention of the Foot Clan. ★2010/08/31
Using low-level acidic substance to simulate rash from laundry detergent in order to get girlfriend to do my laundry. #lifehack★2010/08/27
@greghaerling — We paved the way for these spoiled shits. "We" being slightly less-spoiled shits. ★2010/08/24
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of helping Maddie attempt to be the King of Seattle. Inspired by the week’s previous King, Maddie decided to give it a go and I decided to support her. The title of King is awarded every Monday at 12am to the winner of that week’s foursquare competition.
foursquare is a location aware webapp for your phone that awards points for various activities that involve going out & about. The reason I “play” is because it gets me out of the house and acts as a great friend-finder. Alice Tiara just posted a great write-up of what makes the game interesting:
For example, on Monday night, I went to dinner with a friend. After dinner, I saw that two of my closest friends were at a local bar. We met them there, and over the course of the next four hours, about 10 other people showed up, all of whom found us through foursquare.
For people worried about privacy, don’t worry; you only check in when you want to be found and only tell who you want to. The more places you go, the more points you get; and if you’re creative with it, you can rack up the points. Here are some tips that I’ve come up with that will help you to be the King of your burg:
Only check in at new locations:
You get 5 points for every new location checkin and zero points if it is a duplicate checkin within the week
Rack up bar-hopping bonus points:
You get a travel bonus point for every subsequent checkin during the night (after 4pm). I.E. 6 points for first unique checkin, 7 for second, 8 for third, 9 for fourth, etc.
7-Day Bender:
Start the Tuesday before your championship run and hit a place each night. By the time the next Monday hits the starting line, you’ll get 7 “Bender” points for the first time you check in each night.
If you’re bar-hopping, drink a pony glass of a dry stout:
You could just not buy anything, but that’d be shady. Buy something that has nutrients, like a Guinness. Otherwise, you’ll succumb to alcohol madness (or so I’m told).
Mind games:
If your score is within striking range, people *will* compete with you.
Either come out of the gate on Monday and establish such a daunting lead that people won’t attempt to compete, or
Pull an eBay – Stay just below the top 5 for most of the week so that you’re not noticed, then swoop in on the weekend to claim the crown.
Part of playing a game is the necessity of agreed upon rules. foursquare doesn’t have any defined rules at this point, other than “Don’t lie about where you are,” and even that isn’t very defined. In an effort to get people playing under the same rules, I would suggest something along the lines of the following (please alter or append any of these in the comments):
Must have intent to stay at a checked in location longer than 30 min.
The checked-in location must be a public place.
The checked-in location must be someplace in which you are capable of being social. (i.e. Not @ your coffee shop job or while running errands)
Strong suggestion you buy from the establishment if it is a bar/restaurant.
The rules would only be necessary if you’re interested in competing in foursquare. You can still get use out of foursquare, even if you’re not competing for Kinghood. I would suggest that competing is opt-in for users who’ve read “the rules” as defined and agreed upon by the userbase (ticket).
Other ideas for foursquare that would make me dork out:
Allow users to optionally enter home address and places of work – I’d love to let people know when I’m at home and at work, but don’t want to collect points for these locations. (ticket)
Mayoral voice – Give the mayor of a venue the ability to write a welcome message when a user checks in at their location. (ticket)
On the users “History” page, show which users who were also checked in with you when you visited. I’d love this page to act as my social diary. (ticket)
Add the ability to optionally display your Twitter username. There have been times in which I’d wished I was able to communicate with another user, but couldn’t. (ticket)
All this being said, this only works when you have friends using it. I’d have a lot more serendipitous moments if I had more friends playing the game with me…
The music industry makes records louder and louder and have pushed beyond reason in an effort to stand out amongst the rest of the radio. This drives me nuts. Every time I listen to a Lily Allen record, I can’t stand the fact that the drums are distorted to make a buck; and I particularly can’t stand the fact that the people who perpetuate this problem know about it, but deny that it’s a problem in the first place:
“Somebody told me about [people complaining that the Guitar Hero version of Death Magnetic sounds better]. Listen, what are you going to do?… …The Internet gives everybody a voice, and the Internet has a tendency to give the complainers a louder voice. Listen, I can’t keep up with this shit.” – Lars Ulrich
Lebron James may end up having the greatest basketball season in the history of the NBA this season. And the funny thing is, he’s still got flaws in his game: His post-up game; Spotty outside shot; Stands still and dribbles too much. I’m betting that he’s going to end up being the best player to ever play in the NBA. Case in point:
Back in 1986, actor/director Beat Takeshi, a man who doesn’t like video games, wanted to show people how foolish they were for liking video games by making the most annoying video game of all time for the Nintendo. For example: A level where you must sit in front of the TV and hold the select button for 60 minutes. Apparently it’s coming to the Japanese Virtual Console on the 31st of March.
In a similar vein, Penn & Teller created a video game for the SegaCD in which you must drive across the Nevada desert in real-time for 8 hours in order to get “1 point”. There’s a torrent available for the brave.
GOOD Magazine’s guide for reducing your water footprint. I need me some low-flow toilets. FYI: Getting local WA State apples in Seattle doesn’t use as much water because of the lack of transportation.
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.
This particular point set off Mr. Stevenson to put into words concepts that I’ve always been aware of, but have always struggled to articulate as well as he did in his post:
The most contentious point between software engineering culture and visual design culture is the question of whether important things can be always seen in absolutes. The engineering approach values measurable, reproducible results which can be represented in a graph or a checklist. Unit tests and benchmarks illustrate progress. [...] Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.
Through out my career, I’ve regularly been in similar environments; and one of my biggest problems has been figuring out how to hurdle that divide. I feel that part of my role is as a visual taste maker. You might test to find the most crowd pleasing shade of blue at the first pass, but I might come up with a blue that might not be your instant choice, yet will grow on you when taken in holistically. Like Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” There is a point with visual design where logic starts to breakdown in ways that only experience can answer.
The coolest way to find out that the weather is shit in Seattle. The site uses Twitter status messages in various vicinities to draft a picture of not only how crappy it is outside, but what people think of it. Make sure to use a modernbrowser.
I don’t think that I tweet enough to get as thorough of a journal of my life (and thank the Maker™ for that), but I love the idea. I post too many shortened URLs for it to make any sense. Maybe one day…
Greg and I just got into our layover in Seoul before hitting Bangkok. Best plane ride ever. They have Tetris built into the seats! Greg and I were able to play vs. each other for about 9 hours. Outlets in the seats, hot towels applied to the face, spacious seats. I applaud you, Korean Air. Congratulations on superior air travel service and being awarded the BrumBrum Sky Travel Level Of Excellence Certificate.
Part of the reason for putting this blog together was to aggregate all the content on the various web services I’ve subscribed to. I’ve got accounts that I regularly use with Twitter, Last.fm, del.icio.us, and Flickr (which I promise to be a better steward). With all these, I have splintered friend groups that I have to manage individually through each service. The term “Web 2.0″ is (way too) often used to describe services like these that create their own internal networks. Some have said that “Web 3.0″ is the bridging of these networks.
OpenID and OpenSocial seem to be on the cusp of this concept. Another, FriendFeed, seems to be the “I-can’t-believe-that-I-didn’t-think-of-that” dead simple implementations of the concept. It is essentially the same as Facebook’sNews Feed feature, but with the most popular web services instead of just Facebook’s features (They’ve got a Facebook app, too).Through this, you can create a feed of all your friend’s activities across the web without having to check a bajillion websites. So check out my feed. Now I can feel like I know you without having a real relationship! If they only had a desktop interface like Twitterific…
FriendFeed is currently a closed beta. Let me know if you want an invite.
