What's up with bathroom attendants

I guess this is rant day, since following my time suck post I have a not so serious question about bathroom attendants. What is the deal with you guys? What purpose do you serve? I'm pretty sure I can get the soap out and turn on the faucet for myself. I do it often. And can I please get a towel that you haven't touched? Thanks very much. And now I'm supposed to tip you?

I know you guys have to make a living but come on.

Time Suck #3: Parking

Holy *%&(((^$$$&^ what a pain in the ass it has become to park at DIA. The last time I parked there (which I do practically every week) I drove through all of the west side short term parking, spending about 15-20 minutes trying to find a spot. I finally exited the parking structure to go find a spot in long term which was also full. I then had to go park at the off airport long term parking lot and take a bus in. You might note that this is just a special case of the driving time suck, but it can actually be infinitely more frustrating since you drive around in pointless circles thus aggravating time suck into time suck rage.

I'm not sure what the solution is other than to say, save the planet, save your sanity, and if possible take public transport. I have not taken this advice myself but am seriously considering it.

Money:Tech 2008 Panel

I sat on the "Building a Better Information Beast" panel at O'Reilly's Money:Tech conference this week in NY. Other participants were Randall Winn of Capital IQ, Kevin Pomplun of SkyGrid, Renny Monaghan of Salesforce.com and moderated by Rob Passarella of Bear Stearns. The panel was a good one and Rob was a very engaging moderator. I'm still not quite sure why Salesforce was on the panel but what the hell right? Capital IQ is an obvious choice for a next generation Bloomberg. They have most of the data, can acquire what they don't have, can move faster than Bloomberg, smart guys, etc. SkyGrid is in the midst of closing their A round and want to be the unstructured information aggregator, probably most directly competive with InfoNGen. Near the end of our discussion Rob asked the panel how all of this would come together. Would companies need to assemble it themselves out of the pieces or will someone emerge that will bring it all together. The obvious answer is the latter. It's too big of a market, too big of an opportunity for someone not to put this all together. The big question is when. The data companies need to make their data more open and "mashable." and then will need some way to link context between the data sets. The obvious answer for the financial market is by ticker+exchange or some more consistent code like a cusip since tickers change from time to time. This is a fairly complicated problem with unstructured data however since you need to determine whether what people are talking about should be assigned to a specific ticker. For instance if someone is talking about Chinese manufactured pet food, should you assign this to all pet food tickers? Should you just assign to the pet food tickers that private label the Chinese manufacturer's product? Should you not assign to a ticker at all? As it turns out contextual integration is fuzzy. There needs to be a variable association from tight to loose that we commonly refer to as relevance in search. You can also think of this as "relationship strength." We've attempted to do this with our ranking engine at Collective Intellect but in order for this to work in a mashable way we will all need to agree on a common key in the information taxonomy and a normalized value for relationship strength in order to bring all of this information together in a meaningful way. We're getting there and work at companies like Metaweb are helping to think through this but I'm afraid we're still years away.

There Will Be Blood

The movie was amazing. Daniel Day Lewis is an artist. I also thought Paul Dano was good as the preacher, although the symmetrical lashing he gives Daniel Day Lewis' character in the church is not nearly as powerful repayment as the scene where Daniel Day Lewis promises to bury the preacher much earlier in the movie slapping him down into the mud thick with the oil they both need. The dialogue is spare and the moments of silence leave you on edge, sort of like Cage's 4'33" piece. The soundtrack is wild, going from manic percussion to somber violin. It was extremely effective but unlike any movie I can put my finger on. This movie will have you on the edge of your seat for the full 2.5 hours and leaves you with a sense of despair, not necessarily about life, as you get with No Country For Old Men, but for the diametrical characters and choices they make living on the edge of their belief systems.


I'm Finished...

shambhala meditation

Just attended my first class on Shambhala meditation at the Shambhala Center in Boulder. Normally my mind is running several times the speed of sound and the G's my brain cells are pulling are starting to wear me down. I don't know if you've ever seen Over the Hedge but there are many days when I feel like Hammy the squirrel.

I've been a tourist of Buddhism and eastern philosophy since my late teens and decided it was time to try to take this passing interest to a new level AND enjoy the benefits of quieting the mind for a few minutes each day.

This first evening was very good with some introductory instruction on posture and focus on the breath. Shambhala has two forms of meditation: Calm Abiding and Contemplation.

Through calm abiding meditation we train in cutting through distraction and
bewilderment so we can use mind’s natural qualities of clarity, peace and compassion to enrich our own and other’s lives. more info

We learned about Calm Abiding tonight and will be working through Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's book, Turning The Mind Into An Ally. There is serious rockstar worship going on among the students for Sakyong Mipham and at one point someone said, "just getting close to him makes you feel at peace." Now I don't know if I buy all that, but I did come away from the first class feeling much more at ease with myself in the world than I've been for a while. It should be a great learning experience progressing through the course. And bonus, one of the instructors is a software engineer who just might be looking for work. Another serendipitous recruiting opportunity!

company blog switch over

We just changed blogging platforms from movable type to wordpress at Collective Intellect, so now we are here. I would say overall the switch was a pretty good experience. It was fairly straight forward to import the old posts and after digging around I was able to quickly hook up google analytics, Lijit, and Twitter Tools. Twitter Tools is pretty cool because you can configure it to auto-twitter everytime you create a blog entry and it creates a TinyURL on the fly for you. Conversely, when you twitter (and you can twitter right from the blog page!) it will either create a blog entry for each twitter or create a digest of your twitters at the end of the day. This is the exact kind of interaction that will make the abundant social web survivable. Teach a man to twitter and he'll twitter for a day, teach a man to integrate twitter with all of his socialness sociality online environment and he'll twitter long after he's forgotten what twitter was :)

The only thing that I haven't figured out is why someone with "author" privileges can't post a picture or a link. I had to set people up with admin permissions before they were allowed. Yes, before you flame me, I'll flame myself for not looking it up in the documentation.

So check out the new CI blog and subscribe. We have some pretty cool stats we're pulling to predict primary results. Look for more of these predictions as well as some pretty interesting analysis we'll be doing around the superbowl coming up this Sunday!

Mad World

Took a cab ride this morning and the driver's name was Daniel Darko. I just hope I don't start having visions of giant evil bunnies.

Analyst Briefings

Just did one of those taking-my-medicine company rituals of doing an analyst briefing this afternoon while hanging out at Laguardia airport. As luck would have it the flight was delayed so was able to do the full hour. This should probably be labeled as another time suck post because you tend to get much less out of the conversation than you give. Perhaps it should be a double time suck because I was also waiting on a delayed flight. Doh! Don't get me wrong, I think these people are smart and do perform a necessary service, although it's sort of a grift. They download your information, pop you into their competitive model, and then resell the information you've given them to other companies. How cool is that? Anyway, the call went really well and I think I explained and defended our service righteously. On to the next task, writing up software requirements! Yay!

Time Suck #2 - Meetings

Meetings can be a huge time suck if not run efficiently. It is very easy to drift off topic and not find your way back for large chunks of time. It's best to reserve certain times of the day for meetings so that there are more contiguous blocks of productive time. At Collective Intellect we do dev meetings only in the afternoon, while the majority of business meetings are in the morning. Have a set agenda, make sure everyone knows it beforehand, show up on time, guide the meeting quickly back on track if it starts to wander, schedule for no more than 30 minutes, and probably best advice is to not even have a meeting where an email exchange would suffice.

fyi, an excellent post from the past by 37 Signals on the same subject can be found here.

Time Suck #1 - Rush Hour Traffic

I started writing down a list of all the things in life that take more time than the value they add to your life. If attention is the new currency, then these things are all liabilities on the balance sheet.


#1 - Driving in Rush Hour Traffic
This has got to be the black hole of time sucks. Rush hour traffic should be avoided at almost any cost. Most of the time your schedule can be arranged to avoid such nastiness. When it cannot, carefully evaluate that event for attention ROI taking into account driving time. The horror, the horror...