I’ve been using Zipcars for almost a year now and love them. I usually take public transit here in Chicago, but every once in a while I’ll meet friends out for dinner some place where it is more convenient to drive, head to the suburbs for shopping, or need to move a couch or something else that requires a truck. Gas and insurance are included with the yearly membership fee, and most cars are equipped with iPasses so you can breeze through tolls which are billed to you later. If you’re cutting it close on your reservation, you can use their iPhone app or 800 number to see if you can extend the reservation. They do a much better job explaining it all on their site.

Beyond the service, I also love all the technology behind Zipcars. Their website is really put together integrating with Google Maps and have as few of steps as needed to make a reservation. The iPhone app is just as well put together using your GPS to find nearby cars and having intuitive filtering methods. The Zipcard is RFID enabled so you don’t need to swipe it anywhere, enter any numbers, or even take it out of your wallet. Checking in and out is almost magical since you don’t ever see or talk to a person. When the car is parked in its parking spot and you lock it, it is considered checked in.

Everyone always asks me, “what if you’re late returning a car?” Well, it actually happened a few weeks ago to me. We were out at IKEA picking up all sorts of new stuff to furnish our new apartment and it took longer than we thought. I tried to extend my reservation like I had in the past using their iPhone app. It said I couldn’t extend my reservation and if I was going to be late, I should call support. I called and apologized for not being able to get it back in time. They asked for an estimated time of arrival to notify the next person and told me I would be charged the late fee of $50. It’s a good system that keeps people on time, and if you read on their help section they say they sometimes pay for a taxi for the people who have to wait to get them to another car. It’s that kind of company.

I’m not being paid to write this overly positive review of Zipcar. I just really love it. I’ve even cleared out an ad space so that if you sign up, you’ll get $25 in driving credit (and I’ll also get $25 in driving credit). If you’re in a big city without a car or on a campus like Indiana University Bloomington, you should definitely try it out.

Current Boarding Process

Currently, you can print your ticket or display it on your smartphone to the bus driver. The driver then compares your reservation number to their list of numbers on a clipboard. Here’s an old ticket of mine:

MegaBus Ticket

You can decipher my departure location and destination along with some other info from the reservation number. It seems silly to me that someone would have to compare this complicated string of letters and numbers to a list of complicated strings to decide if my ticket is valid.

Wouldn’t it be easier to scan a QR code and have the scanner say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

Proposed Boarding Process

Passengers still have the choice of printing their ticket or displaying it on their smartphone. The complicated string of letters and numbers would be replaced by a small square that to the layman looks like a scrambled TV signal.

QR Code

The driver would be equipped with either a proprietary scanner like airlines have or their personal (maybe company subsidized) smartphone with a scanner app. There are plenty of QR scanner apps available for both iPhone and Android phones. It wouldn’t be hard to throw one together for any other platform. The only requirement is that the phone has a working camera. MegaBus could even develop their own scanning app to keep better track of customers and deploy it across the enterprise.

The driver’s camera would snap a picture of the passenger’s QR code printed on paper or displayed on screen. The captured code is beamed to MegaBus’ ticketing site for validation. They could do it over the wifi most of their buses are equipped with to make it quicker.

How much faster and easier do you think it would be for both the MegaBus passengers and drivers if they used something like this? The buses would load faster and be on time more often as a result, too.

There’s nothing wrong with MegaBus’ current system. It just feels outdated and could be a little faster. What if you could eliminate the driver’s interaction with the passengers completely? What if Foursquare partnered with MegaBus and could use checkins via GPS to verify someone was boarded?

Scenario: MegaBus implements a OAuth signin on their site for a location based service like Foursquare. This makes ticket purchases tied to a Foursquare account. That user checks in to the departing bus stop in a given window like 30 mins prior to departure. The driver opens his “admin app” to see all of his passengers are checked-in before taking off.

Any passengers who aren’t on Foursquare could still bring their QR code, and the driver could scan them in. The checked-in passengers and scanned-in passengers would all be shown in one list of “boarded passengers” on the driver’s app making it easy to see who was still missing. Even though it looks like the driver is checking text messages, he or she is just refreshing the boarded passenger list.

QR codes and location checkins are going to become a whole lot more meaningful when they are applied to real life scenarios like this. Mayorships are expired. Advertising is tired. Using your checkin as a ticket would definitely be wired!

1. Save and Invest

I definitely could be saving more, but I’ve slowly stocked away and paid down debt mostly in the form of student loans. I haven’t been approached to support anyone’s side projects, but I have had a few people give me insider peeks at their beta projects which is even cooler.

Mint has tons of great blog posts to help with saving and investing. They’ve also launched an Answers service for your personal finance questions just in the last six months. I highly recommend both as sources to get your finances on track. I also just signed up for Texthog this week to better keep track of my personal expenses. Mint does an OK job of scraping bank statements to give me estimates, but Texthog will give me the manual control to track everything including the small purchases that add up.

2. Optimize Information Intake

I have unsubscribed from feeds in Google Reader and become better at scanning and not archiving links marked for later on Read It Later List. I got an iPad about a month ago and it has helped knock off a few more links late at night before bed. I’ve also quietly cut back on people I follow on Twitter and strangers I call friends on Facebook.

The biggest help in focusing information intake has been unsubscribing from every email newsletter I can. Hotels and airlines seem to think I can book a trip every day and sometimes twice a day. Every time my iPhone vibrates with a new email, I now know it’s something I actually care about.

3. Read More Books

I finished a book cover to cover. I listened to another one twice in audio format. I’m almost done with a third which means I’m a little behind the book-per-month pace I had laid out for myself. ReWork is still sitting bedside. I’m honestly scared to read it after Crush It and Delivering Happiness. None of them are healthy for my corporate psyche.

4. Return to the Dark Side

I hate Microsoft. Internet Explorer sucks. Outlook sucks. Sharepoint sucks. I’m still using Windows XP everyday at the office, and I’m glad we have to lock our laptops to the desk or it would have been thrown across the cubicle weekly. The only thing Microsoft I have come to like is Exchange which my iPhone takes full advantage of.

My Windows Home Server has been just as big of a pain. I’m starting to consider alternatives since WHS is nothing more than stripped down XP. After talking to some Windows 7 reps at TechCocktail Mobile last week and helping my grandparents pick out a new Windows based computer for their office, I have no confidence in this company.

5. Produce More

I’ve done my best to keep blog posts consistent but haven’t done much in the way of videos, designs, or code. In my defense, I have been putting more thought into the business side of projects instead of purely considering what’s produced. Still, the second half of 2010 needs to be filled with releases. I hope Forrst can motivate me. If you haven’t signed up, you’re missing out.

6. Visually Brand Myself and My Sites

If you’re not reading this through RSS, you can tell I haven’t made any substantial progress. I got a great book from Smashing Magazine on WordPress, but it has just been collecting dust. This is the perfect time to get everything revamped because Facebook released Open Graph, Twitter released Anywhere, and Digg is starting alpha testing for their overhaul. Oh, and WordPress just released 3.0 which is killer.

New New

There have been some new developments in my life over the past 6 months. I did briefly get back in shape before losing interest. All my clothes started to not fit, but that sparked an interest in how to dress like an adult.

My roommate Andy and I successfully brewed our own beer! It was better than expected for our first time- not great, not craft. We have our second batch started which we hope will be more refined.

I helped Andy design and launch an iPhone app that got some awesome coverage from RWW and other blogs along with being featured in the App Store. It has definitely sparked a big interest in mobile development. We were actually just mentioned in Business Insider yesterday (and we’re already ahead of them

The new job is wearing off. The new city is becoming familiar. The new friends are becoming regulars, and as for new toys, snagging both an iPad and an iPhone 4 have made it a good first half of the year. But, there is more work to do. How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming?

It was a charge for renewing some business registration GoDaddy offered that we must have signed up for originally. I didn’t want to renew for this “registration”, but the order had already gone through.

I tried to find the simplest way to contact GoDaddy about this charge. Anyone who has used their site knows that it’s not the easiest to navigate, but I’m somewhat of a long time customer so I am used to it. I could either call their phone support which has been very helpful in the past for other accounts I’ve dealt with, or I could email them. I chose to email them because I just don’t like talking on the phone. Especially to complain about $5. I simply wrote:

I was automatically billed for Business Registration on the domain tombeatty.com. I do not want Business Registration. I have cancelled it. I would like a refund. Will open dispute through PayPal but would like to handle it through your support staff. Thank you.

And they responded within a few hours saying it would be processed. The next day my $4.99 was back in my PayPal account. For as big of a company they are it was a pretty painless process.

GoDaddy depends on people auto-renewing services. My dad would have never caught the $5 charge, let alone cared about it. Some companies would have fought and said I agreed to some renewal terms when I initially signed up and next time around I could opt-out. GoDaddy didn’t. In fact, they processed my claim pretty quickly considering all of the cogs involved (their support staff, their payment processing, PayPal, etc.).

For all that people rag on GoDaddy for security flaws and hosting problems, I had to point out that they do get some things right.

Good job GoDaddy.

Ten years later, why doesn’t everyone do this as a courtesy or even as part of their business model?

Roller coasters, tall buildings, and places with animals like zoos and aquariums are notorious for putting you in a line after you paid admission so they can take your picture to sell to you as you exit. I hate the experience. I’m not interested in various sizes with custom mattes and keychains. What I would be interested in is a digital copy that I could reuse, edit, and redistribute.

The Minus5 Ice Lounge charges $18 per photo that you can download from their website. I bet they don’t sell a lot of photos, if any. What’s worse is that we actually bought two actual photos at the lounge for close to $30 and they wouldn’t give us a digital copy. I’m not an economist or even that great with numbers, but I would have to think they could benefit from the long tail with a more aggressive pricing strategy.

Take the success of digital music and apply it to souvenir photography. People used to, and some still do, pay for the physical good at a premium, but now a lot more people pay fractions for the digital copy. There’s no need for DRM since each photo is unique and redistributing doesn’t lose the “artist” any royalties.

KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID

You don’t need some e-commerce store to sell individual photos. If they were stock photos, that’s another story, but these are individual, unique photos of families, grandparents, and the occasional teenage couple filled with blinks, blurs, and awkward smiles.

I’m convinced email would be the best way to distribute the photos. Add a watermark in the corner before sending if you want them to know you took the picture. Offer a 10% discount if the customer allows you to add their email address to your mailing list. Keep backups of the photos for 30 days just in case someone accidentally deletes the photos or your email gets bounced because their inbox is full.

Instead of billing for each photo or set of photos, you could alternatively build it into the price of admission. For an extra $2 a head, you’ll email a free photo to them (and you can still include fine print on the ticket to sign them up for newsletters).

Maybe I’m wrong and people are still overpaying for cheesy souvenir photos which is why touristy spots aren’t that interested in selling more photos. This sort of model isn’t limited to touristy spots though. Any social spot could hire a photographer to snap a couple hundred pictures a night, upload previews to their site, and then charge 10 cents a shot for their visitors to download the next morning.

Another twist on digital souvenirs is the Gowalla items model. Users find value in those free collectible icons. Either Gowalla and the like are going to cash in on that interest or the places of interest are. Just watch.

Accenture

My HR representative sent me this simple email to start the day off right. It’s very “Microsoft Clip Art” but in a company of over 180,000 employees, it’s nice to get some personal attention.

ING Direct

One of the banks I use gave me a coupon for their online store to buy some bank schwag. I like ING’s emails. They are always simple and to the point.

Hertz

The other end of ‘simple and to the point’ is ‘long and drawn out with too much information’ like this Hertz email. They’ve included stuff I really don’t care about like an account summary and Spring cleaning tips which buries their ‘birthday bonus’ offer. I think a rule of thumb for emails should be, “if you can’t do a complete screen capture on a 24″ monitor, it should be simplified.”

Coke

I am a brainwashed My Coke Rewards member. I feel bad if I buy a 12oz can or fountain drink because I know I won’t get any rewards points. That aside, I think this is the best designed email that I received. It showcases the product, isn’t too pushy with the copy, and makes it easy to unsubscribe. Most marketing emails like this would bury that link way down in the legal fine print.

Harrah’s

Harrah’s Casino had the poorest email. I was really confused by this long really long email that went on forever with text then a link, text then a link. It made me feel 10 again in a bad way. Once I found a link to display what they meant to include in the email, it wasn’t so bad.

The Real Effort

Kudos to these few companies that put forth the effort to wish me a happy birthday. It was a nice touch by some companies who traditionally might be viewed as uncaring (employer, bank, consumer good, casino). If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve probably given my birthday out to over 250 websites yet I only received a few emails acknowledging it. One argument might be that a birthday is a confidential piece of information so reminding a user that you retain it may worry them. I think it’s a great opportunity for brands. What if I’ve totally forgotten about your site or product? What if I had a lingering disgruntlement? Maybe that little note that says you care as a brand could reel me back in.

What’s even more powerful than any email is a personal face-t0-face acknowledgement. The client lead at my current project blew me away when he stopped by my desk to wish me a happy birthday. I’ve barely known the guy for 6 weeks, and he was the first person in the office to do so. Not the guy I report to, not the manager above him, not anyone else at Accenture – the client. I have no idea how he even knew it was my birthday, but it spoke volumes about his character. I took note of it as “that’s the manager I want to be”.

How You Could Send Birthday Emails

I don’t have any current projects that could benefit from this or I’d write out the code to do it. Here’s how I’d approach it though:

1. You have a database of user information (name, email, birthday, etc.)
2. You have a cron job that runs daily to see if it’s any of your users’ birthday.
3. If it is, grab their email and send a form email inserting their name where appropriate (e.g. Happy Birthday <first_name>)

Put it in the extra effort. It’s worth it to people like me.

Ladies and gentlemen: the ideas you are about to hear is true. Only the presentation has been changed to make me look less like an idiot.

Groupon is great. I love it. I’m addicted. Each day they “feature something cool to do at an unbeatable price” and when enough people buy-in the deal is “on” (see: woot.com). There are thousands of restaurants in Chicago, and I can’t get out to all of them. But when I see that I can get double the value for half the price, I am immediately tempted (read: brainwashed) into buying the Groupon of the day.

How Groupon Is Supposed To Work

The system is supposed to serve customers who see unbelievable offers to local businesses. I buy a coupon; I either print it or present it on my smartphone; and I usually have an enjoyable experience. The experience is almost as great as the business model.

Groupon’s Problem

Most businesses are still 10 years behind when it comes to interacting with customers. They want you to print a copy of everything. If you use Groupon’s iPhone app (saving you, the customer, from printing a meaningless piece of paper), Groupon’s client just jots down whatever number you show them on the screen.

PROBLEM:When you use their iPhone app, Groupon expects you to “Mark As Used”.

“Expects” is where the vulnerability lies. The Groupon system never marks it used. They rely on the honest user. I’ve flashed my iPhone at a crowded lunch spot and had someone from high school come up from behind and surprise me so I hurriedly locked my phone and shoved it in my pocket.

The next time I visited the same establishment (as I had multiple Groupons), I realized that the coupon I didn’t “Mark As Used” last time was still valid. An honest mistake that exploits the honesty system.

Another situation arose while I was out trying to use a Groupon on my iPhone where the manager had me email him a screenshot of the number. I mistyped his email address; he said he never got it; and had me write it down on the receipt. It was never claimed.

How To Cheat Groupon

Disclaimer: You’re not really cheating Groupon. You are cheating the small businesses who place their faith in the great Groupon community. I’m sorry Groupon, but if you didn’t think of this you should hire me or someone with half a brain regarding security.

I am not responsible if you use these for personal gain. Please don’t!

Photoshop the printouts by changing one digit. Save as PDF, open in Photoshop or Gimp, erase whatever digit you want, and put another digit in there after matching the font. The restaurant or bar won’t run the number until you are long gone. Sleezy? Yes. Guaranteed to work? Yes.

iPhone app user? Take a screenshot of your Groupon code, edit just like I previously mentioned, bring up saved image/pdf/html to server or cashier. Same principle, less paper. The cashier will jot down whatever number you show them and charge you the difference.

Until Groupon fixes this loophole, you will be able to reuse and duplicate coupons endlessly (or until the Groupon expires). I’m sorry to all the small business who will lose money because of this post. I really am. There’s always one guy in the crowd that has to ruin it for the rest of us. Sorry to be that guy.

Groupon, please fix this! I’ll post a follow up with some of my ideas.

Restaurants

That’s convenient. Why doesn’t every service everywhere that wants a tip have this? I’m instantly inclined to tip more because of this simple little table. I think they could take it further and have the tip added in so I could just circle what total I want and sign. People love when they don’t have to think. Waitresses, bartenders, valets, and other people expecting tips love bigger tips. It’s win-win.

Rental Cars

Most people who rent a car are in a different city and don’t know any of the local radio stations. That’s why Sirius XM radio is so great. The station title gives away the genre, there aren’t any annoying commercials, and the music selection is better so you don’t have to hear the same 10 songs while you’re in town.

A feature most cars come with these days that’s often overlooked is an auxiliary audio input jack. It allows you to play your MP3 player through the car stereo, but not a lot of people pack the $4 cable when they travel so they can’t utilize the feature. It’s like a hotel room having an ironing board without an iron. Would it really be that hard for rental car companies to throw one in the glove box? If someone takes it or loses it, charge them double so you can buy two to replace it.

While they’re throwing stuff in the glove box why not include napkins, tissues, or a pen and pad? Some basic things everyone keeps in their car just like a hotel gives you shampoo, towels, and a TV.

Hotels

I stayed at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel last week, and they had something I had never seen before. The only way I can describe it is as an A/V box with HDMI, VGA, and RCA connectors. Then, in the desk drawer there was a VGA cable and an audio cable so you could hook up your laptop to the 36″ LCD TV. It was pretty well thought out and would allow for visitors to watch DVDs or stream Hulu or Netflix in their rooms.

The box was unique because it encouraged guests to plug in their own stuff. They obviously didn’t want guests getting behind the TV and messing with the cable and pay-per-view devices. The box even had a power outlet built into it so I wouldn’t have to get behind the dresser.

Before I move on, why does it cost a minimum of $10 for 24 hours of internet access in a hotel? Honestly!? It’s 2010.

Airlines

Like I said, I’ve been traveling for business which means taking the same flights every week, which also means seeing the same in-flight movies. They change out every couple weeks and are different going east and west, but still not a lot of people watch them even with free headphones from the airline.

So I came up with a fun idea to get more people engaged in the movie selecting process. Before each flight when you are checking in at a kios or online and picking your seat, why not also vote on which movie you’d like to watch? The movie with the most votes gets played. Simple as that.

Of course, I still prefer JetBlue’s DirecTV in each seat along with the option to watch a number of movies (for a price). I wouldn’t care what’s on if the airline has Wi-Fi. That is the ultimate in-flight convenience.

Conclusion

I love convenience because it saves time, energy, and frustration. It’s simple. Sometimes that comes at a price, but other times it just takes some creative thinking. It’s true I have come to expect the little things as a customer. I want my snack bags to reseal so they’ll be fresh later. I want my cases of beer to have the same fridge packs as my Diet Coke. I want others to stop overlooking all of these everyday conveniences that would be so simple to implement.

(Claim token 77QZ6TZ65T6G)

I could have probably hidden this post so it only shows up in the RSS feed, but I’m lazy

1. Save and Invest

This is the first year in my life that I will earn more than I spend. There’s no more tuition to pay and I’m one of the lucky 2009 grads to have a paycheck. I have some manageable debt in the form of student loans, but for the most part I’m looking to get my income into a 401k, IRA, savings account, or some other form of investment before I can go spend it.

I’m not making gobs of money (yet) but if you need $10 or $100 or $1000 to do something awesome, send me an email. I figure the easiest way to start giving back is by donating to designers and developers who give out their work for free and have little charity pages setup.

2. Optimize Information Intake

Since starting my new job, Google Reader has become unruly and my Read It Later List has grown to nearly 200. I need to take an hour or two a night to knock out 10-20 old links and do a better job filtering or scanning new articles as they come up. Surprisingly, I feel like I’ve kept up with Twitter and other social networks pretty well.

3. Read More Books

I read a lot on the screen, but never on the page. I couldn’t tell you the last book I finished cover to cover. I’m hoping to read one book a month but perhaps more depending on how much I fly and how crazy the new TSA rules are. I think I’ll try to keep a springpad list of books I read.

4. Return to the Dark Side

For the past 4 years, I’ve done everything in my power to get away from Microsoft to the point everyone in my family now owns a Mac or runs Ubuntu. Joining the corporate world has forced me to submerge myself into everything Microsoft once more. I knew it was going to happen so I’ve been trying to learn more than fight.

I also have a Windows Home Server that I’ve neglected for months, so now that I’m back into dealing with Windows headaches I should hopefully be able to trick it out. I want to enable remote access so I can access all of my media when I’m on the road, automate torrents (legal ones) to download to it, and explore what our household XBox can retrieve from it to play across the house.

5. Produce More

I want to put out more blog posts, more videos, more designs, more code, more everything and not just get things started but actually finish them. I want to focus on getting things done. I have tons of ideas and half-cooked projects started, but nothing is completely done and out in the wild. I want to be able to show more from 2010 than I can from 2009.

6. Visually Brand Myself and My Sites

My blog design is tired and nearly expired. I don’t have a logo. I want to further develop a brand so I’m more recognizable across all 100,000 profiles I have everywhere. I really like what Kyle Haskins has done with how he’s kept his blog, Tumblr account, and portfolio all congruent. Both of the Hale brothers are putting the finishing touches on their new designs which has motivated me even more to get my own out there.

The last few things I want to do this year are minor and I haven’t completely figured out how I’m going to do it. I want to play more basketball and get back in shape. I also want to stop ordering the same movies as my roommate Alex from Netflix weeks and months after he does. Anyone know of a collaboration service that can read your Netflix queue?

A little over a year ago, I went to a 3rd round interview in Chicago for Accenture. It was a stressful day among the endless introductions, multiple interviews, and nosebleed at lunch in front of the other recruits and current employees. I walked away tweeting it was 1st class and didn’t think I made the cut. A few weeks later I got an offer! It was my third along with ArcelorMittal and the NSA. I stopped interviewing with other companies and accepted it. I was Chicago bound!

Before I graduated in May, I was notified that my start date had been pushed back from my requested June 1st to November 16th. As someone who had grown impatient waiting for Christmas breaks to end, I was horrified. What the hell was I going to do for 6 months?

To start, I went home for a few weeks and conquered a massive to-do list for my parents (wireless this, backups that, you know) while simplifying my way of life based on the “100 thing challenge“. I helped my neighbor with a small project and the itch was on to get involved with something. I considered emailing Gary Vaynerchuk to see if he’d put me up for a few months in NYC in exchange for helping Vaynermedia get off the ground by doing whatever I could. Luckily, there was a startup just as interesting launching in Bloomington. I attended the SproutBox opening making a point to talk to Mike Trotzke so I could express my interest in, again, showing up to do whatever I could. We had met at career fairs before and I followed him on Twitter so I didn’t feel like a complete stalker approaching him.

SproutBox

After being through dozens of interviews just 6 months ago, I was incredibly nervous to meet with Trotzke and ask if I could work for free to help them out. He welcomed the help and I was back in the gritty startup environment I fell in love with at ChaCha. From day one I learned something new every day! I walked in there like I had a college education but was clueless when it came to version control systems or PHP frameworks.

Thankfully everyone from Kyle and Matt (designers) to Dave and Cameron (developers) to even Marc, Mike, and Brad (cofounders) were available to consult for help immediately next to me if they weren’t busy flying helicopters, gliding scooters through the office, or planning Tequila Tuesdays. I looked forward to coming to “work” in the morning and learned as much as possible from everyone there. I loved my time at SproutBox. I wish they would have been hiring when I was hunting for jobs.

Eppley Insitute

I was quickly running out of graduation money so I applied to work for the Eppley Institute as a web developer. During my interview, I did the 2009 – match a face to a Twitter avatar who ended up being Jacob Gube (goo-beh for the non-l33ts). I thought he was setting me up when he asked what sort of blogs I followed for design and development. I said the obvious Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Depot along with a few smaller (now bigger) names like Chris Wallace, Rogie King, and Tim Van Damme. I purposely didn’t mention Six Revisions and tweeted about it afterwards.

That tweet caught the eyes of both interviewers (Matt and Jacob). Every career counselor will tell you to do your homework about the company you’re interviewing with and that you should write hand-written letters to thank them afterwards. Since there wasn’t much info out there about Eppley, I relied on my knowledge of the web design/developer community. Instead of wasting my time with a most likely illegible post-interview thank you note, I got the attention of both interviewers while blasting a good word about their company to all of my followers in less than 140 characters.

At Eppley, I was given the daunting task of mashing together three different open source content management systems to satisfy a number of requirements from every branch of the company’s org chart. Basically, they wanted a more robust ecommerce solution that kept their user system synced with their existing eLearning system. There were restrictions such as payment methods the university could accept, delays such as marketing reports that would shape the branding and layout of the site, and even limitations of what the open source solutions could deliver even with their worldwide network of developers and supporters. It was one of the toughest projects I had ever taken on.

Frustration grew, progress slowed, life went on. I signed a lease for an apartment in Chicago and had to start paying rent even though I was still in Bloomington. My car died so I had to borrow my brother’s car to get to/from work. JetBlue announced their ‘All You Can Jet‘ pass. All of that made me decide to chalk up the Eppley project as a loss and move on.

I admit I failed at completing that project and it was a valuable experience in a professional setting. It’ll be my go-to story the next time I’m faced with the inevitable interview question “tell me about a time you didn’t succeed”. I have my theories and suggestions on how we could have done things differently (which is how you end those types of interview questions) but the Eppley web developers were great to work with regardless.

All You Can Jet

I made the complete and official move to Chicago at the beginning of September only to fly to Boston a few days later. Then we flew to Los Angeles, Portland, DC, Seattle, and San Diego touching down in Chicago every week for clean clothes and a good night sleep. I also went to Sarasota and Las Vegas to round out my 26 flights in 30 days. I had the time of my life and only regret not taking more pictures, shooting more video, and writing more blog posts about all the awesome things we did. (I did try to post to Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and other social sites so our travels didn’t go totally undocumented.)

Freelancing

For the last 6 weeks before starting my career with Accenture, I looked to take on small projects so I could pay the rent and maybe have a few beers on the weekends. I was very limited in regards to what jobs I could take on since I couldn’t commit to anything longer than a month or two.

I primarily used Craigslist to find small local computer-related jobs. The Chicago network is pretty active so there were a couple dozen posts a day to sift through. I responded to over 100 posts and maybe heard back from 10 (never in a timely fashion even though most posts said they needed help ASAP or to have the project done tomorrow). It was appalling how uneducated and unprofessional the people looking for help were. Everyone wanted everything for nothing if they even knew what they wanted. It was beyond frustrating to the point I wrote a post just to vent.

Somehow I was able to find a few projects and pay my rent on time. Overall it was a very humbling experience and made me appreciate my pending job with Accenture all that much more. I realized how unprepared I was to be a freelancer. Not so much the technical aspects, but business related tasks such as invoicing and contracts. I experimented using my Google Voice number as my “business” line but even that needs some perfecting. If I had to do it again, I would definitely approach friends and family for projects and not waste my time on Craigslist. If I was more established I would have felt more comfortable bidding for bigger projects on professional designer/developer job boards, but I didn’t think I was ready to compete with people who freelance for a living.

Starting at Accenture

After my first week at my new job, I know I’m at the right place. From the people to the corporate culture to the endless extra perks, I’ve calmed any worries I had about putting my life on hold in order to start this career. I’m excited about the kind of projects I’ll be involved with next year being in the Identity and Access Management security group in Technology Consulting.

The last six months have been a blast! I met a lot of great people, visited a lot of new places, and managed to not run out of money in the process.

Two Years of Daily Snapshots

Before I show you how to automatically take a picture of yourself every day using Automator, maybe you’d like to see the results I had from almost 2 years of captures.

Daily Snapshots

You can see how it captures the happy, sad, and boring nights of my life. Looking back through 2 years of pictures, I realized a few things about myself like my hair is always different and I don’t shave as much as I thought. My little sister told me the other day that I have a very serious face when I’m on my laptop and that’s also very apparent.

Creating the Automator Workflow

Automator is super simple to use because it’s all drag and drop with a few options. The original tutorial from TUAW goes into more detail about what exact steps to take and what exactly you’re doing with each step so read that first if the rest of this doesn’t make sense. Take a look at a screenshot of my workflow and then download the workflow.

Automator Workflow

You can see that I tell it to take a video snapshot using my built in iSight camera in my Macbook and to save that picture to my desktop. Then, I import that file into iPhoto and add it to an existing album called “Daily Snapshot”. This step also deletes the original image on my desktop since iPhoto makes a copy in its library. This part is optional, but I love Growl notifications because they tell you what’s going on behind the scenes on your Mac. Finally, I tell it to quit iPhoto so everything on my system is back to how it was before the script ran. Pretty simple, right? Finally, make sure to save your workflow then “save as…” an application (download here for the lazy) for the next step.

Save As Application

Now for having it run automatically every day using iCal. In iCal, I created a new calendar called “run_scripts” that I could hide so it didn’t clutter my other events on other calendars. I created a new event at 9pm and told it to repeat every day forever. Here’s the trick- as an alarm for the event I have iCal run a file- my daily snapshot application if you couldn’t guess.

Open File as Alarm 0 Minutes Before

Now, every night at 9pm iCal will launch the Daily.Snapshot.app and the workflow will be processed.

Open file every night at 9pm

Why I’m Ditching This for DailyBooth.com

There’s nothing wrong with this system. Occasionally in Snow Leopard, I’ve noticed iPhoto crashes instead of quits after the import. With iPhoto’s evolution, each import is classified as a new event which makes organizing my other photos harder since I have to scroll through all of the individual events with only one photo. The main reason I’m switching is that DailyBooth.com gives me what I’ve always wanted to do with my script – sharing with everyone else.

When I update my account on DailyBooth, other people can comment on it, and I automatically tweet about it to give more people a chance to see what I’m up to that day. I also have more control over when I want to take a picture each day. You might have noticed I only had 275 pictures from 677 days. That’s just above 40% which isn’t even 3 days a week. DailyBooth.com offers to send me an email whenever I go 24hrs without taking a picture. I think I’ll update more since I’ll be on my own schedule. I’m just not around my laptop at 9pm like I used to be!

Come back tomorrow to see how easy it is to display your latest DailyBooth.com update on your blog or website!

What some might not have known is that John Mellencamp used the Fun Frolic as the setting for his 1985 music video for “Lonely Ol’ Night” (embedding was disabled )

Something cool I learned yesterday from my mom is that my Uncle Ray is actually in the video! Check him and his then-girlfriend out at around 2:46

My Uncle Ray makes a cameo in a John Mellencamp video

I thought it was a little trivia that should be shared with the world. I don’t know how I never heard about the Fun Frolic until this year or how I’d gone my entire life without knowing my uncle was in a music video!

Logo on PizzaX cups (formerly Pizza Express)

If you read my blog, you probably know a logo I designed was selected for the IU Little 500 race this year. One of the many places it ended up was on the side of cups from Pizza Express. Any time anyone in Bloomington ordered a drink from Pizza Express they also received some of my art work. As soon as I found this out, I was ordering their Big X Bargain every couple of days so I could collect as many cups as possible to give to friends and family.

The week after the race Pizza Express underwent a name change to PizzaX which was reflected on their new green cups. I was bummed my cups weren’t being delivered any more but then had a thought they might have extras laying around. I sent @PizzaX a message on Twitter asking if they had any extra cups and if I could have them. A few days later, they sent me a DM saying they had a stack set aside for me at their office and I could come pick them up at my convenience.

This isn’t the greatest story ever told about the generosity of a company, but I thought it was very cool of them. It didn’t cost them anything to set aside some extra outdated cups, and it didn’t take me anything but my spare time to write up a little free press for them (however minimal it may be).

It was also very cool this was all set up via Twitter. We never emailed each other, exchanged phone calls, or met face to face. I hope more small businesses use Twitter to interact with their local customers (and not just to give away free stuff). I would have been just as content if they replied that they didn’t have any extra cups. It was more important that they reached out and communicated with average little me. Thanks PizzaX!

I’ve moved four times in the last year, and each time it has become easier because I keep getting rid of old stuff. Just yesterday I donated three full trash bags of clothes to Goodwill. My next big challenge is to get rid of all the extra computers and peripherals I’ve accumulated. When I told my dad, he had a pile of electronics to get rid of as well.

Everything still works and is in good condition so my first inclination was to put it all on eBay, but the shipping costs for a 30lb computer is almost more than the computer would be worth to someone. The price of new equipment also makes it hard to resell old equipment.

Fry's Ad has new Laptops and PCs for next to nothing

Currently, I personally have my Macbook, an old self built PC from high school, and a small Shuttle XPC with great specs. My dad is looking to get rid of his ancient Dell laptop and two similar Dell towers. On top of this there are speakers, keyboards, mice, and 3 LCD monitors (15″, 17″, and 19″). We’re pretty much ready to open a Circuit City in our garage.

I would like to sell my computers to get a new Macbook Pro and maybe a 24″+ monitor. My dad is just looking to not throw everything away. The best solution so far that I’ve found besides eBay or Craigslist is Best Buy’s Trade In program. You tell them your specs, they shoot you a bid, if you accept it they give you a pre-paid shipping label, and in 7-14 days you get your agreed amount in the form of a Best Buy gift card.

It’s not a bad deal for older equipment that might not fetch much on eBay. I have no idea what Best Buy could be doing with all these old parts. Maybe they are building a stockpile for Geek Squad house calls. If you have another suggestion on what to do with old computers, please leave a comment.

Also, if you are in the market for a 53″ Panasonic  HDTV my roommates and I are looking to get rid of it ASAP.

53" Panasonic HDTV includes HDMI and 1080i

1. Go to http://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/millerlite and click on the Peel and Reveal Carb Day Ticket Offer
2. Verify that you can easily fake your age and that you are an Indiana resident (even if you aren’t)
3. Enter YC9PC4KRW3 and press “View Promotion”
4. You’ll see you have 2 tickets to Carb Day that you can ‘Add to Cart’
5. It’s all free to ‘Proceed to Step 2′
6. Now you need to create an account if you don’t already have one.
   

   You can only register one account per email address, but they never ask you to verify your email address so you can put a fake one down. If you plan on picking your tickets up at Will Call, you can fake all of your address information as well. You just need to use your real name so that your photo ID matches when you pick up your tickets.

   This is the weakness of the promotion. You can create as many accounts as you want and keep reusing the same code to claim as many free tickets as you want.

7. After you’re done registering, you choose whether you want the tickets mailed to you or if you want to pick them up at Will Call (note: you need photo ID to pick up)
8. Complete your order and then repeat these steps if you want more tickets.

If you get some free tickets because of this post and want to meet up next Thursday, leave a comment and we’ll share a Miller Lite at IMS.

I needed to expand a list of URLs I already had that are serving as “seeds” for my search engine project. I knew I had a nice collection of design blogs in my Google Reader, so I thought I could export those as an OPML file and extract the URLs. The OPML file is just XML that looks like this:

<outline title="Design Feeds" text="Design Feeds">

<outline text="10 Steps" title="10 Steps" type="rss"

xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/10Steps" htmlUrl="http://10steps.sg"/>

<outline text="1st Web Designer" title="1st Web Designer"

type="rss"

xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/1stwebdesigner" htmlUrl="http://www.1stwebdesigner.com"/>

I didn’t want their RSS feed URL, just the URL to their homepage for my web crawler. I could have sat around copying and pasting for hours, but I’m lazy and have other things to do so I wrote a quick Perl script to do that for me.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "Need OPML file to extract URLs from i.e. google-reader-subscribtions.xml" unless (@ARGV == 1);

open (FH, $ARGV[0]) or die "Cannot open $ARGV[0]: $!\n";

my %urls;

while(<FH>) {
$_ =~ /htmlUrl="(.*?)"/;
$urls{$1} = 1;
}

print join("\n",keys(%urls));

close FH;

The code just says to open a file, look for where you see htmlUrl=”http://domain.com”, and print all of the unique URLs. There might be a simpler or shorter way to write this in Perl, but I thought this was straight forward enough. Leave a comment with your simplified or shorter method

I can then run it in Terminal ./extractURLfromOPML google-reader-subscriptions.xml > seeds.txt and I’ll have a nice text file with a URL on each line. I copied and pasted all of those into my original seeds list and now I have around 250 URLs to crawl within a couple of minutes. This is just another reason why Perl (and programming in general) is awesome.

That code solves a specific problem, but it could easily be modified or expanded to solve other problems. For example, I want to know how many different artists I have in my iTunes library (I know iTunes will tell you but go with it). You could modify the regular expression line in the above code to look for $_ =~ m|<key>Artist</key><string>(.*?)</string>|; and it’ll match and print all of the artists in your iTunes Library XML file.

If you wanted to expand this modification, you could take the Perl modules for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to automatically send a friend request to all of the artists in your iTunes library on all of your social networks. It might not be a perfect solution, but it would save you some time and effort for sure.

It looks like I’ll have a few months this summer to freelance so I’ll try to post some more simple code tutorials and examples. Enjoy!

Still, this doesn’t always satisfy people’s curiosity most times about what you actually do with informatics. Last week I came across two real world examples of how you can use informatics in real life to solve real world problems. I hope to continue this “series”  as I find more real world implementations of informatics to help explain to the layman what it’s all about.

Forming Groups in Class

The first example comes from my Search Informatics class where every student is building their own search engine. As part of the most recent assignment, each student had to find three other students to evaluate their engine and return the favor for three other students.

I wrote a simple Perl script to match up everyone with three peers to evaluate that also made sure everyone was evaluated three times. We could have counted off in class or emailed each other a few times to work it out, but it was easier to let the computer do the work. Here’s the script and the output:

my @peers = ('Nurzhan', 'Max', 'Matt', 'Andrew', 'Dmitriy', 'Tom');
my @tempPeers = @peers;
foreach my $p (@peers) {
my @evals = ();
for(my $i=1; $i<=3; $i++) {
push(@evals, $tempPeers[-$i]);
}
push(@tempPeers,shift(@tempPeers));
print "$p evaluates ", join(', ',@evals), "\n";
}

It outputs:

Nurzhan evaluates Tom, Dmitriy, Andrew

Max evaluates Nurzhan, Tom, Dmitriy

Matt evaluates Max, Nurzhan, Tom

Andrew evaluates Matt, Max, Nurzhan

Dmitriy evaluates Andrew, Matt, Max

Tom evaluates Dmitriy, Andrew, Matt

Simple, effective, and probably earned me some brownie points with the professor. I posted this to the class forum and everyone liked the idea and used it.

Critiquing Flyers and Posters

The second example I came across on Twitter from Jay Steele, a HCI/d master student. A couple of his fellow peers posted some design critiques around a poster hung in the hallway of their design lab. On a college campus, there are fliers and posters everywhere so if you want to get any sort of response from people (i.e. show up at your event, join your club, vote for your candidate, etc.) you need to design it properly.

These subtle, often overlooked, details could transform this boring posting that’s probably being ignored to something that makes people want to, in this case ironically, enter a poster design contest.

These two simple examples from last week will hopefully help people better understand what you actually do with informatics. Letting a computer properly match up students for a group assignment saved everyone the time and effort of organizing and error checking by hand to make sure everyone was covered. The HCI/d master students had a little fun by offering some truly constructive criticism that could help make this poster stand out to people passing by.

He was visiting the other weekend down at IU and decided he wanted one of Marvin’s GCB’s (Garlic Cheeseburger) so he called them up for a delivery to Bloomington. The guy taking orders thought he was kidding too until my brother pulled out, “I thought you guys delivered anywhere?” I guess that’s Marvin’s motto and they will ship you sandwiches around the world.

An hour or so passed and my brother, still hungry, called back to check on his order. The new receptionist told him that they were packaged and would be shipped out tomorrow. My brother wanted something to eat that night so he convinced the people to cancel the order and promised to order some GCB’s when he got back to DePauw. We all assumed the order was cancelled and his credit card wasn’t going to be charged- until today.

A package addressed to Jackson showed up today and sure enough it had three vacuumed sealed sandwiches inside along with directions on how to cook them! I called my brother to make sure he didn’t get charged unknowingly. Since he’s notorious for not answering the phone, I had to track him down on Facebook Chat to get the details. He checked his credit card statement and there wasn’t any charge!

What I hope: Marvin’s shipped him the sandwiches for free to prove the point they will deliver anywhere.

What probably happened: The sandwiches were already in the stack to ship out and they forgot he cancelled the order or didn’t have any way to check if the person paid. (Don’t try to scam this small business because of their lax shipping practices!)

I’m going to stick with the hope they were out to stand by their brand’s guarantee. It’s just more awesome that way. Every once in awhile you hear about big players doing something awesome (ie Steve Jobs personally shipping Final Cut to a HS Student), but never about small businesses in small town America doing the same thing.

I’m going to write them a letter offering to build and host a website for them regardless of their reason for shipping those sandwiches. It’s the least I can do. Go Marvin’s!

That’s the only acceptable reason for taking an elevator up or down one floor. If you are moving a refrigerator or suffer from extreme bathmophobia, then maybe I can let you slide, but no able-bodied person should ever take the elevator up or down just one floor. You are lazy and putting yourself at risk to being punched in the back of the head!

I don’t care how heavy your backpack is or how long of a day you’ve had- take the stairs. They are there in case of fire and in case you only need to go one flight up or down.

I stress the up or down because someone tonight actually took the elevator from the 4th floor to the 3rd floor. Usually, you see people taking the elevator from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and they deserve to be verbally abused with phrases such as:

1. “Were the stairs broken?”
2. “Could you be any lazier?”
3. “Would you like me to show you the stairs so you don’t have to take the elevator down?”
4. “Consider this a warning!”
5. “Incoming!” followed by a punch to the back of the head for those who have been warned

This has been building up for the better part of 4 years and that lazy individual who couldn’t mosey down one flight of stairs put me over the edge. I’d appreciate comments including more things to say to these people who refuse to take the stairs.

The first thing I see – I live a pretty awesome life. I love it. I am thankful.

I’m earning a great degree from a major university with ease. I have a challenging job teaching my peers that pays enough to cover the bills and a few drinks with my friends. I actually have plans to get paid after graduation which is quite an accomplishment in this day and age. I’m glad I’m not losing sleep worrying about anticipated job offers or graduate school admittance like most of my other friends. As my grandfather aptly said this Sunday when I went and visited, “Well Max it sounds like you’ve got it all planned out.”

It meant a lot coming from him because he’s a very successful man in his own right and I wasn’t so poised for graduation last time I was a senior. I graduated from high school by the skin of my teeth (not because I was a poor student, that story will be unveiled when I get my book deal) so I’m somewhat anxious to do it right this time. It’ll be the first time I’ve been in a cap and gown since kindergarden (I think my mom still has the picture somewhere).

The other side to the “get across the stage” anxiety is the feeling to cherish every day until then because life is really going to change for me this May. Last week I saw a friend from 1st grade and I honestly don’t when the next I’m going to see her. Another friend from first grade came down to go to Oliver Winery this weekend for his wine appreciation class and it was a great time. I went to Indy Tuesday night because I scored a pair of complimentary tickets to a Pacers game (thanks @indianapacers!). Last night, my roommate came into my room at 1:30am and convinced me to go to Bluebird.

I’m going to miss the college life. I’m thankful to have such trivial worries, such great friends, and an even better family. Sometimes it takes a little self-reflection to realize it, but I guess that’s what blog posts like this are for. On May 10th, I’ll start showing more of my excitement for my new life in Chicago but until then- senioritis.

1. Mac OS X’s Time Machine

   I use Time Machine with a 500GB Apple Time Capsule. It automatically backs up all of my data for my entire computer. I can go back and get files I may have deleted by accident or get a different version of a file. It’s just as easy as the videos make it look! The Time Capsule is nothing more than a wireless router with a hard drive inside, but using all Apple products completely streamlines the process.

2. External Hard Drives

   I currently have 4 external hard drives.

   • 1TB USB SATA that I built back in December
   • 250GB USB WD Passport drive I use as an external iTunes Library (read how to on Lifehacker)
   • 1TB “DriveZilla” that is really a RAID system of 4 250GB ATA drives
   • 120GB USB WD Passport drive that was my old iTunes library drive, but I needed more room so I upgraded. Now I store all of my Flip MinoHD footage on it.

   My newest 1TB drive stores everything. I mirror its contents on the DriveZilla. I backup my iTunes Library drive to the 1TB drives and also have copies of my Flip footage on them as well. I’ve decided to put more trust in my bigger 1TB drives since I don’t travel with them like I do with my smaller Passport drives.

3. Déjà Vu

   In order to keep a copy of my iTunes Library on my 1TB drive, I could periodically copy and paste everything on the drive, but that’s archaic and would take too long because most of the time would be spent copying over files that haven’t changed. This is the essential thinking behind the Time Machine feature. I exclude my iTunes Library in my Time Machine backups so that my Time Capsule can fill up with more important documents.

   This is where Déjà Vu comes to the rescue. I can easily tell it to copy everything from my iTunes Library drive to a folder on my 1TB drive and it’ll check to see if new files need to be written or if old files need to be updated. You can schedule Déjà Vu to run daily, weekly, or monthly but I just do it manually whenever I feel like it’s been awhile. The limitation in using all of these external drives is that you need all of them to be plugged in, turned on, and mounted before starting any of these backup processes or they will fail.

4. DVDs

   The last line of defense and the safest bet is hard disc media like DVDs. When I accumulate 4GB of new music, I burn the files to a DVD in case my iTunes library or drive ever becomes corrupted. If I have to start from square one, I can import DVD after DVD of music. I also burn important software to DVD that I may have downloaded (legally of course). If I need to reinstall something like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, I can grab the DVD a lot quicker than I can re-download multiple gigabytes of install files.

   I also have a growing collection of unix distribution CDs and DVDs that have come in handy. Just the other week my roommate was downloading gOS to install on one of his parent’s PCs and my archives saved him some time.

   downloading gOS to put on the parents PC and finally end the constant nagging about Windows (tweet)

   @llobster I have the ISO on my shared drive and it’s prolly on a disc around here somewhere (tweet)

This configuration allows me to sleep easy at night because I know my entire laptop is backed up, my entire iTunes Library is backed up, and most of my other media is mirrored as well. Something is missing… my iPhone! Where is my iPhone backed up to? Every time I sync it I see it says it’s backing itself up. Everything should be ok right?

In reality, my iPhone is just being backed up to my laptop but that backup is being ignored by my Time Machine backup by default. Luckily, the smart guys over at TUAW have laid out an easy way to hack this default so that your iPhone backups are included with Time Machine. With that in place, NOW I can rest easy and feel properly prepared for when something inevitably happens to one of my drives.

Here’s the portion of the email with their requests:

You are unable to log in because your Full Tilt Poker account has been temporarily suspended pending verification of your identity.

Please understand that requesting proof of identity is by no means an accusation of any prohibited activity. We often request ID to verify the identity of account holders and ownership of payment processor accounts. These account verification policies are necessary to ensure the validity of transactions, confirm registered account information and protect our players.

Please send scanned, clear copies of the following documents to security@fulltiltpoker.com:

1) Photo ID:
One of the following: valid driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID that clearly shows your birth date and the date of issue or expiry.

2) Proof of Address (less than 3 months old):
One of the following: bank or credit card statement, utility bill, cell phone bill, home or auto insurance papers.

Before sending copies of your documents, please ensure the following requirements are met:

* The copies are clear and legible (96 to 150 DPI or higher recommended for scanned copies).
* The copies include the full document (bill/pay stubs, folded papers and partial sections are not accepted).
* Email attachments do not exceed 3 MB and are in JPEG (.jpg) format.

If you do not have access to a scanner, we will accept digital photos of the documents providing they meet the requirements above. If your camera has a macro feature (appears as a tulip icon), please enable it and take the photo within a 12 to 18-inch distance. If your camera does not have this option, please take the photo within a 24-inch distance.

Please note that your Full Tilt Poker account will remain suspended until we receive and verify legible copies of all requested documents.

Once we process your documentation we will contact you with an update on the status of your account.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Regards,

Rosalie
Cashier
Full Tilt Poker 

To summarize: scan your driver’s license and bank statement and email them to us.

Just because their email address is ‘security@fulltitlepoker.com’ doesn’t make it a secure communication. I might be ok with sending an email with a secured attachment, but no they want plain JPG files. Anyone can read and intercept my emails, and if they had my driver’s license along with my bank statement attached, my identity might as well be marked STOLEN. 

Beyond that, who still has their bank statements and utility bills mailed to them? I’ve been paperless for months and love it. I could get them a PDF no problem, but that isn’t an option. Should I print my PDF and then scan it as a JPG? That doesn’t make any sense!

Full Tilt Poker needs to get an SSL certificate and make a basic file upload page where I can submit these valuable documents securely at the very least. They could also look into other methods of proving user’s identities online that doesn’t require giving up so much information. Either way, I’m not sending them anything but these comments on their security policy.

PokerStars hasn’t requested any of this information so I’m going to use them exclusively until they make a similar asinine request.

To give you a better idea about what I lost, it’s a small USB drive that’s about the size of a paperclip and has a rubber cover that makes it a little bigger than one of my iPhone earbuds.

You can imagine how easy this would be to lose, and now that I think about it I probably left it plugged into the back of one of the older iMacs we use in my Digital Art lab. I was surprised to get this Facebook message last night from a stranger named Christopher Holland:

Hey Max. A friend of mine found a blue “KingMax” 8 gig jump drive the other day. I plugged it in and saw your name on most of the files. Thought you might be looking for it. Let me know how you want to go about getting it.

I immediately wrote him back thanking him and we set up a place to meet. I met him today in the union and my little blue USB man was lost no more!

It’s pretty amazing that in this day and age Christopher’s friend didn’t just pocket my lost USB drive for themselves (I had Adobe CS4 on it with the key in a text file. Major score for anyone who can’t download it for free like we can at IU). It’s also somewhat amazing Christopher was able to figure out it was mine just by the file names (I preface most of my school work files with my IU username. I guess it finally paid off!). The most amazing part was that they were able to track me down and get in touch with me with hardly any effort thanks to Facebook (Understanding and properly using privacy settings CAN pay off!).

In the past if I were to lose something even with my name on it, the best I could hope for was someone turning it into a ‘lost and found’ (if one existed) and I would have to continually check back to see if someone turned something in. In the recent past, I might have been able to post to an online forum saying I lost something and continually check back to see if anyone found something similar or replied to me. Now with the power of social networks, someone can search Facebook or Google for ‘maxbeatt’ and find me making it extremely easy to contact me as well. 

Even though technology tools made it possible for my lost USB drive to be returned, none of it would have happened without the efforts of Christopher and his friend, and for that I am very thankful! I hope people who lose and find items in less quaint and friendly places than Bloomington, Indiana will remember how easy it can be to recover and return items using social networks.

The clip has been dugg over 500 times on FanDome.com so far, but here is the newscast posted on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh2yJwDFTDo

I played freshman basketball at Chatard and eventually graduated from Broad Ripple. I can’t believe I didn’t pay closer attention when I first watched it. And for everyone who noticed the scoreboard, my brother says the shot was at the end of the first half, not the end of the game.

Thanks Jackson for filling me in!

Yes, it wasn’t cool. It was bad. It should have never happened. Everyone said they were sorry and the US government paid over a billion dollars in reparations to surviving internees and their heirs.

That doesn’t mean it defines America (or even 40% of America). Honestly, all things considered, it wasn’t the worst thing happening to a group of people in the 1940s. Ever heard of the Holocaust? Even for America, it wasn’t the worst treatment to a group of people. Anyone remember slavery? I’m pretty sure they’re still waiting on their reparations if they haven’t given up completely.

If my grandparents were internment victims like my teacher’s were, I might be out there trying to educate people about something that gets overlooked when studying WWII. I wouldn’t spend 15 years on a PhD and then shove it in the faces of a bunch of college kids whose grandparents and great-grandparents were overseas dying for the war instead of being relocated. If my teacher knew anything about America, they’d write a book or make a documentary, win some awards, put some money in her pocket. This is the “land of opportunity” not the “land of oppression”.

The remaining four books that the final will be over are more of the same faults of America that you don’t need a college course to know. Racism is still alive, the poor get poorer while the rich get richer, fast food has made Americans lazy and obese, and when all else fails you can run away from your problems with no consequences.

I’m sorry for anyone who majors in American Studies and has this as their introduction to the department. I’m sorry if I sound inconsiderate towards my teacher’s efforts and those affected by Japanese American interment. I’m not sorry for wanting to actually learn something and still being proud to be an American and live in America.

As simple as the last design was, this one gives me some more places to showcase my social media involvement and it promotes my RSS feed better. I’ve also migrated all of my hand-coded pages to WordPress pages for easier management. I’ve tried to keep as many of the old permalinks in place during the revamp.

I added some new plugins and removed some others. I’m sick of the snow here in Indiana so the snowfall plugin had to be deactivated. The new theme has links to Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter on each of the posts so the AddThis plugin and TweetThis plugin bit the dust.

If you’re using IE6, you should know it and switch ASAP!

If you’re one of the 150 million people who use Facebook, you can leave comments on my site using your Facebook account. If you haven’t seen it on other sites, try it out. It’s really simple and nonintrusive on Facebook.

Own an iPhone or iPod Touch? Try http://maxbeatty.com and see how it’s nicely formatted for you thanks to WPTouch.

The only thing I don’t like about the redesign is that it’s based off of someone else’s work. MaxBeatty.com 3.0 will definitely be a homebrew! I also need to find a good way to present my portfolio using WordPress or something that integrates well. Look for that coming soon but until then enjoy, read, comment, share, friend, follow, chat, and be well!

This “call to action” comes after reading Elevate Web Design at the University Level by LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN and my continued frustration from the last year of teaching outdated material, interning with a global top 50 company who didn’t know what “web standards” were, and now facing another semester of outdated and boring material anyone could learn by searching for free online tutorials.

I’ve only been in one class at IU that stressed web standards and it wasn’t in informatics or computer science! Since then I’ve been instructed to teach students non-standard methods in the computer science department and have even worked in groups where members argued against the importance of using web standards (he was a informatics/computer science major). I still haven’t found a class that goes beyond teaching the W3School’s XHTML and CSS tutorials. How are students supposed to compete in the job markets with no real web development instruction? Why hasn’t the School of Informatics addressed this when most of the capstone projects end up being web-based?

From the educational initiatives I read about in Brighter Horizons for Web Education by AARRON WALTER,I think the WaSP Educational Task Force and their WaSP Curriculum Framework sounds most appealing. The courses would already be designed so instructors wouldn’t need to invest a lot of their own time into making their own versions. Everything is being released with a Creative Commons license and as PDFs so these courses would be cheap for both the department and students. The Opera Web Standards Curriculum (Opera WSC) also sounded interesting, but by adopting the WaSP Curriculum Framework, you’re also adopting the Opera WSC.

“Incidentally, many of the WaSP Curriculum Framework courses will include Opera’s articles as recommended readings and will tie directly into the learning competencies, assignments, and exam questions in foundational courses.”

I know academia is slow, but if the WCF is released in March of this year how unrealistic is it to have a course or two setup by Fall 2009 or Spring 2010? The courses are laid out for the SOI so all they’d need to do is find someone to stand in front of the class to instruct. I agree with LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN who said:

We also need to let go of the idea that professors in these disciplines must hold a master’s degree. The reality is that many web professionals are self-taught. A person with solid experience and a proven track record should be considered an appropriate candidate to teach web design and development in higher education.

My entrepreneur class this semester is being taught by adjunct professor Mark Hill who is a respected entrepreneur in Indianapolis. Why couldn’t someone from the SproutBox team in Bloomington come in to lead these web standards courses or even a talented graduate or undergraduate student?

I have just over 100 days left at IU so it might be too late for me to start some sort of student-led evangelical movement. I think I will pass along these ideas to lecturer Matt Hottell, who heads the capstone projects, Richelle Brown, the Director of Student Academic Support, Jeremy Podany, the director of career services, and Cameron Schnick, who has been involved with the Informatics Student Association and also on Twitter. It’s time IU (and SOI) takes web standards seriously because people like Jeffery Dawald and companies like Media Works are the results of poor education on the subject.

Ok, I didn’t drop out of college yet, but it definitely crossed my mind today as I struggled to get through the day. My classes this semester are anything but challenging, and I’m ready to be done with college. First, I reviewed basic unix commands in a 400 level informatics class. Then, I had to take oral roll call and notes over a poorly done PBS documentary. Finally, I sat for 3 hrs in a computer lab watching weird japanese movies that were supposed to inspire me to produce digital art? I should have saved my tuition money and just googled “perl search engine”, “japanese internment”, and “photoshop tutorials” instead of enrolling in classes this semester.

Then my day turned around. I watched the Daily Show’s Inauguration coverage, LOST premiered, and then Gary Vaynerchuk made a timely, inspiring post entitled Stop crying, think, wipe your tear and crush it!. I’d received Twitter replies from both my roommates saying I’ve been complaining a lot lately, and they were right.

@maxbeatty you are complaining a lot these days. (tweet)

@maxbeatty i’m going to stop following you if you don’t stop complaining about your stupid classes and then posting links that i don’t click (tweet)

I’ve decided I’m going to roll with my high school level courses, stop obsessing about how ignorant I think some of my teachers are, and find something I’m passionate about to “crush” in Gary’s words. I know I hate being bored and having nothing to do. Most people are surprised when they hear how soon I’m starting my job after graduation, but I know if I sit around I’ll be miserable. I haven’t done anything productive in over a month and I’m going crazy!

I’ve started revamping my site and from there I’m going to start tackling my long tech-related to-do list. I may not have a Facebook up my sleeve like Mark Zuckerberg or even a TwitPic like Noah Everett, but I’m going to work it to keep a leg up on the competition!

The first week of classes has become dubbed “syllabus week” because you know every class is going to waste a day or the week going over the syllabus. It’s pathetic teachers still have to read it to the students instead of letting them review it on their own time. It’s downright wasteful some teachers still feel the need to print out syllabi to hand out like the internet was never invented.

At IU, we have an online collaborative learning environment called Oncourse that is so revolutionary it includes a built in tool for teachers to (gasp) post their syllabus! Why doesn’t everyone do this? Why aren’t they required to? Here’s one example from one of my classes this semester of how useful and thrifty posting the syllabus online would have been.

The professor sent out an email the week before class started with the syllabus attached. Good start, but it was filled with errors (i.e. Spring Break was scheduled in February) and it was attached as a Word document. Why couldn’t she copy and paste all that plain text into the email?

On the first day of class, she prepared 40 stapled copies of the same 4 page erroneous syllabus to hand out. Instead of relying on the competence of her students to manually correct her errors, she collected them all and handed out fresh corrected copies in the next class. Today, our third time meeting, she had us make another correction!

Instead of wasting 320 pages of papers, she could have simply written her syllabus in Oncourse’s WYSIWYG editor. If she makes an error or wants to change around some dates, she can do it instantly and send out an announcement that there has been a change to the syllabus. No printing off, stapling, and handing out another version or having me keep track of a packet of paper for 5 months to continually mark up with changes.

In the future, I hope she saves herself some trouble, saves the rainforest a few trees, and saves me the headache of trying to keep it all straight. Get smart, simplify, go green, and just put it online!

The text notes were traditional text boxes of text you could place anywhere. The anchored notes were my favorite because you could attach the note to whatever text you selected to be clear about what you were talking about. I didn’t use the circle, box, underline, or strike out, but if I were a teacher giving rough draft notes they would be really helpful. I used the line and highlight to point to a few different instances where the same text note comment applied which was nice.

After I had spent the time to sufficiently mark up the document, I wanted to save them in a way that my friend could see them without having to also download Skim. I had to experiment with the Save As… and Export options before finding what I wanted. You can Save As… a regular PDF (plain PDF) and as a PDF Bundle (Skim file-type that includes all the notes). These weren’t what I wanted so I went on to the Export menu:

The PDF With Embedded Notes option made a nice new PDF with all of my notes, comments, highlights, and lines (I checked it by opening with Preview). An added benefit to this whole process- the original 118kb .DOCX is now a 78kb PDF with added notes.

This turned out to be a great tool today and I’m excited to use it in the future for schoolwork. I can’t say I always read every PDF a teacher sends out, but this tool would definitely help me take better notes. Teachers could use Skim, too, to add notes where something might be unclear or to add emphasis to a section. Best part about Skim- it’s FREE!

Requires 3rd Party Cookies AND Firefox!?

I was irked for both security and design reasons. First, they require you to enable 3rd party cookies. I learned the dangers of enabling 3rd party cookies a few years ago from my Informatics professor Filippo Menczer who showed us how he tricked students into giving him great reviews on sites like RateMyProfessors.com by having them follow links on his site that said they were doing something completely different. If the students didn’t allow 3rd party cookies, they didn’t leave a positive review, but most who did put his ratings through the roof. That’s a pretty harmless example, which was his point, but now this is my electricity bill where my bank account information and other sensitive details are going to be treated with the same level of insecurity.

Why can’t I use Safari? It’s one of the most standards compliant browsers out there and is only increasing its market share. A big FAIL for the developers who just gave up by saying, “This application doesn’t work with Safari browser.” I have nothing against Firefox, but I use Safari by default and it’s an inconvenience to have to stop what I’m doing to launch another browser because the web team was too lazy or incompetent to develop a cross-browser compatible application. Totally unacceptable!

http://www.facebook.com/friends/?phonebook

I know people used to not include their number in their profile because of the lack of privacy, but Facebook has evolved and now you can get super specific about who you share what with. Take a look at the “Contact Information” tab of the Profile Privacy settings page:

Contact Information Privacy Settings

Those are my actual settings and based on them I can enter a certain friend or stranger to see how much access to my contact information they’d be granted. Obviously I’d want my brother to have total access but restrict my crazy ex-girlfriend from high school. Here are the current available options:

• No One
• Only Friends
• Friends of Friends
• People at <<Network>> and Friends

You can go on to customize using friend lists and specifying individuals to include or exclude. Here’s a screenshot of the customize settings for my Mobile Phone number:

Mobile Phone Customized Settings

In my life, if I’m friends with someone on Facebook then they can have my phone number. Some other people may have friended too many strangers and don’t share this feeling, but the privacy features allow for everyone to share with who they want. The only improvement Facebook could offer is allowing users to export their friends’ numbers in a format that could easily be synced with a new phone. I luckily found FacebookSync before it got banned so my Address Book has all of my Facebook friends’ email, IM screenname, birthday, photo, as well as phone number. I can understand why Facebook wouldn’t want people pulling ALL of that info, but what about just phone numbers?

From now on when I’m invited to groups or events asking for my number, I’m going to paste a link to this blog entry, a link to Facebook phonebook, and tell them to start a group asking their friends to add their number to their profile instead of bugging me.

Adriana, I was going to write this before you sent me the invite. Anyone AFTER you will get the above treatment

What can I buy with an iTunes Gift Card or iTunes Gift Certificate?

iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates can be used to purchase music, videos, TV shows, and audio books from the iTunes Store. At this time, iTunes Gift Cards and iTunes Gift Certificates are not accepted for online Apple Store purchases.

The vice versa reads:

Note: Apple Gift Cards cannot be redeemed at the iTunes Music Store.

Both of us immediately questioned- Why? I thought Apple owned both the iTunes Store and their brick-and-mortar stores. That’s like saying your Walmart gift card is good in Sporting Goods by not in Electronics.

My only guess is that deals with media outlets that provide the music, videos, TV shows, and audio books from the iTunes Store are different from the vendors that offer all the non-Apple products from the Apple Stores. Shouldn’t they be able to handle this internally instead of making two different types of gift cards?

My other sister is saving up for a MacBook for high school and her grandmother gave her an iTunes gift card with good intentions to help her, but it turns out it’ll only help her buy more Taylor Swift albums. What’s the deal? Why hasn’t Apple addressed this? I’d say try to exchange, but that doesn’t sound plausible according to the Apple Support Discussions.

My wallet is exploding from gift cards!

As my butt became extra sore on the car ride home today from Cleveland, it dawned on me that I shouldn’t have to carry so many gift cards or any at all!What is a gift card? Some say it’s a heartless generic gift for lesser known relatives and friends, but I love them. This year I received them from iTunes, Starbucks, and Subway which translates to more iPhone apps, more coffee runs, and more free dinners. Thanks distant relatives! Now whose to thank for the pain in my ass?

Yes, the plastic card is something to open whether from a card in the mail or on Christmas morning and gives the recipient the tangible “credit” card to bring to the brick-and-mortar store, but what happens when you get more than one card for the same store? You have to drag 8 cards to the store and manage remaining balances on 3 of them. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine the balances on all of your gift cards via the same website or phone number that’ll check their balances? Really make it easy for me by applying that balance to my account I have with that company already (i.e. iTunes, Amazon, Khols, or any other store that asks me if I’m a <<preferred customer>> at checkout). I guess iTunes already sorta does that, but it’d be way more convenient to click a URL from an email than scratch off and type in a code. If you don’t know my email address, why are you giving me a gift?

Which brings me to my next point- why aren’t all gift cards sent via email? I wouldn’t have something to physically open, but an email is just as fun, right? I don’t have a plastic cut out to drag to a store, but I could just as easily print off a barcode or spend it online, right? Wouldn’t I be able to instantly reply to my gift giver with a nice thank you note? Might be less meaningful than the handwritten 42 cent variety, but more than the auto-reply “thanks so much” after the first piece of packaging is ripped.

The environmentalist spin on all of this is the opportunity to eliminate lots and lots and lots of waste. Call me disingenuous, but I don’t archive my Christmas cards. What happens when you spend your gift card? The clerk asks if you want to keep it and my response is always, “Why? What am I going to do with it?” Think of all the paper and plastic that could be saved if gift cards were sent as emails!

What is a gift card? A code giving you credit towards a purchase at a store. Shouldn’t I be able to add these codes up to be represented by one card? Yes. Couldn’t we cut cards out altogether by sending the codes via email? Yes. Would it ruin Christmas? No, but Grandma’s house would definitely need WiFi to open gifts

My landlord recently made an ass of themselves in the form of an ALL CAPS email sent out to remind tenants about the holidays. I fired back a smart ass response to them and nearly 400 of their other tenants they mistakenly didn’t blind carbon copy (BCC).

Here’s what my landlord’s incompetent secretary sent out to everyone:

NOTICE TO ALL TENANTS, THE HOLIDAYS ARE ONCE AGAIN HERE AND YOU WILL MOST LIKELY BE LEAVING TO GO HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS.  WE WISH ALL OF YOU THE BEST AND A SAFE TRIP HOME AND BACK.  JUST A FEW REMINDERS BEFORE YOU LEAVE,  BE SURE TO LEAVE THE HEAT ON IN YOUR APARTMENT, LEAVE THE CABINET DOORS OPEN SO THE HEAT CAN GET TO THE WATER LINES, AND DON’T FORGET TO PAY YOUR JANUARY RENT ON TIME.  IT HAS TO BE IN OUR OFFICE ON JANUARY 2,2009 OR IT WILL BE CONSIDERED LATE IF NOT RECEIVED BY 5:00PM. 

 

THANK YOU ALL AND ONCE AGAIN

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

 

FROM THE STAFF OF PAVILION PROPERTIES MANAGEMENT

Warm holiday tidings that came right in the middle of finals week. I couldn’t think of a better time to hit that ‘reply all’ button to teach them a lesson. It’s not like I could be evicted for being a smartass (or being right ) My reply to Brenda and almost 400 other tenants:

Thank you Brenda for sending that message in ALL CAPS. It was much more effective.  

You might look into sending future messages to almost 400 of your tenants using the BCC field so I can’t reply to all of them like this. You can read more here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_carbon_copy

Other proud PavProp tenants, would you so kindly take a moment to watch this YouTube video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgOiD5_wnFY – If my group receives 1 million views, we get an automatic A+! Thank you so much

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Haha good on ya for calling her out on it. I was just thinking the same thing. Hope you get the A +

THANK YOU MAX!  I even wrote them a while ago and asked them to use
BCC.  They didn’t respond.  

-ANOTHER PISSED OFF PP TENANT

haha… your email just made my entire daySent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with SprintSpeed

I’m glad I could brighten someone’s day during this stressful time of year. The last email I received was the most in depth:

Thanks Max, I wish they’d learn how not to be so….abrasive or lazy. Did they inform you about changing the furnace filters earlier this month? Or did they barge into your apartment without consent nor notification? I had sent Mark Hoffman an email asking him to update the message board with out names on it in Pavilion Heights and he said it was my responsibility (since I have a key to the locked board…not). Again, thanks for informing them not to give out all of our email addresses to all the tenants. I appreciate that. (Also, did you get a message under your door, in addition to the email, to pay rent and turn heat on “or else you are legally responsible for damages” even if its not our fault? Sounds like they have had problems with their buildings and like pinning them on us. Watch out for them.

Regards,

Fellow Neighbor Until My Lease Expires

I got a little lost in the middle about message boards and key to the locked board, but the overall message was clear – these guys think they can walk all over their tenants and demand anything with the basis of “if you don’t you’ll be breaking your lease“. 

Four great responses from other tenants who felt the same way. Who didn’t I hear back from? Brenda and the rest of PavProp of course. The sad part of it is almost all of my friends have similar stories about their idiotic, irresponsible landlords in Bloomington. There’s no stopping them. A few of the companies own most of the town’s rentals. Hopefully some day a realty management company will come along who cares about their renters. Maybe this blog post will start the revolution?

I would love for this to at least be sitting under Pavilion Properties in Bloomington, Indiana on Google so future tenants have a fair warning before signing their lease.

UPDATE:

Received yet another response so I thought I’d throw it in here:

Not too sure who you are, but this is awesome. Awesome. Awesome.
#210

Not too sure what #210 means, but awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Last week I bought a Hitachi 1TB SATA hard drive for $79.99 after rebate (it’s in the mail) and a SATA to eSATA & USB 2.0 External Enclosure for $19.99. The installation couldn’t have been easier and for $100 I can now backup all of my data. More importantly to me, I can drag 1TB of files around on one 3.5″ drive instead of a stack of 4.

Unfortunately, the deal on the enclosure has ended, but the $30 mail-in rebate on the hard drive is valid until the end of the month. You can always find similarly priced enclosures like this other one from Rosewill.

I should have taken some pictures of how easy installing the SATA drive was inside my enclosure. First, it’s screwless so the bay just slides out. The SATA interface inside just slides in like any plug to an outlet on the wall. I used two screws to secure it and slid the bay back in the enclosure. Couldn’t have been any easier.

The coolest part about the enclosures is that they support USB2.0 and eSATA. When I built my Vista box last year, my ShuttleXPC came with eSATA onboard but I had no idea how to use it. I finally realized that eSATA supports 3.0Gbs transfers! This has motivated me to make my Vista box work somehow or another over break so I can transfer data between the two 750GB SATA drives inside it to my new external. That’s right, I now have 3.5TB of storage at my disposal and that doesn’t include the 500GB inside my Apple Time Capsule or my two WD Passports (250GB and 120GB).

 Why all the storage? Why not? You can’t have enough backups. My DriveZilla gave an error a couple weeks ago and AirPort Utility said I should verify the disks and repair them if necessary. I’m assuming the stack is nothing more than a RAID 0 array which means if one disk fails all of my data is gone! I used to have a bunch of extra 120GB IDE external hard drives, but gave one to my step-mom for her to use as a Time Machine and I gave another to my brother so he could store his iTunes library on it. When something faster and better comes out, I can usually find someone to help out with my “old” toys.

I remember when I worked for ChaCha that Scott Jones had his entire DVD collection digitized so he could stream any movie he wanted across the network. Maybe I can setup something similar…

I’m not one to stress over grades. I just want credit where it’s due. That’s how grading systems work. IU’s Oncourse is supposed to allow students to track their grades throughout the semester so that when grades are sent out they aren’t shocked to see they got a C in a class they thought they were getting an A in.

Unfortunately, Oncourse sucks. Ask anyone on campus and they’ll have plenty of horror stories ready to tell you. I could write a dissertation on the failures of Oncourse, but instead I’m calling out my professors for not using it’s limited ability to post grades.

My freshman level physics class does the best job of reporting grades this semester, but he doesn’t use Oncourse. He still uses the old Post’em system, which as you can see by their website, is as old as the internet. All it does is print out a huge unstyled list of every graded element of the semester. We meet three times a week and get points for attending and answering questions. We also have weekly homework assignments so by the time you list all of these out, it’s not that helpful. It is nice when the professor totals everything up for you so you don’t have to copy/paste the data into a spreadsheet to do the calculations yourself.

My flash class does the next best job in reporting grades, however he doesn’t trust Oncourse for submitting assignments. This means when I have a zero for an assignment I know I did and still have on my computer, I can’t point to Oncourse and say, “Hey there’s my assignment, completely uploaded for you to download, accompanied with a timestamp so you know it was turned in on time.” He still hasn’t filled in the first eight weeks class participation grade when it’s now the end of the second eight weeks. What’s taking so long?

My new media course has the same problem of not posting grades in a timely manner. At one point this semester, we were missing grades for over half of our assignments. There are three assistant instructors along with the instructor himself for about 100 students. By my math that’s no excuse to not post grades within a week of an assignment being due. This class somehow used an Oncourse default which set the maximum value of every assignment to be 95/100. At IU, A-’s and A’s are worth different values that affect your GPA. I’m not a GPA whore, but it affects the availability of some grants, scholarships, loans, jobs, and even other classes.

Out of seven classes only those three have posted grades for the semester. They didn’t do a good job, but at least they attempted. Two of the four non-reporters will base my entire semester grade on my final project so I can’t blame them for not posting anything. I can blame them for poorly designing their course, though.

So, how to make it better? Standardize it! Take away all those options for varying the grade book. I understand courses grade differently, different metrics, curving grades, but there are base conditions all assignments share. There should be an easy way to figure out your current grade in all of your courses so students don’t have to use this university calculator. iSocket just blogged about their new metrics box which is exactly how I’d like to see my grades.

Enough ranting and raving. I need to crank out a report that just got increased to 7-9 pages yesterday when it’s due today. Wouldn’t you know, it’s due for one of the classes that hasn’t reported grades all semester.

1. Put your course first thing in the subject line. Many professors teach multiple courses so if they can tell right away what the email is pertaining to based on the first 4 characters (e.g. A110) it is easier for them to prioritize. They don’t have to open the message, it won’t be confused for spam or some other request, and the rest of the subject will make more sense since the professor can put it in the context of the course (e.g. A110 – Missing grade for last assignment)
2. Be concise in your message. Younger undergrads love to spend time fluffing their sob story because they think the professor will be sympathetic towards their made up situation (ok not all situations are made up, but most are in my experience). Instead, be very short and to the point because professors don’t have time to read your essay about an essay. If you have a story to tell, do it face to face. Shorter messages usually mean shorter response time.
3. Include details in your signature. Your professor knows what course you’re in, the just of the situation, and now is looking for who it is in regards to. Do NOT just sign your first name! You are not the only Matt or Emily in the course. Include your first and last name as the instructor would see it in the grade book as well as your username and section number. Those three details can make changing a grade take 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Which do you think the professor, AI, TA, or UI prefers?
4. CC yourself to ensure delivery. Technology excuses are the new “dog ate my homework”. Send a copy to yourself so you can prove to the professor you sent them a message incase they say they never received it. As soon as the CC arrives in your mailbox, you know it’s also in your professor’s.
5. Attach ubiquitous file types. Even though everyone can freely and legally download the latest and greatest software doesn’t mean they do. Stick to the basic filetypes to ease the process of viewing your attachments. I prefer everything to be in PDF and most of my security conscious professors do, too. If you have multiple files, put them in a ZIP instead of something proprietary like 7zip or technical like tar.gz. Use the old Office filetypes like .doc and .ppt instead of .docx and .pptx. Also, make sure the timestamps on your documents match your story

I’m of the persuasion that tasks are more manageable in lists so what better place than a blog post! Besides, I need to see if my new MySpace Crosspost plugin is working.

1. GameZombie.tv redesign (T436)
   1. When the new site launches, I’ll write a really detailed blog post about everything we’ve done since that’s what the webteam’s entire grade is going to be based upon. We have lots of great backend written, but now we just need to put it all together on the frontend.
2. Flash site (T361)
   1. I’ve chosen to redesign the pitiful Yogis.com for this open-ended assignment. Best case scenario- I pitch the new site to Yogi’s for some free food and drink
3. Password Reminder System (I430)
   1. Designing and implementing what happens when you click “Forgot Password?” I’m hoping to use the CakePHP framework to speed through the development. If anyone has any tips, I’d love to hear them!
4. Viral Video (I310)
   1. Sounds simple enough. Teams of students who’ve studied new media theory for a semester should be able to produce a video that shows a thorough understanding of the new media and viral video concepts. The kicker/motivator - ”Any group whose video receives 1million views will receive an automatic A+”. I still need to find a group
5. Pedagogy Paper (B599)
   1. I have to design a unit to teach for a course giving rationale for the planning. I’m doing my unit on CSS so the content is easy but the higher level pedagogy stuff will be a challenge.
6. Honors Seminar Paper (H498)
   1. A simple 5 page paper discussing one of the seminars we heard this semester. I hate writing papers like this. It’s nothing more than a glorified book report on some talk given months ago. I’m hoping Dr. Raquel Hill will lend me some notes on her Electronic Voting System research.

After all of these are due, I have a physics final on the last day of finals week. There are some small homework assignments also due in the next couple weeks, and I’m sure I’ll have to grade assignments and tests for A110.

Better get to bed so I can get back to Bloomington tomorrow to start on all of this. I want to get a good handle on it all so I can put some time into planning for our annual Christmas party and secret santa!

Good night.

A week or so after that, she sent me another message saying she had spilled something all over her laptop and that it was fried. She went to Geek Squad and they wanted gobs of money to save the remaining data on her hard drive (mostly school documents). She wanted to know if I could help in any way so I blindly accepted the challenge of doing it for free. I had disassembled some laptops in the past so how hard could it be?Like any good repairman, I started by unscrewing every screw I could find on her laptop and tried to pry the bottom off so I could take a look at the motherboard. After some struggling, I decided to Google for instructions on removing the hard drive from a Dell Inspiron 6000. Aren’t those Dell guys great? Those were the only two screws I hadn’t managed to get out, but once I did the hard drive slid right out.

My first inclination was to just plug in the laptop hard drive as an extra drive in my Ubuntu box. Dummy me, rushing to get something done, didn’t think that I only had  PATA connectors and that the laptop hard drive was of the SATA variety. I thought we were stuck, but then remembered I had an old Western Digital Passport I didn’t use anymore and would be willing to bust into. This time I did a little homework:

It was pretty easy to pop it open and switch out the hard drives. My friend Claire brought her external and it was just a few minutes to transfer the files between her old laptop hard drive, that was connected through the SATA to USB connector from the Western Digital Passport, to her new external drive she recently purchased.

Lessons learned:

1. Geek Squad is once again overpriced and overrated
2. Hacking leftover devices is fun and sometimes useful
3. Blindly approaching tech problems still impresses your non-tech friends

I wanted something that I could invoke with Quicksilver to control how often it posted what I was listening to Twitter and also wanted it to be automated from there. Would a Growl notification be too much to ask for to top it off? Here’s my edited version of TwiTunes:

– get properties of the playing track

tell application “iTunes”

set thisTrack to current track

set trackName to the name of thisTrack

set trackArtist to thisTrack’s artist

end tell

– change the status message to your liking here:

set tweet to “Listening to \”" & trackName & “\” by ” & trackArtist & “.”

– get login from keychain

tell application “Keychain Scripting”

set twitter_key to first Internet key of current keychain whose server is “twitter.com”

set twitter_login to quoted form of (account of twitter_key & “:” & password of twitter_key)

end tell

– post to twitter

set twitter_status to quoted form of (“status=” & tweet)

set results to do shell script “curl –user ” & twitter_login & ” –data-binary ” & twitter_status & ”

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”

– notify growl

tell application “GrowlHelperApp”

set the allNotificationsList to {“Tweet iTunes Success”, “Tweet iTunes Failed”, “Results”}

set the enabledNotificationsList to {“Tweet iTunes Success”}

register as application “TwiTunes” all notifications allNotificationsList default notifications enabledNotificationsList

notify with name “Tweet iTunes Success” title “Twitter Updated w/ iTunes Track” description tweet application name “TwiTunes”

end tell

If I knew more (read: any) AppleScript, I would have thrown in some sort of check to see if the tweet was successful and growl notify accordingly, but I’m only one man. If anyone could add that feature, it would be greatly appreciated!

Download script

To use the script drop it in some place like

~/Library/iTunes/scripts/TwiTunes.scpt

or

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/TwiTunes.scpt

and then point Quicksilver to it in the preferences by going to Catalog and then adding the file under Custom. (Might be a better way, but that’s surefire) Enjoy!

If you’re unfamiliar with greek life, they run much like a political party. They recruit new members, show them a good time for 4 years, then continually ask for money so that they can continue to recruit new members.

These greek organizations need to take a look at the marvels of social networking for guidance as to how to organize themselves online. I’m not talking about creating a Facebook page or LinkedIn group, but actually structuring their national site like a social network. Barack Obama’s online community is a perfect example of how you can make local organizing easy while maintaining a national database of members. His my.barackobama.com is broken down by state so that voters can keep track of his national campaign while also seeing what’s going on in their state.

That same sort of system could connect local chapters to their national office and vice versa. There would be no need to republish basic facts like the tradition and history by each chapter. Events could be organized nationally and locally. Potential new members can view everything about an organization in one place. They could even connect with alumni in their area before leaving for college (yes greek recruitment starts before freshman move-in just like college sports). The single most requested item whenever I designed a greek website was pictures. Now they would all be in one place with the ability to make public or private.

The beauty of a system like this is its scalability. Remember how quickly Facebook spread from campus to campus and then to high schools and cities? Same concept. If a new chapter is founded, it has a brand new website set up instantly. Better still, the organization’s branding is maintained effortlessly! If someone (myself if I had the time and resources) could package a greek specific social network platform like Ning, they could go to each greek national organization and sell them the exact same product without any of the other organizations knowing it.

Here are a few examples of current national greek websites:

• Zeta Tau Alpha
• Chi Phi
• Delta Tau Delta

Pretty pathetic, huh? The guy in the DTD shirt isn’t even a delt! I know him from HS, guess he’s developing an acting career.

The first trip was on November 7th to Accenture in Chicago. It was the third round of interviews and there were almost 20 other applicants from the midwest. Accenture put me up in the Allegro Hotel the night before and it was very nice. Friday was mix of HR presentations, Q&A with recent hires, and two interviews with senior management. I thought the interviews went great, but I almost died when I got a bloody nose in the line for lunch. Fortunately, I didn’t get any blood on my suit and no one with any hiring power saw me. My roommate came along with me since he’s from Chicago and I took him to the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond on our way out of town to blow off some steam from the high pressured day. All in all, I had a great time and really hope to get an offer from them.

My next trip was to Baltimore to complete “applicant processing” for the NSA. I have a conditional offer from them that is basically contingent on me successfully passing a background investigation and a number of tests that they slowly tell me about. I flew through Cincinnati to BWI and they put me up in the Courtyard Marriott. I had to be in the lobby at 7am to meet the representative and off I went to get my Applicant badge from the visitor center. Obviously the NSA office was going to be secure, but it was nothing outlandish like some people had tried to tell me (being led down hallways in black hoods, etc.). I couldn’t bring anything that could carry data so sitting around was pretty dull. 

On Wednesday, I was signed up for a PAB (Psychological Assessment Battery) and psychological evaluation. The PAB was just a computer quiz with about 350 questions. Very simple, very quick. I then had to wait for them to evaluate that before I met with a psychologist. He just went over my background and asked me some questions about certain answers on my quiz. Nothing too hard, but very thorough. I don’t really like having to tell them my entire life story, but apparently it’s a matter of national security. 

On Thursday, I was scheduled for a polygraph. I honestly think I failed miserably and will soon be getting a letter rescinding my offer. The straps on the chest, sweat sensors on my palm, and the blood pressure monitor around my arm (which made my hand numb and lose color) all combined to make me look like a flat our liar. I couldn’t convince the guy of much besides my name and hometown. I was so petrified I was failing questions like, “Have you ever committed sabotage or a terrorist activity?” or, “Have you ever committed a serious crime?”  I was even shaky on whether or not I had committed espionage! It took over two hours to finally get out of there. I was so freaked out and angry with myself and the process that I skipped lunch, went to the airport, and got an earlier flight to ATL. I had time to grab dinner there at the Budweiser Brewhouse and it turned my day around.

When I finally got back to the new IND airport, I grabbed some Red Bulls for the drive back to Bloomington. I had to get home to start studying for my physics test I had in 10hrs. The test went fine and I ended up going to bed around 8:30pm friday night. Now it’s Sunday night and I have to get up in 4hrs to catch a flight to STL via ORD (crazy I know). I’ll be interviewing/visiting Partek all day then flying back through ORD tomorrow night. I’m hoping to come back with a job offer, but maybe making it back to Bloomington to celebrate my roommate’s birthday will suffice. Time to shut it down and get some shut eye!

If all these logins are able to be displayed in plain text in Firefox, are they stored in a file somewhere on the hard drive that you could steal and peruse at your own leisure? Not exactly, but pretty much. If you check out the knowledge base for Mozilla, it tells you exactly which files you need to transfer data to a new profile in Firefox. You only need two files – key3.db and signon.txt. For newer versions of Firefox, the signon.txt may be signon2.txt or signon3.txt. If you look at the signon.txt in a text editor, almost everything is spelled out for you except for the actual login and password. For example:

https://login.facebook.com
email
MEIEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFA…
*pass
MDoEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFA…

https://login.facebook.com

.

https://www.linkedin.com

session_key
MEIEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFAYI…
*session_password
MDoEEPgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEwFAY…

https://www.linkedin.com

You can see that there is a login for Facebook and a login for LinkedIn (note: I’ve truncated the hash values). From what I’ve found on the web, these hash values are the result of Triple DES cipher. These ciphers are encrypted using a key which is where the key3.db file comes in. The text in the signon.txt file is useless because it can’t be decrypted without the keys stored in the key3.db.

If you have the key3.db and the signon.txt files, you can follow Mozilla’s migration steps to drop them into your installation of Firefox and read all the passwords that were stored in someone else’s Firefox browser. I’ve thought about two scenarios that I come across day to day where this could really be a problem.

First, I’m in college and everyone I know has a laptop and almost everyone has been persuaded by the university to use Firefox (GO IU!). I know at my house there are always laptops laying around and such is the case most everywhere on campus. Some situation always comes up where someone needs to use another person’s laptop (check their email, look up a score, watch a video on YouTube, whatever).

“Hey can I look something up on your laptop?”

“Oh sure, go right ahead”

What they didn’t mention is that they would be looking up all of your saved passwords. Just find the files, email them to yourself, and then open them up later to stalk you on every website you found it so convenient to save your password. This may be a college social setting, but the same opportunities to physically access someone else’s browser occur at home and work, too.

The second scenario I haven’t had a chance to test, but is based off of past experience using lab PCs on campus. Basically, everyone who logs into a lab computer has a user folder created for them and is then deleted after a few hours or every night. The Firefox profile folder containing the saved passwords files is created inside the user folder. The flaw in the system is that new users who log in can browse the other users’ folders after they log out. If the previous users were typical (clicked saved password out of habit or just to get the pop-up out of the way), their logins could still be saved for the next user to import into Firefox without them ever knowing!

This minor security flaw could ultimately be exploited by Firefox’s own extensions and add-ons. There are thousands of these available and some are not hosted by Mozilla making them non-trustworthy. Does the average user care? No. What if I created a fabulous extension that promised improved security or anything enticing, but what I actually did was upload your saved passwords to my personal server? The average user doesn’t pay attention to this stuff!

Firefox was and still is hailed as the safer browser to IE, but was that because its user base was built mostly of tech-savvy individuals? Does it become less secure when Joe Six-Pack starts using it without any care in the world for security? If you’re skimming this post, please read the bold text below:

The best way to protect your saved passwords in Firefox is to SET THE MASTER PASSWORD! With the master password enabled, a user must input the master password whenever they want to view saved passwords or use saved passwords. If you have a master password enabled, the person who steals your key3.db and signon.txt can’t make any use of them unless they know the master password! Here’s the technical explanation for how the master password works:

“The master password that is set is not stored anywhere at all. Whenever user enters the master password, Firefox uses it to decrypt the encrypted data associated with the known string in plain text related to the master password. If the decrypted data matches this known string then the entered password is correct. Thus it’s impossible to recover the master password directly, and if you lost the master password, you lost the access to the database file – and directly – all the stored secrets and sign on information as well.”

Technically the master password could still be cracked, but if someone is going to go through that trouble they might as well crack the password for the specific site they want to know your password for.

Please don’t user this post to take advantage of your poor non-tech-savvy parents, your girlfriend you think might be cheating on you, and, most importantly, unsuspecting strangers. Feel free to impress (scare) your friends and family, just don’t reference me in your court hearing

Create a short animation that reflects the unique spirit of the Indiana Hoosiers, or the town of Bloomington, Indiana.  For example, you could do an animation related to a Hoosier sports team, a popular annual campus event, or your favorite restaurant or bar.

Indiana basketball has been a hot topic since it was introduced and I thought it matched well with a popular annual campus event – pregaming. This season may require a big more than years past, but regardless GO HOOSIERS!

I’ll have to take some time after the semester is over to see which pieces get added to my portfolio. Enjoy!

iCal view of my classes and prospective teaching schedule

I had to take either an A&H or S&H along with two informatics electives to graduate, but I know I’ll be required to take 12 credit hours for certain grants and loans. A&H is Arts and Humanities and S&H is Social and Historical Studies. Most of the classes I’ve taken are Natural and Mathematical Sciences: N & M. I did a lot of searching for the last 3 hours to reach the 12 hour mark required for certain grants and loans.

AMST-A100 is called “What is America?” and talks about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere (my A&H requirement).

FINA-D210 is called “Digital Art: Survey & Practice” and emphasizes learning to use digital media to produce original, creative art work.

INFO-I400 is a topics course on entrepreneurship in Informatics and will offer students the change to hear directly from numerous Indiana software executives.

INFO-I427 is called “Search Informatics” and covers techniques and tools to automatically crawl, parse, index, store, and search Web information.

Tuesdays I’ll hopefully be teaching two lab sections of CSCI-A216 again which is Digital Multimedia Concepts and Technologies.

Fridays are for me – boating, golf, road trips, and most likely sleeping!

I’m pretty excited for next semester, but just half way over with the current one. Better get on top of things so I don’t have to ruin my awesome schedule. Motivation! My XML file cataloging all the courses I’ve taken is updated, but I still have no idea how I want to visualize it…

At the end of August, I posted an old SIMS PC game on eBay that I had found collecting dust in the basement. There was nothing wrong with the game besides the fact that I had turned everyone in my family to Mac or Ubuntu users so no one had Windows to run the game. I eventually found a buyer who won it for next to nothing with maybe $9 in shipping cost. I walked it down to the UPS store in the Union since our new house is so close and the shipping charges were actually more than the item’s selling price and shipping cost so I lost money on the deal. That’s not the worst part.

I get an email notice from UPS about a week later saying that the package was undeliverable! I’ve never heard of this and of course the buyer was filling my eBay message inbox with sob stories about how her daughter was anxiously awaiting for the game to arrive. I tell her about the undeliverable notice and she tells me that she wanted me to send it to another address that wasn’t confirmed or listed as her shipping address when she checked out on PayPal. Is that not the storybook eBay scam? 

I need this item overnighted to Nigeria for my family member’s birthday even though this account is registered to Florida

eBay tells you to not ship to non-confirmed locations so I shipped to the address that she had on record thinking that would cover my ass. The package gets returned to me and then the buyer opens a dispute because nothing was delivered to her. I explain over and over to PayPal the situation including tracking numbers and emails from UPS. They even saw that the address she listed when checking out was the one I had a tracking number to! PayPal sided with her for some reason and I had to give back the $9 she paid me after already spending $11 on shipping the item initially so it was like a $20 loss for me!

The package still sits on my shelf in its packaging and I’m about ready to re-list it hoping the next buyer gives me a real address to ship to.

The most recent eBay headache came just a week or two ago. I sold an old broadband modem to a guy in Indianapolis for a little under $9 and had a shipping charge of $8.99, but he wanted to pick it up from me since my address was listed as Carmel, IN. When I informed him that I was in Bloomington for school, he thought I should ship it to him for free. Not so fast Tahar! The price of gas to drive from your west side residence to Carmel or Bloomington is going to be more than the $8.99 in shipping. Also, it’s only 20 miles further to Bloomington than to Carmel from where you live and odds are that traffic will make the drive longer to Carmel even though it’s closer.

I tried to play nice and offered to bring it up to Indy when I flew out to Vegas at 5am on a Saturday. He actually wanted to meet me and pick it up at the airport. Absent minded me forgot it while packing necessities for my trip, but I emailed him the night before so he didn’t have to show up for nothing. This prompted a, “ship it to me for free or I’m opening a dispute!” So right now it’s a claim and I am going to drag it out as long as possible to stick it to this asshole who would rather meet a stranger at 5am in the airport than pay $8.99 to have an eBay item shipped to his front door. Something just isn’t right about that and for the $8.60 I stand to have returned to him, it’s just as much fun to drag out this dispute on PayPal. I’ve already relisted the item

I have had ONE good eBay experience lately when I was searching for a Philadelphia Phillies home Jimmy Rollins jersey that I owed my roommate due to a lost bet. I thought Manny Ramirez and Joe Torre could take care of the most losing franchise in all of sports, but that wasn’t the case so I was faced with finding a cheap jersey quick. I sent a message to the seller of the cheapest jersey I found asking if he’d be willing to sell it to me at a flat price before the auction was over. Now I sound like a scammer so to ensure my authenticity I briefly explained how I was just a college guy trying to make good on a lost bet. The guy actually went for it and I sent him the money through PayPal just incase he tried to run away with it. 

Turns out that the jersey I wanted had a rip in it so he offered to send a different Phillies jersey that was actually nicer. He sent me the tracking info and it should be here by the end of the week. That’s how eBay is supposed to work! Good people selling their junk to others.

I don’t know why or how people have formed these grand expectations of other buyers and sellers like each person is an Amazon.com or Zappos.com. They’ve become greedy when it comes to getting a deal or saving on shipping. Hopefully I’ve just come across two loons too quickly and there are more people out there like my jersey dealer who’s looking to help people out.

Square version to be painted in the infield on race day

Final Design for Tickets and Merchandise

Black & White version for newspaper ads etc.

In other news, I’ve been really busy interviewing for life after college. The whole process has become routine so I’m never nervous anymore. November is getting busy with a few trips for second round interviews. I had a great steak dinner with my dad this weekend at Little Zagreb’s and he put everything in perspective for me. He has a calming way of simplifying life.

School has picked up the pace as midterm tests and projects are everywhere. I need to come up with some two separate flash projects and need to get moving on some front-end design for GameZombie. The growing number of developers has cut into my slacker time. I’d like to find some time to read my Universal Principles of Design book for some inspiration, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to put as much passion as I’d like into it.

Almost 3am, better wrap this up and get a few more items checked off my list before bed. Good night!

When I first saw the headline I thought it was an April’s Fool joke, but April is nowhere close! Do people really send out that many drunken emails? I get an occasional late night IM or Facebook message where it’s pretty obvious that person is being skeptically honest or friendly, but I’m in college so it’s normal. The Gmail team acts like these sort of things happen in the professional world, too, which is scary. “Like that late night memo — I mean mission statement — to the entire firm.”

It’s funny they took the time to cook something like this up, but is there an ulterior motive? Is there a more bigger and better feature that could come from this to offer some convenience or improved productivity? The least they should do is deny you from sending that embarrassing email and save it as a draft if you don’t answer the questions correctly or in a short enough period of time. Maybe not allow for it to send for x amount of hours depending on how terrible you did on the math so you’re stone sober when you review it?

1. Facebook

Obama is actually using Facebook like it was intended listing his favorite books, movies, and music. He has a wall, a mini-feed, photos, notes, posted items, and most importantly – over 2 million supporters. Meanwhile, McCain has filled his page with tons of images that link away from Facebook. It looks like crap and serves no purpose which might explain why he has just over 500,000 supporters. Why does Barack have 4x as many supporters on the most popular social network in the world? Probably because he hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to be the the campaign’s “online organizing guru”. 

2. Twitter

I’ve slowly become obsessed with Twitter over the last few months and when I first began tweeting I learned Obama has an account, too! Turns out McCain does as well, but his first update was just on September 19th and he only has 10 total. Meanwhile, Obama has racked up over 200 updates starting back in April which has allowed him to collect a following of over 90,000 while McCain has just over 2,000. I’m in agreement with David All who wrote that politicians should be tweeting for themselves, but that’s another topic.

3. AIM

Ok, so this isn’t a deal breaker, but someone in the Obama camp wanted to cover all technology communication avenues when they rolled out Obama Buddy. I’m signed into instant messenger anytime my computer is on (read: 24/7). It’s convenient and quick to IM a bot for some quick info instead of loading my browser, navigating a website, and then getting the info I want. The only bummer is since it’s a bot, it can’t start conversations. 

4. Mobile

Some people are scared to think the future president is sending out text messages directly to constituents, but the fact is they opted in so if they don’t like it – opt out. I personally think it’s pretty cool even though most of the time it’s info I’ve already received in an email or Facebook message. There are endless possibilities when you can get a message directly into people’s hands. IU’s Notify system, for example, will currently text me emergency alerts, but I think they should take it a step further and start texting out sports scores!

Obama’s camp outdid themselves again by releasing a slick iPhone and iPod Touch application. Not only does it put updates, news, events, photos, videos, and the issues in your pocket, but it’ll prioritize your contacts by key battleground states so you can volunteer to call people you actually know!

5. Media

McCain’s Download Center offers some icons, wallpaper, and website buttons. Pretty boring stuff that looks amateurish when you check out what Barack is offering:

• Logos & Taglines
  • Tons of versions of his logo in all sorts of formats
• Website & Chat
  • The icons and badges plus widgets offering news and video
• For Your Computer
  • Desktop backgrounds
• Posters & Signs
• Support Tools
  • Forms, sign-in sheets, and supporter cards
• Flyers and Documents
  • More templates to easily spread the word
• Videos
  • This is 2008- sound bites and pictures are last decade. Video is now king online.

6. Blog

If the candidates aren’t going to tweet for themselves, what makes you think they’ll blog for themselves? Matt Lira appears to have written all of the posts for the “McCain Blog”. Luckily for me, just the title of the latest post further proves how out of touch the McCain/Palin ticket is with a tech savvy young person like myself. Who tunes in for a weekly radio address? What’s the point of embedding the audio into your blog post? Why didn’t they make a video and put it on YouTube? It requires the same technology (flash embed) and effort so why not? Could it be that the videos released by the actual campaign will just get buried under the parodies and bashings that are everywhere on YouTube?

What’s the latest post on Barack’s blog? A 20-yr old Purdue student from Noblesville is excited to cast his first vote for Obama. Wow- someone from my backyard in my age demographic is also excited about the Obama-Biden ticket. Does his blog trace my IP to give me this regional news? Wouldn’t surprise me 

Barack has used new media superbly during his campaign and as a result has won me over. This isn’t to say that I support his entire platform or that I’m ready to go door to door for the guy. Obama’s campaign has sought out new voters and showed that they can relate to me. McCain’s campaign, on the other hand, has never once sent me a Facebook message, an email, or even a postcard in the mail asking for my support. When I watch the news or debates, I’m turned off by McCain and Palin because they never hit on topics that interest me or I’m left debating whether or not I’m “Joe Six-Pack”. When I go online to learn more about McCain, he’s either non-existent where I’d like to find him (Facebook, Twitter, his blog, other media outlets, etc.). Just searching for Palin or McCain on Google or YouTube returns more negative reviews than reasons for me to vote for them. Are they really ignoring the internet and depending on major broadcast news channels to get their message out? You can’t ignore the internet. Mark Cuban wrote a blog post last month about the importance of the president being computer literate and I’m in full agreement with him. “A candidate that has not adopted any level of digital lifestyle will have a harder time understanding the relative importance of protecting digital connectivity and assets vs physical assets.” Judging by McCain’s campaign, they’re trying but not very hard.

Why should I have to work so hard to figure out if I want to vote them? Shouldn’t they want me to vote them? Why haven’t they tried? Why doesn’t John McCain want my vote?

I did find some time tonight (by find time I mean put off homework) to throw together a logo design for the 2009 Little 500 races. The logo requirements are as follows:

• the simpler the better  (logo will be transferred onto tickets, merchandise, etc.): Colors of the logo should be red, white, and black
• needs to include the race dates April 24th,25th
• needs to say “Indiana University Student Foundation Presents the 59th Running of the Little 500″ somewhere on it

Submissions are due Friday afternoon. I might try to cook up another one since we have to turn them in on CD anyways. I wish I knew my way around Adobe Illustrator so I could make a vector graphic. I may look into importing this and converting it to vector form if that’s possible. I need to get to bed! Promise to blog more soon…

My dad brought me a bag of mail this weekend that was filled with great examples of how you can’t escape advertising. I received a free Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer because I voted on how Ryan Nyquist should shave his beard for the X-Games. Promoting a product, person, or event is just advertising. If you look at the site I voted on they throw in a another ad for Thor Motocross implying that Nyquist endorses the product.

This isn’t the first free promo I’ve received in the mail. In fact, I can’t tell you the last time I bought a razor because I manage to keep finding freebies with the help of sites like Spoofee. People who loves deals spend their time putting together a collection of discounts, coupons, and freebies (read: hard to find ads). You could argue that since they are hard to find that they are not doing their job, but someone posting that I could get a free razor, I in turn was exposed to four different advertisements and spent the time to visit each of their homepages and then blog about them. Not so ineffective now?

Of course there are going to be ads on the internet. That’s how it works. There are so many ads, in fact, that people have become used to them and subconsciously block them out. Think about the last time you clicked on a banner or even noticed it if it didn’t start screaming at you that, “you’ve been selected for a free (insert hot electronic gadget)…”. Smart, suave advertising execs like Donald Draper realize this sort of thing and think about new places to stick ads- like video games.

My roommates and I just picked up Madden 09 last week. I don’t play it serious enough to notice any of the new features and would still be happy just playing Rush Attack or whatever they call it now. I did notice a lack in advertising, though. Sprint sponsors the half time review, and I’ve seen a few ads for Snickers but that’s it. The weirdest part is that Tom Hammond keeps making these announcements that say something along the lines of, “Let’s pause to remind you this game brought to you by EA Sports.” 

I can’t tell if it’s just shameless self advertising or if they didn’t sell to an advertiser or if an advertiser backed out… either way it comes across as plain annoying to me. The game has been around for 20 years now and this year they threw the EA Sports logo in it everywhere like it’s something new! Are they merely making room for future advertisements? How long until they start advertising beer in video games? Would my roommate’s XBOX Live account that says he’s 21+ allow them to stream in mature ads? Throw in ads for cars if you’re over 16 and just candy/snack ads if you’re younger? I don’t think that’s crazy given how Facebook Ads operate.

Why doesn’t EA Sports have a deal to mention Gatorade during time outs? You know it’s on every football field in America. They’re missing out on some easy cash. Would that be considered a product placement inside the game? I think product placement in online videos will be the next wave of advertisement after pre-roll ads become ineffective. When will my favorite video game review site give their take on Madden 09, shameless self promotion, and product placements inside games and online videos?

In closing, SHUT UP Cris Collinsworth! You are worse than Madden! Ok, I’m off to play some muted Madden to see which I notice more – the commentary or the ads.

Three gentlemen were walking a relatively short distance home (Google Maps estimates it as less than 900 ft. by walking) when a young lady passes them obviously looking like she was suffering from the effects of alcohol. She fell into some bushes in front of a university owned building and two of the gentlemen helped her up. The third gentleman continued to walk home and was shortly thereafter joined by one of the other gentleman. The first gentleman home enquired as to where the last of their party had gone and the second gentleman said that the third gentleman was canoodling in the alley with their new female acquaintance in a nearby alley.

While the Good Samaritan was being rewarded for his kindness and the other two gentleman sit safely home, police lights suddenly flood the street. The two gentlemen sitting home investigate to find their Good Samaritan friend and new female acquaintance being arrested. What could they have possibly done to draw attention to themselves besides do a little stumbling and smooching?

After hearing this story, I went about my morning to my first class only to see the front page of the IDS. Their top story reads, “IUPD still searching for a suspect in assault case“. Over the weekend, a crazed male came up on a group of students returning to their dorms and slashed three of them. One male got a 4 inch cut on the throat that required 19 stitches and two girls received “superficial” cuts. During this assault they were able to identify him as being between 5′ 6″ and 6′ 2″ (yes, 8 inches in disparity) and that he was wearing jeans, a yellow t-shirt, and a white hooded sweatshirt. How they figured out what color shirt he was wearing under his sweatshirt while not being able to give a relative height description remains to be untold (they were probably drunk).

The assailant ran off and a witness gave police a direction (read: wild goose chase). He is still on the loose and a composite sketch has been seen by most of Bloomington. I will go on record saying that the Good Samaritan looks nothing like this sketch even though he may be between 5′ 6″ and 6′ 2″.

So why is the Bloomington Police Department trolling alleys to break up make-out sessions instead of trying to catch the Bloomington Slasher? I haven’t received the full story explaining why the two went to jail last night. If it turns out they were breaking into a car or something, then I’ll write a follow up post hailing the BPD, but until then they need to get their priorities straight!

My main reason for attending was to gain exposure to local tech companies. ChaCha is the only Indiana based tech company I hear about and keep tabs on, mostly because I interned with them last summer. Every so often my mom will email me about some new start-up by Informatics grads, but for the most part I don’t hear about companies I would want to work for after I graduate.

The conference offered three different “tracks” you could follow (basics, business, and general) but you bounce around if a speaker or topic interested you. I tended to stay away from the business track since it was mainly aimed at corporations, but I did do a good bit of bouncing around and getting a taste of everything. It was a lot like being back in class- half paying attention, poor slides, multitasking on my phone or laptop. The most interesting part was following everyone’s activity on Twitter. I’ll summarize the rest based on my tweets:

Swung by Dunkin Donuts on my way to the @blogindiana conference at. IUPUI

I fell in love this week with Dunkin Donuts coffee.

First talk – Legal Issues in Blogging. Lots of chicks turned out for this “Sili-corn Valley” conference

I thought the “Sili-corn Valley” was a nice touch in the morning announcements. After taking Legal and Social Informatics in the Spring semester, I was interested to see what they might cover. It was mostly a review of copyright law (don’t use what isn’t yours), but I was curious about forming an LLC for legal protection. Andrew Paradies, who led the talk, made some good points on why to have one, but it was a bit much for a college kid like me. 

Oops, looks like I didn’t tweet for my second talk about “Writing for Blogs”. It was simple stuff, but after only writing college papers and essays for the last few years it was good to be reminded that simplicity goes a long way.

Sitting patiently for the panel on How Social Media Impacts Elections to begin

This would have been more interesting if it had less of a Republican tone and focused on all social media and not just blogs.

Third talk- Between the Blog Posts with Mitch Maxson. Ppl r still trying to get on wireless. IU remembered my iPhone

Mitch Maxson of MediaSauce gave some nice tips on promoting your blog when you’re not blogging. Less SEO leaving your URL in comments everywhere and more exploring alternative outlets like Twitter.

Fourth Talk- How to Make (More) Money From Your Blog by John Ramey, friend of @GameZombie

My first encounter with John Ramey, who I had heard a lot about from my work with GameZombie but never actually met or knew much about. He was very knowledgeable about different advertising plans and how to attract advertisers. He threw in a sneak peak to the new iSocket and gave us all special invites for all that attended the talk since iSocket is still closed beta.

Very impressed by @isocket and pleased with the day at @blogindiana ! Grabbing Red Bulls and heading home to code and of course blog

That concluded my first day at my first conference. I was really excited and ran home to apply all that I had absorbed.

I ALMOST felt bad for these kids being up this early to work at Dunkin Donuts until I saw two taking a break by their BMWs

Wasted most of my time in the first session working on the BMOC site, now web analytics

I told you I was addicted to Dunkin Donuts that week and I had to wake up somehow to get downtown by 9 a.m. Ironically I was wasting time in the first session that was entitled “Stop Wasting Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Yourself More Efficient”. I was pretty efficient, but should have taken better notes on some of the online tools Scott Abel suggested. To summarize the Web Analytics talk – Google Analytics. Pat East from Hanapin Marketing in Bloomington have based their entire business on knowing Google Analytics inside and out. I wasn’t very impressed.

Listening to the panel about Building Community Around Your Blog @blogINDIANA

This panel bounced ideas around as to how to attract a crowd, but I was most impressed with the anecdote John Ramey shared about a wine company promoting themselves by giving away their bottles of wine at parties and allowing them to become social objects. The social objects are what social networks (communities) are built around. If you don’t have the social object, you can’t have the social network. I loved it so much I made a mental note to remember it by tweeting:

@jpramey great example of the wine being used as social media. I’ll have to remember that!

More of the entertaining Scott Abel talking about Syndication and Web 2.0 Tools. Semantic Web FTW!

Unfortunately, I was stuck in a room of newbs who didn’t really understand the basics of the topic so the juicy stuff I was hoping for was never brought up. I wouldn’t mind running into Scott Abel again, though. His presentation style was very upbeat and interesting.

I ended up leaving early from the second day. None of the last round of talks interested me. I was itching to go home and share with my family all that I had learned about blogging and social media. It actually led to me convincing my step-mom to start a Ning site for my sister’s 8th grade.

I had a very enjoyable time at my first conference. The people were great, the material a little beneath me, but for $50 and two free lunches it was a great deal. I’m not sure if I’ll be around to participate in next year’s conference, but if I’m in the Indy area I’ll definitely be in attendance.

It was kind of distracting running this informal workshop in the middle of the store where there were a hundred other people running around and making tons of noise, but then again it was a free workshop. Since I’ve taught a class that introduces people to an office suite, I was pretty curious as to how the Mac Specialist would approach this quick overview.

He started by inserting text and then moved on to inserting photos from iPhoto. Very simple, very intuitive, duh, it’s Apple. The animation was a little trickier. I’ve only used PowerPoint to put together presentations and I couldn’t tell you the last time I had to use it. Another class I’ve taught requires an automated PowerPoint presentation, I tried to challenge the Specialist with making the entire presentation play without any interaction from the user. After a slight stumble, he delivered and I thought the solution was much easier than what you have to do in PowerPoint. He ended the Keynote overview by inserting a chart. I was a little disappointed that you couldn’t link data between Keynote and Numbers (have a spreadsheet in Numbers with data, insert that data into Keynote, change something in Numbers, it automatically updates in Keynote)

Next, he showed off Pages, which is Apple’s word processing program. It was much of the same. Started with text, inserted images next, tried to explain the difference between positioning them inline vs float but I didn’t think it was the greatest explanation. Something I found neat was the ability to fill shapes with images so you could take something like a starburst and insert one of your photos from iPhoto behind it so it looks like you masked the photo with the starburst.

The last part of the workshop briefly covered Numbers, Apple’s equivalent to Excel, but the Specialist was honest in saying he had very little experience using it since he didn’t ever work with spreadsheets. The most advanced feature he showcased was the ability to “AutoSum” a column (whoopee).

After we had all these documents created, the Specialist gave us an overview of exporting options. Pages has the ability to export as a PDF, a Microsoft Word document, a Rich Text File (RTF), and as plain text. I was most impressed by Keynote’s ability to export as a PowerPoint presentation, Quicktime movie, Flash movie, as a set of Images, and as HTML!

Since nothing is free in life, the workshop ended by promoting Apple’s One to One personal training. It sounds like a great deal. For $99 you get 52 classes with a specialist where you ask all the questions and get to choose when and what content you’ll be covering. I’ve seen other personal training where $99 gets you just one session!

All in all, I thought it was a very positive experience. My step-mom, who is a complete newbie to Mac, said she learned a lot in the short hour long workshop. She’s planning on going to another free workshop that covers iLife this Friday, but since I’m moving back to Bloomington I won’t be able to accompany her.

The teams are formed by “popping” the last element of the players array into the team array.

teams[i][1] = players.pop(); // teammate 1
teams[i][2] = players.pop(); // teammate 2

Obviously the players array is randomized by this line:

players.sort( randOrd ); // randomize players

So to restart the script and make sure the teams stayed the same, I first wrote down the players names in a reverse list on a piece of paper (players from Team 1 were on the bottom of the list … players from Team 5 were on the top of the list). Then, I commented out the line that randomized the players and entered the player names in the order I had my list (players for Team 5 were entered first … players for Team 1 were entered last).

This recreated the teams we had originally and we were able to continue the tournament without any other interuptions. The tourney did end with two teams tied with the same record and same number of points so we had to go to the sudden death playoff but instead of one hand they wanted to play an entire game. My brother and aunt won it all while my grandmother and I came in last place (but we had the most fun).

So here’s how I did it:

 

<SCRIPT language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>

<!–

// global variables

var teams;

var initRound = 0;

var rounds = 0; // total to be defined later

 

function randOrd(){ 

return (Math.round(Math.random())-0.5); 

}

 

These are some globals that I reuse such as ‘teams’ which is the associative array that holds all the team info like name, players, record, and points. The ‘initRound’ is used to determine which round it is so I can do stuff like update the score, move completed rounds, and tell when the tournament is done. Obviously ’rounds’ is how many rounds there will be and by my comment will be defined later. The ‘randOrd()’ function I ripped from Google and is used to randomize the players into teams.

 

function promptNumPlayers() {

var numPlayers = 0;

numPlayers = prompt(“How many players?”,”(enter number here)”);

if (numPlayers == null) {

return;

}

if(isNaN(parseInt(numPlayers)) || numPlayers < 0 || numPlayers == 0) {

alert(“Looking for a number here, chief! Try again!”);

promptNumPlayers();

} else if(numPlayers % 2) {

alert(“Need even number of players for this Euchre tournament!”);

promptNumPlayers();

} else {

buildTeams(numPlayers);

}

}

 

This is what starts it all off – have to know how many players you’re going to have! The check for ‘null’ sees if the user pressed ‘Cancel’ instead of ‘OK’. This function loads every time the page does so if I or someone else doesn’t want to go through the setup, this will stop it and just display the basics (good for testing CSS). Next, we see if the user tried to be smart and put “twelve” instead of “12″ or something else that would crash the script. Since I don’t know anyone with a robot that plays Euchre, I made them pick an even number so proper teams of two could be formed. Speaking of:

function buildTeams(num) {

numTeams = (num / 2)

teams = new Array(numTeams);

players = new Array(num);

 

//build players list

for (i=0;i<num;i++) {

players[i] = prompt(“What is player #”+ (i+1) + “‘s name?”,”(enter name here)”);

if(players[i] == “” || players[i] == “(enter name here)”) { 

alert(“Please enter a proper name!”);

players[i] = prompt(“What is player #”+ (i+1) + “‘s name?”,”(enter name here)”);

}

}

 

players.sort( randOrd ); // randomize players

 

//build teams and stats

for (i= 0; i < numTeams; i++) {

teams[i] = new Array(6); 

teams[i][0] = (i+1); // team name

teams[i][1] = players.pop(); // teammate 1

teams[i][2] = players.pop(); // teammate 2

teams[i][3] = 0; // wins

teams[i][4] = 0; // losses

teams[i][5] = 0; // points total

}

 

buildSchedule(teams);

displayTeams();

}

The number of players is divided by two to form those teams of two (Euchre is traditionally played with partners incase you didn’t know). The ‘teams’ and ‘players’ arrays are set to proper length and then the prompting for player names begins. Again, more checking to make sure the user enters something besides blank or the standard filler text. Here’s where that random function from earlier comes in handy. It jumbles the array so now I can go through in order and no one knows who will be on whose team. The ‘teams’ array is now built with team name, teammate 1, teammate 2, wins, losses, and point total. Time to build the round robin schedule!

function buildSchedule(arr) {

var len = arr.length ;

 

if (len % 2) {

//alert(“Odd number of teams.”);

byeTeam = ["BYE","BYE","BYE",0,0,0];

len = arr.push(byeTeam);

}

 

rounds = len – 1;

var games = len / 2;

//alert(“There are ” + rounds + ” rounds to play and there will be ” + games + ” games each round.”);

var home = new Array(games);

var away = new Array(games);

 

//establish home and away

for (i = 0; i < games; i++) {

home[i] = arr[i][0];

away[i] = arr[i + games][0];

}

 

away.reverse(); // creates first vs last … middle vs middle matchups

 

for(r = 0; r < rounds; r++) {

var txtNode = document.createTextNode(“Round ” + (r+1) + “:”);

 

var roundNum = document.createElement(‘h5′);

roundNum.appendChild(txtNode);

 

var roundDiv = document.createElement(‘div’);

roundDiv.setAttribute(‘id’, r);

roundDiv.appendChild(roundNum);

 

// print matchups

for (i=0;i < games; i++) {

txtNode = document.createTextNode(“Team ” + away[i]);

var spanA = document.createElement(‘span’);

spanA.id = away[i];

spanA.appendChild(txtNode);

 

txtNode = document.createTextNode(“Team ” + home[i]);

var spanH = document.createElement(‘span’);

spanH.id = home[i];

spanH.appendChild(txtNode);

 

txtNode = document.createTextNode(” vs “);

var matchup = document.createElement(‘p’);

matchup.appendChild(spanA);

matchup.appendChild(txtNode);

matchup.appendChild(spanH);

 

roundDiv.appendChild(matchup);

}

 

document.getElementById(‘schedule’).appendChild(roundDiv);

 

//advance to next round

home.splice(1,0,away.shift());

away.push(home.pop());

}

}

This part baffled me the most and made me do a little research into how Round Robin Tournaments were formed. This is also the first time I had played with the DOM using JavaScript. The ‘(len % 2)’ uses the modulo to test if the number of teams is odd or even. Round Robin tournaments need an even number so if it is odd you have to add in BYE rounds (thus the pushing of fake team on array). The global ’rounds’ from earlier is now definable along with how many games will be in each round.

Deciding how to form match-ups was another difficulty. I literally drew out tournaments and how they progressed and then switched to inserting them in Excel. Once I found a pattern I decided it would be easiest to split the teams into ‘home’ and ‘away’. The first half of the teams would go to ‘home’ and the second half to ‘away’. By reversing the ‘away’ array (say that 5 times fast), the first team in the ‘teams’ array would now face the last team instead of the middle team (important later). Now, we build some elements and append children. The for loop basically says, “I’m creating a span for the home and away team, placing the text ‘Team’ at the beginning and then assigning the id of the home and away team to the span.” This id is actually the same id as the ‘teams’ array which will come in handy later when we are updating scores. 

Based on what I found drawing out tournament rotations by hand, the first team would stay in a fixed position and all the other teams would rotate around it. To accomplish this, I first spliced in the last array element of ‘away’ after the first element of ‘home’ and then popped off the last element of ‘home’ and pushed it to the front of ‘away’. So something like:

I was pretty proud I figured that out since I was always terrible with push, pop, and splice. Next is the easy part of displaying the teams in a scoreboard fashion:

function displayTeams() {

var myTable = document.createElement(‘table’);

var myTHEAD = document.createElement(‘thead’);

var myTFOOT = document.createElement(‘tfoot’);

var myTBODY = document.createElement(‘tbody’);

var myRow = document.createElement(‘tr’);

 

var theads = ["Team","Player 1","Player 2", "Won", "Loss","Points"];

 

for (i=0;i<theads.length;i++) {

txt = document.createTextNode(theads[i]);

var myTH = document.createElement(‘th’);

myTH.appendChild(txt);

myRow.appendChild(myTH);

}

 

myTHEAD.appendChild(myRow);

myTable.appendChild(myTHEAD);

txt = document.createTextNode(“Results after ” + initRound + ” rounds.”);

td = document.createElement(‘td’);

td.colSpan = 6;

td.appendChild(txt);

tr = document.createElement(‘tr’);

tr.appendChild(td);

myTFOOT.appendChild(tr);

myTable.appendChild(myTFOOT);

 

for (var i= 0; i< teams.length; i++) {

arrRows = new Array(); //holds row info so then I can append in a loop

arrRows.push(teams[i][0]); // team number

arrRows.push(teams[i][1]); // player 1

arrRows.push(teams[i][2]); // player 2

arrRows.push(teams[i][3]); // wins

arrRows.push(teams[i][4]); // losses

arrRows.push(teams[i][5]); // points

 

myRow = document.createElement(‘tr’);

 

if(arrRows[0] != “BYE”) {

for(j=0;j<arrRows.length;j++) {

txt = document.createTextNode(arrRows[j]);

myTD = document.createElement(‘td’);

myTD.appendChild(txt);

myRow.appendChild(myTD);

}

}

 

myTBODY.appendChild(myRow);

}

 

myTable.appendChild(myTBODY);

document.getElementById(‘scoreboard’).appendChild(myTable);

 

updateForm();

}

Again, building elements at the DOM level, appending children, forming the table’s head, etc. The footer was more to make sure it was actually updating but actually added a nice touch in the end. Loop through the teams, give each element a cell, tada! But wait, I don’t care about that fake BYE team I had to throw in to make a schedule so don’t print that. These last two functions took me the longest time and the most debugging:

function updateForm() {

curRoundDiv = document.getElementById(initRound);

scoringDiv = curRoundDiv.cloneNode(true);

document.getElementById(‘curMatch’).appendChild(scoringDiv);

 

points = document.createElement(‘select’);

for(i=0;i<=13;i++) {

opt = document.createElement(‘option’);

optScore = document.createTextNode(i);

opt.appendChild(optScore);

points.appendChild(opt);

}

 

spanAH = scoringDiv.getElementsByTagName(‘span’);

 

for(i=0;i<spanAH.length;i++) {

if(spanAH[i].id != “BYE”) {

PTS = points.cloneNode(true);

PTS.id = spanAH[i].id;

spanAH[i].appendChild(PTS);

}

}

}

Pretty short, right? That ‘initRound’ comes in handy again! Pull whatever round it is, clone it and let’s make it into an update form. Build simple ‘selects’ with ‘options’ to number from 0 to 13. Why 13? I thought Euchre games were played to 10? I’m not going to short change someone who goes alone after they’re in the barn! Besides, points are the tie breaking mechanism in this beast so points need to be awarded where due. Still no love for the BYE team as they aren’t awarded a ‘select’. Now for makes this sucker run:

function nextRound(form) {

var formSelects = form.getElementsByTagName(‘select’);

 

//update W, L, point totals

for(i=0;i<formSelects.length;i++) {

for(j=0;j<teams.length;j++) {

//alert(“team: ” + teams[j][0] + ” | selectID: ” + formSelects[i].id);

if(teams[j][0] == formSelects[i].id) {

//alert(“MATCH!”);

teams[j][5] += formSelects[i].selectedIndex;

if(formSelects[i].selectedIndex >= 10) {

//alert(teams[j][0] + ” team is winner!”);

teams[j][3] += 1;

} else {

//alert(teams[j][0] + ” team is loser!”);

teams[j][4] += 1;

}

}

}

}

var curRoundDiv = document.getElementById(initRound);

var spanAH = curRoundDiv.getElementsByTagName(‘span’);

 

for(i=0;i<spanAH.length;i++) {

if(spanAH[i].id != “BYE”) {

for(j=0;j<formSelects.length;j++) {

//alert(“spanID: ” + spanAH[i].id + ” | selectID: ” + formSelects[j].id);

if(formSelects[j].id == spanAH[i].id) {

//alert(“MATCH!”);

txt = document.createTextNode(” Scored: ” + formSelects[j].selectedIndex);

spanAH[i].appendChild(txt);

}

}

}

}

document.getElementById(‘pastRounds’).appendChild(curRoundDiv);

 

//remove old scoreboard

d = document.getElementById(‘scoreboard’);

t = d.getElementsByTagName(‘table’);

d.removeChild(t[0]);

 

//remove old update form

d = document.getElementById(‘curMatch’);

i = d.getElementsByTagName(‘div’);

d.removeChild(i[0]);

 

initRound++;

 

if ( initRound == rounds) {

te = teams.pop();

if(te[0] == “BYE”) {

//alert(“ODD TEAMS”);

for(i=0;i<teams.length;i++) {

teams[i][4] -= 1; //subtract loss from BYE rounds

}

}

displayTeams();

document.getElementById(‘updateForm’).style.display = “none”;

txt = document.createTextNode(“Play Again?”);

againBut = document.createElement(‘a’);

againBut.setAttribute(‘href’,'JavaScript:location.reload(true);’);

againBut.appendChild(txt);

document.getElementById(‘schedule’).appendChild(againBut);

} else {

displayTeams();

}

}