Last night I slept for 6 hours 51 minutes, 7 minutes under my monthly average. Decent quality for most of it, looking at the graph. Tap another app: today I’ve consumed 16 oz of coffee (4 calories, since I drink my coffee black.) Better log another cup – those seven minutes are taking a toll.

If I felt like it, I could post graphs of these patterns to Facebook, to bore my Friends with the minutia of my statistical existence.

Or I could think about why I monitor these things in the first place.

There’s a terrific New York Times article from about a year ago called “The Data-Driven Life” on this self-measurement phenomenon. At the time, I thought the tracker lifestyle was pretty bizarre. A few apps later and a quote from the story rings true:

I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.

I’m not a true believer yet – and I doubt I’ll ever be a person who creates a statistical analysis of how daily butter intake changes my arithmetic speed. But I started tracking to wean myself off of caffeine, and it’s worked. Unchecked, I consume it like a fiend. Logging every diet soda keeps me from overindulging. Then I wanted to see if my sleep improved on days I drank less caffeine (it does!). The daily graphs have taught me how I sleep and how often I sleep — and how to improve them.

Now if I can only remember to track my hours at work…

With iOS, Android, and other platforms, we see some sites creating a native applications. What’s interesting to me is that this idea of optimizing the end-user’s experience could have been done ages ago by creating applications that interact with the web on Windows and OSX. My guess is that it just wasn’t practical at the time.

However, I slowly see sites developing native apps (although having mobile versions of their sites coexist). For me, personally, if there is a site I go to often, I prefer to have the native app (presuming that it works well). In my imagination I see the web evolving in this way. HTML, JavaScript, PHP, RoR, among other programming languages are great for what they do. But without the current type of synergy with these tools that makes the web so unique and fresh over time, the environment for web development is pretty dull. Web standards are always being debated and there always seems to be issues with creating a new site that takes advantage of new web technologies.

If you take a look at the SDKs of other platforms, they can provide deep device integration along with tools that expand on possibilities of what you could develop solely on the web. However the web surfing environment on the computer has always felt like a separate space.

It’ll be interesting what type and form of web content will be considered as standard in the years to come.

For probably the first time in a VERY long time, I have decided to choose my next “main” desktop computer as a Windows machine. While most people update their computers every few years, I usually have bought a new computer every year.

My last computer was a 3.02GHz Intel Dual Core iMac 27″ which was bought about 2 years ago. Although the computer is still running okay, I cannot stand lag. Although I am a programmer at heart, I also all types of media development and editing (motion graphics, sound editing, etc). So while waiting for a redesign and spec bump in the iMac lineup, I ran into a gaming case, the Thermaltake Level 10 GT. For some strange reason, it just looked really geeky and attractive to my eyes.

Although I really love the way Apple delivers its products, I felt that I really wanted a machine that would let me do all the things I ever wanted to do on a computer with no hassle. And I also felt that I should start building my own things and upgrade things rather than buying and replacing (which has costed me many $$$$ along the years). This is when the idea to build a PC from scratch came about. The last PC I built was probably about 10 years ago, so I knew that there was a lot to learn IF I was going to take this approach. I looked into many forums (particularly Tom’s Hardware forum and Hardforum.com) and was shocked at the builds that PC enthusiasts are using. Although I had an initial budget of $2000 (including a new monitor), after putting all the parts I wanted together the price for my dream PC was around $6000.
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I’m not an absolute Apple fanatic (unlike other people at Manning) but we all today should be inspired by Steve Jobs. Char shared with me this article about an inspiring commencement speech Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 encouraging student to find their passion and set out to do it — and you will never regret it for one day. Words of wisdom we should all continue to follow.

A New interactive  HTML5 app aims to convey personalized messages in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster.  Google Japan teamed up with a dance troupe Pilobolous and the band OK Go to create a video dance messenger that works in Chrome.

You should open the link in Chrome, but for your convenience here is a video version:

The programmed  choreography is truly amazing, as is the way the dancers spell out your personal message that your enter when you first launch the application.

I can only imagine the time and creativity that went into creating this. You can read more about the making of All is Not Lost – then try adding your own message to the global forum.

“A Girl Story” is a unique new inspiration for a philanthropic campaign.  It’s based on a series of short animated YouTube clips that are seamlessly linked together.  The film series progressed scene by scene as donors made contributions to the Mahindra Foundation to help provide education to under-privileged girls.  This engagement is really an innovative alternative to the traditional passive video solicitation that non-profits have used in the past.

A new study demonstrates the rapidly increasing impact of smart phones on Internet browsing habits.  The Pew Research Center report shows that more than 40% of adult cell phone-users in America have a smart phone.  Surprisingly, a large number of these smart phone users prefer to go online using their smart phone rather than using a desktop or laptop computer.  25% report that their smart phone is their most common means of Internet access.

This growing trend will have a dramatic impact on online marketing strategies and the way web designers and developers build the next generation of web sites. Understanding how, when and why an end user surfs the Internet and engages with content is critically important to us, especially as smart phones become the web browsing platform of choice.

Post-graduation.

Our professors and advisors warned us to think ahead and be prepared for it, but there was no time to. There were too many thumbnails to sketch, too many emails to read, too many content dummies to print out and bind, too much sleep to catch up on. It almost didn’t matter to us, sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated 3^rd year art students, what was going to be going on in our lives two years from now in the thing called the “real world.” Some of us knew what we would like to be doing after college, but most of us had yet to figure out what we liked to draw best. Besides, two years away was still too far away. If college so far taught us anything, it was that about 43 minutes is enough for everything to change anyway.

But now it’s happened. Suddenly, my student ID doesn’t let me into my home the studio building anymore, I must pay the full price for student-discount art supplies, and the only new email in my inbox is the automated ad from GradPhotos hassling me to purchase the overexposed photo of me holding my BFA degree.

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One of the hardest things to do when you work in a creative field is to allow yourself to veer from a direct line of thought. New ideas come from unexpected places, and it’s hard to find the time to check those places when you’re on a strict deadline.

Looking back on our linear timeline of history, innovation seems obvious. Of course the Earth revolves around the Sun, of course we can fly, of course we’ll use cell phones to check Facebook on a daily basis. However, there is nothing more intimidating or terrifying than being sat down and told to be innovative on command. Businesses need to be increasingly creative to stay competitive in the current market. Often, this happens when someone from marketing is forcibly grabbed from their desk, locked into a room, and told to come up with the next biggest thing on the FaceTube.

This is hardly fair to the poor chap from marketing.

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Photo courtesy of Zagrev

The legal profession has been turned upside down by changes in technology, new competition, globalization and the recent recession.  Firms have been forced to rethink their business model, to reevaluate their practice areas, provide alternatives to hourly billing and implement new technology, all of which are radically changing the way law is practiced. But many firm websites don’t reflect these changes – and remain the same static law firm brochure websites of 10 years ago.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at these sites in conjunction with the work we do for our law-related clients and are truly surprised by what we see. While there’s some variation from site to site, we observed five troubling practices with these brochure style sites. Continue Reading →