2009 in Review

Wow, the second half of 2009 has just flown by. I'm obviously not blogging here as much as I used to, partly due to migrating the more personal stuff to Facebook and short stuff to Twitter.

Here's a recap of my year, based on my tweets:

• Bucs fire Gruden and Allen - Didn't like them, so I'm happy
• Steelers win the Super Bowl - Yes!
• N.Y. Times has a great visualization of tweets during the game
• Florida State Fair had "chocolate covered" bacon - it sucked
• Bill Reiss became the first Silverlight MVP
• Bucs cut Brooks, Dunn, June, Galloway, Hilliard - I give up on Bucs
• The St. Pete Times won a Pulitzer for The Girl in the Window
• We joined a chess club over the summer
• Cancer sucks
• Our family spent a lot of time on our First Lego League team
• I got to see my brother graduate from UF
• Facebook "punked" Techcrunch with a fake "Fax this photo" feature
• I'm still really impressed by Dropbox

In other news, we rejoined Disney's annual pass program this year. Their birthday program really hooked us. Still would rather be vacationing somewhere "real" but Disney World is still an amazingly well-run resort. It's getting old for us but it's still a decent vacation value.

Our peanut/legume/soy-allergic daughter has experimented with eating gluten-free with some good success. That really deserves a longer write-up than this. Maybe soon.

Work is about as good as can be, given the economy. We're certainly doing better than a lot of companies.

Finally, five-ish things from 2009 you really should read:

1. Get Excited and Make Things
2. Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
3. There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.
   
4. How I Did It: From $7 and Hour to Coaching Major League Baseball MVPs
5. The Great American Bubble Machine / Obama's Big Sellout

More Free WiFi - Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble just added free wifi for many of their stores, including all of the Tampa locations. I'd love to see Borders follow suit, but not very hopeful.

Besides all the local Panera Breads, I know of free wifi at Atlanta Bread, and most Hillsborough County library locations. I think the Tampa Ale House in Carrollwood and Bar Louie at International Plaza still have free wifi as well.

Tools I Use: Readability

A while ago, I found Readability, an online tool that reformats almost any web page to be more readable. One click of the browser bookmarklet and Readability strips the page down to just the text, in a standard font size, in black on a white background. No more tiny fonts, unreadable color combinations, or annoying blinking sidebar ads.

For example, it takes this:



and turns it into this:

Tools I Use: Dropbox

I'm becoming a big fan of Dropbox. At first glance, it's an online backup service. But it also synchronizes files between computers, keeps a revision history, shares files/folders between Dropbox users, and shares files/photos online. Plus it's cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). It's like the Google GDrive that has never materialized.

It's practically replaced my USB flash drives. No more digging in my laptop bag, worrying about safely removing the drive, forgetting to take the flash drive with me, or finding a flash drive in the clothes dryer. No more worrying about forgetting to back up all those LOLCats photoshops.

Since I work on several computers during the week, this has saved me a lot of time and trouble. No more having to remember to email myself that document to review. No more wondering if I have the latest copy of the readme file I'm editing. No more wrestling with Windows file sharing at home. 

Their 50 gigabyte plan is $9/month, or the 2 gigabyte plan is free. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes of free storage.

Obama Team and Social Norms

An interesting article on how the Obama team pulled off a very successful "get out the vote" campaign. Their winner? A simple phrase: "A record turnout is expected". 

Wow. That's the same Robert Cialdini and his descriptive social norm I heard about over two years ago. 

The basic idea is that "everybody is doing it" is much more powerful than "you ought to do it". We use it every time we ask somebody else if they're going to X's party, if they're contributing to their 401k, if they're tithing, if they're on Facebook, etc. 

Robert Cialdini's book is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials).

Everyone is buying it.