webslog

Sleeping with my iPhone and My Favorite CES Find

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:48:00 -0600

Back from CES means back to a regular work schedule and, more importantly, a regular sleep schedule. My “sleep hygiene” really suffered the week I spent in Vegas, a fact that was made abundantly clear to me thanks to my favorite find at CES, Zeo’s Sleep Manager Mobile.

Zeo uses a comfortable, lightweight headband that tracks the brain’s electrical activity as I sleep and sends the data via Bluetooth to my iPhone where it’s crunched and visualized in a simple, well-designed app. When I wake up, the app displays the sleep I got (or didn’t get) in an easy-to-read graph.

Red bars indicate awakeness (bad), light sleep, R.E.M. sleep and deep sleep. In my first week with the Zeo, I can already see the that I’m not sleeping well at all.

Because the headband is transmitting data every five minutes to the iPhone, Zeo should be plugged in to ensure it gathers a full night’s data … not a problem (WARNING: unsubtle product placement ahead) as Griffin makes any number of power solutions including our 3-Meter USB Dock Cable (Available as an accessory purchase in the Zeo online store.) I wake up with a treasure trove of sleep data AND a fully charged iPhone. Everybody wins.

Zeo supports the product with an online sleep tracker and an informative blog (blog.myzeo.com). But the real Secret Sauce for me it the fact that it integrates with my Runkeeper data. I’ve been tracking my running progress for the last 13 months using the Runkeeper app. Adding sleep data is a big deal as I can draw correspondences between sleep and my running. Turns out that Runkeeper and ZEO are both Boston-based tech start-ups who have something of a mutual admiration for each other. I love it when my stuff plays well with others.

I’ve been amazed at the motivating power of data in my running efforts … tracking my total distance, pace, etc. is finally showing that I’m improving. I’m looking forward to watching the same happen with my sleep.

(Full disclosure: I received a sample unit at CES last week. Did that influence the outcome of this review? Maybe. But if the product had stunk (and it didn’t) I would have said so. It’s how I roll.)

On the value of the off-balance mind

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:15:22 -0600

As I’m about to head out to run, I’m realizing that 2011 is closing much as it opened … A sunny cool day during which I spent the morning learning something new. Last year, it was running. This year it’s playing the ukulele.

As I’ve strummed my way through this week trying to figure out how people cram all their fingers into an area the size of a postage stamp, I’m in fifth grade again, learning to play the clarinet. It took a week to get a sound out of the thing. It took a month to get a scale and Hot Cross Buns. I wasn’t frustrated at the time, because I had no preconceived notions of how it was supposed to be. I just knew that eventually, I wanted to be good enough at this thing that I could play The Pink Panther Theme.

I guess what I’m getting at is trying to play the ukulele pushes me outside the lines I normally color within. Just like developing film this summer did. Or learning to run over the past year. And I’m trying to become comfortable in the discomfort of not knowing how to do something.

And rather than trying to hurry through the learning-how parts, I’m trying to bring focus and intent to the wibbly-wobbly part that happens before you learn how to do something.

Maybe that’s something like a resolution. Or maybe that’s just learning to get out of the way of what the mind wants.

Run facefirst into the Winter Solstice

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:58:03 -0600

This Thursday, 22nd December, is the winter solstice, the day when the night is the longest. In ancient times, our forebears would observe all manner of dramatic rituals … huge bonfires, virgin sacrifices, fanstastical savior birth narratives, making gifts of heavy inedible cakes. Anything to beat back the wolves of Death and Darkness from the door.

This year, I’m saying “Fuck you” to death and darkness and running face first out into the unknown. I’ve always felt that I was trying to outrun a kind of death when I run. Not capital D death, which is inevitable and possibly our greatest journey of all. I’m talking about what the Bene Gesserit called the “little-death that brings total obliteration” … fear.

I don’t know when my time will come. But I’ll be damned if I’m just going to let myself, my brain, my spirit just sort of relax/laze/slip effortlessly into the emotional stasis that signals the beginning of the end.

We never know if the light at the end of the tunnel is that of delivery or an oncoming train. But waiting on it can’t be an option. Death will come some day, too swiftly, too suddenly, too unexpectedly. But the Little-Death that hangs around in our psychic dark corners is a snivelling, sneaky little fucker who hates action, hates resolve, is terrified by change.

There is a promise buried deep in the shank of the longest night of the year … that it’s only one night long. And that immediately after the clock ticks over to midnight, the days become longer, the nights become shorter. Little-death goes crawling back to the cesspool that bred it.

So fuck you, Little-Death, I’m going for a run. Catch me if you can, asshole.

First blood! Next stop, toenail loss. #destroymybodylikeaboss

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:16:02 -0600

First blood! Next stop, toenail loss. #destroymybodylikeaboss

Steve Jobs had designs on melting your toddler's brains with the iPad

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:01:00 -0500

The Unofficial Apple Weblog reacts to a report just published by Common Sense Media. The study examined tablet and video game usage is the under-eight set.

In part:

Common Sense Media suggests 20% of parent use a mobile device to keep their child entertained so they can get some errands done.

Where this post breaks down - and where most blog posts that are commentary on a news item break down - is in failing to clearly demarcate where the facts/data leave off and opinion picks up.

Common Sense Media is sort of like the Pew Internet Life project … the data they gather are presented in an essentially value-neutral format (we asked x people y question. Z responded.) I have come to trust their data and recommendations because the information is presented in a level-headed, straightforward manner.

I think the post’s author wanders off the data path and into opinion as she opens he 2nd graf. “These mobile devices have a darker side though.” Without a “We believe” or “I think”, the reader might reasonably be led to believe that the two grafs that follow are part of the Common Sense Media release. In fact, no such positions are put forth in the study itself.

Further, if the “darker side” portion was attributable to someone at Common Sense Media as a reaction/response to the study, that should have been made clear.

If this post is picked up and used without some form of clarification, we are just a few news cycles away from this being reported as “Common Sense Media decries the dark side of technology.” (And don’t even imagine what the punditocracy will do with it then :) )

I don’t in any way begrudge the author her right/job of putting forth an opinion on the research. In fact, I agree with her assertion that “the line of appropriate usage will become even more difficult for parents to define.” But analysis/opinion pieces, and their readers, are served best when the lines between data-driven fact and opinion are clearly visible to the reader.

Hyper-focused attribution has always been a thin bright line for journalists. It should become more of one for bloggers.

Candy Golde covers Paul Simon's "Boy in The Bubble."

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:44:46 -0500

Candy Golde covers Paul Simon's "Boy in The Bubble.":

Happy Birthday, Paul.

On Facebook, No One Knows You're Dead

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:30:46 -0500

Sooooo, Facebook keeps suggesting I add, as a Friend, a person who is dead. Which raises a couple of questions:

Assuming no supernatural intervention, who is it that actually Confirms my request to be a friend?
If I don’t take FB up on its suggestion, is that denying the friendship we had (have)?
Why, having declined the suggestion several times, does Facebook continue to suggest them as a friend once every couple of months?

I know the answers to these questions, of course. But as Facebook’s Lifecloud grows, deaths and how they’re handled will inevitably present new challenges for the web platform.

Bibi and Ben

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:38:04 -0500

Bibi and Ben

Harvey, Resthaven Cemetery, Franklin, Tennessee

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:35:18 -0500

Harvey, Resthaven Cemetery, Franklin, Tennessee

if this then that - super awesome robot butler on the web.

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:51:39 -0500

if this then that - super awesome robot butler on the web.:

Webmacros. Awesome. WIth a user community building recipes by the hour, IFTTT makes something happen in your web world when you make something else happen.

Post to instagram and autosave a copy to Dropbox. Back up tweets as their tweeted. Lots of cool stuff. Think this could rock and looking forward to playing with it this weekend.

All of your digital life are belong to Zuck.

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:22:15 -0500

This is a meditation on Facebook, memory and time.

Workmate and social media phenom Dave Delaney discusses the impact that Facebook’s Timeline (and Facebook in general) are leading to the shift from personal blogs like this one to something completely different. It’s absolutely worth a read.

What I wonder is if the idea of digital legacy is all that different from one’s non-digital legacy. Here’s what I mean.

We have two lockers full of color slides my Grandfather (maternal) shot over his 65 years as the Eakin family patriarch. They are well-filed, and with the exception of the fact that physical slides can’t hold the metadata and findability that digital files can, they’re more or less as accessible as the first entries from webslog.com. That is to say, I am no more or less likely to drag out a slide viewer and queue up the 1972 trip out to the Grand Canyon than I am to look at what I thought about books I read in 2003.

On the flip side, we have maybe three shoeboxes full of slides from my father’s side of the family. They were just less thorough documentarians than my Mom’s family. In both cases, the existence of this content only really “matters” in that it could be looked at if we wanted to look at it.

What allows us to do that is the common format … Little celluloid strips in paper frames. As physical manifestations of a memory, they can be experienced by anyone with a lightbulb and a magnifying glass. What concerns me most in this discussion of digital legacy is less the where … Facebook, myspace, posterous, etc. … and more the how. We haven’t had to recall a piece of digital content 75 years after it happened.

Too, the field is so new that the battle over standards is still being fought. TIFF files may be the true gold standard in uncompressed digital image files now, but one only need look at the evolution of the PDF over 15 years to know that even the most established formats are just one CEO away from a total revamp. As content creators, we have a responsibility to our digital estate to do the sometimes boring work of data warehousing.

We must download our Facebook data. We must seek out apps that grab our tumblr feeds and store them over to a piece of media that we physically control. But at the same time, the creator community needs to constantly look at the basic formats we store in and make sure that we can look at them, manipulate the content, etc. Ansel Adams shot on wet plates. Over time, however, the his estate has taken his fragile legacy and moved it over to both celluloid slides and digital for this very reason.

Like any legacy, who we were digitally speaking is precious and important. It’s also tremendously fragile … something we’d do well to remember as we watch companies like Facebook and Google strive to become the connective tissue of our digital life.

36:51 - final time on last weekend's 5K

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:32:24 -0500

Chip time was 36:51, pace of 12:05, placed 28th of 35 in my age bracket. That’s TT improvement of 2:12 and a pace improvement of 25 sec./mile. FEEEAAAAAR ME!

Tuesday Tips: How to Make Portraits of Strangers

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:16:09 -0500

Tuesday Tips: How to Make Portraits of Strangers:

Great advice whether you’re a photojournalist or jut trying to move beyond your crippling fear of shooting people.

Du Hast - Rammstein. Accordion, and plastic bucket.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:20:00 -0500

Du Hast - Rammstein. Accordion, and plastic bucket.

The Model, on an accordion.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:17:00 -0500

The Model, on an accordion.

The Love Drums.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:56:39 -0500

The Love Drums.

GOP vs. Tea Party - The Battle for Conservator

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:25:27 -0500

CNN reports “GOP split down the middle over tea party support.” GOP Will Eat Itself? #punsmixingpoliticsandmusic

It is an odd world we live in today. Wire taps, no-fly lists,...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:56:48 -0500

It is an odd world we live in today. Wire taps, no-fly lists, GPS records from our phones can be used as evidence. And in the flipside, I can see precisely where my Mom’s flight back from San Diego is at any time. We live in a fortress made of glass and funhouse mirrors — brittle, transparent, distorted and endlessly disorienting.

"I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, painting, in the tragic blank..."

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:19:47 -0500

“I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, painting, in the tragic blank space in our souls that this event has left behind. Of course, this preoccupation is largely a result of an unconscious bias of the media. If pig farmers had as much currency with NPR as literary novelists, we would be hearing just as much about the healing power of bacon.”

- John Hodgman, excerpt from a reading he did 25 Sept 01. Clipped from NcSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Google sez carbon footprint of 3 days YouTube vids = manufacture of 1 DVD in jewel box.

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:08:21 -0500

Google sez carbon footprint of 3 days YouTube vids = manufacture of 1 DVD in jewel box.:

So every time you send a Michelle Bachman autotuned video, or force me to watch the extended 3 hour megamix of nyancat, God kills a pony, a tree gets knocked down, and Dick Cheney drinks the tears of babies. SO stop sending me stuff. Unless it’s awesome.