Brian McNitt’s Blog

It’s that time of year. Time for the obligatory top 10 list. Walking home from getting coffee this morning I tried to think of the most memorable personal events of 2007. Here’s what came to mind. In chronological order…

1. Ironman 70.3 Hawaii. One of six triathlons I did this year. It was a tough day but was a memorable experience to race in Hawaii and to spend time with friends on the Big Island. (Thankfully, the sunburn has mostly healed.)

2. TrendMedia office. This year TrendMedia made the leap from home-based business to a office in downtown San Francisco. While web developers can work from anywhere, I admit it’s nice to work more directly with others and to have a place to call “there”.

3. Santa Barbara Triathlon. Highlights were the beautiful surroundings and the opportunity to spend quality time with my mom who came from Chicago to see the race. Would like to do this again. (Could even skip the racing part.)

4. Alcatraz 100 (Swim of the Centurions). My second swim from Alcatraz. Somehow I thought it would be easier than the first. Hmmm. Tough swim but great weather and post-race breakfast with friends made for a memorable day. (Right: Nicole tends to Fred’s minor injuries.)

5. Birth of Miles Prescott Grover. Born Tuesday, September 4, at 7:58 am. Congratulations to friends Traci and Jojo! Miles’ blog.

6. Fred and Nicole’s engagement. Congratulations to friends Fred and Nicole! (Fred found a caregiver.)

7. Meditation class at IMC. The most significant thing I did for myself this year. Surprise. It’s not triathlon or technology related.

8. GTD. Consider me late to the party. David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity came out in December 2002 but I didn’t get around to reading it until this year. In fact, I cheated and downloaded the audio book from iTunes. Applying the GTD principles and Merlin Mann’s Inbox-Zero approach has given me a framework for getting more done with less stress in every area of life.

9. First marathon. A classmate in grade school once told me that I “run like a Chester”. I never understood the reference but it was clear that someone who ran like a Chester was clearly a poor runner. Despite being a triathlete, I’ve always felt like a Chester on the run course. Thus, training for my first marathon this Fall was a big deal. While I’m still no Prefontaine, the training and race was a challenging and rewarding experience, and I managed to finish the marathon in under four hours. (So, Adam F., wherever you are, who’s the Chester now?)

10. Christmas in Chicago. Spending time with family. What’s more important?

What were your highlights in 2007? Looking for some inspiration for the coming year.
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and great 2008!

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mcnitt, trendmedia, 2007, top-10, highlights

We just had a bit of a shaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Magnitude 5.6
to be exact. No damage here but it was certainly felt across the twittersphere.
You know you’re a technology geek when…

Neat to see the real time responses, and glad everyone is alright. Picture
below of the shake map.

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5.6, earthquake, twitter, twitterrific, san francisco, trendmedia, mcnitt

“Good boy!” TrendMedia and GuideDogs.com win the Web Marketing Association’s 2007 Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Website Development. Wow, that’s a mouthful. Bottom line, it was a fun project to work on and at the end of the day one of those projects that really makes you feel good about what you do. Three cheers for accessibility and a big tail wagging congratulations to everyone at Guide Dogs for the Blind for their efforts in creating such a great resource for the blind and visually impaired community. Award well deserved.

Learn more about the Guide Dog’s web project on Brian McNitt’s Blog — Guide Dogs, TrendMedia, Accessibility in News.

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It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco once again and my windows are rattling from the Blue Angels flying overhead. Scott Beale from Laughing Squid says that an Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world, will be flying over SF today as well.

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In 1283, Zen master Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen School in Japan, wrote a cookbook in which he encouraged readers to cultivate mindfulness through simple kitchen chores like washing rice and kneading dough. How to Cook Your Life is a documentary film filmed at the Scheibbs Buddhist center in Austria and the San Francisco Zen Center which follows cooking classes by Zen teacher Edward Brown. Entertaining, practical, and full of humor, Brown applies Dogen’s ancient Buddhist principles to modern day cooking, life and thought. Check out the preview.

How to Cook Your Life opens on Friday, October 26 at the Lankmark Theatre at Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and other theaters across the country shortly thereafter.

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zen, cooking, health, humor, movies, mcnitt

1. Marathon. Signed up and training for my first marathon (Dec. 2).
2. Veggie experiment. First two weeks eating vegetarian. What it’s like.
3. Learning Vipassana. (Meditation). Podcast-curious to first sitting.
4. No coffee, tea. Two weeks trading the bean for green tea.
5. Ironman in 2008. Yes, no, maybe?

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vegetarianism, marathon, coffee, tea, ironman, buddhism, vipassana, mcnitt

Everyone loves a good story. I think that “iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It”, the autobiography of Steve Wozniak qualifies.

(Pictured below: Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I computer. I would say that Apple’s image has come a long way.)

Being a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to buying new books, I’ve waited for over a year for the paperback edition of iWoz to be released, but when I found iWoz available as an audio book from iTunes, I downloaded it immediately and listed to it virtually non-stop over the course of two days. The book is an absolute thrill-ride of the geekiest proportions and brought me back to the days of my first computer. (It was an Apple IIe with a green monochrome monitor, 80 column video card, not one but two 5.25″ floppy drives — perfect for copying and sharing early computer games, and an Apple dot matrix printer.) I wonder where it’s at today?

Many of the events detailed in iWoz are also recounted in Pirates of Silicon Valley, a must-see movie for any computer geek on either side of the PC / Apple divide.

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What other product besides the holiday release of Cabbage Patch Kids back in the 80’s has had so many people act so nuts? People camping in line on the streets, tech and popular press headlines dominated by the iPhone for months, hackers going to war with Apple, people with signs outside of T-Mobile offering to unlock iPhones, Apple developers fighting back. It’s all so crazy…

…and I love it. I’m so happy to be able to say twenty years from now that I got an iPhone on day one, paid full boat for it, got the $100 refund (grievance money), and grinned while watching WebbAlert on my bus ride home from work each day, amidst the global maelstrom of controversy that surrounded the phone on so many levels. Honestly, it’s more fun than anyone should be allowed to have.

I haven’t hacked my iPhone to install third party applications nor do I plan to for the moment. I feel bad for those who “bricked” their phones as a result of the iPhone 1.1.1 software update but fall more in the camp of, “you knew it was a closed Apple and AT&T platform before you bought it, so if you hacked it and now it doesn’t work, it’s your own darn fault.” That said, I understand there are ways to recover an iBrick and restore the phone back to factory Apple / AT&T settings or even back to it’s hacked state. (Google is your friend here.)

For the developers in the crowd, there are SO many ways to unleash the power of the iPhone with AJAX enabled web applications, or web/desktop PC hybrid applications. IMHO, developers could be far more creative on this front. Cali Lewis highlights one such hybrid application, Signal, in the latest episode of GeekBrief. She even paid $25 for it! Plus, with web based applications, there is the advantage of creating a single application that can be deployed to all mobile devices, not just the iPhone.

My (unsolicited) short-term advice to Apple: create an application that allows users to create home screen icons and link those icons to any website URL. This way, web apps become more integrated into the iPhone and developers are encouraged to create web based versus embedded iPhone applications.

Apple (specifically Steve Jobs) has a track record for listening to user feedback and anticipating the market. I’m confident that the iPhone platform or similar future Apple devices will open up in the future. I advise patience.

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iphone, apple, controversy, hack, webbalert, mcnitt

On a recent trip to Chicago I went see “Niki in the Garden“, a show by Niki de Saint Phalle, at the Garfield Park Conservatory with my Mom. Sculptures covered with ceramic mosaics, mirrors, glass, and semi-precious stones depict brilliantly colored animals, mythical creatures, “Nanas”, sports figures, and more. The Niki in the Garden show runs through October 31, 2007. If you are in Chicago this fall definitely check it out.

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Computing is rapidly evolving to encompass every area of our lives. Given this, how do we identify skillful and unskillful relationships with technology? How do we distinguish when technology is improving our experience verses detracting from it? What are the benchmarks? Like Tron, I picture technology marketers as the blue team, the buying public as the “gold” team. We’re speeding along, but how critically are we evaluating the path?

Thanks to my friend Geoff Barnes for forwarding these videos inspiring the conversation over IM this morning.

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microsoft, surface computing, apple, future, tron, barnes, mcnitt

Excellent.

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hoover, vacuum, star wars, chewbacca, youtube, humor, mcnitt

“The USDA grossly underfunds the healthiest foods while pouring billions into a farm bill that supports many of the foods its dietary recommendations warn against.”

An interesting perspective on the USDA 2007 Farm Bill by Scott Kahan of The Baltimore Sun. Read the complete article, “Why Americans Keep Getting Fatter”, at AlterNet.

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health, fitness, food, obesity, farming, triathlon, mcnitt

Workout-wise, Wednesdays are tough since they generally include some form of tempo running, a run at near maximum sustainable effort. Today I had to do a one hour and fifteen minute run with fifty minutes at tempo. Oye. I was pretty sure that running back and forth along Chrissy Field wouldn’t provide enough of a distraction, so I decided to try running across the Golden Gate Bridge for part of the workout. Besides a bit more car exhaust and the need to leap around a few large groups of camera-happy tourists, running across the bridge was pretty nice. Very cool to live in a place where you can include one of the seven wonders of the world as part of your lunchtime run.

(Photo of running path and bridge available for purchase from Miriam Grebe Images.)

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running, run, san francisco, golden gate bridge, triathlon, mcnitt

A great sign I saw on the bus today. “Turn OFF Your TV & Turn On a Healthy Lifestyle!” The San Francisco MUNI Community Health bus poster features three drawings, one by a Presidio Middle School 7th Grader, one by a Chinese Education Center 5th Grader, and one by an Ida B. Wells High School 11th Grader.

Yes, that’s the spirit!

Will see if I can get a better picture of it.

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san francisco, muni, health, tv, fitness, triathlon, mcnitt

Well, it’s official — TrendMedia has moved from its original offices (a desk in my kitchen) to 1 Sutter Street, the Flatiron Building, Suite 201. (The food isn’t as good but the view is definitely better.) I look out onto the Citicorp Center plaza and the e-Trade building at the corner of Sutter, Sansome, and Market.

Since I no longer have a refrigerator and four-burner stove within immediate reach, I assume I’ll be eating out more. If you’re downtown and want to grab lunch sometime, definitely give me a shout.

(Photo: By Joost Bossuyt)

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