The AONC blog just posted “The One-Year, Alternative Graduate School Program”. It’s a pretty good read and fits in well with other things I’m doing anyway. In particular I had not considered using podcasts as a way to learn a foreign language. I think I’m going to give that a try.

Guess I’m a little slow on the update sometimes. Case in point: my FaceBook news feed. It turns out that if you want to see your news feed on your Windows Phone you just go to the contacts thing (People Hub?) and then go to What’s new to the right (drag your finger from right to left). Viola – news about your friend. If you friends like or comment on your stuff it will show up in the Me tile.

I just saw that there is a FaceBook client for Windows Phone in beta. I’m not sure I care, it looks like the same client for Android and iOS, so it won’t really take advantage of the way this phone works. That kinda sucks and is lame. I’ll probably skip it and just work with what is already built in.

Perhaps not explained, but I provide an analogy to help you move on and get over the missing Start button.

Most Americans drive cars. We are comfortable in cars. It does not matter what type of car we get in to; we got it. Cars are a lot like the previous generations of Windows. The turn signal is here, I setup my printer there, gas pedal is on the right and the brake is to the left. Windows 8 isn’t like that. Windows 8 is like a motorcycle. Nothing is where you expect it to be. The throttle (not a gas pedal) is in your right hand and so is the brake! You shift gears with your left hand and foot. What the @#$^!@#^!????

To me the issue comes from Microsoft trying to be consistent. When they created the ‘modern UI’ or Metro as the replacement for classic windows they should have changed the name too. Nobody whined that much when Apple killed Finder and shipped OS/X. You don’t hear about people whining about the lack of a start button on their iPad or iPhone. Why not? Because they didn’t expect there to be one. But because Microsoft called it Windows they expected that cute little button down in the left bottom corner.

Whatever.

Now that I have a Surface a Windows Phone 8 and my workstation running Windows 8 I’m finding a lot of cool shit going on. Zune, now called Xbox Music imported all of the music on my workstation without any fuss. Then it offered to sync up my workstation’s library with the cloud so my phone would be able to play the same stuff.

The synchronization apparently works by comparing the metadata of the music files on my hard drive with the Zune library (yeah I know – Xbox music) and marking in a database that I own that song. This obviously is conjecture but it wouldn’t be that difficult to pull off if I knew the Zune (yeah I know – Xbox music) api.

So this means that I’ll be moving back from Amazon Music to Zune (…). My only wish is that the Playlist editor in Windows 8 Music was better. It kinda blows hairy goat ballz. Sorry guys but it does.

On the phone I’m really not missing the Facebook client. The people app does everything I need quite well and if I must see Facebook I have the web client. Also, I can post updates to Twitter and Facebook at the same time.

The voice recognition on my phone is also kick ass. I’m still getting used to using it, but for texting people it is too easy.

One wish I do have is that they integrate Kinect in to Windows 8. I have large displays that will never be touch enabled. But I see no reason the Kinect couldn’t make that irrelevant. I should be able to gesture and wave my way around just using the Kinect. If I had the time I’d start working on it myself.

I love software development and I really enjoy the jobs that I do. It’s really easy for me to let computers, technology and the internet completely consume me and fill up all of my time. It’s almost effortless. The various gigs I pick up always have just one more thing that I can do.

Working from home also throws in another twist. On one hand I have a great deal of freedom. I don’t waste time commuting to an office, people can’t just walk in and interrupt me, and there are other little perks. For instance I drive my daughters to school in the morning with the dogs in the car with me. I can run to the store to pick up stuff for dinner. It rocks.

On the downside: I’m always at work. I can get myself in to cycles where I’m checking email every 10 minutes, then checking web-sites and so on. I start early in the morning usually before 6 and will sometimes still be working on ‘stuff’ as late as midnight. Weekends? I just need to write this unit test and that’s all. Worse, I also have personal projects I want to work on that also involve the computer.

As you can imagine, it is easy for me to end up living in my office. And if you had the setup I have you wouldn’t want to leave either. However, I do have a family, pets that require my affectionate attention and I have hobbies the need some of my time too.

How do you manage it? With effort and choices. However, before trying to solve all the problems I’ll layout to resources I’ve discovered that have helped me better manage my work day.

I found this on life hacker and it just makes too much sense to me. My job is not to run outlook, but it’s really easy to spend too much time in it. In the past the first thing I would do is check email in the morning. Now, I wait until 10a. I have Skype and Lync running, my cell phone is right here so if somebody really needs me I’m easy to reach. I check email 2 more times as suggested, the rest of the time it’s off. I’ve turned off sounds and alerts for email. I don’t care. I already know what I need to do. If there is something urgent I’ll get a call of an IM.

Next is organizing what I’m actually doing for the day. I actually tend to do this as I wrap up the previous day. Depending upon what is going on I might end up with only 1 thing to do (program) , occasionally there are several, but I’m careful about prioritizing the tasks so the most important is what gets done first.

For me to get away with what I do I have to deliver which means this is probably the most important thing. Every day I need to be able to tell people what I got done. Just working on stuff doesn’t cut it. Real tangible progress on the projects I’m running has to be delivered. If that doesn’t happen the gig is up and I’ll wind up back in a cubicle farm.

Finally, start the day at 0800, take an hour lunch somewhere (I tend to wait until 1300) and then shutdown at 1730.

After I’m shutdown we’re done. I might be in my office but I’m not working on work stuff. I’m screwing around, training or working on personal project. I get out and spend time with my family too.

When the weekend rolls around – it’s the same deal. No email, no work related stuff.

Also, my smartphone is hooked up to my personal email. My employer does provide a small allowance for my phone but it does not cover everything. They also have fairly strict security requirements that I do not like, as such: no corporate email on my phone.

The next little jewel came from Seth Godin. I forget the entire background but it’s along the lines of starting your business while still working (read it years ago, but have the notes still hanging on my board). The points he made were (I’ve adjusted them to my purposes):

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ‘spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading, commuting, wasting time on Facebook and meetings.

2. Spend those 120 minutes doing this instead:

a. Exercise for 30 minutes

b. Read relevant non-fiction (business books, blogs about startups, etc)

c. Learn new stuff (spreadsheet macros, photoshop, graphic design, etc)

d. Volunteer

e. Blog/write about something you’ve learned

3. Spend at least 1 weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with your family and friends

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

In my case I watch only 2 or 3 TV shows a week. My time has mostly come from cutting out internet stuff (email, forums, facebook, youtube). It’s amazing how much time you can waste on LOL Cats and watching fail videos on youtube.

I’m investing my time in learning to program against Facebook’s API, learning my way around Microsoft Azure and Windows Phone 8. I have no idea where this will take me but I’m sure it will be fun.

The theme of all of this is to put boundaries around the things you spend your time on. Focus your time so that it is as productive for you as possible. Then focus your leisure time to be as leisurely as possible.

Enjoy

References:

The original post on LifeHacker that the picture came from can be found here: http://lifehacker.com/5161561/simple-guidelines-for-workday-quality-over-quantity

And Seth Godin’s post about Effort is here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/10/is-effort-a-myt.html

Been an insane year – might be getting back to blogging. Ha…as if.

So I have an idea for a mobile application that uses GPS. Before I invest time in building the real thing I’m going to prototype it on the web using html and javascript. Who knows…maybe that will be good enough to go all the way.

First thing to learn is how to get the phone’s location. Initially I thought this would require real programming (everybody knows real programming is done with a real language like C,C++,C# or Java not one of those baby languages like VB, Javascript or *gag* Python). However, it turns out I was wrong. Those nice people at W3C have already specified that the browser should have this nice geolocation object that offers methods for either getting the location (call once) or watching the position (keeps calling back with the location). Sweet!

Anyway this nice person wrote a decent sample you can look at here. You’ll need to provide two div (output & location) to show information. I killed the geturl stuff and just threw the lat & long on my page. My initial application just needs to know where the phone is, there isn’t any mapping.

The next piece I’m working on, just for fun, uses Google gears to go ahead and show the map. I’m still working on that step.

You can see my progress here.

Once I’m done I’ll provide my prototyping code. Should have what I’m after by the end of the weekend.

Right now I’m working on a project that has provided me another opportunity to work with a Usability Engineer. He’s pretty damn good at and it’s a lot of fun watching him work. Although his documentation makes mine look like crap in comparison. Jerk.

Anyway, I forget where I got the reference, but I just watch this documentary called Objectified. Three things I’d like to say about it. First, the documentary itself is well worth watching. It is an hour or so long, covers a lot and provides a bounty in food for thought. Second, Amazon’s Instant Video rocks. If you happen to subscribe to prime you can watch the movie for free right now. So subscribe to prime. Finally, it works great on the XOOM! Only complaint about the XOOM is that the speakers could be a lot better. Easily solved with a pair of headphones.

Anyway, if you’re a software developer and have to create UI’s give Objectified a watch.

The next thing I want is more material on Personas and Scenarios.

I really like my Zune, cracked screen and all. 120Gb of storage and the Zune subscription is pretty darn good. However, new toys mean it is time to move on. Move on to Android.

Yesterday, I bought a Motorola XOOM (Wi-Fi only) to go with my DROID X. The DROID has a 32Gb card which as it turns out is plenty of room for the music I listen to and a month’s worth of RMS podcasts. Only problem: playlists. The playlist feature on the droid sorta stinks. Not that the Zune player does all that well.

So at this point it looks like I’ll be leaving my Zune at home. The phone will take over it’s job.

Another win for me is that having bought the XOOM I broke down and rooted the droid so that I can run Wireless Tether. Previously I was using PDANet via a USB cable. Now – just start Wireless Tether and my laptop and tablet have internet access. Oorah!

Next little win: Evernote. I’m still learning my way around it, but it does a great job letting me take notes on my phone, table, laptop or workstation and then keeping them all in sync. That’s pretty sweet in my opinion. I still have a huge amount of information stored in OneNote and don’t really expect that Evernote will replace OneNote, but it will do nicely for letting me take notes in a meeting and them be able to review them later.

And still more cool stuff – I have a NookColor and a few Kindles….Well, both are available for Android so my XOOM tablet can download both libraries. The NookColor is going to get rooted and have HoneyComb installed as soon as it is available. I want the regular Android marketplace on my Nook, not the lame B&N marketplace. Sorry guys….but you’re still kicking M$FT’s ass – you at least have a marketplace.

Finally, a little project for this weekend is going to be seeing if I can get a simple WPF application running on my XOOM. Should be an interesting project.

Why? Why? Why doesn’t Microsoft have a marketplace for Windows? How friggin hard could it be? Those pointy toed shoe wearing dorks at Apple seems to have figured it out for their crummy phone. The morlocks at Google seem to be doing it pretty well for Android. Even that redheaded step child Windows Phone7 has a freaking marketplace.

Part of the success of Windows has always been developers and the huge number of applications available. What has really made the iPhone and Android phones successful is their marketplaces. The phones themselves are nice, but not really all that great. Until you can load apps, smart phones are pretty dumb.

For an entrepreneurial developer like myself I’m really attracted to the iPhone and Android platform because of their marketplaces. Those marketplaces represent an easily accessible distribution channel for my products. It means marketing is easier, meaning that the distance between my hard work and getting paid for it is that much shorter. I can tell prospective customers: go to the marketplace and buy my application.

However, I have mad skills on Windows. I can’t just tell the guy I meet at Starbucks to download my application from the Windows marketplace. I have to tell him to go to my web-site and get it there. You think he is going to remember my URL for more than 15 seconds? He’ll remember the Windows Marketplace. Not my URL. I don’t care if my URL was yomomma.com. He isn’t going to remember. He’ll remember Windows Marketplace or app store. End of story.

So what am I to do? Wish the Ballmer would just friggin retire, get BillG to quit screwing around and comeback to save his company. Or Microsoft needs to hire a technical person to run the show. Not another friggin MBA type. Somebody who has a vision that goes beyond the tip of his nose. And while they are at it: fire all those friggin directions and VPs from IBM that they have been hiring. They are killing it!

While I wait for that to happen: I’m going to start learning how to get .NET code to run on Android.

Really glad I’m not a professional blogger.

Last time I posted was back in July.  In the past 3 months I got myself a concussion on the race track, developed a huge amount of CRM integration code taken up shooting (both hand guns and rifles) and I’ve been helping a startup get their web-site going.

The little stunt on the race track has me off the bike until next year (I’m counting the days).  The concussion was pretty serious and having your wife have to meet the ambulance at the hospital is never good.  So for now I’m doing something much safer: working on my marksmanship.

If things will settle down I have a huge amount of stuff that needs to be written that I’d like to put here.  For the past 2 months I have been working 50-60 hour weeks.  Occasionally more.  But it looks like it will all slow down over the holidays so I’ll get a nice break.

Hope everybody else is having as much fun as I am.

I thought I had the comment spam problem cured.  I thought wrong.

So no more comments.  Wanna comment: get your own blog, put your comment there and link to my post.  It will create a trackback that will show up over here.

Or hit me on my twitter feed – jakew there as well.