Shane Life

Today, I was really fortunate to go to the Big Omaha conference that was put on by Silicon Prairie News. As soon as I heard about it, I started lobbying my manager to send me, so I could listen to the likes of Jason Fried from 37signals, Matt Mullenweg from Automattic (the creators of Wordpress), Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless and the king of internet wine shows, Gary Vaynerchuk.

It was a terrific day as Jason Fried kicked us off and talked about what became a common theme for the day, failure. While there were others who thought that failure was a good thing, Fried felt similarly to the way I did:

When did “fail early and often” become cool? - Jason Fried

What followed after Fried was a Yahoo guy a presentation about Girls in Tech and Micah Baldwin, who talked at length about failure. We headed over to lunch across the street where Ramsey, Whitney and I spent time talking with the very visionary web team at the University of Nebraska, who are really doing some interesting things with their web initiatives.

After lunch is when Big Omaha really came alive. Unfortunately, Matt Mullenweg was not able to make it because of a conflict, but we were very fortunate to have a lively panel with Fried, Vaynerchuk, Baldwin and Kalmikoff. It was all Q&A based and was a lot of fun to see these thought-leaders and visionaries on the web talking and bantering back and forth. Of particular note was their rant on the higher education system, which is a little too colorful for this blog.

That was followed up with one of the most insightful and thoughtful talks of the day by Kalmikoff, where he talked about transparency and accessibility and what they mean to Threadless as a company and as a community. His slides included a great large/medium/small fanged Pac-Man illustration as well as great insight like:

“Spend time with your community.” and “Listen. Review. Respond. Act.“

I got the opportunity to spend some time talking to Kalmikoff after the talk and I really found him to be approachable and friendly as I asked him such lame questions as “How do you apply your community models to a B2B environment?”

Kalmikoff was followed by Ben Rattray of Change.org who gave a well-polished (albeit a little forgettable) presentation. I couldn’t help but think that Rattray was actually Chris Pine from the new Star Trek movie (mixed with a little Jake Gyllenhaal). You decide:

There was a local entrepreneurial panel that highlighted some of the really cool projects that are going on in Omaha, including the concert hall/non-profit 2-screen theater that they’ve got, which is very cool.

The day was closed out with a great keynote (so to speak) with Gary Vaynerchuk. Now, say what you will about Gary, you can’t ever say he’s not genuine. The guy knows who he is, knows what he loves, and isn’t afraid to tell you what’s what. Instead of doing his typical talk, he realized that much of the crowd had heard him speak before, so after a short 7-minutes, he went into an open Q&A session.

I decided that I should take a crack at asking a question. Much of what I found to be challenging about ideas presented at Big Omaha was that much of it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to apply to the corporate B2B world. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but I have a hard time taking Gary’s advice of “you can’t change them, just quit”, very lightly because I was unemployed for 3 months.

But getting to interact with Gary during the Q&A session (as well as briefly after it was over) was a lot of fun. Plus, I even got a Thunder Show wrist band!

Big Omaha was an extremely well-organized conference for its initial outing. Even down to the smallest of details. The folks at BrightMix put together a heckuva day that made the 3-hour northward trek completely worth the price of admission (a steal at $200). Many thanks to Jeff and Dusty (and all their great volunteers) for working so hard to hold such a great event. You can find my pics (and others, tagged with ‘BigOmaha’) on Flickr.

There were these pictures circulating on Flickr a couple years back and I always intended to take a picture of the contents of my laptop bag, but it just wasn’t that interesting. It’s still not that interesting, but I at least have enough stuff to photograph these days. So here’s what’s in my bag (if you can’t tell from the picture, from top left):

• iPod nano (nanomack) and headphones
• Cerner-issue Mead notebook and Moleskine (plain)
• Business cards (mine and people I’ve met with recently)
• Keys
• Pens and pencils (Uniball signo 207 in black, blue, red, Pentel 0.7mm lead mechanical pencil)
• Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 (no dongle required, carrying case not shown)
• BlackBerry 8330 Curve (for now)
• Eyeglass cleaner
• USB mini-to-USB cable
• Wallet

So that’s that. I carry all of it in a Case Logic Canvas Messenger Bag, which I really like. It’s comfortable and stylish and holds just the right amount of crap. I have a place for everything…not a perfect place, but good enough for my company-issued Dell D630.

People often aske me why I chose to get a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone. The reason is simple: I have many close friends who work for my local wireless company and through an excellent employee plan, I pay very little for the service. Plus, I would feel like I was betraying them and indirectly putting them out of a job if I were to jump ship. Sprint doesn’t need yet another person defection to another wireless carrier.

Frankly, I’d love to have an iPhone, but for the time being, I rock a Red BlackBerry Curve. Up until about a week ago, it worked pretty well. Then the delays started. I began to realize that e-mails were not being delivered to my phone in a timely manner if at all. Since the e-mail functionality is one of the key reasons to own a BlackBerry, I found this to be a bag full of FAIL.

I had heard that RIM rolled out a change to the BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) and that if you deleted your e-mail account from your phone, then set it up again.

EXCEPT…

See, my e-mail that is delivered to my BlackBerry (not my work e-mail, but my main personal/freelance account) is hosted by Google using their Apps for Domains. This is a common things these days. Even my mother-in-law’s school district is using it.

RIM doesn’t deal with this well.

Set up is supposed to be easy for e-mail addresses and I imagine that it is for most accounts. Unfortunately, even though my device indicated that my e-mail setup was successful, I still had issues. E-mail wasn’t delivered or was severely delayed. After trying for hours to figure it out, I finally stumbled upon a forum post that gave me the solution.

You have to access the advanced settings in e-mail setup, but there’s no documented way to do that and the settings are unavailable once an e-mail address has been set up.

Where do I access the advanced settings?

The problem here is that the IMAP settings are non-standard for Google for Domains. You still use imap.gmail.com as you usually do for Gmail accounts, but because your username is different, it doesn’t work.

The fix

In order to access the advanced settings when you set up your e-mail account, you have to leave your password blank. This is nowhere in the setup documentation. This is a huge FAIL. What kind of usability is that? It’s no wonder that people are defecting left and right from RIM devices to iPhones and other smart phones (can’t wait for the Palm Pre, by the way). Not only does their documentation suck big time but their devices could be a lot better.

Now that it’s working again, I can get back to tweeting about something else. But RIM should know…it’s on THIN ICE with me.

For a long time I’ve been using Feedburner to track my RSS readers. It gives a little more information than is built into Wordpress and has worked great up to this point. Unfortunately, when Google purchased the property a while back, they decided that it needed to change. They didn’t say when the change would come, just that it would.

Well, that change is now.

It would be freaking super if I understood the rhyme or reason behind it or how to fix it, but I don’t. All I know is that my feed is jacked up right now and I’m trying to fix it. I hope this doesn’t cause too many problems. I may end up abandoning Feedburner altogether and just returning to the standard Wordpress feed.

We will see. I’m just giving you a heads up.

The 160GB hard drive on my five-year-old iMac G5 died a few days ago.

I’m not sure what happened. I’d like to blame Microsoft and I actually have some justification in doing it. For some reason, it froze in the middle of a Microsoft Office automatic update and it never recovered.

I’ve tried everything I can for free. I took it to the Apple Store on the Plaza…they couldn’t even see it. I bought a SATA to USB adapter on eBay that arrived today…it didn’t work either.

So I called a data recovery specialist. They told me that if they didn’t recover anything (which they assured me rarely happens), it would still cost me a $200 attempt fee, but if they did, it would be closer to $2,300! (They give you a range and the price is based on how much they recover – minimum $500, maximum $2,700.)

As much as I’d like to recover the data, I’m not down with dropping that much money. The only absolutely heart-breaking thing that I lost was a bunch of pictures. Fortunately, I moved many of the 10,000+ in my iPhoto library (especially the almost 2,000 from our Italy trip) to my Macbook and I’m thankful for that. 

I’ll likely discover over time more of what’s missing, but what’s disheartening is that if I’d upgraded to Leopard I could have used Time Machine to automate the backups, but unfortunately I was still running Tiger.

If there’s one bright spot regarding the crash, it’s that the computer itself will still work and I can upgrade the drive to 320GB…twice the size of its predecessor. Still, it sucks.

Besides The Catcher in the Rye, my all-time favorite book is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The main character (played by John Cusack in the movie version) is obsessed with making lists.

I love making lists. In fact, one thing that I like to do when interviewing people I will potentially work with is I ask them their top five movies of all-time. Say what you will, it’s my version of a personality test and I think that your top five movies say a lot about who you are as a person.

My love for making lists is what led me and my brother to name our company topfivedesign.

So when my friend Allen came to me with his idea for a site – a place where people could list their favorite of anything.

“I always seemed to be looking for recommendations from people on products and places and wanted a site where I could easily find something like ‘Favorite brand of refrigerator’.”

I’ve been beta-testing Topulist for the past several months. It’s a straight-forward website that’s easy to use and very addicting. Think of it as a social networking version of Consumer Reports, only it’s not limited by anything. You can list your favorite Marvel Comics character, your favorite game for the Wii, your favorite hybrid car or even your favorite McDonalds Dollar Menu item.

You can create your own Topulist and Allen’s ninja Rails skills make sure that it’s not already up there.

It’s a cool site and you should totally go check it out.

I was exposed to TED a couple years ago when Internet semi-celebrity Ze Frank spoke and pointed his many feed followers toward the TED site. TED is essentially the smartest conference in the world. It stands for “Technology Entertainment Design” and people pay $6,000 just to be able to go to the conference AFTER they get the invitation. The waiting list is about 2 years long to go and you have to be amazingly accomplished in order to become a part of the conference.

Speakers include such folks as Bono, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Clinton, Frank Gehry, Peter Gabriel, Seth Godin and Al Gore. The motto of the conference is “Ideas worth sharing” so I thought I’d share one today.

The above video is “rock star physicist” Brian Cox talking about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe. The LHC is a fascinating piece of scientific machinery and to hear someone like Cox describe its purpose is nothing short of remarkable. Cox purports that there is an equation that helps to explain the universe and how it works, but it requires one small little thing – a subatomic particle called the Higgs particle that has not yet been discovered.

I mention this because it is a fascinating piece of science. This Higgs particle is what gives matter its mass. It is a part of everything, yet has not yet been seen by scientists, but is essential to proving all their theories and such. According to Cox, it’s what gives matter its mass. To me, the Higgs particle sounds an awful lot like the presence of a power greater than ourselves.

Part of the goal of the research at the LHC is to try and find sub-atomic particles not yet seen, like the Higgs particle. I don’t claim to be an expert on all this scientific stuff, but I think it’s completely fascinating. Scheduled to be turned on sometime this summer (I think…the date is a bit difficult to find), the LHC will answer some pretty big questions about the universe. Or maybe it will just raise more…

Discuss.

(All apologies to my friends that work at Sprint…this is a rather long post and it’s not exactly complimentary of the Instinct…)

Sprint and Samsung are really putting the full court press on with the new Samsung Instinct. They’re promoting the heck out of it and have given it a terrific price point and coupled with their $99.99 Everything plan, they’ve got a compelling reason to take a look at the phone. The press has even been complimentary of the phone, calling it a “decent iPhone competitor.”

Unfortunately, Sprint bought into the iPhone comparisons and continued to tout it as a competitor to the iPhone. This was their first mistake. If you compare the two phones solely on features, the Instinct probably comes out ahead right now. However, when you factor in the iPhone 3G coming on July 11, some of those features (like true GPS) become irrelevant.

I spent about 30 minutes playing around with the Instinct on Thursday after receiving an e-mail invitation to preview it in stores. Many things came to mind…here are my most significant thoughts:

GPS - From what I can tell, this is a great feature. I didn’t go anywhere, but the interface was nice and easy to use. Again, it’s irrelevant to compare it to the iPhone once the 3G comes out, but right now, Sprint has the edge.

Interface - With the way they’ve advertised it, I expected the interface to be comparable to OS X on the iPhone. Not so much. It was pretty clunky and not terribly responsive. Not only that, but since the touchscreen on the Instinct is pressure-sensitive rather than heat-sensitive like the iPhones, I found that I had to push pretty hard on the screen in order to get it to do what I wanted. As someone who has played with the iPhone as well, this is a big disappointment.

Web browsing - This was probably my biggest disappointment with the Instinct. One thing that’s great about the iPhone is that it will adjust portrait-to-landscape just by turning the screen. All applications work both ways (with the exception of the included YouTube app, I think), including browsing. On the Instinct, you can only browse (and type) in landscape mode. Couple that with Mobile Safari’s ability to zoom and its far superior navigation capabilities, the iPhone wins this one hands down.

Form factor – This one’s a wash. They are about the same size and they feel the same in your hand.

Keyboard - This is kind of a duplicate complaint, but the pressure-screen makes typing kind of a chore. Not only that, but the iPhone has auto-correct built in while the Instinct only suggests misspelled words. The typography of the Instinct is far inferior to the iPhone’s (to be expected) as is the color saturation, making the Instinct’s screen a lot harder to read.

Lack of sync - I’m not sure why I should be surprised with this. As someone who has made the choice to live better in a Windows-less world, it’s difficult for me to find a phone that will synchronize with my Macbook. Windows Mobile-based phones OBVIOUSLY won’t do the trick, so I’ve got very few options – Blackberries (ew), Palm-based devices (I like the Centro, but HATE the typography) or iPhones. Everything else just kind of sucks. The amazing thing to me about the Instinct was that it doesn’t even sync with Windows. That makes no sense to me. Synchronization is one of the key reasons to have an advanced phone like an iPhone or a Blackberry. The fact that the Instinct doesn’t even sync with Windows is a HUGE failure by Sprint’s project planners. Sure, you can view your mail on there, but if it doesn’t synchronize, what benefit is there?

Bells and whistles - There’s no doubt that Sprint made a lot of effort in making sure that the Instinct was packed with features. That gives them the ability to point to lists like this and say, “SEE, our phone has more features.” The problem is that with a lack of a good platform, the Instinct’s features don’t feel cohesive and they are all difficult to find (the technician at the Sprint store on the Sprint campus spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to add an e-mail account). I’ll admit, the Live TV function is cool (although I can’t for the life of me find where the list of channels is) and the addition of Visual Voicemail is great. But with the opening of the iPhone App Store, the applications built for the iPhone will all be vetted by Apple’s developer standards and are going to be sweet. The applications I saw for the Instinct fell far short of anything on the iPhone.

Summary

I really wanted to like the Instinct. I really did. But there were so many places where it was so far inferior to the iPhone that it was laughable. Even the Sprint employee that was checking out the Instinct said that it “didn’t hold a candle to his iPhone.” That’s just sad.

Even sadder was that when I asked one of the people in the Sprint store (REPEAT: this is the Sprint store on the Sprint campus) why I shouldn’t just leave Sprint and go get an iPhone, his response was, “Well, if you’re on the Employee Friends plan, that’s why.” And it’s true, but not for the reasons he thinks. The Friends part is the important thing to me. As many problems as I have with Sprint (small by comparison to my problems with Comcast), I won’t leave their network because I’m a loyal person who wants to support a local company that employs about half a dozen of my friends. The cheaper plan is nice, but the friendships are more important. I just wish that the company wouldn’t rely on my friendships for my loyalty and instead provide me with great phones and great service.

The Instinct’s failure is not entirely Sprint’s fault though. The media who touted the phone as “a viable iPhone competitor” really sealed its fate. Sprint would have been better off to not believe the hype and just sell the phone for what it is – a touch-screen phone with media features. They should not have tried to go head-to-head with the iPhone for a lot of reasons, but they certainly got some great press out of the deal. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t live up to the hype. There are some neat features for sure, but if you want to compare it to the iPhone, well…you just shouldn’t. Compete with Blackberry or Palm…don’t compete with Apple. For an example, see the Microsoft Zune. Microsoft has TONS more money than Sprint and they still can’t compete in the MP3 market.

For me, I’ve been waiting for this phone to come out before using my hardware upgrade that Sprint offers every 18 months. I’ll probably now use it to get a Centro because it at least will synchronize with my Macbook. I wish that I liked the Instinct because there are some great features there…I just felt like using it was too much of a chore.

As someone who has been a loyal Sprint user for many years, I have been really looking forward to the release of the Samsung Instinct, a phone that many are calling one of the first decent competitors to the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out, I was jealous, but it was way too expensive to even consider. Tack that onto the fact that I am a member of Sprint’s Friends and Family plan, which makes things all the more inexpensive.

I’d go as far to say that I was excited for the release of the Instinct…

Until today.

Today, my favorite company in the world released the second-generation of their industry-changing device. There are haters that don’t want to admit Apple’s greatness, but those people are kidding themselves. This is a phone that has sold 6 million units in ONE YEAR.

To put that into perspective…even though it was released mid-way through the year, the iPhone was the 2nd most popular smartphone in the U.S. (3rd globally) and outsold all Windows Mobile devices combined.

The iPhone 3G isn’t really a massive update overall. However, the fact that it is adding 3G wireless connectivity and dropping its price by half (the 8GB iPhone went from $399 to $199), combined with the best operating system a phone has ever seen…well…needless to say, I’m reconsidering whether or not I want to stick with Sprint.

So here’s what I’m proposing…those of you that helped me raise money to buy a dairy cow back in January…I’m giving you another opportunity to give.

If you donate enough money for me to buy an iPhone, I’ll give up red meat for the rest of the year.

You read that right…I’ll give up red meat through the holidays if you help me buy an iPhone.