Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

The $40 PDA

I went to Office Depot a week ago looking for a new notebook and left with a sleek new way to be organized. After being trained to simply get what I came for in all shopping experiences, I accidentally browsed and found myself buying things I had no intention of purchasing.

All of the notes I take and to-do lists I create in the physical world are temporary. I jot things down, add them to Outlook/Entourage or Backpack later, and then tear out the page and throw it away. So this means I have no need for a high-quality, permanent notebook, just something decent and cheap.

Many of you are familiar with the Hipster PDA phenomenon, which essentially replaces complicated, expensive, battery-swallowing PDA's and SmartPhones with, well, 3x5 index cards. I have always been intrigued by this, since technology isn't the answer to every problem, but had trouble picturing how it would work in the real world.

Until last week that is, when I came across a wonderful thing called The FranklinCovey Leather Index Card Holder. It not only has space to hold 10 index cards, but room for a small pen. What's really great (I didn't even see this until Ben pointed it out to me) is that it functions as a wallet as well. There's room for a driver's license, 3 credit cards, a couple of business cards and cash. All of this for $15 in a package only slightly taller than the typical wallet.

I picked up one of the Fisher space pens because I'd heard good things about them and knew it would fit. Now, I have the ability to take notes anywhere on easily replaceable, cheap index cards and I've replaced my wallet as well. So far, it's been the best solution I've ever had.

The $40 PDA

Fisher Space Pen ($20)

FranklinCovey Leather Index Card Holder/Wallet ($15)

500 Index Cards ($3) (look for the 3x5 graph paper cards)

Of course, Lori could do a post about the $0 PDA, as she basically handmade her own day planner, but men have to spend some money in order to feel like they saved money.

Technorati Tags:
hipster pda, lifehacks

Five funny things

1. Do you have any idea how funny Laser Hair Removal sounds to 10-year old boy obsessed with Star Wars? The sound effects alone made my weekend.

2. Wired Magazine profiled four body fat scales in the April issue. The title of the section? Chubby Checkers.

3. We used to own a Honda Civic. One night, the three of us were parked outside a friend's house where Ben was going to have a sleepover. Like any family, we began pretending that we were staking the joint. When the family arrived and turned on their porch light, we imagined them saying, "That's a specifically suspicious Civic!"

To this day, that phrase will provoke endless laughter. Try to say it five times fast. No, out loud!

4. Lori has her alarm clock set to play Clocks by Coldplay. As funny as that sounds now, it's slightly less funny at 6:00 am.

5. After watching and learning from 37signals for the past two years, I think we're finally ready to strike out on our own. On April 1st, we'll launch our new web development company, 37psalms. Our first product is a sleek new chat application, similar to Campfire. The name? Kumbaya.

Two things for kids

Here are two fun things I've been enjoying lately with Ben. First is our favorite magazine, National Geographic Kids. Kids love to get mail and a magazine is a simple, fun gift that (as every magazine ad inevitably points out) keeps on giving throughout the year. We tried a few different magazines without any success before Ben received this one from his aunt.

What can I say, it's just packed with fun and very entertaining. He really looks forward to it ever month and reads the whole thing from cover to cover within the first two days. It is perfect for anyone between 8 - 12. It has a perfect mix of science, animals, humor, games, and pop culture. There are a few ads, which some may find objectionable, but they aren't a substantial part of it. I would highly recommend it for your own child or as a gift. Presents get very difficult at this age.

The second thing is just a television show, but it's one I had no idea existed until two weeks ago - Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering. It was actually quite funny. I haven't flipped channels in months thanks to TiVo, but when I did recently, I came across this show within 15 seconds. Who knows what other quality television I'm missing!

I seriously doubt that the show is meant for kids, but Ben and I have had a ball watching it. The show basically spends an hour showing a massive, modern day engineering project (bridge building, football stadium, and the like). We've already discovered that there are two editions of the show. The recent episodes are much better. They feature a very entertaining host who does a great job of learning along with us. They also have some incredibly well done visual explanations of key elements. The size and scope of these projects is overwhelming. Frankly, building a website seems like finishing all of the games and puzzles on a restaurant placemat in comparison. If you have a very curious child (10+) or just like these sort of things yourself, it's worth a look.

The Six Apart Mistake

Six Apart just announced that they've secured another $12 million of financing, bringing the total raised to $23 million. They also announced the acquisition of a mobile blogging company.

I finally had the chance to see Mena Trott, the co-founder of Six Apart, in person at SXSW. I've always thought highly of Mena and her company, but I was disappointed. She was the only one on a diverse panel on the future of web apps who had nothing to show, which was somewhat foreboding. Then, as she discussed the funding, acquisition and plans for the future, she said that Six Apart was focused on the millions and millions of people who don't blog. The last thing these people want to do when they wake up in the morning is blog. How can we build the tools that they would want to use? How can we convince them to blog?

I believe that Six Apart is making a serious mistake.

The company is no longer passionate about users and blogging, they are passionate about markets and reach. Even when Mena talked about convincing people to blog, it was clearly motivated by what they could do for Six Apart, not what blogging could do for them. The company has thousands upon thousands of people paying $100 per year or more to use TypePad. Instead of serving, rewarding, and empowering the enthusiastic and the committed, they are pursuing the people who are specifically uninterested in what they offer.

As Jason Fried mentioned in his keynote, the more funding you receive, the more you will waste. The same goes for employees and time. The funding Six Apart has received has allowed it to grow through acquisitions and new hires. Now, the company is forced to pursue additional funding and market initiatives to support its ever-growing infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the company's core products are stagnate, despite the additional money and employees. I have used TypePad for over two years and the tool has remained essentially unchanged. Of course, there have been a number of very public outages and consistent, sometimes painful, slowness in the meantime. What I find interesting is that each time someone, including myself, posts frustrations or suggestions for Six Apart, the company responds promptly with "we feel your pain" and "we hope to address that soon", but the changes never come.

A simple example: to this day, there is no way in TypePad to see when your subscription will expire and when you will be charged next. Again, this is a subscription-based service that costs over $100 per year and I cannot see when I was charged last and when I will be charged next. Not even a simple "Your current subscription expires on June 1, 2006." And it has been this way for over 2 years! Why is a company with over 120 employees unable to roll out a steady stream of improvements?

Many loyal TypePad users are switching to Wordpress or other options. Most pro-level users incorporate stat trackers on their sites because TypePad's stats are so poor (and often down). The same users turn to FeedBurner for detailed stats on their RSS subscribers. Don't they see their core audience slipping away?

Six Apart is chasing the business market with Movable Type (high dollars) and the millions of people who have heard about blogs for two years and still aren't interested (high volume), rather than serving existing users who are passionate about blogging, and were once passionate about Six Apart.

Tags: typepad, six apart

Offline Introductions

There were a number of great moments at SXSW this year, but two stand out above all others. During the conference, I had the privilege of meeting two of my favorite bloggers, Julie Leung and Kathy Sierra. I have such enormous respect for both of these ladies.

Julie is an incredible writer and thinker who brings a level of thoughtfullness and insight that is rare in the blogosphere. By all objective criteria, she also happens to be a beautiful, dedicated, homeschooling wife and mother. She spoke at a session on blogging and relationships and her joyful spirit was inspiring throughout. Plus, she wore a flower skirt to SXSW - how can you not love that?

Kathy had a session all to herself on Creating Passionate Users. She speaks as well as she writes, which can be said of very few bloggers. Her session was fast-paced, entertaining, provocative and packed with information - it was the only one in the four days where I took pages of notes and still felt like I missed a lot.

It wasn't until the last day that I ran into Kathy and had the chance to meet her. I told her that she consistently produces more high-quality, worthwhile contently than anyone else I know. If there was ever a blog I would consider paying for, it's Creating Passionate Users. Her posts get read, re-read, printed out, and talked about again and again. As if to prove my point, she left SXSW and quickly wrote two incredible posts. The good news is we'll be able to buy her book in the near future. By coincidence, Kathy is also kind, beautiful, and a great mom (of a teenager, no less), but I promise not to use these criteria to evaluate every female I happen to mention.

We also talked about the most recent Head First book, a series from O'Reilly she's involved with. I set Head First HTML & CSS in front of Ben two months ago and he has absolutely loved it. The books are incredible, no matter what your age.

Both Julie and Kathy could not have been more gracious. I can't wait to see how they use their immense talent next.

TiVo Goodness

We love TiVo at the Bailey household. We've had it for nearly two years and consider it indispensable. In fact, whenever we go on a trip, we always ask Ben what he misses most about home. His answer is the same every time - our cat, Mango, smoothies, and TiVo (to clarify, Mango is the name of the cat and not the flavor of smoothie). Actually, we might not have TiVo if we didn't have Ben. I really think people with children benefit more than anyone else. Ben never flips channels or watches commercials, which greatly reduces the amount of junk he sees. We can also record shows like Leave it to Beaver or Green Acres that are on at odd hours of the day or night. He never just watches what happens to be on tv at the time.

The point of this post, however, was to celebrate one more incredible thing about TiVo. While we were in Austin (we got back tonight), I read about a show I wanted to record. I vaguely remembered that there was a way to schedule TiVo through a web browser, but I had never done it. I visited tivo.com, logged into my account, and within 5 minutes had set TiVo to record two shows that I had forgotten about. When we got home, the shows were waiting for us as if we had programmed the box from our couch.

That is just so cool (not awesome Chris, just cool).

Design and Politics

Cordell Ratzlaff, former manager of Apple's Human Interface Group, was asked whether open source was used as a resource in the development of OS X. He talked about how good open source is for code development projects, but not for user interfaces.

"Great design comes from dictatorships, not democracies."

I have to agree. There has to be a driven person with a vision for what a product, website, or application should be. Every new design involves many, many small decisions, but a desire for consensus above all tends to drive the project toward mediocrity.

A Cheaper Backpack

37signals dropped the price of the premium Backpack plan today from $19 to $14 per month. Now there are four simple price points - free, $5, $9, and $14 per month.

I use Backpack for organizing every part of my personal and professional life, and even to write a book. Just when I thought my addiction was leveling off, Jason drops a hint that some form of calendaring may be added in the near future. This could be very cool.

If you haven't grabbed yourself a Backpack account yet, sign-up now for free and see what you've been missing.

Tags: 37signals, backpack

Why is SXSW so cheap?

The most expensive ticket for the 4-day interactive conference is $250. Most technology conferences cost $750 or more. In fact, some are $2,000. How does SXSW manage to produce a 4-day conference with a great line-up of high-profile, talented people for so little? I'll let you in on a little secret.

They put very little money into the conference itself.

The registration process is so painful as to be almost hilarious. Today is the first day of the conference. The first session is at 10am. The organizers are expecting the largest SXSW crowd ever. What time would you open registration?

Wrong! Try 9:30am. If you know that's it's impossible to process thousands of registrations in 30 minutes, build another process.

Guess what the registration workflow is. Wait in a single, incredibly long line on the bottom floor of the convention center, where small groups are periodically allowed up the escalator to enter another very long line. You are then told to work your way through a crowd of people to find "Station 4". You hand the person at Station 4 a green card of handwritten information, which they verify and then take your picture. Here's the really funny part. You then step to the back of the large crowd you just worked your way through and wait for someone to shout your name over hundreds of people so you can get your actual badge. Finally, if you want your conference bag and book, you need to return to the first floor and find the bag pick-up location.

Total time: 85 minutes.

What's sad is this is the exact same process that has been in place the last three years. Could someone really look at this process from beginning to end and not see a single thing to improve? You can save quite a bit of money if you put no effort into improving the conference and rely on volunteers to an unnecessary degree.

Next, organize a conference around keynotes where it is physically impossible for all of the attendees to attend. I find it hard to imagine that there is not a room at the Austin Convention Center that could hold more than 500 people. Yet each year, SXSW holds keynotes in rooms that max out at about the number, leaving many, many people on the floor or in overflow rooms. At some point, you have to decide to either cap the number of attendees or invest in a bigger room.

On the plus side, so far it appears that the sound, visual, and stage elements have been improved over previous years. And there is a good argument that a bare bones, cheap conference is a wonderful thing. If SXSW was $1000 and had a fancy, smooth registration process, I wouldn't be here to enjoy it. But there are innumerable ways to make the SXSW experience better that don't involve a lot of money. Hopefully, more improvements on are on the way.

Tags: sxsw

SXSW III

I arrived today in Austin for my third consecutive South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW). The Friday drive from Dallas to Austin was miserable in a typical sort of way. In fact, it was likely worse than in previous years because today also happened to be the beginning of spring break for most school districts. Though that made the drive a bit worse, it also meant that the family could join me for the first time. Lori and Ben will be visiting all of our favorite Austin sites, and some new ones, will I'm expanding my web knowledge.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the vibe is this year. I'll post my thoughts on the sessions as time permits. Saturday's highlights are Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, Andy Budd, and Kathy Sierra.

Tags: sxsw