Keith Silgard

An Easy Way to Use Safe Passwords

2013-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Do you have one password that you use for everything? Is that password shorter than 12 characters long? If so, that’s super dumb. Don’t feel bad though, pretty well everyone does that same dumb thing. I don’t blame you either. Remembering unique, 12+ character passwords — in addition to usernames — for every site you use is basically impossible.

Why every site needs a different password

When you sign up for any site online [1], they need to save your password in a database. Unfortunately, safely storing these passwords is really hard, and a lot of sites do it wrong. Some sites store your password with no security precautions at all. That makes stealing passwords a super common tactic for dickhead thieves. If you use the same password for every site, you’re only as safe as the least secure site you’re using.

Common password tactics that do nothing

Does your password end in a “1”, or some other number? Did you swap a vowel for a number? Congrats, you’ve effectively made it take a few minutes instead of a few seconds to crack your password. You’ve probably saved yourself from some clown guessing it by typing a few common patterns, but that’s about it.

Common tactics that lead to a false sense of security involve:

adding a number at the end of a dictionary word or name: pasta1
replacing vowels with numbers: p4ssw0rd
keyboard sequences: asdfghjkl, qwertyuiop, etc.
using your phone number, birthday, or any other personally identifiable sequences: 1994/06/24, 7805556792, etc.

None of those things are bad, it’s just that none of them will help you if you have a short password.

A super easy way to make a pretty good password

Come up with an uncommon, three or four word phrase: hot garbage soup, great underwear divide, ugly green drapes (just make sure it ends up being at least 12 characters long)
Remove spaces, add at least one number, and at least one capital (this isn’t for extra security, it’s so that your password will work on stupid sites that have password restrictions): hotG4rb4geSoup, gr34tUnderw34rDivide, uglyGr33nDrapes

Huge success. You’ve created an easy to remember, easy to type password that’s exponentially safer than what you’re using right now [2]. Go change your bank and email password right now.

Now do that three times

Those passwords are hard to crack. If a bad guy gets a database with your password in it (and it’s properly stored), it would be really annoying to figure it out. That said, it’s not impossible (and it’s not always going to be properly stored), so that’s why you need to create and remember three different passwords.

Super Important Password
This is your bank, and your email address. Anything where your life could be ruined if bad guys gain access. (Remember, your email can likely be used to access every other site you use.)
Pretty Important Password
This is Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, TicketMaster, and anything that stores your credit card number. If someone gets this password it would be bad, but you could probably recover. You want to keep this group pretty small if you can.
Everything Else Password
This is pretty straight forward. If some jerk site stores your password in plain text, and some asshat steals their database and gets your password, hopefully it can’t be used to ruin your life.

This is a totally manageable system that is probably a whole heck of a lot safer than whatever you’re doing right now. You’re still sharing passwords, but at least you’ve managed to contain the possible damage [3].

Bonus: a kind of annoying way to use super safe, unique passwords for every site

There are applications that can do this for you. I strongly recommend 1password. It will create, and remember insanely long, ultra secure passwords for every site you visit. There are also iOS and Android apps, so you can sync your passwords to your phone/tablet. This is the only way you can truly limit the potential damage of a compromised password. (Though it also creates a single point of failure, because if someone has access to your 1passwork app, the have full access to your life. eep)

You might have noticed that lots of sites let you sign up using your Google, Twitter, or Facebook accounts. On the plus side, that’s one less password to remember, but that peace of mind comes at a (sometimes significant) loss of privacy.
Don’t literally use those passwords. Make your own, you lazy bugger.
For bonus security points, you can add part of the current domain name and make every site’s password unique. So, if you’re on facebook.com, you could take the 3-5th letters (facebook), and make your password cebHotG4rb4geSoup.

Last.fm Loved Tracks to Rdio playlist

2013-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Hey, this is super easy and safe [1]! I’m going to make you a super great Rdio playlist using all of the songs you’ve loved on Last.fm [2], and I’m going to do it pretty automagically. Stick with me kid, I’ll have you farting through silk.

I won’t do anything creepy or annoying with your Rdio or Last.fm accounts. I’ll just create a playlist, then forget all about you.
Well… the most recent 250 of them.

Do We Need a Bigger iPhone?

2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Average Android phone screen sizes (source) [1]

The average Android phone released in 2012 had a 4.2” screen. The Galaxy Note II was the size champ at an amazing 5.5”, and people are actually buying those monstrosities. In comparison, the iPhone 5 has a paltry 4” screen. So the question is, if people want giant phones, should Apple release one?

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t think I’d like it. I recently spent a few weeks with a 4.65” Galaxy Nexus, and even though I have big mitts, I couldn’t reach the full screen with one hand. I found that I’d have to either hold it with both hands, like a tiny tablet, or hold it with one hand, and tap with the other. It was annoying.

I suppose it could be interesting if the extra space were being used effectively, but pundits are predicting that apps will just be scaled up. I suppose developers could put more on the screen, but in practice I doubt they will. [2]

The Galaxy Nexus does look more impressive

A bigger iPhone just doesn’t seem very Apple-like to me. Larger screens eat up battery life, and are awkward to hold. You’d think that the larger touch targets would make it easier to navigate, but the awkward hand contortions necessary to reach the top of the screen actually make it more difficult. An especially glaring problem is iOS’s convention for placing the “back” button in the top left corner. Right handed users are going to have a hell of a time stretching for those. Apple isn’t known for bowing to pressure to make products that compromise user experience — take netbooks for example — so it would be strange to see Apple release a worse phone because it looks better lined up on a shelf.

The worst of it is that I really can’t see any advantage beyond “people think they want big screens”. To completely offset the difference, all you need to do is hold the smaller screen slightly closer to your face.

If you hold the larger screens slightly offset, it appears to be the same size

And it’s not even all that much closer either. Around 4” does the trick. Unless there’s some key benefit I’m missing, the release of a bigger iPhone would be Apple placating pundits and customers who blindly believe that bigger is better, and sacrificing the user experience to do it.

A 4" offset nullifies the difference in screen size

If you would like to comment on this article, you can email me, or let me know on Twitter. If you're interested in following what I write, there's an RSS feed, and a mailing list.

These would be even higher if I took the time to filter out phones with QWERTY keyboards. Brent pointed out that it would be interesting to try and figure out the average screen size per phone sold (to filter out all the weirdos and failures)
Look at how few developers have done any tweaking of their iPad apps after the release of the iPad mini

Apple’s Software Quality

2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m an Apple fan, and I’ve bought into the Apple ecosystem in a pretty big way. Every day I use: my MacBook Pro with a Cinema Display, my iPhone 4S, a first gen iPad, and an Apple TV. I’ve bought enough iPods over the years to amass this collection in a drawer. I’m also a geek. I know how computers work. I write software for a living.

There’s been a lot of press since the launch of iOS 6 about the inconsistent map data for Apple Maps, but otherwise reviews have been fairly glowing. Mountain Lion was released earlier this summer, also to a positive reception. When people review Apple products, they often mention the value of the Apple ecosystem and how everything “just works”. I think that’s fast becoming Apple’s biggest misconception.

I’ve become incredible frustrated with the quality of Apple’s software. Two weeks ago, I started keeping a list of every bug I encountered during normal daily usage:

Safari’s UI occasionally gets all messed up when it’s in the background
Safari’s address bar would only display the domain name, not the full address (restarting fixed it)
I cannot get iPhoto to send a picture via email
iPhoto error: “The iPhoto Library is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have permission to make changes to it.”
iPhoto repeatedly unmounts my camera when I attempt an import, and I don’t have an SD slot
With around 40,000 photos, iPhoto is unusably slow
Top left corner of my iPhone wouldn’t respond to clicks (restarting fixed it)
Three finger swiping stopped working for exposé, the started again after about an hour (confirmed it was still enabled in System Preferences)
This note won’t show up on my iPhone, so I’ve missed a few iPhone bugs because I forget about them before I get back to my laptop. Yay iCloud!
Quick Look refuses to respond when trying to preview several large images. It just pretends I didn’t hit spacebar
Apple TV wouldn’t play videos I purchased from iTunes. There was no feedback, it just pretended I didn’t press play (a software update fixed it)
Remote app for iOS consistently cannot connect to my either of my Apple TV’s (I have to double-click the home button and manually quit it before it will connect again)
Bookmark sync is messed up on my phone, and refuses to acknowledge all of the bookmarks in my bookmarks bar (the bookmarks folder is there, but it only shows three of my six bookmarks)
iPhoto for iOS crashes every time it tries to display a list of photos
My MacBook got crazy hot, and wouldn’t wake from sleep
Bluetooth stopped working on my MacBook (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4140781?start=0&tstart=0)
Photos that are not in my Photostream show up in my Apple TV’s “Photostream” slideshow
Safari developer console can’t be cleared

Now some of these are cosmetic annoyances, but several are complete blockers. If I had an iMac instead of a MacBook, losing Bluetooth would mean losing the ability to use a keyboard or mouse. Not many people know to double-click the home button to manually quit an app on iOS, so if they’ve also lost the super small Apple remotes, they wouldn’t be able to use their Apple TV without buying another one. Non-geeks wouldn’t be trying to fix these problems, they’d be frustrated because their devices are broken. [1]

The worst of these are the ones that are consistent, and unmissable. Anyone using the Remote app with an Apple TV knows about the connection problems. Anyone using iPhoto recognizes how terribly it performs. I doubt that everyone at Apple is using Chrome when they develop their own sites. People at Apple have to be encountering these problems, but they’re still shipping them. That’s not indicative of a culture of excellence. Jony Ive is measuring the fit of glass panels to the micron, and the result is a perfect phone that sometimes doesn’t work.

I used to be an evangelist for Apple products. My Mom has a MacBook Air and an iPhone because I told her it would be so much simpler for her. My Dad and brother both use iPads. My wife has an iPhone. For years I was practically an Apple salesperson, recommending Apple products to anyone who asked. Now I’m an apologist. When search on iOS email doesn’t work, it’s me explaining that search only works for the emails on your phone (for no good reason). When my wife’s iPhone locks, and the screen won’t respond to touches, it’s me explaining that she has to wait a minute, and if that doesn’t help she needs to do a hard reset. When my Mom complains about some silly message that shows up with a bunch of techno babble every morning, it’s me that has to buy her more iCloud storage because she hasn’t been backing up for a few weeks. When sharing photos on Facebook won’t work for my friend Caroline, it’s me helping her debug it.

So now I don’t recommend Apple products. I don’t recommend against them, but I certainly don’t evangelize them. I didn’t even get into things that are merely frustrating instead of broken. As Apple introduces complexity, quality is taking a dive. I get that the work they’re doing is difficult, but Apple needs to understand that to most people these aren’t bugs. They’re broken devices, and when people depend on these devices, they’re broken trust. Trust is fickle, and Apple is losing mine.

The saving grace in all of this mess is that there’s always the Genius Bar, so at least non-geeks have some avenue of recourse, but it’s still becoming untenable.

Idea: A Better Job Site

2012-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Job sites are terrible for hiring, or for finding a job. Employers create postings filled with uninformative corporate drivel, and ridiculous requirements. Résumés focus on bios and facile action verbs. There should be a better way.

Employers and employees have aligned interests; employers need to hire and employees need a job. The purpose of a job site is to broker a relationship between the two, but there’s no logic making the connection. Skills are treated as binary, you either have them or you don’t. There’s no room for priorities or emphasis. Making matches is a crap shoot, with neither side fully understanding what it is the other requires.

So how do we improve the system? Let’s start from the employer’s side. I’ve worked — and hired — as a programmer for the last 9 years, so for this exercise, let’s pretend you’re hiring a web developer. The question we need to answer is “what type of developer do you need?”

If you scan job sites, you’ll see a common theme: every company is a “dynamic”, “laid back” and “cool” place to work. They all need “rock star ninjas” who are “detail-driven” and “can work both independently and collaboratively” and blah blah blah. In short, every company needs the best, most talented people in the world. Next come the required skills, which is a laundry list of technologies that candidates must possess “expert knowledge” of, as well as having at least two years job experience. The icing on the cake is often the requirement of a degree. In short, employer job listings are an impossible dream so bereft of real information that no one takes them seriously.

So how do we improve this? We constrain your options. Your company name and URL are both required; employees need to know about your company. Describe your company, but do it in less than 140 characters. Then, tell us how much you are willing to pay for this position [1], how much work experience you require, and what level of education prospective employees will need.

What we’re going to do with those three factors: pay, experience, and education, is assign points. With those points, we’re going to allow you to adjust sliders for your job requirements, so you can create a more accurate picture of exactly who you’re looking for.

The sliders will range from novice to expert, and each level will require more points than the previous. You’ll be able to add or remove requirements easily, but the points total will remain static. An important point is that each skill level needs to be anchored with concrete examples, otherwise there’s no way of ensuring that what you consider a three matches what I consider a three. For example [2], if web programming [3] is a requirement, skill levels could be something like this:

They understand variables, functions, conditionals, and loops. They’re comfortable modifying templates with code in them. They can perform simple tasks like sorting lists, or swapping words.
They can query a database for information. They can process forms, checking for required fields, and saving the submitted data.
They can create templates for popular open-source projects like Wordpress, or Drupal. They have experience using a framework like Ruby on Rails, or Django. They have some experience with object oriented programming.
They understand complex object oriented programming. They have a working knowledge of design patterns. They have contributed to a large, open-source project.
They have a deep knowledge of computer science. They have experience in scaling massively trafficked websites. They’ve written a programming language.

Now you can start to see how — as you add requirements for your position — a really clear picture of who you’re looking to hire emerges. The huge challenge of this is defining the different job requirements and their skill levels, as well as balancing the points system. For every industry, it would require deep domain knowledge, as well as a lot of testing a fine tuning until we reach the proper balance.

A few other things that I’d like to see:

a section that asks you to describe three different tasks whomever fills this position would be performing
an overview of the technologies you use
what other benefits the position offers (health, work from home, etc.)
position details (full-time, part-time, contract)

We want to keep this page nice and clean, but it’s important that you’re able to explain some of your corporate culture.

This leads us to employees. First off, if you’re looking for a job, chances are that your résumé sucks. I have personally seen hundreds of résumés, and while programming may be a special case, all of them have sucked. There’s your objective statement, about being a “motivated self-starter” who is a “fast leaner”. Your list of previous jobs with action word bullets which fail to convey what you actually did there, and for some reason you post that you worked for a grocery store when you were 15. If this is a technical position, you jam in every acronym you’ve ever heard of so that you can bypass clueless HR filters. You list your education, and let me know your reference are available on request. Oh, and you have a typo. I can’t use any of that to hire you, I can only use it to find a reason not to.

So let’s learn who you really are. The first thing we want to know about you is how much money you’re making right now, and how much you think you should be making [4]. It would also be nice to ask you to link your Twitter account and Github profiles if you have them. I like the idea of allowing you to express some personality. Some may shy away from putting private, or silly messages on a job site, but do you really want to work for someone who wouldn’t hire you if they knew who you were? I’d rather the opportunity to allow a small glimpse into the type of person I am, whether it ends up being more or less likely that I get any given job.

Next, we’re going to ask you to explain what it is you do, how long you’ve been doing it, and how skilled you are at doing the various requirements of the job. Sound familiar? It’s the same process employers had to go through when defining their job postings. The key change here is that for each skill, we also ask for an example of work that you’ve done that can demonstrate it. There needs to be a preference for concrete examples here as well, though for certain skills that would be impossible.

The last thing we ask for is a historical overview of your professional life. Where you worked, your job title, and how long you worked there, merged chronologically with when you want to school, what you studied, etc. Splitting up work experience and education always felt strange to me, and I’ve often found myself flipping back and forth between the two due to gaps of unaccounted time. Providing a nice, cohesive view feels a lot more natural.

Without a large pool of employee listings, we’re never going to be able to attract employers. I think that it’s really important that letting employees sign up be fun, and that the resulting page is really attractive and useful. Ideally, after they fill it out, they should be able to export a PDF and have a really great résumé that they can start submitting to employers. It might even be nice to make parts of the system (especially the skills chart) embeddable, so that people can put them into their websites, etc. That would be a great way to let your early adopters spread the word about your site, which is critical.

Benefits to Employers

Using pay, education, and experience, along with the stated job requirements, we have a really great base for searching for candidates. This is key because you don’t want to hire someone who’s looking for a job. Instead, we can match you with whoever happens best meet your criteria, and help you to attract them. We also have a great opportunity to help you understand why you aren’t able to find your ideal candidate. We can let you know if your expectations are out of whack; if you’re asking for a university graduate with two years work experience, $50,000/year isn’t going to get you what you want. If you’re offering $80,000 for someone to skin Wordpress blogs, you might be over paying.

We also reverse the typical job ad cycle. Instead of paying to push a message out to the world, you define your position, and we deliver a list of vetted employees. It removes the tedious step of manually drudging through the dozens of terrible résumés that typical job postings return, and puts you directly in contact with the people you’re looking for.

We could also set this up as a “pay for contact” model, which drastically lowers risk. Fill out the job posting form for free, and see if the site has any matches for you. If you want to contact them, you have to pay, but at least you know what you’re getting.

Benefits to Employees

Being passively available on the job market is very much in any employee’s best interest. By outlining your skills and experience, you’re automatically available to any potential employers and job offers. It could help you find a job that’s a better fit than your current position, or give you leverage when it comes time to negotiate your current compensation.

Exporting a clean, professional, and concise résumé would be hugely valuable. If the site were to succeed at nothing beyond helping people create decent résumés, I can’t say that I’d be completely disappointed.

There are already a crop of “hey look at me” style job sites (Zerply, Stack Overflow, About.me) which compell people to sign up and share themselves with the world. I think the RPG style skills charts would be really fun for certain demographics (see: nerds like me), and seeing other people making and sharing profiles would compell people to make their own, just to play around.

One last, quick note on matching. I think an ideal candidate would be slightly below an employer’s requirements, and not over any important ones. The reason being that someone overqualified for a position is going to get bored quickly, whereas a person slightly underqualified will be just challenged enough to be focussed and interested.

If you have a something to say about this idea, you can email me, or let me know on Twitter. If you’re interested in following what I write, there’s an RSS feed, and a mailing list.

Pay doesn’t have to be published, but it should be. I understand the reasons why employers wouldn’t want to publish it, but I think they’re silly. Most employers seem to be of the belief that while hiring, they are in a position of power, and that they can exploit that to minimize salaries. Fear of overpaying seems like a weird concern when weighed against the cost of lost opportunities or hiring someone who’s underqualified. I suppose I’d rather spend too much money well than waste it frugally.
Please don’t knit-pick this hierarchy. It’s an example. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough.
Would it be “web programmer”, or “PHP/Ruby/Python/etc”? Deciding how finely grained the requirements should be is another big challenge. One idea is to make it “web programmer”, but within the widget allow employers to specify which web programming languages they deal with, sort of like adding tags to a skill.
I don’t think salary would really play into the points system. It’s more a factor of experience and education. The main reason to ask for this is the ensure that employers and employees are on the same page when it comes to compensation.

What the Internet Knows About You

2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

A scenario

Pretend that you’re shopping, and you visit The Gap. As soon as you walk in the door, someone quietly — and without asking — attaches a tracking device to you. As you continue to shop and visit different stores, the device reports back to The Gap on where you’ve been, what you’re looking at, and what you ended up buying. Would you accept that? Would you continue to shop at The Gap?

The reality

Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others are doing exactly that to millions of people every day, but not many people know or care. If you have a Google account, and you keep yourself logged in, you may be interested to see Google’s ad profile for you. The first time I saw my profile, I was shocked at its accuracy. How does Google know so much about me?

In a word, cookies

Whenever you visit google.com (or Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, and Google+) Google can write a simple text file to your computer called a cookie. In that file is a bunch of random looking text that uniquely identifies you, and from then on, whatever you do on any Google site, Google tracks exactly what you’re doing.

It gets even more interesting once you consider Google AdSense. Google sells ads on millions of web pages all across the internet, you may even recognize the familiar “ads by Google” ad blocks. Whenever you see those ads, your personally identifiable cookie is sent to Google and Google knows which site you’re visiting.

Have you heard of Google+? Well, you may have also seen Google’s +1 button which lets you share pages on Google+. Guess what? Any time you see that button, you’re cookie data is being sent to Google, and they know which article you’re reading.

Let’s not point fingers at Google though. The exact same is true for Facebook’s “like” button, (or the confusingly similar “like” box), and Twitter’s “tweet” or “follow” buttons.

Why are they doing this?

It’s important to remember that — so far as Facebook, Twitter and Google are concerned — you’re not their customer. You’re a product that they sell to their customers: advertisers. They track you all across the internet to build a more comprehensive profile of you, so that advertisers can more accurately target you. They provide you a service, and in exchange sell your attention.

The data is also used to improve the services, and provide features (to both you, and advertisers) that would otherwise be impossible. The information is all readily available, and there are no laws (in North America) preventing accessing, storing, or sharing that data.

Google uses the information gathered from across all of its sites to improve the quality of your search results (very successfully). Facebook uses their profile of you to suggest friends, and geo-tag your photos. Twitter suggests users you can follow who visit similar sites. Access to the data genuinely helps them improve your experience on their site.

Do I need to worry?

I honestly don’t know. I worry about it, but only in a far-future, I read too much science fiction kind of way. For example, Facebook knows an incredible amount about me. Facebook is based in the United States, and as such, falls under the authority of the Patriot Act. As such, the US Goverment can request the full contents of my Facebook profile without my knowledge and without a warrant. How much information is that? Ask Max Schrems who used a UK law to force Facebook to send him a copy of all data they had stored about him. From a Forbes article last year:

Schrems and a few of his friends made the request, and a few weeks later, received CDs from Facebook’s California office in the mail. Schrems, who has been on Facebook since 2008, had a file that was over 1,200 pages long, including everyone he had ever friended and de-friended, every event he had ever been invited to (and how he responded), a history of every “poke” he had ever received, a record of who else signed onto Facebook on the same computers as him, email addresses that he hadn’t provided for himself (but that must have been culled from his friends’ contact lists) and all of his past messages and chats, including some with the notation “deleted.”

A typical response to this is “let them look, I have nothing to hide,” and chances are that you’re completely right. Like I said, it’s the scary science fiction scenarios that get me a little worked up. Today, I’d say it’s largely to your benefit that the data can be used to improve your experience on those sites. Tomorrow? That’s really something you should think about.

What can I do about it?

You could disallow 3rd party cookies. Then when you visit “Site A”, cookies aren’t sent to “Site B” if there’s an ad or a sharing button. Well, they shouldn’t be, but unfortunately, it’s possible and commonplace to bypass that privacy setting [1].

Newer browsers have the option to send a do not track header along with all of your requests, which certainly helps, but again it’s disabled by default, and most people aren’t even aware the feature exists. Further, it’s opt-in, so it will only be obeyed to the degree that it won’t damage business (see 3rd party cookies above) [2].

Unless you’re willing to be extremely paranoid, there’s almost nothing you can do to truly protect your privacy. There is so much data sent by your browser to every single site you visit [3] that it’s completely possible to create a “digital fingerprint” which uniquely identify you, even if you don’t use cookies.

As near as I can tell, to be even slightly private on the web you’d need to extremely knowledgable about how the internet works, and implement insane workarounds like:

use a plugin like AdBlock Plus or Ghostery to block 3rd party traffic
if you need to sign in to any site, do so in an incognito browser, and sign out as soon as you’re finished
don’t allow plugins, such as Flash or Java to run
use some type of proxy to hide your IP address
spoof your browser user agent and randomize it
change your browser size from one request to the next

And even then, you’re not really in the clear. I do the first three, but I don’t really suffer any illusions as to whether or not the people who really want to track me still can.

The truth about the internet

The most important thing you can do is treat everything you do on the internet as a post card. If you’d be embarrassed to see it posted on someone’s fridge, don’t put it on the internet. This includes emails, Facebook messages, instant messages, comments, forum posts, and the articles you read. There is no such thing as privacy on the internet.

To learn when I post new articles, sign up to receive an email, or follow me on Twitter.

This is actually a neat side effect of Apple shipping all iOS devices with 3rd party cookies disabled by default. Now that so many people use iPhones and iPads, sites are left being a little scummy to get the data (they think) they need to improve their services
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Apple started sending this header with all iOS devices
The important ones include you user-agent and IP address, but there are many more

A Mailing List Experiment

2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to try something a little different, so I’ve created a mailing list with MailChimp. If you sign up, I’m going to email you a full-text version of any article that I write. My thought is that this will be a really great, low friction way to get my writing in front of anyone who wants to read it. I currently post about new articles on Twitter, but I suspect many of those tweets are simply lost in the noise. I’m also hoping that people who choose to receive the emails will be more likely to respond and interact with me. I honestly can’t think of a lower barrier to entry than replying to an email.

You may wonder why — if I’m so concerned about interaction — I don’t have comments on my site. If I’m being honest, it’s because I don’t want people coming to my site to read what other people are writing. Right now I have full control over every pixel and every word on this site, and that’s how I intend to keep it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care what people think about my ideas. I just have a strong preference for those conversations to happen somewhere else.

I don’t really know what to expect from this. Not many other writers seem to be syndicating their articles via email, so there mustn’t be too much demand for it. Though maybe they just haven’t thought to try it? I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

If you’re not interested in joining my mailing list, but you are interested in following what I write, I also offer an Atom feed, and the aforementioned Twitter account.

Vendor Prefix Melodrama

2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Today’s A List Apart is taking a look into this whole browser prefix debacle. The crux of the issue is that WebKit has a monopoly in mobile browsing, and as a result, standards based development is being pushed aside for WebKit only experiences. Now Mozilla is considering implementing the -webkit prefix for certain properties, and changing their user-agent to appear to be WebKit. IE and Opera may choose to follow suit. Chris Coyier has a really nice overview over on CSS-Tricks.

Mozilla are Missing the Point

Developers aren’t developing WebKit only because they’re lazy. They’re doing it because they’re competing with native apps, and right now that means iOS and Android. If you want a web based experience that has a chance of competing with native, you target WebKit because it’s what people have on their phones, and you need the prefixed properties to create a comparable experience. It’s not a knock against standardization, it’s a practical reflection of reality. Developers can build a WebKit only solution and hit their entire target market, so why wouldn’t they?

Mozilla aren’t necessarily being excluded because their implementation is lacking, it’s because they’re completely non-present. If a company makes an iOS app, and an Android app, but ignores Windows Phone and Blackberry, is anyone surprised? So why should we expect anything different on the mobile web? At least with WebKit specific sites, it’s rare that the developers aren’t providing a reasonable fallback for non-WebKit browsers. Apparently, this isn’t good enough for Tantek Çelik:

They’re often broken. These downlevel mobile sites are different and significantly less functional. When users see a substantially worse experience in a different browser on the site on the same device, they blame the browser, not the site, nor the device.

Looking at those example, I find almost all of them completely acceptable (Google needs a few tweaks). Since when is it not okay to degrade the experience for obscure browsers? Have we forgotten how strongly we latched on to progressive enhancement when explaining to clients why things look different in IE6? So few people are using mobile Firefox it’s not even broken out of “Other” in Wikipedia’s browser usage chart. I would not be surprised if you had more visitors hitting your sites in IE6 than mobile Firefox.

This Isn’t Like IE

A common comparison for the current situation is to IE6, but the argument fails to understand WebKit. ActiveX, filters, XMLHttpRequest, etc. were completely proprietary, and their functionality and implementation were proprietary. WebKit is open source. Discussions involving new features are publicly available. The code can be downloaded and viewed at any time, by anyone. You can even download a nightly build to see what’s coming in the pipeline. The spec, the intent, the implementation, and the browser itself are all freely available to anyone on almost any platform. This is decidedly different that Microsoft’s implementation and objective with IE. If Mozilla were to choose to do so, they could freely switch from Gecko to WebKit and not need to fake support for the prefixes. They could submit changes to the code base, and they could be involved in the conversation to help steer the future of the renderer.

Further, I feel we’re doing IE6 a disservice if we don’t mention how many of its innovations ended up as standards: XMLHttpRequest, drag and drop (regrettably), contentEditable, and web fonts. Was IE6 terrible? For the most part. Did it do a great deal to accelerate the advancement of the web? Well, it would be difficult to ague otherwise. The true problem with IE6 was that the upgrade path to IE7 (and 8, and 9, and 10) was so painful, that many chose not to bother. The browser itself was really pretty great from a development standpoint.

It Won’t Work

Mozilla have sat on their hands for the last five years, and have been forgotten in the mobile space. Mobile Firefox is still a “test pilot” five years after the announcement of the iPhone, and four years after Android started releasing modern smart phones. It’s not available on iOS. On the desktop, Firefox’s marketshare has steadily eroded as faster, and more innovative browsers have pushed to the forefront. If Mozilla wants to fix this problem, the path to success isn’t complaining about standards, it’s creating a better browser. Firefox needs to be available, and it needs to kick ass. If Mozilla wants people to care about the -moz prefix, they need to create mobile Firefox users. Developers didn’t shift en masse to standards based development until people started using Firefox. “We’re basically as good as the browser you’re already using, but we’re not on your platform yet” isn’t a great sales pitch. When I switched from IE6 to Firefox it wasn’t just because Firefox was better. It was because Firefox was insanely better. Google just released Chrome for Android, and it is insanely better than Browser. Mozilla has had five years, why haven’t they done the same?

I understand Mozilla’s motivations. They need people to see mobile Firefox as a viable alternative, and if people aren’t using the -moz prefix, sites will look worse in Firefox. The solution is education and evangelism, not obfuscation. Their actions here are just going to make web based development more painful. If they implement -webkit and it varies even slightly from the WebKit implementation, we’re back to browser sniffing to react. Mozilla is talking about standards while actively working to ruin vendor prefixes, an important part of the standardization process. They’re solving a problem they have (irrelevance) by creating one for me (fracturing). That isn’t a path to success.

Developers are going to flock to any environment that saves them time and pain. If anything, actions like this are going to push developers away from the web and towards native solutions.

It’s Okay to Break the Web

If prefixes change, and sites break, so be it. Let them break. It’s a developer’s choice whether or not they use prefixes, and it’s their responsibility to repair broken sites if browsers change the implementation. These “broken web” arguments are an appeal to antiquity. We need to allow the web to move fast and break things. It’s still in its infancy — especially the mobile web — and we’re still figuring out how it needs to work. I’ve built over 40 sites, and few of them still exist in their original form. The web moves fast. Three year old sites are ancient. If a browser drops prefix support in favor of a standardized implementation, most sites will be fine, and the few that do break will just be casualties of progress. It’s not a real problem if a site loses progressive enhancements. That’s kind of the point.

Standardization moves at a glacial pace, and mobile browsers are pacing themselves to create capable alternatives to native apps. The features may well be “experimental”, but they work, and typically, they work pretty well. I have no interest in being standards compliant if standards bodies aren’t capable of keeping pace with browser development. My concern is for my users, and creating the best possible experience. They do not care how I accomplish the things that I do, only that they work.

WebKit is open-source. It has its own committees, and its own development processes, and it’s moving fast. The standards community feels that we should continue to develop to the lowest common denominator until these new properties can be standardized, for the good of the web. For the good of the web, I’d counter that if the W3 wants to remain relevant, they need to keep up. No one is willing to wait months, let alone years, to start developing at the very edge of what’s possible.

Seeking Permanence

2012-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been stuck on the idea of creating something larger than myself lately. Something more important than my next paycheque. Something that people love, and that I can be truly proud of. I made a list of all of the web projects I can remember working on, and it’s a dismal showing. The vast majority of the work I’ve done no longer exists.

It’s not that all was for nothing. I’ve learned heaps along the way. It’s just that I have next to nothing to show for years of effort. Further, none of those sites represent my best possible effort. They all fall short for some reason, be it time, money, or direction. Compromise is a huge part of client work, and I’m not one who compromises well. I take my work personally, and having to deliver something that’s less than it could be eats me up inside.

What it really comes down to is control. Counting sites that I’ve built for other people feels like an unfair measure. Of course they’re not up to my ideals, they’re a representation of someone else’s. When I look at that list of sites, it’s impossible not to wonder: if I were in charge, would there have been a measurable impact? There’s not way to split test the past, so I guess I’ll never really know, but I honestly feel that the answer is “yes”.

So now the question becomes how do I gain control, and of what? Clearly, if I want to create something lasting, client work can’t be the way forward. Clients have all of the power in that relationship. You can educate, cajole, reason, or debate, but in the end your work doesn’t belong to you. Similarly, I’d have little hope of making much of a dent working as a part of any large company. Decisions are made, and you’re left as a cog in a machine. The truth of it is that a ship only needs one captain, and everyone else is left cleaning the deck or shovelling coal. The best time to be a part of any big company is before they get big.

So then, I guess that leaves a few options. The obvious choice is to be a part of a boutique development house. I look at companies like Panic, or 37 Signals and can’t help but feel like they’re on to something. A small group of people, who obviously love what they do, and who pour themselves into making products they care about. There’s a clear path to getting there: find people you love working with, take client work to pay the bills, and put every spare second into building something you love. That’s the path I’m on today, and it certainly meets most of my criteria. The only sacrifice here is impact. Boutique developers tend to satisfy niche markets.

What does it take to make an impact though? It usually requires founding a startup, and shooting for the moon. Startup life seems to require a delicate balance of tenacity, smarts, connections, and luck. My real fear with that path is that you still end up indebted, but to investors as opposed to clients. Startups end up being trapped into always expanding, consuming, and “creating shareholder value”. It’s likely the way to maximize your reach, but it would require sacrificing control.

A simpler plan would be finding a way to share everything I’ve learned. I’ve amassed a hoard of experience, but it’s taken me thirty years to get here. I honestly feel like I could condense a lot of what I know, and help people to fast forward their own ambitions. I’m only capable of doing so much, but if I were to share what I know, and find a way to really connect with people, I might help dozens, hundreds, or (dare to dream) thousands of other people. It’s a little humbling to think of the effect someone like Joel Spolsky has had on software developers all around the world.

The key to all of this is finding a way to create something that people love. Whether it’s a simple piece of software that makes somebody’s life easier, a blog where you share everything you know, or The Next Big Thing™, you just need people to need it. That’s the big secret. Permanence comes with indispensability, and that’s what I really want.

A Faster Website

2012-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

A long time ago, I read High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. In it, the author discusses the value of a fast website, and a bunch of really easy techniques to ensure your site is as fast as it can be. With my newfound knowledge, I promptly never did anything to ever try and speed up a website (with the exception of using non-blocking JS).

When I relaunched this site a few weeks ago, I was happy with how simple it was, but it felt sluggish. It’s all static files (generated by Jekyll), so it really should have been a lot snappier [1]. I decided to knuckle down and see what I could do to fix it.

My first step was to add all of my static images to Amazon S3. I thought this would be pretty straight forward, but it ended up being a bit of a pain. To start, I signed up for an S3 account, and created a bucket with all of my images in it. Because I’m pedantic, I also created a subdomain so that I’d have prettier URLs. Surprisingly (to me), adding images to S3 didn’t do anything to make the site faster. To speed it up, I had to sign up for CloudFront and add my bucket as a “download” distribution. That got images downloading noticeably faster.

Next, I set up far-future expires headers for all of my files. Getting this up and running on my server was easy enough. I just had to SSH in and enable mod_expires, and add a few declarations to my .htaccess file [2]. Getting them set up on S3 was a pain.

By default, S3 doesn’t set expiry headers, and if you want to set them yourself, you need to do so on upload. I searched around for an easy way to do this, but the solution actually came courtesy of Panic. Their app Transmit can also handle S3 quite seamlessly, and you can set custom headers in the preferences.

Setting default Expires headers for Amazon S3 in Panic's Transmit

The final step was setting up gzip compression, which was again, as easy as enabling mod_deflate, updating my .htaccess file [2], and reloading Apache.

In all, I spent a few hours playing with this, and my site is noticeably faster. I now have an A [3] in YSlow, and 92/100 on Google Page Speed. If I would have known how easy making a site responsive is, I would have been doing it all along. It actually took me quite a bit longer to write this post than it did to dramatically improve my page response times.

Even though it’s running off of a tiny little Linode VPS
You can see my .htaccess file here: https://github.com/ironkeith/keithsilgard.com/blob/master/.htaccess
YSlow doesn’t detect that static.keithsilgard.com is using a CDN, so you need to let it know to get that A

Using Bing

2012-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Google’s actions of late have left me wondering: can I live without them? Well there’s really only one way [1] to find out: try Bing. So I switched my default search engine, and since then, I’ve only used Google if Bing fails me.

The unfortunately reality is that I still end up using Google daily. If I’m being honest, I’d much rather still be using Google, on the whole it’s a better product. Bing isn’t a lost cause though, they’re just running a year or so behind. When they launched, there was a lot of clever innovation to be found. There are obviously talented people working there, but they really need to smooth some of the rough edges and differentiate themselves.

Design

The first stumbling block is just trying to skim the results. Bing has borrowed heavily from Google’s design, but everything is just different enough to feel a little off, and where they are truly different, it’s for the worse. Let’s take a look at their search results:

Click to alternate between Google and Bing

If you click the image a few times, you’ll get a good idea of how similar the two really are, so, what makes Google so much easier to skim?

Whitespace
Bing gets all ten links into a single screen, while Google only manages eight. If all of the results had an equal probability of being the one Bing may have an advantage there, but in reality the first few links account for a majority of the clicks. Take a few steps away from your screen and compare the two. Not only are Google’s results more prominent in the page, but the separation between results is more obvious. Google effectively uses whitespace to put the emphasis where it belongs, on the first few results.
URL Location
Bing chooses to place the URL below the description, while Google places it immediately after the title. Google’s placement makes for a better information hierarchy. I don’t read search results, I skim them for useful markers, and the page URL is an important one. My basic process is something like this: skim the title, if it looks good, check the URL, if I know it, click the link, if not, skim the description. A failure at any point takes me to the next result. Bing’s placement forces my eyes to jump around, and even after three months, I can’t get used to it [2].
Page Layout
Bing chooses to list related searches and search history in the left column. Neither of those are ever useful to me, but because they’re blue links, and the often contain bolded words, I find them difficult to ignore [3]. The placement of search history is understandable [4], but it’s functionally useless as I am yet to search for something, find a result, then need to run the exact same query again.

Search Results

Most of the time, Bing does a solid job, but when I see a posting like this one on Reddit, I can’t say I’m really surprised. Google has progressed beyond keywords in pages, and seems to be taking intent into consideration when processing results. They’ve done this by slowly switching from page based algorithms to entity based ones. It’s likely that Bing is also doing similar work (the article says as much), but if so, the results just aren’t there yet.

Unfortunately, I spend much of my day searching for relatively esoteric things, and Bing consistently fails to find what I’m looking for. Let’s look at a few examples (click any result to see how Google handled the same query):

I signed up for iCloud and iTunes scrolling broke, Bing's index isn't fresh enough to tell me why.

Trying to search for the HTML entity to create a "»" by just pasting the character.
Google provides a helpful autocomplete, Bing is baffled.

Google notices and fixes a made-up word typo.

Bing incorrectly fixes a made-up word query.

I suspect Bing has issues indexing Stack Overflow,
it rarely finds results there, even on direct keyword matches.

These are just a handful of the queries where Bing has let me down. I cherry picked them to illustrate the problems with using Bing as your default search engine:

The index is often stale when compared to Google
Bing is less likely to find results for complicated or obscure queries
The auto-complete is slower, and often less helpful
If you make a typo, or are searching for an obscure term, Bing will often fail
Anecdotally, Bing seems to do a poor job of indexing and returning results for Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is basically the Wikipedia of programming queries, it should almost always be in the results

Start Your Photocopiers

I think my biggest gripe with Bing is that it lacks originality. Certainly, Google has done an outstanding job of search, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Bing lacks any sense of uniqueness. It has similar blended results, similar local results, similar maps, and similar images. If I were to replace the Bing logo with a Google one, and tell people that Google has redesigned, most would believe me. What Bing desperately needs is an answer to the question “why would I use this instead of Google?” Innovate, experiment, strike aggressive deals to get content Google can’t access. They need to differentiate because “we’re basically identical, but a little worse” isn’t going to cut it.

Speed

My final grievance with Bing is that it’s a little slower. For example, when I’m typing a query, I usually outpace Bing’s autocomplete. It’s not a huge deal, but Google’s autocomplete loads live results at a faster rate. It is impossible for me to outpace Google’s autocomplete, and often I’ll see a recommended search that’s exactly what I’m looking for, so I just have to hit the down arrow, then boom results. Further, with Google Instant, the results are loaded before I’m finished typing my query. With Bing it’s always an additional page load. It’s a tiny little thing, but the incredible responsiveness of Google make Bing look sluggish, which adds to its general knock-off feel.

And So…

Why am I still using Bing? Well, there are a few reasons. One, I don’t think it’s possible for Bing to get better than Google until it hits some critical traffic point. Google has a huge advantage because of its astonishing amount of search data. That’s why Bing was surreptitiously scraping Google’s results; they lacked the data to generate those results themselves. If I continue to use Bing, I’m one more data point they can use to create a viable competitor. My other reason: trust. Due to some perverse twist of fate, I find myself in a position where I trust Microsoft (of all the companies in the world) more than Google [5]. So can I live without Google? No. Not yet, at least. But I’m still going to try.

blekko also creates its own index, so I guess I could give them a shot. While I ran this experiment, a friend tried DuckDuckGo and found it interesting, but ultimately wanting.
Several times, Bing’s results contained the page I was looking for, but I missed it. After Googling, I’d go back and notice it there, just a little further down.
Placing related searches in the top left corner of the page makes no sense to me. I haven’t had a chance to see if my current query has worked yet, so why choose to provide me with prominent alternates first thing? A better place for this list would be after the first ten results, and Bing seems to agree with me, as the exact same list appears there as well.
It’s nice of Bing to make it obvious to people that they are keeping a history, and allow easy options to clear it, and opt-out. I just don’t agree that it needs that level of prominence.
Though honestly, if I’m going to let that be a defining boundary, I should really use DuckDuckGo.

My Writing Manifesto

2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Create something that can last, and something that I can be proud of.

I’ve written hundred of posts over the years. I’ve also removed almost all of them. Especially any that break the following rules:

No Link Posts — If I want to share a link, I’ll post it to Twitter.

No Angry Rants — No one cares about my whining.

No Bad Stand-Up — Observational humour about my life isn’t interesting to anyone who isn’t me.

No “Me Too” Posts — Why write something if I don’t have anything to offer beyond agreement?

Be Constructive — Cynicism is equally easy and worthless. It’s great to have an opinion, but don’t be a dick about it.

Don’t Be Lazy — Do the research. Write confidently.

Don’t Be Afraid of Being Wrong — Nothing here is written in stone. Feel free to edit.

Make it Mean Something — Don’t write for the sake of writing.

Here’s some general advice: if you find yourself beginning […] with a disclaimer of the form “I hate to be that guy” or “I hate to write this,” just don’t say it.
Paul Graham

Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

I loved to fantasize about going to dinner with Steve Jobs. I’d agonize over the exactly perfect way to phrase an email, explaining that I don’t really want anything from him, but how an opportunity to meet him is one of my life’s ambitions. I’d imagine checking my mail, and running to tell my wife “something crazy has happened, and I need to fly to California.” I’d spend hours thinking: what I would say if I were sitting across the table from him, drinking a little too much wine to try and calm my nerves?

I never could figure that out.

What do you say to someone like that? Maybe I’d ask where he found the courage to get up in the morning and face the world after losing the company he founded. What drove him to start from scratch, and continue to chase the dream that had left him disgraced.

Maybe I’d ask if it was frustrating, to see where things where headed and having to wait for the world to catch up. In 1996 at WWDC, he opened the stage to questions from a hostile crowd after announcing changes that they didn’t like, to a company that was on life support. While responding to their criticisms, he described—with a stunning clarity—the world he’d deliver 15 years later.

Maybe I’d ask where he sees the world 15 years from now. If he had another decade, where would he try and lead us? Was he content with building the world’s most successful company from nothing, or was he still driven to further it?

But he didn’t have 15 years. When he stepped down as CEO, my heart sank a little. I knew that if it was bad enough to pull him away from Apple, that it must be serious, but I still held on to the hope that there might be one last comeback.

I never wrote that email. I was never brave enough to face rejection, or worse still, nothingness. I held the dream so dearly that I preferred its comfort to the fear of rejection. And now I regret that. I’ll always have to regret it. That I’ll never have the chance to meet my hero, and say the only thing that really matters: “thank-you”.

It’s funny too; had I paid any attention, I’d have known better. One of the only truly personal moments he ever shared with the world was his Stanford address, where he warned of the impending presence of death, and importance of embracing life. Take chances. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thanks Steve. Rest in peace.

Stupidly Expensive German Clock

2010-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

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inspired by a stupidly expensive german clock

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What Mattered to Me in 2009

2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

... in Music

Songs I Listened To / Artists I Listened To

Heads Will Roll - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Zero - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Dull Life - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Glorious Dawn (ft. Stephen Hawking) - Colorpulse - Carl Sagan
Blood of a Young Wolf - Buck 65
Runaway - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Miami - Against Me!
What Goes Around.../...Comes Around - Justin Timberlake
Will it Grow - Jakob Dylan
The Day the World Went Away - Nine Inch Nails
19H11 - Danger
Death And All His Friends - Coldplay
Rej - Sonar Kollektiv Orchester
Deadly Sinners - 3 Inches of Blood
Set It Off - Girl Talk
Phantom - Justice
Disarm - The Smashing Pumpkins
Mind Eraser, No Chaser - Them Crooked Vultures
Green Gloves - The National
Twilight of the Thunder God - Amon Amarth

I really, really like this song a whole big bunch. It's Blitz was absolutely my favorite album of 2009, and this is the strongest track on the album. Even the video is great; I'll take a homicidal, dancing rat-man to a catchy song any day of the week (and twice on Sundays).

77 scrobbles on last.fm.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Against Me!
Coldplay
3 Inches of Blood
Metallica
Girl Talk
Incubus
Foo Fighters
Billy Talent
The Decemberists
Nine Inch Nails
Queens of the Stone Age
Amon Amarth
Metric
Buck 65
Tegan and Sara
Arctic Monkeys
The String Quartet
City and Colour

15,406 Songs *

I scrobbled 8,946 fewer songs on last.fm...

308 Artists *

...but it was spread among 103 more artists.

I only went to see 2 bands play live this year.

The fewest in the decade.

... in Travel

I took 7 trips to visit 4 cities in 3 countries.

I love travelling, but this year was ridiculous. This is the most travelling I've ever done in a single year. By a lot.

May 29–April 6

For Ali's birthday we packed up and flew to Houston to visit my parents. After our last trip I had vowed never to return (Mom's cats wreak havoc on my allergies), but I was persuaded by the promise of air filters and daily vacuuming. My allergies were annoying, but the weather was incredible; I didn't feel the need to spend much time indoors. Swimming, golfing, reading, eating, drinking, and visiting. Life can be tough.

I went to a baseball game...

It was the only baseball game that I had ever been to. As it turns out, one was enough.

April 9–April 13

Serge, Cyndy, Faye, Ali, and I all really wanted to make our way to Vancouver for Easter. For some reason, we decided that it would be a good idea to drive there. With a two year old. The drive went well in a way that there's no way it possibly should have, and we all got to enjoy a wonderful weekend together. I got to catch a Flood of Fire show, and party with my buddy Sean. We all shared an Easter dinner together. Then we had to drive home. In a blizzard.

August 6–August 10

Leave the kids at home, we're off to Vegas. Ali and I—and our friends Matt and Caroline—took a break from real life to engage in the spectacle that is Vegas. Bright lights, some drinking, some golfing, an incredible amount of shopping, dinner at Battista's, dinner at Mesa, lounging by the pool, some pee in an air conditioner, and a toenail in an escalator, then it was time to fly home.

August 21–August 24

It's not every year that your sister-in-law turns 30 (unless you happen to have a ridiculous number of sisters-in-law), so naturally we—as well as Isaac, Mel, Serge, and Cyndy—all made the trip to Vancouver. I got to sneak away for a day and hang out with my buddy Sean, which is a recipe for good times. Jess's party was a good time (except for the damn wasps), and best of all, we flew there and back. It turns out that flying for one and a half hours is way faster than driving for 14.

October 2–October 5

55 was a big birthday for Dad, and Mom didn't disappoint. She got Grant, Chrissy, and me to meet her and Dad in Vegas for a surprise birthday weekend. When I arrived, Grant was in full on Vegas mode (read: drunk). We had a nice time, eating, drinking, and gambling (well, I didn't gamble, but they all did). We took in the Cirque show Ka, and I was completely blown away. Dad and Grant, not so much. Best of all, it marked Dad's eligibility for retirement and impending return to Canada!

November 30–December 7

Ali's good friend Sandra decided that a destination wedding was a good idea. We decided that was a great excuse to escape the misery of an Edmonton winter and bask in the sun. Cuba is beautiful, the resort was great, the beach was perfect, and the water was better. That said Cuba is wildly inconsistent. The quality of the food and drink varied wildly depending on seemingly random circumstances. For the most part the drinks were good, and the food was bad. I had a great time, but next time I'll try somewhere not under embargo.

December 23–January 4

One last trip to close out the decade. Christmas with my parents in Houston. This was the first Christmas I'd spent with my parents in a couple of years, and, as a bonus, Papa was there too.

... Online

Why have real friends when you can have pretend ones? It's basically the same as plants.

126 friends on Facebook.

I had a bit of a purge this year... I decided that I'd much rather if strangers didn't know what was happening with my life. Then I stopped updating Facebook. I still leech there, but I don't really care much about it.

I follow 75 and 78 follow me on Twitter.

Twitter really ended up winning the day for me. I don't know how it managed to pull it off either. I guess the only thing I really liked contributing to Facebook was status updates.

I tweeted 998 times.

YouTube tells me I only watched 17 videos. They are wrong.

I also have accounts with all of these sites, so feel free to stalk me!

... in Pictures

Ali and I took 3,385 pictures this year.

We took 4,155 last year, but I also shot a wedding and shot close to 1,500 in one day. If you take that into account, I actually took more pictures this year.

These are some of my favorites.

2008 by the Numbers

2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Most Listened to Artists (Last.fm):

The Smashing Pumpkins – 1359 plays
The Police – 1076 plays
Queens of the Stone Age – 874 plays
Foo Fighters – 737 plays
Tegan & Sara – 695 plays
Metallica – 591 plays
Against Me! – 513 plays
The National - 512 plays
Silverchair – 478 plays
The Cardigans – 451 plays
The Arctic Monkeys – 446 plays
The Decemberists – 440 plays
Thrice – 423 plays
The Shins – 413 plays
Daft Punk – 400 plays

I scrobbled 24,352 songs among 205 artists.

I have 123 feeds in my Google Reader.

A massive 1,837 visitors tallied up 2,917 page views on this blog (according to Google Analytics).

I wrote 40 posts for this blog. One of which I’m proud of, one which I only let my wife read and left unpublished.

I performed 3,150 Google searches (while logged in).

Top queries (via Google)

zend api
pants
13904 146 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB, Canada -> 9932 81 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB, Canada
mamp
9932 81 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB, Canada -> 13904 146 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB, Canada
white whale comic
php 301 redirect
mono
iamthejeff (moderately embarrassing…)
fogbugz

I have 143 “friends” on Facebook.

I was personally involved in building and launching 1 website (the fewest since 1999).

I watched 326 videos on YouTube (while logged in).

I took 3 trips (Phoenix, Vancouver, and Houston).

Concerts

Foo Fighters
Iron Maiden
Gogol Bordello
Against Me!
Flood of Fire
Ninja Spy

Faye has 10 teeth and weighs 21lbs 12oz.

I weigh 245lbs.

I (with Ali’s help) took 4,155 pictures.

I photographed 1 wedding (something I had vowed never to do).

I went to 3 weddings (Gursky, Ali’s friend who I don’t know, Isaac & Mel).

I can’t think of anything else.

Risk

2008-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

I have a tendency to take the path of least resistance. The middle of the road is where I’m most comfortable, so that’s where I tend to stay. When I buy something, it’s never the most expensive and never the least expensive. Why we built our first house, it was designed in shades of brown. With a few exceptions I’ve avoided risk whenever possible. Recently though, a few people in my life have exemplified the value of risk and it’s got me thinking.

The first is a coworker. He left Statusfirm to pursue his own ambitions. On the risk spectrum, leaving your job to pursue your dreams has to be right up at the top. Yet, to me at least, not following through is the bigger risk. There is certainly a lot to be said for a safe corporate job. It’s easy enough to sit back, receiving regular paycheques, and watch the world go by. It’s easier still to sit on an idea and, years later when someone else does it, think to yourself “that could have been me, that was my idea. I should be a millionaire.” There’s no risk there, just self-pity and remorse. Chance are you would have failed had you tried, so it’s far safer to sit back gathering paycheques and waiting for someone else to try on your behalf. Failing is hard, and blaming others for following through on your idea is far too easy.

The other is my buddy Sean. Sean quit school, and moved from Edmonton to Vancouver to pursue his dream of making it in a band. School wasn’t making Sean happy, but had he continued on he could have comfortably passed (he had a high GPA). He could have easily gotten a safe job. He could have easily spent evenings strumming an acoustic guitar, writing silly songs and wondering “what if.” There’s no shame in that, it’s what most sane people choose. But Sean chose to risk it all on the hope that he could find true happiness doing what he loved. It wasn’t easy (it still isn’t) and the chances of success are truly dismal. Yet, when Sean’s old and decrepit and he thinks back on his life, he’ll be able to say “I did everything I could to be happy, and chose an exciting life over a safe one.”

There’s nothing wrong with safety. There’s nothing wrong with seeking stability and going down the easy road. It’s how most people live their life. Sure you miss out on the highest of highs, but you never have to face the lowest of lows; for most of us that’s a fair trade. But I tend to reflect on the risks I’ve taken.

I chose to move to Edmonton, by myself, and stay in Canada while my parents went to live in Australia. My first time living away from home was in a strange city, and my safety net lived on the other side of the planet. I did this because I was in love with a girl. Such a silly, stupid thing to do. She even had a boyfriend; a surefire recipe for heartbreak if there’s ever been one.

I chose to drop out of the University of Alberta, to leave behind a few years of an Engineering degree because I knew it wasn’t what made me happy. I did this much to the chagrin of my parents, my extended family, and the Dean of the Engineering Faculty. It was unanimous that dropping out of school and forsaking a promising career was a really bad thing.

The girl did break my heart, and I probably broke hers. I ended up with a job I hated, making $12/hour (slightly more than my previous job at a grocery store). There were times when I thought to myself “this is too hard; I’ve made the wrong decision.” But I married that girl, and I love her with all of my heart. I’m passionate about what I do for a living, and I’ve managed to parlay it into a fairly successful career.

So while I tend towards the middle, without risk what would I have? Security? Safety? A different life, in a different world? The risks I’ve taken are the things that have made me the happiest. The risks that I’ve taken define who I am. So thanks to Sean and Ryan for reminding me that sometimes it’s worthwhile to gamble on happiness – even if the world thinks you’re crazy for doing so.