GeekLimit

On July 20, 2006, I submitted the following idea to the Cambrian House community. I thought it was a good idea, but the community decided instead that there are more worthy projects. Now, the whole reason I signed up for Cambrian House is because I already know I have great ideas, but don’t have the time or money to act on them. CH suggests that they will take the ideas in as a community, and help you make a success out of them if you’re in a position like mine.
Here was my idea, submitted 7/20/06:

The Idea:
Implement an eBay-like feedback system for other drivers. The idea here is to make the person’s individual score an indicator of how considerate they’ve been, penalize those who aren’t, and publish their standings to the public.
Subject to abuse, so there would probably have to be some sort of normalizing mechanism where all your scores move one point towards zero every day or week. This would mean that you would have to be consistently good (or bad) to maintain any score.
You also would be able to look back and see historical monthly scores, to see if the person is consistantly bad or just had a bad month.
Also, the police would have the ability to see this ranking too, since it’s public knowledge. If someone was -50 in a week, they might take a closer look at addressing the issue.

I thought of this idea when I was…
While waiting in traffic, I watch people bypass the entire line of cars waiting to exit the highway and cut in front of everyone. Following closely behind are the people who just drive on the shoulder past everyone.
I’m looking for a way to promote driving courtesy. This is an embarrassment-based system, which usually works pretty well as a deterrent. Plus the fact that anyone (police, spouse, employer) can look up your plate #…that would be a fairly large deterrent as well…

…and what do you know, WIRED magazine posts this up in their RSS feed a few days ago:

Online service PlateWire lets motorists, pedestrians and cyclists keep tabs on the good, the bad and the ugly behind the wheel. In Autopia.

I went over to the platewire site, not believing my eyes. It’s a horrible implementation of my idea, but in surfing the founder’s blog, I found something more interesting: platewire.com launched on July 29, 2006… 9 days after I posted my idea. What’s worse is that the guy is on CNN and WIRED with this bag of crap.
Now, at first I was pissed, because I assumed some visionless hack stole my idea and implemented some junk site based loosely around it. I felt a little better when I noticed that the domain name had been registered in May.

Of the few ideas I’ve posted to Cambrian House, this is one of my favorites, and I hate to see it bastardized like this. I’ve got a whole lot of ideas about how to improve the service and make it workable and profitable… all I need is some help developing the site.

We’ve already seen the idea is good, I know how we can make it great. If you think you can handle making a clean, database-driven site (preferably with MySQL, CSS, PHP or Ruby), shoot me a message and let’s hop on this gravy train and blow platewire out of the water.

edit: I’ve had to close commenting, due to OT posting and spam.

I’ve dumped snap, I found it to be annoying and pop-up-ish. I have, however, pimped up my feed a bit. I hadn’t logged into feedburner in a while, there certainly are a lot of options I wasn’t taking advantage of.
In particular, I’m glad that they offer a service to splice in your del.icio.us links. I use that service a lot, and I’m happy to share them! If you’re a blogger, and have a del.icio.us account that you use to mark sites interesting to your readers, I would recommend using the splicing feature.

I’m also as happy as…well…a car guy at Christmas-time, I suppose. Have you seen how many Top Gear videos are on metacafe?!? It’s unbelievable! They canceled the show here in the US, but I’m willing to go out of my way to catch it. IT’s probably one of the better evaluation/testing shows I’ve ever seen, and hilarious at the same time! I’ve been watching so many videos lately that I’m starting to accidentally use English vocabulary in my everyday life. I’m subscribed to anything tagged “Top Gear” on metacafe, and expect to be for quite a while.

Besides being excellent car reviewers, they do some very strange things that somehow are always very interesting.
Right! On to a proper show!

Oh, and by the way, metacafe, what’s with not having a plugin for embedding videos from your site into wordpress?  Isn’t this a given for any of these multimedia sites?  We’re all not on blogger/myspace, you know…  Anybody have one?

I’m trying out the service from Snap. Hover over any links here and tell me what you think. Not bad functionality for a single line of script in the header…
Snap

EFF

via Natalia Menezes

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This might be a viable alternative to my recent struggles with Ruby on Rails… (or I might just need to take it slower than a 4-hour marathon of tutorials). I’m looking forward to seeing the functionality added to this toolkit by the open-source community.

What functionality do you think might be added by the community that would make this the “next big thing” in framework-based development?

If you’re not familiar with GWT:

“Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.”

Here’s a sample widget written with the GWT, seems simple enough…

public class Hello implements EntryPoint {
public void onModuleLoad() {
Button b = new Button("Click me", new ClickListener() {
public void onClick(Widget sender) {
Window.alert("Hello, AJAX");
}
});
RootPanel.get().add(b);
}
}

Looks like those of you who already use Java/Javascript might have a new option out there for rapid web development.

		

I’ve been checking out 43things.com this weekend, and I have to say – it’s great! I’ve already finished one of the things on my list – learning about Ruby. This site is great, and I highly recommend it. Everyone should make a ‘life list’ of things they want to do, but this stie goes further. For example, I added ‘Drink more water’ to my list, along with ‘See a space shuttle launch’.

Check out 43things today, it really is simple to use, and I’ve found it to be a great motivator, both to myself, and it’s nice to get encouragement from others!

I like those peppermint mochas from Starbucks, but they don’t really fit in with my holday (or any) budget. I mean, come on. $5 for flavored water? Ouch.

Check this out, I’ve been making my own, and it’s just as good. What’s more, I think I could make over a gallon of it for about the same price as a trip or two to Starbucks. Not that I would want to make/drink that much at one sitting…!

Take 2 cups of hot chocolate mix (from costco or wherever), mix with 2 cups sugar. Keep this mix by the coffee grounds. Then go get some peppermint-flavored cream for your homemade coffee. It’s by the milk in the grocery store.

Put enough cream in to cover the bottom of your mug, and add 2 tablespoons of sugar/chocolate mix before filling the rest with coffee, and you’ve got yourself a grande peppermint mocha for the winter months, and a sizable amount of extra cash per month (# of trips saved to startbucks per month times about $5)

For me, this is adding up to about $20 per month, but I’m a light starbucks patron. $20 per month added to my savings of a programmable thermostat and my compact fluoresent bulbs. Overall, that’s about $120 per month saved, and I still have adequate light, heat and coffee! Try some of these cost-cutting ideas, and have a happy holiday!

I had to answer a few questions in my grad class on a very good article. The article is from the May-June 1990 issue of The Futurist, and is titled ‘The Importance of Followership’. Basically, it lays out the importance of cultivating an organization of employees that are happy to do their work, and are rewarded for acting on the best course of action for the organization, instead of trying to just be good employees because they’re afraid to stick out and lose their jobs. Having been written in 1990, it’s a little interesting to realize that most of the companies that survived the dot-com bust seemed to have understood this, and emerged as leaders in their fields. Here are some of my (short) answers to the discussion questions:

1. Distinguish between leadership and followership. What are the characteristics of successful leaders? Successful followers? Are the characteristics similar?

The article does a good job describing the roles of leadership and followership, and what makes each successful. What struck me is that the most successful leaders and followers are those that choose to carry the traits traditionally held by the other. That is, employees that take a more vested interest in leadership qualities in their organization, ad leaders who choose to be open to collaboration with their employees.

2. Why do you think so little emphasis is given to followership compared to leadership in organizations?

Unfortunately, our culture is shaped around celebrating the top percentage of success stories. We celebrate sports stars on winning teams, when there are usually multiple people responsible for their rise to greatness. In recent years, there has been more hopeful signs of celebrating the accomplishments of non-leaders. Just look at the online world for example – its equalizing tendencies are celebrating people for their accomplishments or ideas, as opposed to celebrating a leader for the successes of their organization.

3. Describe the ways organizations can nurture followership. What are the obstacles to implementation of these strategies, if any?

By including people in the operation of business and giving them a sense of ownership, they will be more inclined to operate on the behest of the organization’s well-being. By rewarding this behavior, whether it is popular or not, leaders can cultivate employees that are more interested in being dynamic producers than an army of followers looking for the answer people want to hear.

Addition: Coming from the IT field, I can see the organizations that survived the dot-com bust were ones that counted on, and encouraged, the initiative of their employees to be personally innovative in the best interests of the company.

Another good case of this was in the forming of Silicon Valley back in the 50’s and 60’s. The inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, won the nobel prize in 1956 and is generally regarded as the father of the computer age. He formed a company, and was set to be the first to build transistors, which led to semiconductors, which led to processors. He had an innate ability to hire geniuses, but due to his overwhelming desire to control people, and a fear that they would come up with greater innovations than his own. In the process, he almost immediately lost most of his first employees, who soon formed their own companies: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

William Shockley faded away from the birth of the computer age, and people like Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) eventually took his place as silicon valley’s innovators.

As a side note, later he basically went crazy, heavily supporting Eugenics, the belief that humans are in a form of “reverse evolution” by breeding “undesirable” traits more often than desirable ones. The Nazi party based their reasoning for the Holocaust on eugenics, so this didn’t make Shockley popular in post-WWII America… He died in 1989, and his ex-wife was the only attendant at his funeral.

If he had been able to foster a sense of “followership” as strong as his desire to lead, we would have undoubtedly been the most wealthy person in the computer age, either at or above the level of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

I’d be shocked if anyone reading this hasn’t seem Office Space. I mean, come on – it’s practically a prerequisite. But you probably haven’t seen this.

Office Space: the horror movie?

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