Dan Nordquist writes on the internet.

Here’s what I want: some notification system for important news. I am not chained to the grid of mainstream news and that’s a conversation for another time, but if someone rolls up and says “woo hoo, America elected a black president” I want to not be all “what-lected a black presi-what?”

I believe in the business they call it breaking news. I also think that they might define breaking news as “anything happening on cable right now”, as searching for “breaking news” on Google brings up every cable news organization in the country.

Funny story: @cnnbrk actually used to be somewhat good at this. Then, honest to God, someone at CNN found out. Go, see what they post there. Wouldn’t you be mad if you got two text messages because they didn’t include their self-promoting URL the first time through? If they’re only going to cover important stories, with no unnecessary interruptions, isn’t some of that stuff profoundly inessential?

Anyway, I’m generally finding that @WCCOBreaking fits my peculiarities better than @CNNbrk now. But it’s still a terrible fit. What I’d like is to get mobile alerts for important things, but since that seems to be hard, let’s review a couple of things I need out of this service.

• Positively configurable for time of day. It’s possible to set Twitter up to instantly text you when selected accounts update, but they wisely allow you to set a window that it’s okay to update, and never text you outside of that window.
• Never update breaking news. Not for new body counts, not for a delay, not for late-breaking election returns, not because the president has finally and predictably chimed in. Your first breaking news alert says “whoa – turn on a TV” or “seriously, it might be a good idea to come to the website”, not “stay tuned” and certainly not “prepare yourselves to become interrupt-driven news consumers”.
• I don’t care if you mistyped your URL. Do not send another update.
• While we’re on URLs, and this might just be me, but Twitter is semi-sort of designed for mobile devices. Most of them don’t play Flash video on websites, and if they do, it’s YouTube or nothing. Just saying. Linking me to a Flash-based video page is bad.
• Speaking of videos, do not self-promote. I got this Palin-related update last week. Go ahead. Check it out. Mixed in with the news is a “Bombshell!” about the ex-VP-candidate’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s media tour. Early Show exclusive! But certainly not news, and not breaking news. Oh, I was mad about this one. While I think most of us understand that network news is propped up by the entertainment on those same networks, don’t rub our noses in the fact that you occasionally have to repay the favor. It’s hard to imagine a non-CBS outlet pushing the Letterman story in quite the same way as WCCO did. (@CNNbrk left it completely alone.)
• Please be right. WCCO (in their 12 Fort Hood updates) wrote that there were shots, no Minnesotans were involved (as if that mattered), that one shooter was dead with others in custody, that the suspect (now singular) had been identified, that he wasn’t dead, and that there actually was a Minnesotan in the injured. Now, nobody expects you to debunk balloon-boy shenanigans mid-shenanigan, and God knows there’s a push to get the scoop, but with only 140 characters and a commitment to saying relatively little relatively infrequently, it’s really important to not be way off base.
• I’m going to gently put forth that you don’t get hash tags. CNN signs everything “#cnn”. You know who else (besides CNN) uses the #cnn hashtag? People who are talking about CNN. I don’t even know why they occasionally slip into “#newcnn”. And while I actually appreciate a shortened URL to a news story, ending every update with “http://www.cnn.com” is dumb. You’re CNN. We know what your URL is.

Now I’m just picking on them. But this isn’t hard. I’m not asking you to adapt to my news preferences (more NFL, less NHL, yes Britney, no Paris), but just respect the fact that I’m letting you interrupt me. When the phone dings, I pick it up. Make this work for both of us.

Note: I intend to include more technical, work-related stuff in the blog now. That shouldn’t be terribly distracting to two or three of my readers, but I’d like the other two or three not to give up just because this is getting nerdy.

I was visiting a nine-month-old SpaghettiCode podcast the other day, and they were talking about the gap between an application’s users and the developers that wrote it. (They were trying to pick trends for 2009, and focusing on a Microsoft offering that will allow more business-line users to build application-like things out of developer-approved building blocks.)

The conversation turned to the topic of power users, who exist in between the business line user (who basically wants to get his work done) and the developer (who lives in the technical world, maybe to a fault). The power user writes long Excel macros to get his job done, or constructs an Access database / application that does 90% of what an enterprise app might do. 90% of his day is spent on business and working, but he’s willing to use every tool on the desktop to get that work done – he won’t wait for the IT department to put the app on his desktop to start working on it.

What I kept thinking during the conversation was that power users become developers. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that there is a pretty sharp dichotomy between the developers that trained in school / under a mentor, and those who picked up software development through more and more advanced business problem solving methods.

I am one of the latter, even though I was introduced to object-oriented programming in college. If that doesn’t count, I was certainly introduced to professional software development by someone who came in the Access / Excel door. I feel like power users who become developers have some advantages over purebred developers, but there are disadvantages, too.

Hire That Hack…

The self-taught ex-business developer has one huge advantage, if he can take advantage of it. He is a user, so he understands the user. He has user empathy. The purebred developer can certainly learn the domain, but if she hasn’t lived and breathed it, it’s a different kind of understanding. Business logic and user experience should be his strong suits, and it’s possible that he’ll be more versatile and diplomatic in interfacing with the business user.

Self-taught developers are self-starters, and won’t necessarily lean on “their way” of doing things. They clearly remember a time when they “didn’t know”, so with any luck, they’ll be flexible about new ideas, new approaches, and even new languages. If your developer’s developer was taught C#, she might feel like she’s specialized in that area and not comfortable or confident stretching into a new area.

…But Not Just Any Hack

The self-taught developer, left to his own devices, can build some seriously complicated stuff in whatever macro language he picked up. He may have found object-oriented principles in time to prevent the whole thing from collapsing. Whatever he knows, there are things that the purebred developer does that he’ll have to learn.

First, formally educated developers are taught to work in teams. (That doesn’t mean that they necessarily learn it, but they’re at least exposed to it.) Your developer might lock herself in a Mountain Dew-fueled cave of code, but she’s an order of magnitude more transparent than your self-taught developer ever had to be. He only ever had to code anything for himself, and as the only developer, he never showed the code to anyone. Collaboration might come naturally to him, but he’ll start out behind.

His vision of requirements was “what I needed to get my job done”, and then “what I felt like was missing”. Again, that develops a strong sense of user experience, but it doesn’t practice any of the areas of the brain required to read and understand someone else’s project plan. Having only developed for himself, he probably hasn’t ever documented anything. And if he ever ran into a problem, he probably ran to Google to solve it. While those long lectures on pointers and tree structures seemed unnecessary to her at the time, she’s got a foundation in principles that he can’t pick up by copying other people’s code. (There is some seriously weird advice out there on the internet. Google helps you find it, but sometimes that’s no help at all.)

All of these skills are learnable across this divide. There are certainly productive, happy developers on both sides, and both camps count their share of woeful wrecks. But developers that operate at a high level in both the technical and business-facing sides of their jobs, no matter where they came from, are always a joy to add to the team.

I am, I suppose, inspired, a little bit, but mostly Scott just reminds me that I’ve wanted to make a list (regularly) about this stuff. And not for you – for me, and for me-in-two-years to look back and laugh.

PC

At press time, I was not a PC. I’m using an almost three-year old MacBook Pro – one of the first Intel Core Duo Macs, which won’t go forward with us into the pending 64-bit revolution. (I have worked on a few 64-bit machines, and the difference between the two platforms caused a few headaches on a recent ASP.NET project I worked on.) I am looking forward to replacing it, and also looking forward to doing that with my data in place, since Time Machine (theoretically) makes it easy to back up and restore. My AppleCare expires in eight weeks, I think.

There is a six- or seven-year old PC in the basement that doesn’t like to turn on without a warmup. It runs XP and I don’t mess with it that often. I have XP on a Parallels image I can use in emergencies, but that’s (over the past year)

• 50% time-waster games / apps that won’t run in Mac OS X
• 50% Visual Studio.

I also find myself doing more and more “general computing” (games, email, websites, Twitter, Facebook) on my iPhone, which is the third generation (3G S) iPhone. About half the time I’m reaching to take my computer out of a bag, I’m remembering that I can just go to my pocket. It’s useful.

At work, I don’t know. It’s a Mac Pro, but it’s running XP. It has two screens, and I’m fond of it.

Apps

We’re using Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 at work. That’s my job. There’s also Outlook.

Every other waking minute, I’m using a mix of:

• Quicksilver. Just got back on this one, actually. Spotlight served my needs for a year or more, I think, and it wasn’t an unhappy year. QS is a little snappier, I think, a little smarter, and has cool tricks Spotlight won’t do. (I append to a file called inbox.txt when I have an idea and don’t want to lose it.)
• TweetDeck. If you follow more than a few people on Twitter, or you just want to quarantine the high-volume high-chatter people from your real friends, you want TD’s categories. Twitter will implement that functionality someday soon, but again, at press time, we don’t have it.
• iCal. Again, this is a new experiment, but as cool as Google Calendar’s online functionality is, it’s not useful to me offline. Even with the iPhone, I’d rather trust the nearby calendar, the one that can alert me without using the text messaging network, than the one in the “cloud”.
• Gmail. Sometimes I pop open Mail.app accidentally. Sorry, Mail.app. Didn’t mean to get you excited. If you’re visiting from 2014 and I’m not still using Gmail, something very bad must have happened.
• Evernote. About six months ago, I decided I needed to keep notes. I wasn’t wrong about that – frequently looked up, temporal, never-know-when-you’re-gonna-need-it notes are helping me stay productive, but I didn’t find Evernote until a few months ago. In this case, I’m cool with the cloud.
• Safari. I’ve gone back and forth on this, too. I was pretty strict about Firefox until I fell under the “Safari just seems more like a Mac app” spell. Somehow, the little things it insisted upon stopped irking me so much. I have learned to live without my nest of plugins, and I’m none the worse for it. At work (XP, remember) I use Chrome almost exclusively.
• Google Reader. I’ve been steady with Reader for years now. Whichever one you choose, choose an RSS reader, and quit wasting your time “visiting” sites to see if they’ve changed. Your brain has much, much better things to do.
• OmniFocus. I don’t do a daily review, but I do have the ceremony of a pretty important weekly one. I’m not strict GTD, but I do enough there that I really miss it when Sunday comes and goes without me thinking – alone – about where I am and where I want to be.
• TextMate. I needed a higher-test text editor than what comes for free on the Mac, but I no longer write emails, blog posts, or anything but text files in there. It’s in the dock because I forget its name. That’s how fervently religious I am about text editors.

TV

• Over the air digital. We’ve been DirecTV/cable-bill free for a year now. A lot of TV sneaks in on DVD / Netflix. The rest comes off the DVR.
• TiVo. Probably a little undersized for high def TV, but they sell external drives. That upgrade will happen soon enough.
• Netflix. We don’t mess with high-def media or downloads. I guess I’ve seen a couple high-def rentals from the Xbox Marketplace, but I have to have a couple of beers before the whole money-for-points-for-movie-rentals economy starts to sound reasonable. But four Netflix movies at home at a time, plus a giant online library through the Xbox and TiVo is silly for the amount we pay for it.

Music

• iTunes. If I didn’t like it, I’d still pretty much have to use it, on account of the iPhone. Fortunately, I still think it’s the most forward-thinking, fully featured app for music collections. And anything can play music these days.
• Pandora desktop. They started talking about a desktop app for a yearly fee and that was a day one no-brainer. You have my money.
• Pulsar (XM online). XM / Sirius is a car standby (and a road-trip workhorse), but I don’t use it on my computer a ton. Still, the online service is perfect for what it is.

Games

• Xbox 360. I really hoped to usher in a new generation of casual arcade-style gamers with the Xbox. “Casual” means that you jump on, play for 15 minutes, or maybe grab a friend and rock for an hour. The kids didn’t pick that up. (Although there’s an argument to be made that Xbox game design itself leans towards “play forever and order a pizza”.)
• iPhone games. Casual. 15 minutes. Arcade-style. Perfect. (But not the slightest bit social.)
• A big TV. Plasma. They were cheap last year. And it’s almost paid off. If I had to do it again, I’d probably go LCD. In 10 years, I probably will.

I’ve had the same email address for over 11 years. I know people who switch up every year, and I’m not that guy. I couldn’t do that. But with about 30 spam messages a day coming into my original (@nordquist.com) address and my Gmail address, I started to think about what I’d need to do to move my life to a new email address.

See, a new email address will kind of reset the spam clock. (But, oddly enough, not eliminate it. I set my daughter up with an email address – first.last@gmail.com – and without ever hitting the internet at all, it’s already getting a ton of spam. Some addresses I’ve set up get none, but hers was apparently already on lists.) There’s a question of who you tell: some people maintain personal accounts (for friends) and then give another address to faceless corporations they don’t trust. You can try to notify everyone that you’re changing addresses, or you can selectively check the old account for any email that is still coming in, and notify people as they use the old address. But how aggressively? That would add a whole “weeks to months to feel truly done with it” dimension that I wouldn’t like.

There are also the archives. I grabbed a bunch of important emails when I switched over to Gmail (and some not important, but I didn’t do a full import), but I honestly don’t know how valuable old email is to me. That might be a benefit of the new account, honestly: “if you sent me an email before mm/dd/yyyy, I don’t have it. Sorry.”

And I don’t see a way to move filters over. I have an extremely long list of companies and domains that, while they aren’t spam (like watches, Nigerians and Viagra), still aren’t anything I need in my capital-I Inbox. And I love the Vikings, and Apple, and Crate and Barrel, but the filters let me not unsubscribe from them. They can be processed later. Closer to later-never than later-this-week, actually, but still, I don’t think that’s being dishonest with myself.

In the end, the facts are:

• I get 30 spam messages a day, and maybe 10 real messages
• Gmail filters work about 99% of the time (missing 1% of spam)
• It would be a giant hassle to move my email to a new account

…so for the time being, I’m staying put.

A whole year and one comment. From my brother, saying “also, your face”. Which I hear all the time, in my head, anyway.

Whatever happened to the posts?

The regular posts were never all that regular, were they? If they made a difference to your day, you never called, you never wrote. The album of the week posts were a bad idea anyway. I’d love to do an MP3 blog, still, but I have a lot of other ideas, too. It all still seems vaguely illegal, and yet still completely just? If that makes sense?

I would love to get on board with Tumblr one day, and I’ve actually signed up for a posterous blog, but those still seem like new tools to do a dead or dying thing: write “articles”. I love stories, and I love to narrate, but nobody does that any more. Nobody makes the clackity. (Genius, but if I’m saying what I’m thinking here, I’m going to be saying that Merlin Mann is a genius a lot.) We’re a nation of Facebookers and rebloggers and Twitterers.

How’s life, otherwise?

The kids (twins, they are, if you’ve forgotten) are starting first grade in five days. We’ve already been by, once, to drop off fifty pounds of school supplies in five plastic Target bags. The upcoming weekend is

1. the last of summer
2. the last without NFL football
3. the last where the kids don’t have bowling league. Seriously.

The wife has a fabulous librarian job. Starting any minute now, we’ll have two incomes again for the first time in three years. It’s a little unnerving, actually: things will be tightly scheduled. There will be no room for error. And yet I think we’ll adapt.

And what about your work?

Well, I got to a point at the beginning of the year where I started feeling comfortable calling myself a contractor. “This is going pretty well,” I’d say to myself, “and I suppose I can start really embracing that part of what I do.” Then I signed a deal to convert to a full-time employee, which is excellent, because I’m at the happiest place I’ve ever worked. It’s really ideal.

Let’s talk about Three Dog Night, the history of Three Dog Night.

That’s not a very good question for me, but I did hear someone ask that on the radio this morning, before I’d heard that he was a member of Three Dog Night. He says that they were the most popular band in America at one point, which I think I disagree with. That’s still a lot of records, though.

One of the things I love from Stack Overflow is that they use Markdown. Having written in it over there for a year, I wondered if I could add it to WordPress. Turns out it’s allegedly already in WordPress, but my copy must be so old and patched together that I was missing it.

Preview isn’t working for me (ugh) so I’m just going to

1. let
2. this
3. fly

This is actually

fussier than I thought it might be.

And I do have a code plugin now that I should be testing.

string GetErrorLog()
{
      return m_ErrorLog;
}

string ErrorLog { get { return m_ErrorLog; } }

The following things have to go:

• Any commercial that talks about how expensive gas prices are, like it’s still July. Put it in the can for when gas prices matter again. Most of you have moved on to “we know you’re broke and going to die of starvation but come shop here anyway”. Some are lagging behind the times.
• That thing you do where I say something, and it happens to be a song lyric, and you start singing the song, especially if I didn’t actually say the actual lyric, or if it’s something that people say all the time. Like if I say “we can dance if we want to, it’s a safety dance,” then it’s on, go nuts.

And that is how you break a four month blog silence, son.

Eh. Here’s what they tell you when you buy a fabulous new (hot) TV: “we calibrate it so you get a great picture and use half as much energy, saving you money, the room doesn’t get as hot, and it prolongs the life of the display.”

Which is fine – if you mess with the buttons like I do, you realize that you can run it at absurd levels, get it super hot, or tone it down a lot (fine for dark rooms) and compromise. But that’s all it is, switching between modes.

I did it for a few reasons:

• I would be freaking out on a weekly basis, adjusting the levels and ending up on a sine wave of performance.
• I actually was kind of concerned about the energy it’d be eating, and I’d rather have it be on the conservative side for that.
• They do it for $300, and offered it to me for $200, with the option to cancel it before it happened. Then it rang up at $100 and they were like “that’s weird.”

I wasn’t thrilled with the process itself. (First, I had to wait for a few weeks to “break in” the plasma. Then they were booked for months, so it ended up being three months out.) I left a detailed note saying what I did with it, what I liked, and where I’d been leaving the levels so far. When I came back, everything was pretty washed out, so I might have undone everything by bumping the contrast back to higher-end and messing with the saturation (which I continue to do – there’s a fine line between the Vikings being a little washed out and Brian Williams looking like the B&W-then-colorized Shirley Temple.)

If your TV is like mine and every mode has its own color settings, he’ll do the ones you say you use. When we switched to the component-in in the back for TV (we were on S-Video when he was here) we used his base levels as a starting point, but I don’t think it’s perfect.

One thing they do that you can’t (or maybe you can, but I wouldn’t) is setting up a computer with a light sensor, and then going into the service menu to tune up the overall color balance. That should get you to an even, honest color no matter what you do to contrast or brightness. I think that takes effect for the whole TV, regardless of which mode you’re in.

In the end, there are a lot of settings I won’t bother with now that “the guy” has messed with them, but it hasn’t been the TV-performance peace of mind that I had anticipated. Then again, I’m a little fidgety about it.

I recently got to hang out with someone who was a dear friend of mine during high school. She lived in New York then, and I didn’t, so this was the first we’d ever met in person. Even though we hadn’t kept in close touch over the past 10-or-so years, it was still fantastic.

She (and, to a degree, her brother who was working for a record label) got me into so much music I wouldn’t have really experienced otherwise. We started from a common interest in They Might Be Giants (who had just put out their fourth album – sheesh), but she insisted I hear the stuff they’d done with Frank Black. They brought Brian Dewan on tour, so she sent me a mixtape including that stuff. I wasn’t familiar with Pixies? She rectified that. This wasn’t particularly obscure underground stuff, or closely guarded rarities, but to me, only just starting to get into what we called “Alternative”, it was mind-expanding.

I made a muxtape of the stuff I still really like from those tapes. Obviously, everything is 15 years old. If it’s the kind of thing you might want to spend 45 minutes with, I invite you to fromscarsdale.muxtape.com.

She told me she doesn’t really keep up with what’s going in music now (unthinkable to me, but she has her reasons), so I started sorting out what I’d really loved from the past 14 years – how I’d explain what I’d gotten into since high school with only 12 songs. That muxtape is up at superlady.muxtape.com. It seems a little arbitrary, even silly, but I think it’s an okay snapshot. I am sure there’s stuff you’ve heard there (particularly if you’ve been following the albums of the week here), but maybe some stuff you haven’t, and you absolutely haven’t heard all 12 songs in this particular order.

If I’d done an album this week, it’d have been the Chinese Democracy leaks from last week. They are sounding fantastic. There’s one song missing from the demos we’ve already heard, and the new songs aren’t quite as sonically dense as the tracks that have been done for a while, but it’s seeming an awful lot like Chinese Democracy will be an album of the week, maybe even in the next six months.

There’s no cover, so there’s no picture. I don’t know where you can get it, and you certainly can’t buy it. So no links. But seek it out if you have access to that kind of thing.