Code Camp Oz 2007 Sidebar Gadget

One of the machines I am running here had the Windows Vista Countdown sidebar gadget from Donavan West, a Windows Live Development MVP over at LiveGadgets.net.

Anyway, I hacked his gadget so that it did a countdown for Code Camp Oz 2007, just download and install the gadget (removed) and look at my stunning graphical abilities.

Update: It was pointed out that the way I built this gadget was/is a violation of Donavan West’s copyright on the original Windows Vista Countdown gadget. I have therefore removed the gadget until I upload my own original work. I have also apologised to Donavan West publically and via e-mail.

I ask that if you have downloaded and installed the gadget that you now go ahead and remove it from your system. I will update this post in the future when a new one is available.

 

Technorati tags: codecampoz, code camp oz, codecamp, code camp, sidebar, sidebar gadgets, gadgets, vista sidebar

Goals 2007

Before Christmas I was having a conversation with Darren Nemkie about how he is looking at his goals for the next twelve months and through the discussion it became clear that I hadn’t been operating under a clearly defined set of goals for the past twelve months and I agreed that it would be a shame to coast along and do the same this year – so thanks to Darren for kicking me off on this goal setting journey. This post is all about the high level goals that I have set for myself this year and a little about the process I used to reach them.

Vision Setting

In the grand scheme of things a year is a very short period of time and if I just set years on a year-by-year basis I would run the risk of coast over a lifetime just as much as I coast over the course of a year. To help stop me doing that I decided that I needed to set myself a vision where I wanted to be in the future. I started by defining a simple vision twenty years out, then ten years, then five.

The idea is that the five and ten year visions represent realistic stepping stones to the twenty year vision and four years of of consecutive goal planning should get me to the first five year vision.

I won’t go into particulars but the visions outline briefly where I expect to be from a personal, financial and career perspective.

Goal Setting

With my visions set I was free to sit down and set some high level but specific goals for this year. Under each of the goals I’ve put down some sample actions that I’ll be trying to stick to (funny how the personal goals seem more like new years resolutions).

• Personal and Family Goals for 2007
• Lose weight and get healthier.
• Go for a walk each day.
• Go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.
• Drink less coffee and tea (no more than 2 cups).
• Eat a big breakfast and a light lunch.
• Set aside more time just for myself.
• Go swimming at least once a week.
• Go to a cafe and read a book.
• Record my thoughts when I take my walks.
• Set aside time just for Nicola and I.
• Go out together at least once a month.
• Set aside time for the whole family.
• Do more family activities on the weekend.
• Go camping at least once every two months.
• Get Bella involved in some weekend sports.
• Get more involved in Bella day to day life.
• Finalise unfinished business from 2006.
• UPlift Project from TechEd
• Take real holidays.
• Don’t waste holidays in front of the laptop.
• Set dates.
• Financial Goals for 2007
• Aggressively reduce the amount of negative debt we are carrying (that is debt that doesn’t earn a return).
• Pay off one of the loans completely.
• Increase the amount of positive debt we are carrying (that is debt that earns us value over time).
• Arrange so that I derive financial benefit from one or more of the projects that I work on this year.
• Take the first steps towards home ownership.
• Career Goals for 2007
• Work on getting two ventures up and running.
• Take a leadership role in at least one venture.
• Have a personal stake in at least one venture.
• Actively seek customers who are doing exiting things with emerging technologies.
• Directly approach customers with joint venture ideas using prototypes and designs as conversation starters.
• Strengthen my network of contacts within Australia and Overseas across technical, business and academic disciplines.
• Get in contact with people I have worked with in the past and let them know what I am up to and find out what they are doing.
• Get more experienced at the business side of running a technology company.

That is a lot of stuff to stay focused on but there are some central themes there so I can kill a lot of birds with one stone. When I went for my walk today I started building out lists of tasks to support the goals and actions. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when I get to see how I went – its kind of like an annual Scrum meeting with myself

The good thing is by putting this stuff up here on my blog it increases the pressure but it also gives me a place that I can point people to when they question what I am doing or how I am behaving – but it also enables them to take me to task if I am not following through with what I have laid out here.

 

Technorati tags: goals, goalsetting, goal setting, new years resolutions, newyearsresolutions, resolutions

Explaining evolution to a four year old.

We have a bedtime ritual that involves me reading a story or some other book to Bella before she heads off to sleep. She has her own library of books and at Christmas we got her about dinosaurs, or at least that is what was on the front cover, the book itself contains quite a few more aspects of natural history than that.

Since Christmas day we have been reading a few pages of the book. Today we started reading through the various time periods starting off with the Pre-Cambrian. We came across the word evolution and Bella seemed a little bit confused so I tried explaining it to her.

I explained that over a very long time living things change and assuming that their environment is in constant flux and presenting new challenges, from generation to generation there are minor almost undetectable changes – for example, you (Bella) are a little bit different from Mummy and Daddy.

Without skipping a beat, Bella comes out with “Yeah, because you and Mummy can’t put your toes in your mouth”.

I’m not sure whether I should be sending her to study at a university, or enrolling her in stand-up comedy school.

 

Technorati tags: evolution, bedtime stories, bedtime, children, education, dinosaurs, precambrian

How you know when the blogosphere has lost interest in something . . .

Hail Storm in Canberra

We are getting treated to a pretty severe storm in Canberra at the moment. Up on the hill in Calwell we have a great view of the down pour. You see the centre of the storm, that is pretty much where we live.

A few minutes into the storm it started raining hailstones, and when I say raining I mean raining, like – instead of raindrops but with the same intensity. We managed to capture a few photos.

Bella asked me to go out and pick up some hail for her. I went and grabbed a handful (as you would snow) and put in a bowl for her to inspect. She thought it was very tasty!?!?!

I guess this pretty much cancels the fireworks that they had planned in Canberra tonight for new years eve (the wind is too strong for it to be safe, even though if the firework hit the ground I doubt the ground would be dry enough for it to strike up a blaze).

 

Technorati tags: hailstorm, hail storm, calwell, canberra, storm, weather, new years eve, new years, nye, newyears, newyearseve

Best Wishes

I think Nicola might have sent me this and I thought it was funny considering that it is new years eve today and Christmas has just passed.

Note to all my fiends – best wishes were/are fine thanks

Twadget and Twitter

A few days ago Andrew Parsons reminded me about a Web 2.0 service called Twitter that both he and Frank Arrigo have been using. Basically you just keep sending it little status updates about what you are doing and it creates a log that you can share with your friends. Right now Frank is watching “You, Me & Dupree” and Andrew hasn’t updated for a while. Anyway, I like the idea of the service, its kind of like a community heartbeat but for me it was too much of a hassle to keep updating it via visiting the site and I was worried about the costs of the SMS-based updates.

Anyway – I thought that a Sidebar gadget would be a good idea but before creating my own I did a quick search to see if someone had already crated one – I found this (note the interesting domain name).

 

Technorati tags: sidebar gadgets, gadgets, twitter, twadget

What is my disclosure policy?

One of the people that linked to my blog over the last couple of days is “VC Dan” who has the blog over on DisclosurePolicy.org. The same folks that are behind DisclosurePolicy.org are behind PayPerPost which I hadn’t actually heard of until Robert Scoble mentioned it on his blog a few days ago. I guess having a disclosure policy is required if you are going to pay bloggers for giving positivie reviews about your “stuff”.

Anyway, the main point of Dan’s post was that a lot of the bloggers (like me) that received a laptop from Microsoft and AMD for review purposes were a little haphazard in their approach to disclosing the fact. I think that most disclosed it front was good but without a policy on disclosure how can readers of our blogs be sure that we always will. So there is a difference between simply disclosing something at the time and stating at some point in the time that you will disclose something if you need to (action vs. policy).

The Disclosure Policy Blog links to their own disclosure policy which looks like a fairly reasonable document. The cool thing is that if you go to the main Disclosure Policy site there is a generator where you can step through a wizard to generate your own.

I decided to give it a stab and I have come up with this policy (its one generated by the wizard with a few tweaks). Hopefully by being explicit about this people can feel more comfortable with the way that I write the content that I post on my blog. Of course whether content on my blog has ever been influenced is probably subjective but I am happy to defend what I write especially considering that I have outlined some key affiliations.

Note that I am not planning on participating in PayPerPost, its just a bit to fake for my liking (personal opinion).

 

Technorati tags: disclosure policy, disclosurepolicy, payperpost

But where is the JasJar Mk.2?

Engadget has posted up some photos of the latest HTC mobile devices which will be coming to the market in 2007.

I’ve been a fan of the HTC devices (branded as i-mate’s in this instance) since I first got a SmartPhone (SP2) and latter picked up a JasJar (HTC Universal) which sports a 3G antenna and a 640×480 screen along with a reasonable size keyboard. While everyone around me got smaller devices I went for the heavy weight. I’ve been pretty happy with a device and I think that it has been mostly trouble free (except o`r a very specific problem that the device has).

I know that within the next twelve to eighteen months I am probably going to need to upgrade the device but I haven’t really seen anything that replaces the JasJar. What I want to know is, where is the JasJar Mk.2.

Unique Features and Usual Refinements

The hallmark of a JasJar Mk.2 will be what it keeps the same as the original. Here are some of the unique features of the JasJar that I wouldn’t want to see change.

• Keyboard size and layout.
• Screen size and resolution.
• Flip and rotate screen.

On top of that there are a few things that all PDA/Phone devices can expect to have moving forward:

• Dual cameras – one for video calls and one for taking photos, although to be honest I haven’t really used the video call feature of the JasJar.
• Decent external speakers and microphone for doing things like recording and listening to podcasts.

So that is what they need to do to “not screw up the JasJar” but there are a few extra things that I think that they need to add in to the unit.

New and Improved

So I am going to layout a few improvements that I want to see to the device, those who have a JasJar will know what I am talking about for most of these, but some are just general innovations that I’d love to see road tested on the JasJar.

• External caller ID/Windows SideShow display; one of the great things about JasJars is that the screen is protected but that can make it hard to screen calls because there are no visible indicators of who is calling on the outside of the device. It would be nice to have a small 1×1 inch screen which does caller ID, music select and Windows SideShow – the screen would need to be tough and scratch resistant and below it would be controls for answering calls (the ones on the spine are terrible). In addition to call control there would need to be be media controls.
• Thinner and lighter; OK, so the thing is a brick, but given technology enhancements over the past couple of years I reckon they could stand to shrink the base of the unit by half and still fit everything in.
• Fix the cell broadcast issue.
• Light my way; I have to say that I often use my JasJar as a torch, so why not make it a key feature. Across one edge of the device insert a series of bright LCD lights (may four of the one that is next to the camera) then have a quick access button for turning on the light.
• Address the issue of loose stylus docks; over the course of the first six months of use the dock for the stylus gets very loose. Either tether it so you can’t loose it or come up with a better locking mechanism.
• Act as a router; add the ability for the device to act as a router to 3G and nextG networks so rather than having to dial out from a laptop you can just plug in the USB lead and have it look like a USB network adapter, and while you are at it make sure you don’t use a prototype hardware vendor ID like you did with the USB Modem feature.
• Come with wrist straps; I want to wear my JasJar on my arm (left).

If the HTC guys want some more design tips you know where to find me

Share Your [WEI] Score

This site is linked from the Windows Experience Index site on Wikipedia. You can upload your own score and it gives you a badge to put on your site. Mine came out as 3 but WordPress won’t let me paste style snippets.