One bite has changed a lot of lives

This is one major reason I work where I work. I hope my contributions to the site are helping fulfill that vision.

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One bite has changed a lot of lives

This is one major reason I work where I work. I hope my contributions to the site are helping fulfill that vision.

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Birth

As I currently work on a minor new feature for the Trusera website, I'm reminded for the fourth or fifth time today that 12 November marks my one year Trusera "birthday." It seems bizarre to realise that exactly one year ago, I was sitting--eyes wide, brain trickling out my ear--at the end of my first day. We'd just undertaken the company's first sprint planning meeting (we use the agile development method called Scrum), and it lasted from around 9am til damn near 5pm, if memory serves correctly. I'd never sat through a meeting that long--at least not one with a business context, and especially not one that I could not zone out of.

Things have changed a lot in the past year. Sprint planning now only takes 3 hours, and I can contribute! My design process has gone from a lot of guess work to a reasoned, systematic approach. I've gone from a 3 day Seattle resident to someone who tells multi-year Seattlites how to get places faster. Sabrina and I no longer live hundreds of miles away, but now mere inches. I've learned how to take a corner in my Subaru on tiny, narrow Seattle streets. I actually know where most Goodwill locations are in the Seattle metro area. I consistently eat Thai food. I don't drink carbonated drinks. I weigh a lot more (one of the reasons I dropped the drinks). As far as Trusera, we've gone from a private alpha to a private beta to an invitation-only beta to an invitation-only fully launched site and on to it's current state as a publicly open and kick-ass place for sharing your health experience. This morning, Jude showed off what the site looked like around the time I started. The change is massive. I can't take all the credit (a lot of my time here was augmented by the very capable work of my friend Scott Neilson, and of course, our development team blows my mind with some of the technical magic they can whip out), but it's amazing to see what you can accomplish.

I'm a very lucky person. I work with great people and we make something that matters. How can I complain?

Speaking of birth, my sister just had her second son, Tyson, yesterday. Congrats, Jess!

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What were you doing when Obama won?

I guess the real question is this: What were you doing when you heard that Barack Obama was elected to become the 44th president of the United States?

Here's what Sabrina and I were doing:

We went to Kidd Valley for a quick cheeseburger. We'd been following the results trickle in via the web for a few hours, and we figured we'd better get some food in our bodies before what we thought would be a long night of gritting our teeth. I loaded up msnbc.com on my iPhone, just to check in while we ate, and saw that McCain had picked up Nebraska. Oh well, I thought, and set the phone down. About two minutes later, I picked it back up.

Neil Diamond was singing "Girl, you'll be a woman soon" on the PA at the burger joint. My fries were still scaldingly hot, my burger half finished. I hit reload on my iPhone, and it happened:

OBAMA ELECTED 44th PRESIDENT

I looked up at Sabrina. "What?" she said. "It says Obama won!" I said, gobsmacked, expecting this election to take longer to close. "Already! YAAAAAY!" Sabrina proclaimed.

We are two very happy, excited people.

What were you doing?

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Plan for change

I encourage everyone to watch this. I'm paranoid constantly that my bank is about to fail (yes, I use WaMu), and watching and experiencing the hypocrisy and contempt shown by the major corporations and banks as they pay out millions to fired failure CEOs (Killinger, anyone?) and place the burden upon regular bank patrons like you and me.

McCain is more of the same failure. Let's elect a man who will help us pull the bootstraps and get back on our feet. This isn't a "vote for democrats!" message. This is a message of hope, a message with a plan behind it. And I can support that.

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Enough distraction

I've said it before--hell, this site has worn a button for the past year or more--but I'll say it again: I'm very proudly voting for this man.

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Silverback: Usability testing for apes

Like many in my field, I was intrigued by the nifty "Coming Soon" page for Silverback when word started pinging around the design-o-sphere. A page with a cool parallax effect (all the rage for a few months there), an illustration of a rather nerdy-looking gorilla (by the ever-talented Jon Hicks), and a notification sign up. No one really seemed to know what the hell this Silverback was, but the page was great and it was coming from Clearleft, so that was all many of us needed. Some surmised that the app was some sort of stats package, ala Mint, due to the graphs on the ape's clipboard, and since these were, after all, web developers. No one even mentioned that is might be a desktop app.

Fast forward to about a month ago. Clearleft publicly released Silverback, their screen-recording, click tracking, iSight-capturing tool for "guerilla" user testing. My interest turned into desire--this was exactly what we needed at Trusera. We'd been finagling with makeshift setups for our usability sessions, including watching the screen in another room via an iChat screen share, and filming the subject with a camcorder. It seemed to work okay... so long as you were in the review room, watching each session live, for hours at a time. If not, we had a recording of the session via the handy-cam, but it lacked clarity in showing what the subject was looking at, and of course the recording didn't even show what they were doing on the screen!

I downloaded the preview of the app immediately after I heard what it was, eager to at very least see if it ran at all. I was blown away. Not only was it "pretty" in a way one should expect from all good Mac apps, it made sense. And it worked... astonishingly well. When I started showing it to people at work, they seemed impressed, and most importantly, I never once had to explain how it worked. It was clearly the work of usability specialists and good UI designers (and of course, swell programmers, no doubt).

Yesterday, we gave our demo copy of Silverback a real crash course, using it in two 45-60 minute sessions. The process was seamless, and never once got in the way of the testing. In fact, perhaps the only stumbling block in the whole recording process was telling the app to stop recording (you can remember a tricky keyboard shortcut or click on the gorilla in your menubar, and choose stop from the drop-down menu). It seemed to be a trade off of staying out of the way versus being able to stop the session quickly.

The interface for storing the sessions is simple and easy to use, with areas for notes, a thumbnail of your recording and even a place for a picture of your subject (auto-filled from the iSight video feed, of course). The only part missing from organisational side of things is the ability to do a quick playback of the session from inside the app, without exporting the video.

Ah, export. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in this initial release. To watch the sessions, you need to export them to standalone MOV files. During the export, the user's recorded clicks are merged with the screen capture video file, the iSight capture video, and the audio track. During the export process came the biggest headaches. Video processing takes a while on most any computer, and had that been the source of my frustration, I wouldn't have lost sleep over it. However, one of our session exports continually caused app crashes, and several times it was a fairly far into the export.

Of course, that's a bug and is to be expected in a brand new app. A related annoyance (this one being feature-ask, rather than a bug) is the relative lack of control over the video export. When you click the export button on a session, you are given the options of Quality (Best, High, Medium and Low) and Size (unfortunately in percentage of original resolution: 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%). My natural instinct was to go for Best at 100%, because I hate losing detail. However, exporting an hour at 1280

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Loud noises!

Over the weekend, we were treated to two shows of the Blue Angels jet squadron, zooming around Lake Washington (and thus our apartment) as part of Seafair. We were thus also "treated" to the ungodly noise that accompanies six F-18 fighter jets screaming by at extremely low altitudes. Oh joy.

On a positive note, it was pretty impressive, and a lot of people seemed to have a really good time on our apartment complex docks, including this intrepid soul, who decided the flying shouldn't be hogged by the jets.

Man thinks he's a blue angel: Man jumps into lake Washington during blue angels show.

I cannot believe my iPhone camera actually captured this.

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Trusera officially launches

Let's just say last night was a busy night here in Seattle. We officially launched the all-new Trusera.com at 9pm Pacific Time.

The devs running scripts to migrate old site info to new site

Not only is it an all-new site (new code, new design, lots of new features), it's our official exit from beta testing. Gone are the hip "beta" tags from our logos and pages, replaced simply by a much faster, much better online experience. Apparently the new site is clocking in at 2.5 times faster than the old (and painstakingly speed-optimised) site, without any intentional speed optimisation. For you non-tech-nerds out there, that means the site is fast and the experience is smooth.

As 9pm rolled around, Keith (Schorsch, our founder and ceo) gathered his two boys and stood poised over a shiny metal button, connected via a USB cable to a laptop, ready to trigger the final script that would open the new site.

Last night's pandemonium has spilled over into today, with bloggers and news organisations pouring stories about Trusera into the web's bubbling cauldron. I've been overhearing (easy to do when you work in a giant loft space) all sorts of gasps and exclamations today... exponential growth in hits per second, articles from BusinessWeek and ABC News... it's been exciting.

So, of course, I invite you to check out the brand new site. Take a look around, read some health experiences, and maybe request membership. I can't wait to hear what people think of the new features (question and answers, the muse panel suggestion boxes when creating stories, etc) and especially since this is the first real launch with my design input, how you think it looks.

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Sabrina enjoys some sunlight outside Vera Project

My sunshine is finally here.

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Moving Pictures to Document Moving People

So, a little over a week ago, I got my wish. We loaded up a trailer full of Sabrina's stuff and made the 850 mile slog from Salt Lake City to her new place of residence beside my hairy arse. I could wax poetic about the endurance trial we experienced, but why type a thousand words when one picture will do the same. And even better, why not an eight minute, 50 second video? At 24 pictures every second, this video clocks in at a whopping 12,720,000 words! I know I'm verbose at times, but there is no way I could top that...

Moving Bean from GB Bowers on Vimeo.

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For all the great features of the iPhone...

I have to admit that they've really regressed in the selection of songs for the On-The-Go playlist. Normal iPods can add any song on the go to a special playlist simply by highlighting the song and holding down on the center button until it flashes. Simple.

On an iPhone/iPod Touch, however, to add a song to this playlist is an enormously more difficult task. Once in the iPod section, you have to go to the Playlists section (which, in my case, is hidden under the "More..." button), then choose "On The Go." This pops up an "Add Songs to the On-The-Go Playlist" menu (you many have to hit Edit if you already have songs there, then tap the plus), which, if you're like me and have quite a bit of music on your device, is quite a list to flick through. The helpful Rolodex-esque sidebar selector from the normal selection menus is missing, causing you to need to be extremely diligent, especially when you song starts with something far down the list, such as my fav Wilco song, Theologians. Somewhere in the process, I always manage to accidentally switch to the video or podcast menus, yet still be in On-The-Go selection mode, and somehow still not realise it, forcing me to start over again. Once you finally get to the song you want, tap the plus button, and it is added, strangely becoming greyed out, so you cannot add it again (my old skool trick of stacking the deck with a song I'll want to hear more often). And strangely, sometimes going back to add more lands you in a completely different category (like albums, etc).

I can understand why the functionality from prior iPods hasn't been carried forward (iPhone taps on buttons are only registered upon finger-up), but why not take a page from other mobileOSX apps and add a small icon to the top menubar to turn on On-The-Go selection mode in the regular menus?

And don't get me started on the lack of copy/paste and MMS support, let alone the stability of mobileSafari...

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It Can Be Sunny In Seattle In February

See!!?!

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Did I mention I miss this face?

I did? Well, yeah, I do. Luckily for me, I get to see her again on valentine's day. And I couldn't be more elated.

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Succumbing to a meme

Okay, so I normally hate those pesky memes that spread across the intertube (Garrett, I'm just saying it that way to push buttons), and lord knows it's probably because I'm usually the last one in on it. Anyhoo, my friend Christine happened to post a fun little meme on her LiveJournal (people still use LJ?) that, to me at least, is kind of fun and not entirely stupid. What is it? Well, glad you asked:

Step One

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random - The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

Step Two

www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 - The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

Step Three

www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ - The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. (And since we're using other people's photos, be kind and link back to their original image if you post yours)

The results? Well...

(and the original is fefo codevilla's lovely Untitled image from Flickr)

So... what did you get? Feel free to post them here or link to your meme post, if you feel the desire. As a reminder, the comments use Textile for formatting, so links look like the following:

"copy goes here":http://i.am.a/link

and show an image like so:

!http://image.url/goes/here.jpg!

Have fun!

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I miss this face

Thriftland find

My girlie Sabrina. I miss. I miss. I miss.

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The end and beginning of familiar

Here I am. It's sunday night here in Leschi, and the neighbour's dogs are yapping--of course, inexplicably. I can hear the water outside... or maybe it's just the sound of I-90 to the south. My brand new job starts tomorrow, and I'll admit I'm a bit wigged out. You know, it's that make or break moment: see if I actually live up to the interviews and hype that got me hired. If I live up to what had my wonderful HR rep driving me all over town for a day and a half. If I live up to my own expectations.

I manage to allay those fears and worries through the wondrous application of heart-rending loneliness. I miss my girlfriend more than I can express via text, which must be something, because the livejournal kids out there seem to have cornered the market on long sappy wo-is-me tales.

I miss my family. My nephews. I even miss the friends that were complete douchebags to me when I left and didn't even bother seeing me off or saying bye. I miss familiarity.

I realised something tonight, though, as I was driving back from picking up my car in Woodinville (long story)--soon this will all become very familiar. The crazy hairpin turns on Lake Washington Boulevard. The streets that terminate, only to start up again roughly 50 feet to the left. The mouthwatering nachos from the mexican place across the street from work. And avoiding driving on major thoroughfares like the plague. Some day in the not so distant future, it will all become second nature.

So here's to not worrying. I have my new home. I have my car. I have a great job. And I have my health.

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Salt Lake, I Love You

...but you're bringing me down.

Sorry, I was listening to LCD Soundsystem this morning, and the track "New York, I Love You" came on, and it seemed applicable. What I'm trying to say is that as of the 12th of next month, I will no longer reside in the town of my birth, Salt Lake City. I've accepted a position at Trusera (we're hiring, btw) in Seattle, Washington.

Now, if you've known me longer than 10 minutes, you probably know I've been trying to relocate to Seattle for some time now. I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to finally trade the stress and frustration of that for the stress and frustration of a multi-state-line move. And the stress and frustration of a (temporarily) long-distance relationship with my lovely girlfriend/dork, Sabrina. However, it will be worth it, and we're both excited (and stressed).

One of the best ways I can imagine to relieve stress is by taking a knife to a pumpkin, and hacking its brains out. I give you the results of such a stress relief program:

Bean's wonderful execution of GIR from Invader ZIM, and my lackluster attempt at the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

It's worth noting that Bean used only common kitchen utensils in her carving, while I broke out the X-acto knife kit. She completely destroyed me, and I'm not surprised. She has a gift.

Back to the point at hand: Leaving.

I'm going to miss a few things in this town, first and foremost being my family, a large chunk of whom live within walking distance of each other (and about 15-20 minutes from my current place). However, my family will be my family no matter where I live, and I'll be down in SLC enough to see them, regardless. Of course, I'll also miss Sabrina, but the distance, as mentioned, will be temporary, and (employment opportunities willing) soon enough she'll come up to join me. *gb does happy dance*

That being said, I feel inspired by something Croft did when he pulled up stakes and headed for the moist northwest: some text wrapped in an ordered list tag mentioning things he'd miss about Lawrence, Kansas.

That being said:

(Non-relationship) Things I'll miss about SLC, UT

• Harmon's grocery stores. Best produce section you'll find in Utah, and the always shocking finds such as rambutan and a british foods section. And no damned shopper-cards required!


• Matt's burgers. I ran into my buddy Matt in the Fashion Place Mall last night, and it opened a well-spring of emotion... over his barbecue skills. But his band, I Hear Sirens, will be touring around my way in the future, and I expect him to bring some sauce. Wait, that sounded wrong.


• KILBY COURT. This is the hidden gem of Salt Lake City music. Most Salt Lakers have no idea about this venue (hell, most don't even know you can go see bands play at any place outside of the E Center or Usana Ampitheater), tucked away at the end of an alleyway in downtown SLC. But amazing shows by bands you've probably only seen at large clubs and huge venues have taken place in this small converted garage with a capacity around 200 people. It has appeared in music videos and you can't miss the iconic green fibreglass backdrop in thousands of band photos on the net. I've been to so many shows at Kilby Court that I might as well have worked there (and I've pilfered enough free Dr Pepper to stock many vending machines). I could go on, but you get the idea. If you live in or near SLC, and haven't been to a show at Kilby, you are a poor deprived child.


• Greek Souvlaki. Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick. One of Bean and my favourite places to eat. Chicken pita with a side of red sauce, fries, drink (her) and bacon cheeseburger, fries, drink (me... yeah, I know... but it's still amazingly good).


• Snow. Just kidding... good riddance. And before you say "But it can snow in Seattle!" realise you're talking to a man who used to drive to Park City every day, during the winter, often before I-80 had been plowed. We're talking standing powder and black ice in blizzard conditions... in the mountains... on the interstate. An inch or two once or twice a year is LAUGHABLE! Bring it on.


• Gilgal Garden. If only because I love freaking out visiting friends (and my girlfriend, who has never liked the place to begin with). What's not to like about Joseph Smith's face on a sphinx?


• Utah Drivers. The most intellegent, courteous drivers known to man. Wait, take what I said, and reverse it. Once again, good riddance.


• The DI. This may sound weird to Utahns, but hey, my girlfriend has instilled a love of cheap, tax-free thrift shopping from the Walmart of secondhand shops. Although it still hasn't produced the promised record player I've been looking for.


• The Grid. Salt Lake is laid-out on a massive grid. If you can figure out a cartesian coordinate system, you can find your way around town. And the roads are--generally speaking--freakin' enormous. Downtown SLC could be 20 times bigger, and the roads would still seem big. Good ol' Bring'em Young apparently said he wanted the roads wide enough that a stage coach would turn around on any street. Nice job, Brig.


• The mom and pop burger joints. It almost feels like the 50s. With credit-card machines. And that godawful fry sauce monstrosity.


• Watching the Jazz choke. It's a yearly tradition. I guess I can watch the Sonics suck instead, though.

You know, going through a list of things you'll miss really shows you how little you will miss. Bring on Seattle!

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iTunes Plus Price drop?

There are reports that $0.99 iTunes Plus (you know, the DRM free variety) tracks have been popping up at the iTunes Store. John Gruber speculates that it's either a mistake (doubtful, having looked around, noticed all Sub Pop releases are the same), the introduction of variable single pricing (not entirely impossible... there are still a lot of $1.29 singles in the iTunes Plus section, including Smashing Pumpkins albums that I'm not sure I noticed before), or, perhaps, the early stages of a unilateral price drop to 99 cents for non-DRM tracks. ArsTechnica agree with the latter proposition:

The bigger news on the iTunes Plus horizon, however, is that Apple plans to drop the price of all iTunes Plus tracks. Currently, each track is $1.29 while "normal" DRMed tracks are 99

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Charity Yard Sale for MS

My family and the Lucky 13s are putting on a MASSIVE yard sale this Saturday here in SLC (technically in Murray, where the majority of my family live) to benefit those with MS, like my brother, Seth. When I say massive, I really mean it. I visited my mother on Sunday and they'd only just begun sorting the donated items, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer scope of it all. If you dig yard sales, or even if you don't (there will be a boutique section with fine art, jewelry, etc... it's not all hand me down stuff here), come on by and spend some cash for a good cause.

Donated items for sale! All proceeds to benefit The Lucky 13's! We're a group organizing a charity to benefit those living with the devastating effects of Multiple Sclerosis. Join us in the fight, and pick up some really great things while you're at it!! Due to generous donations we have so may items to sell - and most of it for no more than $2.00 per item!!

From clothing and furniture, to seasonal decorations and outdoor play sets for children! We will also have custom jewelery, handbags and purses, shoe...the list goes on and on!! Come early to get tickets for our raffle! We will have art donated by local artists - everything from a brand new baby quilt to watercolor paintings and photography.

• Location: 507 Holstein Way, Murray, Utah 84107


• Date: Saturday, September 15th 2007


• Time: Bright and early!

Google Map for the event

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