Back in the day I used to do NaNoWriMo and in my need to record and analyze everything I created a popular NaNoWriMo Report Card that helped people track their progress on the long and fast road to 50,000 words in 30 days.

As soon as I started Infinite Jest with the Infinite Summer people (which was last night, by the way), I knew that I’d like to create a quick tool to see if I’m ahead or behind schedule.

Here’s what I came up with:

Here’s a link to my Infinite Summer “template” spreadsheet in case you want a version of it.

It’s a Google Doc Spreadsheet, so if you want to use it for whatever reason, please copy or export it first. Copying it is recommended, however, since I think I used one Google-only formula (DAYS360) to calculate the number of days left until the end of the Infinite Summer (whatever that means).

Reading 11.29 pages a day all of a sudden doesn’t seem that difficult.

Plus, I’m loving the book so far.

To celebrate the kickoff of a couple new features in Locavore, I promised to draw pictures for people who added something to the new “I Ate Local” tab in Locavore.

Here are a few of the first 14 people who’ve added something:

See the full set…

From here, I’ll be drawing a few each day. I’ll focus on people eating things I haven’t drawn yet in places that I haven’t seen people add stuff. Help me by adding something that you’ve eaten locally via the app!

The Robot Co-op, the company I helped found in 2004, and which has built 43things.com amongst several other cool websites, is now hiring:

The Robot Co-op has a history of technical innovation: five years ago we were one of the first commercial sites to use Ruby/Rails, we use external APIs like Amazon’s EC2, SimpleDB, S3, and Mechanical Turk to run our sites, and we’ve incorporated Facebook Connect and iPhone Apps into our web applications. We need you to push us further.

We offer great compensation and benefits and a very flexible work environment that prioritizes personal development and happiness over the drudge work of many desk jobs.

via Seeking: Front-End Focused Software Developer « The Robot Co-op.

If you’re a web developer with an interest in being part of a small and very intense team that builds interesting things, this is a great job.

To start the conversation, send us a well crafted cover letter/email along with a relevant resume.

Email: jobs@robotcoop.com

I got a new iPhone 3GS yesterday and figured out that by taking video in landscape mode it’s possible to email them directly to Flickr and Vimeo.

Here’s a quick virtual tour of my offices:

One of my favorite new features of the recent update on Locavore is the addition of the Facebook integration that lets people say what they’re actually finding in their markets.  At the end of this post I’m offering a weird challenge/reward for people who test the feature and post about something they’ve eaten locally recently.

The new "I Ate Local" tab

The thing about this whole local food movement is that it in many ways is about making food social again. In Michael Pollan’s Eater’s Manifesto, two of his points are about the social value of food.

#3 – Do all of your eating at a table.

#5 – Try not to eat alone.

The rest of the points in the Eater’s Manifesto are really good too.

In addition, many of the suggestions for eating local food involve things like getting to know your local farmers’ markets and growing food in a community garden.  Cooking is always more enjoyable when you can share your efforts with friends and family.

I want to add to the social aspects of food enjoyment.  Which is why I’ve added the “I Ate Local” tab which lets you talk about what kinds of food you’re actually finding in your markets.  What’s available changes from year to year, and even from farm to farm, and so knowing what’s available requires that information be shared about what’s actually in markets, and when.

It’s exciting to know when the first strawberries of the season come in.  I’ve really enjoyed @cooklocal’s Twitter stream and farmers’ market reports like this one that tell me what’s just come in from which farms.  Even if I don’t go out and eat the first strawberries of the season, it’s so nice to feel like you are in touch with the produce of the area.  That rich connection with the growing cycles and produce from farms is something that as a lifetime suburbs/city dweller I have never really experienced until now.

My special limited time “I Ate Local” challenge

Right now, to help kick off this new feature, I’d love it if you could try out the feature and post about one thing that you’ve eaten recently that you know was grown locally.

For the next week or so, if you post a local food you’ve recently eaten (even better if you also post it to your Facebook Wall) I’ll draw a picture of what you ate, and post it on this blog. I reserve the right to stop drawing if my arm falls off.

Thanks for helping!

Interesting article on web design aesthetics. Though, it’s really not about web design at all.  It could just as easily be about physical beauty of any kind.  I like the breakdown of these three levels of beauty appreciation:

The visceral (“gut”) processing level reacts quickly to appearances. It’s the visceral reaction to web pages that researchers measure when they detect reaction times as fast as 50 milliseconds. It’s crucial to understand that these instant good/bad visceral-level affective responses are largely unconscious: it can take seconds or minutes to become consciously aware of your first, visceral reaction to a stimulus—particularly a stimulus as complex as a web page.

Behavioral-level processing involves the more familiar aspects of usability: it responds to the feel of using the site, the functionality, the understandability of the structure and navigation, and the overall physical performance of the site. At this level, users are consciously aware of their attitudes toward the behavior of the system, and their reactions (pleasure, for example, or frustration) play out over seconds and minutes as users interact with a site. It’s at this behavioral level that techniques such as eyetracking are most powerful and trustworthy, because they offer detailed moment-by-moment evidence of what users consciously decided to look at and do to fulfill a given task.

Reflective processing of reactions is the most complex level, and typically involves a user’s personal sense of a site’s beauty, meaning, cultural context, and immediate usefulness. Reflective processing often triggers memories and encourages pragmatic judgments about the overall aesthetic worth and value of what a user sees. Eyetracking and traffic logs are irrelevant at this level, but user interviews can give you insight into your user’s reflective judgments.

via A List Apart: Articles: Visual Decision Making.

Particularly interesting is that both the pre- and post-processing is largely subconscious.  And our conscious mind sits between two much deeper pools of information gathering and processing.

My iPhone app, Locavore, has been updated to make eating local foods a whole lot more social!

Locavore 1.0, when it first launched less than 100 days ago, was an iPhone app that told you what’s in season, what’s coming into season soon, and where nearby farmers markets are located. It has been the #1 Lifestyle app in the iTunes store a couple times, reaching as high as #64 in the Paid Apps list, and has already sold more than 10,000 copies.

Locavore 2.0, released today, does all of that and now also lets you be social about it. Connect to people near you with a new feature called “I Ate Local.” Let people within 150 miles of you know what you’re actually finding at the market. Powered by Facebook Connect, you can also post your local food finds onto Facebook.

New Locavore 2.0 features include:

1. Connect to Facebook and post your local food finds to your wall.
2. A new tab! “I Ate Local” shows you what people are eating within 150 or 500 miles. You can also browse the whole world’s local diet.
3. Top feature request! Manually enter zip codes. If you don’t have GPS, it’s being wonky for you, or you want to have a sneak peek into another part of the world, you can now enter your zip code manually.
4. Bigger pictures for all 234 kinds of food!
5. Now, on every food detail page, it will not only tell you what other states it’s in season in, but also highlight how long until it’s in season near you.
6. Local farms are included within the farmers’ markets listings, and you can paginate through multiple pages of all the farms and farmers’ markets within 100 miles of you.
7. Improved data for a couple states.
8. More responsive pages, more consistent look and feel, more stable and fewer crashes!

There’s also a Facebook App! There’s a new Facebook App for the iPhone-less and people who want to check out availability data from their computer. Check it out.

More information for those who want it:

• Video screencast tour of the new features
• Screenshots and more info about the app
• iTunes store link
• Browse or submit feedback, ideas, and bugs here

Let me know if there’s anything else I can answer for you about this. I’m 100% open with all data, usage, etc.

To follow continued progress on this app, I have a Twitter account (@enjoy_locavore) and a Facebook Page.

I’m REALLY excited about this update, and hope you all like it too.  I’ll be posting more info about individual features throughout the week.

Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time | Video on TED.com.

I think I’m gonna have to watch this a couple more times before commenting on it.  But. Wow!

Hillel speaks words that pretty much mirror my thoughts exactly in this guest post about bootstrapping, and finding a way to maintain freedom for as long as possible.

Much like humans will always prioritize breathing over every other requirement in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bootstrapped business will always prioritize enough revenue to continue operating over everything else.

via Guest post: Bootstrapping and the infinite runway – TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source.

For me, there’s a simple lightbulb moment that flipped this for me several years ago.  Know what success means to you.  Then, go as quickly and quietly to that vision of success as possible, while avoiding the heavy-gravitational-pull of what you think is “normal” or “tried and true”.

The definition of success for me is having the freedom to create what I believe to have the most value.  Monetary success is only an enabler to that truer form of self-expressive success, and it actually takes very little money (in my case) to be free.

In other words, why sell the reward that you already have in order to gamble on getting a much more difficult reward that might enable you to buy back what you sold earlier?

The rules of Infinite Summer are pretty simple:

The Challenge

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

1. Plus endnotes^a.
a. A lot of them.

The Rules

There ain’t none. Read Infinite Jest, start around June 21st (if you want), finish around September 22nd (if you want), gloat about having completed the novel afterward (required).

If you wish to read ahead, feel free. Think of us as a pacecar: you can leave us in the dust, but it’s probably best not to fall behind.

If you are ahead of the pack you should feel free to join the conversation. All we ask is that you adhere to the Inficratic Oath: First, Reveal No Spoilers. So, apparently, there is at least one rule.

I’m a sucker for this for several reasons: 1) I love a group challenge, 2) I love David Foster Wallace, 3) And yet, I’ve never read this book past page 50 or so. 4) For some reason, right now, I’m really into personal endurance challenges of some sort.  The half-marathon, 8:36pm, this, and a general obsession with longitudinal studies all have some kind of magical endurance element that sparks something in me.

So naturally, I’ve subscribed to the site’s RSS feed, read Dave Eggers’s new forward, followed the @infinitesummer Twitter account, followed InfiniteTumblr, and joined the Facebook group. I guess this is what it means to “commit” to something in these futuristic days.

Eventually I plan on starting the book too.

Feel like reading a really long book with us?

An interesting article about redefining happiness in love to not be about comfort and safety, but about challenge, and rising to that challenge.

In her most provocative and interesting chapters, Nehring argues for the value of suffering, for the importance of failure. Our idea of a contented married ending is too cozy and tame for her. We yearn for what she calls “strenuously exhibitionistic happiness” — think of family photos on Facebook — but instead we should focus on the fullness and intensity of emotion. She writes of Margaret Fuller: “Fuller’s failures are several times more sumptuous than other folks’ successes. And perhaps that is something we need to admit about failure: It can well be more sumptuous than success. . . . Somewhere in our collective unconscious we know — even now — that to have failed is to have lived.”

via Book Review – ‘A Vindication of Love – Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,’ by Cristina Nehring – Review – NYTimes.com.

I was reminded of that joke we used to play as kids when our parents tell us to “Wake up!” and we yell back, “I am awake!” and the joke is that if they want us to get out of bed and get ready for school that they should be more specific and in the meantime we’re following all orders to the letter.

As adults now, we are all supposed to “go to work”. And somehow, the act of going to work is enough to satisfy some mystical authority figure that bestows on us our duties. Being unemployed can lead to an existential crisis unless you’ve found the enlightenment in the separation of employment and identity. For the rest of us, we go to work. But of course the mystical authority figure is only going to be tricked for so long before it realizes that you can still lead a meaningless life while employed.

What does it mean to go to meaningful work?

Just like being awake is more than just having your eyes open, going to work should be more than just being at a workplace trading time for money. It should be meaningful. But where does meaning come from? Of course, it comes from ourselves. We put meaning into things, and share our meanings with others, and teach each other how to build meaning out of what is in front of us.

That said, if meaning is created from the act of work, it’s a matter of finding that work which, to us, feels meaningful. I’ve been in many work situations that seemed dreary and dull until I decided to find a way to make it meaningful. The desire for meaning creates a shift in how I work… I pay more attention to the details of work that I find delightful, I find ways to learn something new, I experiment with different ways to do the things that I’ve gotten bored of doing. The actual product of the work may not change, but suddenly it has life.

It also becomes apparent pretty quickly that I don’t have to be at a desk to do meaningful work. A mid-day walk through the park where I tease out a creative idea in my head becomes meaningful work. Reading a book about something that helps me find a new design or idea becomes meaningful work. Conversations become meaningful work. And when I am at a computer, I can design and build with a sense of purpose and meaning that the stereotype of a desk job has no clue ever existed.

When’s the last time you went to meaningful work? How many of us have been meaningfully unemployed for longer than we care to admit? Think about what meaningful work means to you for 10 minutes and see how it changes the way you work immediately into something with a bit more life and spark.

What stops us most often from doing what we want? My educated guess is that the primary reason we don’t do what we want to do is that we don’t know what we want. That’s a whole post in itself, but personally I think the best way of solving this problem is to manage a list of things you want to do that you revise, edit, and add to weekly (here’s a post I wrote about creating achievable goals a while ago).

The second most challenging hurdle to doing what we want is not feeling prepared or ready to do it yet. Needing more time, needing more money, needing more opportunity, needing more smarts, needing more general motivation.

When you think about it, feeling unprepared is really just another way of saying you’re scared.

This is why I’ve become a fan of creating the occasional exercise of doing something I’m not prepared for. For example, back in 2006, I decided to run a half-marathon without training for it. You’d be surprised at the responses I got to this idea. It being dangerous, it being crazy, it being masochistic, etc. Fear is a very interesting thing, and I experienced it firsthand the day before the race when I felt like I had to call my own bluff about running the race. In the end, I did run it, even though it was miserably cold and I was very sore the next day.

Doing something that I wasn’t prepared for, in a strange way, actually prepares you for a huge number of things. Imagine the benefit of being prepared for everything you’re unprepared for. It’s like a loophole of logic that in the end gives you something that can truly counteract the effects of fear: confidence.

I’m running the half-marathon again in 10 days with 7 or so of my friends. We are universally not runners, and we’re doing it as another hat-tip towards being unprepared. We’re raising money for a highschool class in Burien so they can afford SAT prep materials, college admission fees, so if you have a moment and can spare a buck or two to support our ragtag crew, check it out our promo video below, and donate here.

I just met them a couple weeks ago, but Cori and Aviva from The Adventure School are my new professional crushes.

They interviewed my Proust-Questionnaire-style (I have a copy of the Proust Questionnaire on my bookshelf even) and I gave answers while perhaps a little over-caffeinated.

Here’s a sample question/answer:

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a genetic biologist that spliced pet genes together into new amazing combinations. Like the squid/kitten/butterfly, and the monkey/fox/scorpion. It was going to be called Invent-A-Pet. Hey, maybe it still is. Hurry up, genetics!

Read the full interview here.

I’m tempted to turn the tables on them and interview them next.

A bit over a year ago, I started a little project called 8:36pm. The premise is simple: to take a picture of whatever I’m doing at 8:36pm every day, for the rest of my life. Notes on inspiration here.

A year later, I can say that the project is still going strong. I missed 3 days somehow, but I think 389 out of 392 is pretty good for a start.

You can browse the full history on my personal blog here.

Why longitudinal studies are awesome

The strength of this project lies in the fact that it’s a lifelong project, and that the longer it continues, the more valuable it becomes. The moment captured on any one day is not that special (in fact, the constraint usually guarantees that it’s “less special” than a picture that I would have normally taken, because in all other cases I am hand-picking moments that I want to save in some way). This project is all about not hand-picking. About capturing what’s actually there when you aren’t editorializing your life.

I wish there were more longitudinal studies that we could opt-in to. Ways to say that we’re willing to check-in every month for the rest of our lives, providing insight into our lives in a way that allows us to find patterns that only emerge when studied in big groups and over long periods of time.

I’m about to start watching the Up documentary series on this topic, that follows the lives of 14 British children from 1964 when they were 7 years old. And then there’s a new documentary about them every 7 years.

The National Children’s Study is another very interesting longitudinal study that’s following 100,000 children from birth to the age of 21.

I wish I could get my hands on some of these questionnaires. I feel like there could be a much looser-organized and funded version of these longitudinal studies online, what with the Internet and all. 8:36pm is my initial toe-dip into the idea.