By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, February 22, 2017.
Screw Holacracy, I have an idea that will revolutionize business and drive the next wave of global productivity gains. It’s a simple question of fixing meetings.
My dream week is one where I have two miserable days with back to back meetings and forget lunch, there isn’t even enough time to grab a coffee. Sound miserable? The upside is three uninterrupted days where I can cruise through a ridiculous amount of work.
My real week - meetings dotted throughout each day with half hour breaks in between. And many of these meetings will involve eighteen people shoehorned into a closet because someone booked the big room for a 1:1.
We need a meeting defragmenter.
Let go of picking a time and a room. Just say who you need to meet with and for how long. The meeting defragmenter will pick the best room and group all meetings as close together as possible with a five minute break in between.
Your company can decide if you prefer to load mornings or afternoons, or maybe Mondays and Thursdays. You can set core hours for each team.
Information workers take around twenty minutes to enter a state of flow which is where you need to be to write great code, conduct awe-inspiring analysis or generally do anything of value to your company. A half hour gap in between meetings is just enough time to get back to your desk, dismiss unwelcome interruptions, start to get into a state of mind to tackle some real work and then realize it’s time for another meeting.
Giving more people more blocks of useful time would be an incalculable benefit to their mental health, their businesses and the global economy. This one simple tool could change the world.
As usual if any of my billionaire investor readers are interested, call me.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Meeting Defragmenter #etc#meetings#lazyweb Fix meetings by automatically grouping them into chunks leaving free time to actually get some work done without constant interruption.)
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Saturday, October 1, 2022.
An Echo knockoff and rapturous applause for variable font size in a messaging app. Not much innovation so far this year.
The horrific trend in Inbox and now Allo is machine learning auto reply so you can send something canned and inauthentic instead of actually speaking with people. Zombie Robs might approve but I'm far from convinced.
Updated 2016-05-18 14:12:
Android N looks super cool and I can't wait. The #1 productivity enhancement I'd like to see though is copy and paste icons that look like copy and paste. I do not have a clue currently.
Updated 2016-05-18 14:24:
No headset.
Updated 2016-05-18 14:40:
Android Studio is very nice. Eclipse was painful. I actually like Android Studio more than Xamarin which is saying a lot for a C# leaning person.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Goodreads Feature Request #etc#goodreads A modest suggestion for a dedicated shelf in Goodreads for Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.)
Less than half of Americans have passports compared to around 75% in the UK. Brits often use this statistic to mock Americans for being uncurious provincial stay-at-homes.
I've always felt this was unfair though. As an American you might have visited all 50 states, all of the National Parks and maybe thrown in Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico without having ever bothered with a fully fledged passport.
A Brit on the other hand might have spent a few days eating fish and chips at a British pub in Benidorm and is suddenly a sophisticated world traveler. I don't think so. There is simply more to see and experience in the US without needing to cross a border.
After I moved to America I realized that maybe there was another reason. Americans for some reason don't bother taking vacations. You get massively less vacation time over here and even then a huge number of people don't even manage to take off their paltry few days. There is no effective way to have a holiday overseas if you never take a holiday.
Now I realize that neither of these factors is as important as the United States Postal Service if you have a kid.
In the UK to get a passport you mail in an application and get back a passport. It's pretty easy. Even for children.
In the US you need to go to a Passport Acceptance Facility and that probably means a post office. There is a handy website that lists the 10 closest facilities together with their phone numbers so you can call to make an appointment. These phone numbers are not answered. It's less like a basic government service and more like trying to bag a ticket to Glastonbury.
I gave up and delegated to Fancy Hands (a personal assistant service). They have spent two days on the phone trying and failing to get an appointment.
I was going to do my best to vote my principles this year but at this point any presidential candidate who would force USPS to put in a web scheduling system might just get my vote.
Updated 2016-04-18 23:23:
After I posted this a friend pointed me at the United States Digital Service (via this Ted Video) and basically said why bitch and moan when you could help fix it. Which I don't have a great answer to. Except this.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
The real reason Americans don't have passports #etc#passport#travel#usps Americans don't get enough vacation and have plenty to see at home, but the real reason they don't have passports is the United States Postal Service)
I've been feeding webcam images into the Google Cloud Vision API for a few weeks now so I thought I'd take a look at what it thinks it can see. The image above shows every label returned from the API with my confidence going from the bottom to the top and Google's confidence going from left to right (so the top right hand corner contains labels that we both agree on).
Google is super-confident that it has seen a location. Can't really argue with it there.
It's more confident that it has seen an ice hotel than a sunrise (and it has seen a lot of sunrises at this point). Maybe I need to explore the Outer Sunset more.
Google is 60.96% confident that it has seen a ballistic missile submarine. I suppose that's plausible, I do have an ocean view but it's rather far away and unless there was an emergency blow that didn't make the news I'm going to have to call bullshit on that one. It's 72.66% confident that an Aston Martin DB9 went past which is pretty specific. Possibly a helicopter slung delivery?
Maybe I'm sending basically the same image in too many times and the poor system is going quietly mad and throwing out increasingly desperate guesses. Probably I've just learned that I should use 80%+ as my confidence threshold before triggering an email...
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Google Cloud Vision Sightings #etc#google#vision Things that Google Cloud Vision claims to have seen from my San Francisco web cam (including an ice hotel and a ballistic missile submarine),)
I've struggled for a while with Chromecast. The idea is great. I love using my phone rather than a remote. I like the idea of being able to cast any screen or browser tab in principle (in practice I think I've only done this once). I like the nice curated background pictures and that I could get round to using my own photos one day.
But here is how it works in practice. Fire up app. Select Chromecast icon and watch it go through the motions of connecting. Nothing streams. Reboot Chromecast, phone and router. Hard reset Chromecast and configure from scratch again. Reboot everything some more. Disconnect house from grid for ten minutes and switch off gas mains as well to be on the safe side. Finally, streaming! Repeat.
It's miserable. With both a Chromecast and a Chromecast 2 (which I really hoped might fix the problem). I've been through two different routers and I've tried a bunch of different settings but nothing seems to make the thing work. I even renamed the device to remove spaces.
For a while I considered buying an OnHub. Maybe Google's router would work with Chromecast? But it can't be bothered with Ethernet ports for some reason and so I'd need a new switch and then I'd probably need another power port and how important is John Oliver right now anyway (very)?
As much as I want Chromecast to work I've binned the wretched thing and bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Same basic principle but with apps on the device rather than your phone and a remote control.
I'd rather not have another remote, but it works instantly and without risking an aneurysm. It's also available with voice control which lets you both search for programs and trigger Alexa (my typical morning is asking Alexa for a flash briefing and then sobbing quietly when a daughter yells 'Alexa, stop... Alexa, play Gangnam Style').
My only gripe so far is that the voice search doesn't search inside non-Amazon apps (Netflix, HBO, etc).
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Chromecast won't connect to wifi - finally found the fix #etc#amazon#google#firetv#chromecast After trying hard to make Chromecast work with my WiFi the only fix that works is moving to Amazon Fire (which manages to Just Work).)
I'm over social media - the Facebook page for this blog is a hopeless way to reach people and I removed the slow horrible sharing widgets a while ago. But I have this nagging suspicion that RSS is a super-niche activity for techno-libertarians harking back to the good old days of the Internet with open protocols and wall-free gardens and isn't entirely up to snuff either. So I'm going to experiment for a monthly email list for people who vaguely follow the blog or use Catfood Software products but don't quite manage to come back here every day to check for updates. Sign up here.
Why? Excellent question. The rules for blogs are to pick a narrow topic of interest, know your audience and do keyword research and drop SEO honeypot bombs to draw that audience in. I did that for Catfood Software but this isn't that kind of blog. It's a random collection of my hobbies and interests. So if you're not sure read through the Featured section in the side bar to get a preview.
I write a lot of code so what you'll get for sure is updates from Catfood Software and other occasional side projects. When I struggle with the process or discover something I write about that as well - these posts are more interesting to other developers and less exciting if you just want your desktop wallpaper (or Android phone) to look awesome. I love to make videos that don't have me in as well, mainly complicated time-lapses so you'll find alotofthose too. Also hikes in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Occasionally politics.
If that works for you and you're not an RSS type then please join and let me know how I'm doing.
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Saturday, February 19, 2022.
Zooming into the Mandelbrot Set is always fun but I feel it's often a bit static and would be enlivened by a good spin so you can corkscrew your way down. Enjoy:
This was cloud rendered over two weeks using a Google Compute Engine high CPU instance (on a free trial, thanks Google).
I used the coordinates from a video posted by metafis on YouTube and a palette approach posted by Alex Russell on Stack Overflow.
The music is Flaming Memories generated by JukeDeck.
