Based on the initial outline (pdf), I pledged to the project. (It might’ve had something to do with me itching to fund something for the first time on Kickstarter, but only a teeny tiny bit.)

Help support independent makers; if interaction design is your thing, consider preordering a copy for yourself. Or if you know somebody who would be interested, please send them to the C&S site.

I’m looking for somebody to help me take my development skills up a notch. Portland, OR-based preferred, but finding the right situation for a successful outcome is most important to me.

I’ve got a number of holes in my knowledge (I have ideas of what I don’t know) and it’s too time-intensive to fill them on my own. While DIY-for-life is what my heart says, my brain is overruling with a demand that I speed things up and fill in the gaps with just the best knowledge, pronto.

Ideally, you

• are an excellent communicator
• are patient
• develop on a Mac using TextMate
• practice BDD using Shoulda (I’m somewhat open to change but Shoulda syntax clicks for me much better than Cucumber/RSpec)
• won’t stick to a predefined “course”; I might not get something you’ll assume is obvious, I might be past whatever you assumed you’d be teaching that moment. I’d love somebody that can read cues and is flexible enough to fit what they’re teaching to me.
• (I’m repeating the last one in a different way ’cause it’s so important); initiative is awesome. See the gaps before I can define them and fill them in. Don’t plan on running me through Depot from AWDwR and calling it a day.

My best-case scenario is one where we start off by examining my current codebase together. I’ve gone through and documented all the things I think I’m doing less-than-ideal but am unsure of how to appropriately refactor. (I’m sure there are other issues as well.) Hopefully from there you’ll be able to craft a customized curriculum that fills in the gap between what I’m doing and where I’m trying to go.

Code review + consulting

On top of a round of instruction, I’m looking for somebody that can provide code review services and consulting, both on an as-needed basis. (We’ll hash out a scenario that works for both of us.)

Moving forward

I’m open both to individuals as well as companies. Email me (jacob@ this domain) and let’s work something out. I’m looking to get started ASAP.

Are you trying to rip me off? You’re definitely confusing me.

I just got this in the mail:

but I can’t figure out if I’d be paying $12/year for both subscriptions, or $12/yr for each subscription I order (myself + any gifts).

As a preferred subscriber (it says so in big bold slab serif!), I’d like to think I’d get a better deal than say, what they offer to everybody else on their own site:

Or on Amazon:

instead of paying $2 more. I don’t want Wired to go the way of the dodo, but come on. Let’s not take advantage.

I spoke with a nice lady over at 1-800-SO-WIRED, who had absolutely no clue. She wasn’t exactly making an above-and-beyond effort to help me find the answer either, but I wasn’t expecting her to. (<self-promotion>Low expectations are a problem we’re aiming to tackle with Wantist.</self-promotion>)

Anybody know the answer?

Mt. Hood Meadows from the parking lot

We’ve been working a 6 day on / 1 day off workweek (although it mostly turns into 6.5 on / .5 off when we wake up Saturday and keep pushing forward on whatever didn’t get finished Friday night), however yesterday I played a full day of hooky and went snowboarding. Mt. Hood had incredible weather with blue skies, chilly wind and 140 inches of base. Most of the trails were tracked but there was tons of deep powder in the trees. I’m sore today, but it’s a great feeling sore. (Afterwards we went to the Blazers / Mavericks game, but the Blazers lost so we’ll leave that alone.)

With Fremont (the placeholder name for our current project), I’ve been in a constant back and forth in my mind with whether to spend some of our available cash to speed up development or keep fighting through the DIY process we’ve been doing. Development has been coming along relatively smoothly, much to my delight. Without any economic rebound insight, I can’t pull the trigger on hiring a full-time developer, and I don’t think we’ll see enough of an increase in development speed (compared to the tradeoff of burning cash so much faster) going with a freelancer/external team that has to balance other clients.

Of course we want (NEED) to get to launch and a revenue-generating phase, but there’s no sense in arriving at that milestone without the cash to fight the good fight towards the black. Our overhead is so low right now (with The King helping make a decent dent), our desire to raise another round nil (not that it’s exactly easy in this climate) and consumer behavior/belief so shook up right now, that if it takes us a bit longer to get up and running (but costs multiples less), is that really such a bad thing?

On both this site and Brittany’s site, I’m using Mark Kirby’s excellent Date in a Nice Tone Wordpress plugin, which is what enables the date in the upper right corner of this post to be written out in loose English rather than just displaying a date.

Brittany wanted a modification that added “yesterday” to the available options—she felt that “freshly baked” for posts sitting in the 48 hours between right now and time posted was too long to be useful.

The plugin calculates its dates by using time (seconds) in a day and phrases everything in approximate language (i.e. “a couple of days ago”, “a few days ago”)—so the difference between “a couple of days ago” and “a few days ago” is if the post falls between 86400×2 seconds and 86400×3 seconds. (There are 86400 seconds in a day.)

This works fine when using approximate language, but “yesterday” is more precise because it needs to work off of midnight. (Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t take into account timezones of the user; I’m pretty sure it just uses your web hosting server’s timezone.)

My equation for calculating “yesterday” is if the time between now and when posted is greater than the time elapsed today, and the time between now and when posted is less than the time elapsed today plus another full day, then it is yesterday.

I also changed how “if equal to or more than 2 days ago” is calculated so that it uses the same pattern as yesterday. Otherwise, you get a weird overlap where it’s not yesterday, but it’s less than 48 hours from the post, which would give you a less recent post showing “freshly baked” behind one showing “yesterday”.

I’m hardly a PHP programmer, so if you see any flaws in my code, please share a fix.

@Mark Kirby: If you like my revision, it’d be great if you added it to the version in the Wordpress Plugin Directory; if not, no worries, I’ll leave it here regardless. Thanks for writing (and sharing) your plugin.

Download Date in a Nice Tone v1.2.1

Wordpress Plugin Directory page for Date in a Nice Tone

A few loose goals, some self-serving, some not

* Be opinionated.

* Keep a running archive of what I come across, what I’m thinking and where I’m at in my life both personally and professionally. Some of this is for myself, some of it should be helpful content to you. Hopefully the mixture of voyeurism and curation will work.

* Build my “story”, increase my exposure and thus exposure to our work. We’re working on a large project, chasing the brass ring. As our company grows (fingers crossed) in revenue and head count, we’ll be working to boost our visibility through PR, getting written about on other blogs, etc. I want to provide the story of what I and Ideademic are about, beyond my Twitter ramblings. Got to make it easy on the writers, right?

* On a similar note, I’m hoping that by sharing what we’re trying to accomplish, others can help me out if they feel so inclined. (see weekly recap, below)

So to start at the beginning—I’m Jacob Reiff. I’m the CEO of Ideademic. We’re working on a to-be-announced consumer website, currently in the thick of developing our first private alpha. And while I’m mostly a believer in the “share your ideas, execution is all that matters” philosophy, I’ve found myself opening my big mouth too wide a few times to people that could strategically hurt us and am instead sticking with keeping it shut, for now.

Here’s a rough content publishing schedule for this site

* tumble (as found): images, video, links to sites, quotes etc. I won’t be duplicating much between this and my delicious feed, what links I tweet, etc.

* reviews (as finished): books, sites, video/podcasts, software, experiences at businesses, games

* takeout (I’m thinking every Friday?): I’ve done this a few times in the past but didn’t keep up with it. Basic idea is that I’m frustrated that I read new content in printed magazines that once I finish the issue is usually lost to me forever. With a takeout, I’ll catalog the bits of the issue I found interesting including articles (trying to link to the publisher’s permalink for the article), ads, and whatever else catches my eye.

* weekly recap (every Wednesday): This one is going to be the hardest for me, and that’s why I’m the most determined to do it. We run off of a loose interpretation of Scrum with weekly sprints starting on Wednesdays. I want to do a weekly recap of what I accomplished in the past week and establish what my goals are for the upcoming week. I’m hoping by holding my own productivity out there for others to see it will enable others to help/sell/recommend ideas to me if they better know what I’m working to accomplish. It’ll also hold my feet to the fire (not that I need much help with that).

This site is running on Wordpress, using MarsEdit to publish and a rough theme I threw together. I’ve got Mint for Analytics (along with the ubiquitous Google Analytics), but I’ve got no idea if Mint’s Bird Feeder is properly set up. I used to use FeedBurner to track my subscribers, but I’d rather move away to a solution I own in full.

Be a friend and subscribe. I promise to make it worth a skim now and again.

You can find me elsewhere

* Twitter

* Delicious

* last.fm

* Flickr

* Shelfari (maybe moving to Readernaut, haven’t decided)

* Gyminee

* Brightkite & Shizzow (I feel guilty I’m bad about shouting there—gotta support the home team!)

* SpotScout: Online marketplace for parking spots. All that buzz (NYT, Boston Globe, Financial Times, CNN, etc.) comes from it being a novel concept, but will it turn into a money-making venture? (2006 revenue = 0, with 7 employees.)

* Inspiring: Kidrobot’s Paul Budnitz on making time for creative thinking.

* Part Nine (of nine) of Norm Brodsky’s adventure in selling his business: One key lesson learned—always know who has the final say when negotiating.

* TechShop: I totally want one of these near me. It’s like the gym, but instead of working out, you get to play with welding equipment, lathes, 3D printers and other fun stuff. [Inc. article]

* Elevator Pitches: Wow do I need help with mine. Most of the time, people kind of scratch their head while their eyes go glossy—and I don’t even do anything unheard of. Great tips on discovering the core of what you do and refining how you say it.

* Kenji Hirata—colorful, clean acrylics. This style of work (2 pianos + trumpet x 1 handclap specifically) never seems like it would translate well to me as a painting, it’s too clean, too precise, too reminiscent of Illustrator. Yet somehow, Hirata’s painting breaks through.

* Buff Monster—colorful, pretty and filthy. (NSFW.)

* Greg Lamarche—collage with a focus on typography. Handmade so clean, it looks like a computer produced it. Great colors & composition.

* Wooster on Spring—show at 11 Spring Street held prior to demo.

* Richard Colman—I’m lost in the detail, characters.

* David Ellis—intricate forms, all scales. Installations.

[ March 2007 Issue Archive ]

(I need your email address to invite you—perhaps a *name* [at] *domain.com* will do the trick?)