blog.bradjward.com

Reality Check

// February 1st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Brad's Life, Technology

You might remember about 10 months ago when I wrote about earning my evangelism wings. Well, the story doesn’t end there.

Last week I found out that my email to Guy Kawasaki was turned into a chapter of his latest book, Reality Check.  I got the book for Xmas and have yet to tear into it (It’s sitting behind Outliers in the queue).

Chris at GotShoo.com talks about it on his blog, because he wrote the code behind the site, bloghighed.org, which is the premise behind the chapter, titled ‘The Art of Sucking Up.’  Me? Suck up? Hah.

Fun Fact: There’s something wrong with the very first sentence of my email to him in the article.  It should read ‘Here it goes.’  Instead, it reads ‘Here goes.’  I doubt many people even notice, but I sure did.  Also, there were some URL links in the email that don’t come through in print.  You can see the original email here.

(Photos by GotShoo.com)

To read it, check out the book or sneak a peek by clicking this link and typing my name in the search box.

So make that 2 books for 2008. A photo on the cover of Tribes by Seth Godin and a chapter in the book Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. Not bad company to be around.

Twitterers: Cut your text messages in half!

// November 22nd, 2008 // 10 Comments » // Brad's Life, Technology, Uncategorized

(Are you following me on Twitter? Join today!)

(This is my personal blog. Didn’t want to send it to my regular subscribers, but you should check that out too.)

With my iPhone, it KILLS me to pay $5 a month for 200 texts, with email/twitter/etc at my fingertips.

I finally brought my wife into the 21st century this week and signed her up for a text messaging plan. BUT, I didn’t want to upgrade my plan and pay more.  Since I use Twitter so much, I turned to it to handle this issue and serve as the middleman for text conversations between my wife and I.

Here’s how you can get your non-tweeting significant other to utilize Twitter and cut the amount of messages you have to send to 0 while you use the web instead.

10 Steps to Twitter Texting

1) I set my wife up with a twitter account and linked it to her mobile device, a Motorola L2.

2) I set a new contact in her phone called ‘Brad Text’, with the number as ‘40404′.

3) I then send ‘off’ ONCE to ‘Brad Text’. This shuts off twitter updates via text. Otherwise, she would get every single update I send. Not only would that blow her 200 text limit and the point of saving texts, but would be information overload… even for my wife.

4) Now that I have sent ‘off’ to ‘Brad Text’ once, the phone will then only receive direct messages.

5) I set her Twitter account as private, so only I can see her twitter updates.

6) I taught her to send a text message to ‘Brad Text’ whenever she wants to send me a text message. This ‘text message’ goes to her twitter page, where I then see it in my regular stream.

7) If you follow LOTS of people and don’t want these important messages to get lost in the stream, or if you don’t want those tweets to be public in the event this person eventually ’sees the light’ and begins to utilize Twitter for what it’s mainly for… teach them how to direct message you.  We’ll get there, but for now… baby steps…..

When I teach her how to DM me (which also sends me an email notification, so.. double alert!), it is as easy as her sending a text message to her ‘Brad Text’ contact that says ‘d bradjward hello you are great.’

9) Whenever I want to send her a text message back, I just send a direct message to her.  ‘d username hey, you’re pretty awesome too.’

10) She gets the text message on her phone. The DM doesn’t go out to my followers. Just her, on her phone. (She would get the email too.) And then when she responds, it starts all over.

There you have it.

It’s kind of cool because it also archives our text messages.. not that it’ll be fun to look back on emails of…

‘what is for supper?’
‘porkchops’
‘again?’

…but hey, you never know.  So that’s how we do it, and that’s how our conversations count as half as many text messages on our AT&T plan.

Leave a comment if you have questions!

@Bradjward

Dear Blog….

// April 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Photography, Technology

Blog,

It’s not that I don’t love you. I do. I’ve just been busy. And it’s so nice outside. And, well…. I’ve been spending a lot of time with someone else lately. We go on walks together. We see things that I’d never see inside while talking to you. Grass. Flowers. Sunsets. You know, the kind of stuff that a computer can’t offer me.

I still want to be friends. But I just can’t give you that much time anymore now that there is someone new in my life. She’s beautiful. Sleek. Cutting Edge. She shoots 8 frames per second, and gives me 12.4 megapixels whenever I need it. I’m sorry Blog, but I just love my new D300 way too much to sit around inside with you. Me and D300, we go together. I just melt every time I hear her shutter rap off 20 photos in a few seconds. It’s like clockwork. We tick. I hope you understand.

Warmly yours,
Brad

PS – Of course, I got a deal on it. Talked it $200 below retail price, for a cool 11% discount. Baller. Now excuse me, I’m going to go shoot.

I have seen the future.

// March 11th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // Brad's Life, Flickr, Technology

WOW. I just downloaded the coolest web app that I’ve ever seen. You need to see this (This means you too, Mom). Here’s what you do.

1) Download Firefox if you don’t have it (http://www.getfirefox.com)
2) Download PicLens, an extension to Firefox.
3) Install PicLens, restart Firefox (it’ll do this for you).
4) Go to www.flickr.com/photos/bradjward
5) Put your mouse over the top thumbnail, and you will see a ‘play’ button appear. Click it.
6) Enter a whole new world of internet experience. Scroll, click, click again, scroll faster, zoom in, zoom out, it’s amazing.
7) Make sure you search your name on ‘Flickr’ in the upper right corner.  There’s a good chance I’ve tagged some photos of you.

I cannot wait to go home and install this on our home computers. I’ll be sitting in front of the TV messing with this for quite some time. This blows .Mac out of the water in terms of user experience. No playing around tonight though, Brett and I are heading to the Butler vs. CSU championship game. A win will secure their bid to March Madness. Should be a great game!

MacBook: 1 year later

// March 11th, 2008 // 13 Comments » // Apple, Mac, Technology

It’s officially been 1 year since I’ve had my MacBook, and it’s been a great laptop. It’s been well traveled and well-used (and well-abused), but it’s as solid as ever and has no signs of slowing down…. like my previous PC laptops that were practically choking to death at the 12-15 month mark.

And I guess it’s true that once they get you in, you’ll slowly start converting. 2 iPods, an iPhone, multiple accessories, and a Mac Mini later, we’re pretty much an Apple household. Nice work, Mr. Jobs. Now stay out of my wallet for awhile.

And in other news, I’ll go over 6,000 blocked spam comments with Akismet today. That’s a lot of spam. But not as much as what is in my FusionCash inbox:

Hinkle Fieldhouse

// February 26th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Butler, Photography, Technology

SI.com lists playing a pickup game at Hinkle Fieldhouse as a top 100 thing to do before you graduate college. The Washington Post says you need to catch a Saturday afternoon game there. A Butler Collegian writer says “There is nothing in college basketball like a Saturday afternoon game at Hinkle when the sun is shining through the south windows onto the maple floor below. It is truly a remarkable sight.” CollegeHoopsnet.com agrees, saying “Try to catch an afternoon game when the sun is shinning in from the windows at the top of the arena as if the heavens are watching the game too. If it doesn’t send chills down your back, you are not a genuine hoops fan.”

I have to agree, it’s an amazing experience. Chief and Kyle are coming in this weekend for the game, a 2pm showdown with University of Detroit. It’s Senior Day, with 5 seniors graduating. It’s my first afternoon game. And it’s going to be great.

Here are some pics and audio from Saturday’s loss to Drake to pump you up for March Madness.

Time to start sleeping again.

// February 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Brad's Life, Butler, Technology

For the past several weeks, sleep at night has been few and far between. It all started back in November when I met Matt in San Diego and we started talking about a website. After chatting for 2 months, we decided “let’s do it now, because there will never be a ‘perfect time’ to get started.” So we registered domains, set up hosting, consulted the coding master, and got busy. Everything was running smoothly until a post on a listserv basically said “hey, let’s build a site that does xyz”… and it was exactly what we had been working on.

Time. To. Move.

So little than a month later, we finally launched beta yesterday at www.bloghighed.org. We are aggregating the best higher ed blogs into one site, and building a community around it to help each other out. We’ve already seen 500 visits since launch, so hopefully that continues on an upward trend. There is no monetization built into the site at this point, just a goodwill gesture to the higher ed community.

And that’s pretty much been my life (+ sick wife + sick dog + classes + work) into the wee hours of the morning.

Huge shout-out to Chris at Gotshoo.com/Spfldbloggers.com for all of his code and assistance to get us up and running. If you need any sort of coding/design help, give him a shoutout at gotshoo[at]gmail[dot]com. He’ll rock your socks off.. which might be why he’s got shoo’s. BA DUM CHING. Somebody write that one down. Oh wait, I just did.

Next post: Dan’s 23rd birthday party/Lego extravaganza!

What are they doing?!

// January 13th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Brad's Life, Technology

After the HTML trainwreck known as Microsoft Frontpage, I am really saddened to see Microsoft unleashing a whole new line of software dubbed Microsoft Expression. At prices of $280-500, I don’t think we’ll see an initial mass userbase, not until it starts getting bundled into Vista or on new computers.  That will happen in a few months after the sales of this software are dismal.

Oh well, glad I don’t have to be the webmaster at school and deal with all of the pages

Facebook App: Sold!

// January 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Facebook, Investing, Technology

I’ve been messing with Facebook Apps for about 2 months now, and generated a nice little revenue stream during my run.

In late October I paid a guy from Australia $50 to code me a quotes application. I also used some tutorials to build an RSS reader/publisher for Facebook Apps.

Since then I launched 3 main apps: UIS Prairie Stars Newsflash, Butler Basketball Tracker, and LOLCat Bible Verses. I never really had the time to grow the LOLCat app like I wanted to, but built a decent user base (400). The Butler Basketball Tracker peaked around 600 users, and the UIS app hit a high of about 20 users. (I really can’t understand how inept UIS students are when it comes to the internet/social media. Seriously. Say the word blog or RSS and they’ll shrug and look at you with a blank stare.)

So on the side I started selling the code that I had tweaked to work for me. I would post the availability of it on message boards and kind of decide a price based on how interested the person seemed. Here’s what I ended up with over 2 months:

RSS App: $40, $50, $75, $60, $50 = $275
Quotes App: $50, $75, $65, $45 = $235
Total = $510

And today I put the LOLCat Application itself up for sale for $300 and it sold within a few hours. Total profit = $810. Nice little 1620% increase from the initial $50 I spent to get some code going. Pretty sweet. Helps pay for those gadgets that I love without my wife freaking out.

Question: Do I need to get a 1099 from Facebook for taxes? Haha

ALRIGHT — Off to go buy our house!!! Wish me luck.

Indiana Blog Conference

// December 19th, 2007 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Indianapolis, Technology

Call it a hobby, call it a job, call it a professional development opportunity, call it whatever you want.   Just round up $50 and join me for the Indiana Blog Conference in Fall 2008.  More information can be found at: https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/indiana-blog-conference.

I think this would be a great thing for the city of Indy to host, and I hope to be a part of the planning/presenting side as well.

The way thepoint.com works is that you pledge to pay the $49 fee assuming the 200 user mark is reached.  If/When it is, your credit card would then get charged.  So it won’t be charged for several months.  So no holiday credit card maxing to worry about.

Seriously, come with me.