I've been frustrated a bit with spending most of my workday sitting. About a year ago I ordered a Magnetrainer exercise bike off of Amazon so I could bike at work. Coworker Nick helped me raise my desk, I lowered my chair adjusted how my laptop sat to use it. It certainly wasn't a perfect solution: my posture wasn't great and it was sometimes difficult to type while cycling. It lasted about a week and then it sat under my desk for a couple months until I brought it home. I now use it at home about once every couple weeks.

Last Wednesday, I was at lunch with coworkers Nick and Ian and we got talking about exercising at work in regards to a "Problem / Solution" project where we are tasked with tackling any problem we want and in our free time at work designing a proposed, theoretical or actual solution for it. We talked about some of the reports in the last decade about the pros and cons of using a treadmill built into a workstation. We saw some commercial solutions that were upwards of $4,000 and decided to drive to a used exercise equipment store to see what the possibilities were to modify a treadmill to work with our existing workstation setup at the office. I didn't realize how expensive even used treadmills were and I was also amazed with how the consoles on all of them dominated the area in front of the person using it (aren't there thousands of other people thinking the same thing we are?).

Strangely, that evening I was talking with a friend who was trying to help get rid of a treadmill. I figured if I could get it cheap enough, I wouldn't mind taking it apart for this project. Sure enough, that evening we decided to bring it over to my office in the middle of the night and I paid him $100. The next morning I go up to coworker Nick and say, "hey, guess what I got in the back room?"

Nick, Ian and I spent that Thursday at lunch secretly building our workstation-treadmill. With removing only four bolts we were able to get the top bars and console off. We eventually used small tables to extend the height of the main desk. We positioned the controls so the safety key still works properly. It makes a bit of noise, as most treadmills do, but we've compensated by adding some spare speakers we had in the office for music. For the three of us, it was literally only about an hour to complete. I think it looks pretty decent.

After we presented it to the rest of the company a few people wanted to sign up for shifts to use it! I am going to try to spend a few hours every day on it and see how it goes for a month.

Google Maps, Limbo and Whrrl, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

It's been more than a day now since Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 and released the new iPhone 3G. With GPS and the ability to add third-party applications, mobile social networking tied with location information may finally take off.

As many of my friends and readers know, there's a real soft spot in my heart for Dodgeball. It was created way back in 1874 or something and bought out by Google a few decades or so later (okay, about 2000 and 2005, but it feels that old). Dodgeball was the first mobile service that told your friends where you were. Even though there is no longer any active development on it, it is still one of the best, most reliable and most simple services to use from most mobile phones. There's one other service that might be more simple than Dodgeball but doesn't currently have location information (for the most part): Twitter.

A frequent joke about all these new services coming out is "if it's harder to use than Dodgeball, it will fail." Some technology-minded friends might laugh at the joke because Dodgeball is as simple as saying "@turf club" or "@town talk diner" and you're done. It's not so much of a joke though because I actually believe it. My idea of a successful mobile social networking application is one where you can actually spend your time being social. If I'm at a bar or music venue with friends and I need to stick my nose in my phone for more than 30 seconds to make it work, I'm not going to use it half the time if at all. Lastly, if it is not easy for the non-techie to use, those non-techies won't use it. What good is a social network if it's all nerds like me? ;-)

I took a bunch of the new iPhone social networking applications for a spin. There's a bunch I'll skip because I want to cover the most popular ones.

Limbo

Limbo might be the most thorough and detailed mobile social networking site I've ever used. In fact, it blows my mind how big it is. It has everything from telling your friends where you're at, where you're going, being categorically specific about the type of activity you're doing, being specific about when you are starting and stopping activities and even selecting if specific activities you are doing throughout the day are ones you do or do not want to be disturbed during. You can search for other members based off of what kinds of activities you are doing right now. You can search for restaurants, bars and shops near you, you can play social networking games, subscribe to events, weather, tips, sports scores, horoscopes and the like and even accrue points that you can earn stuff with.

Holy crap, I just want it to know where I am and find my friends. In the photo at the top of this post I show a three screenshots. The one on the far left is Apple's implementation of Google Maps with GPS, which is fantastic. In the middle is Limbo telling me where I am: "It looks like you're in the Minneapolis, MN area." Yeah, no shit.

The interface looks nice but isn't very intuitive on some of the basics. For example, when I click "Find Me," I don't need it to give me a dialog box. There's separate "who" and "what" sections that both list my "Faves," "Friends," "Contacts" and Members" but I still can't remember if I go to the "Who" or the "What" part for different tasks. I still can't figure out how to change my profile photo. The default it gave me was a scene of smokestacks and smog! Is that supposed to mean that I'm polluting their service?

Lastly, this application takes time. There's a learning big curve and it takes a lot of time to do anything with it. I can see, though, that if you live in Limbo's world it could become addictive. I'm uninstalling it though.

iFob

iFob is a simple application that finds people using the same WiFi network you are on that are also using iFob. It alerts you and you can see the basics about them such as their first name, a one-line comment from them and their photo. From their site:

In public hotspots the isolation gets so thick it chatters and hums: people sitting behind their computer screens not meeting -- typing email and chats, and clicking through profiles of virtual, distant people. iFob changes this. iFob only shows profiles of people who are so close that they can look up and smile at each other.

An old idea internationally but something that hasn't taken off here. The application seems simple enough, but I haven't found anyone using it yet. I'll keep it on for awhile.

Whrrl

Whrrl comes across as one of the biggest up and coming players but I'm not sure why. Every time I use it I get frustrated. When I use the map, I can't zoom in or out. In fact (as shown by the screen capture in the top photo on the right), my street is missing! When I show a list of what's near me, it shows "Auto Mart," "Honda Town," "Taco Bell," "Nielsen Framing Studios" and "Adprint," none one of them places I'd ever meet up with friends at. When I hit the "current location" button an option comes up if I want it to identify my current location or not compared to the Maps application where it just does it.

In fact, I can't seem to get anything to work the way I want it to in Whrrl. I gave up and started playing with Whrrl with a browser. Even if it knows my last location as being at home in Minneapolis it says:

Welcome Aaron!
What are you doing right now?

Where in Seattle, WA are you?

Weird. I've never been to Seattle in my life. I'm uninstalling it.

Brightkite

Oh wait, Brightkite didn't release an iPhone application! They have had, however, a ton of hype amongst the tech crowd. They've successfully deployed a private beta invite strategy that got a lot of people excited about it and on paper, Brightkite looks perfect: you can declare your location by a specific place, an address or just a city, you can manage your privacy settings and select who gets to know to what detail about your location you want to share and you can attach photos to what's going on at the location you're at.

My problem with Brightkite is that it isn't even close to passing the "is it as easy as Dodgeball?" litmus test. Even their iPhone-friendly website takes too long for me to even check in somewhere. That, and their preferences take a lot of time to go through to get everything just right. The defaults are way too noisy and bombard you with a ton of text messages even if they aren't your friends nearby. The good news is that the preferences are granular enough for people extremely interested in the service but why not make some good defaults so it is friendlier for everyone else? I figured a nice iPhone application would fix all of this. Where is it?

Brightkite had a lot of hype and now they're missing the boat.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific, the popular application for Twitter, will supposedly use (at some point) location-aware features that exist with Twitter's API but are not widely used yet. It doesn't matter to me much because Twitterrific has two serious faults that prevent me from using it: the UI can be jerky but more importantly it doesn't pull any of the messages on Twitter between the last twenty and those from the last time I loaded Twitterrific. It is mostly a limitation of from Twitter, not Twitterrific, but it is still pretty important. Once they clean things up and location-aware features are more widely used on Twitter, Twitterrific might be a big player in this arena.

Loopt: "List" view and two "Map" views

Loopt

True story: The first time I opened Loopt after setting it up initially, it automatically found where I was and put my friends that were nearby on a map. I saw my friend Dave was a few blocks away so I texted him and we went out for beers.

That, my friends, is how this shit is supposed to work.

Loopt has been getting some great plugs from Apple and for good reason: they're the one mobile social networking application you should get for your iPhone. Or Blackberry, even. (By the way, it humorously shows the Motorola Razr on their site but it actually isn't supported.)

Loopt, like most applications of this type use your mobile phone number as your primary user ID. While some people may argue against this as a privacy issue, I think it is a great assumption: if you aren't comfortable giving someone your mobile number you probably shouldn't be comfortable with that person knowing exactly where you are all the time.

Loopt, by the way, doesn't show friends-of-friends or random people in the area.

Wherever you are at, you can also give a short message about what you're up to, similar to Twitter. It can give your friends a good idea of what you're doing at a particular location. You can easily take and attach a photo of what's going on too. It logs it with your location without needing to think about it.

On the map screen, in addition to your friends you can overlay search results for restaurants, bars and other places. That portion is powered by Yelp, which completely negates needing to download the separate Yelp application because the integration is fantastic. I saw a friend of my map and was able to find a great place to meet that was almost equidistant to our locations.

The integration with other iPhone apps is great as well. If it sees my friend on the other side of the city, you can choose to have it use the Maps application to give you driving directions to where they are. You can easily call or text your friend directly from the application as well.

Loopt isn't without its faults though, but only the kinds of things that'll likely clear up in a minor version release.

The "Map" page is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth. While there may be a few advantages compared to using Google Maps, it is clunky for zooming in and out on the iPhone. If you zoom in on a location, the center of where you zoomed ends up not where you'd expect. Sometimes it screws up and throws my view into the Caribbean Sea! Sometimes, as shown in the screenshot above on the right, the address and the map don't match up. It seemed like my friend Brian was only a couple blocks away but the address indicates otherwise. So the map is a bit clunky but overall hasn't been too bad.

The "List" page view gives the option of viewing my friends by how close they are to me or in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order doesn't do too much for me because I am usually not concerned with my friends out of state. Viewing by "Distance" makes sense, but it shows some pretty stale entries. As I'm looking at my phone now, it is showing me some friends that haven't updated with Loopt for more than 8 hours. I wish it'd grey those entries out, not show them at all or otherwise indicate that the data is stale and quite possibly inaccurate. Thankfully for now, it does show a time-stamp in small print.

The friend invitation portion of Loopt has a big quirk I'd like to change: It shows your address book and you can choose who you'd like to invite to be your friend. You can also have it search your address book to find if any of your friends are already on Loopt. If you use that feature, by default it selects those people as wanting to receive an invite and you have to deselect them. This is a serious problem if you have people in your address book that you don't necessarily want to friend on this service. My friend Justine just made a mistake because of this issue. I'd like an option to permanently block those people I never want to add on Loopt or have it never default to send an invite to anyone.

Overall though, those are mostly minor UI bugs and such. Well honestly, I've had it crash too. And Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert today expressed his disappointment with it. Even with those things, Loopt is still a good version 1.0 app for iPhone OS 2.0 and it's my favorite of the bunch. I think they have a real chance to become huge because Loopt is easy to set up, very fast to use and it's simple. You use it to find your friends then you put it back in your pocket so you can be social. If you haven't already, download it and try it out.

World Trade Center Site, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

For some of my stay in New York, I'm staying at Rex Sorgatz' place which overlooks the World Trade Center site. The few days I've been here I've run into a number of tourists wanting to take a peek.

Five new skyscrapers, including the Freedom Tower as well as a new transportation hub, a memorial park and museum are planned to be all completed in 2012. At this point it seems rather ambitious. It looks about the same as it did in 2007. There are strong chance that a timeline extending possibly to 2014 will be announced soon. [via]

More at WTC.com and WTC Rising.

Maplewood Fire Station 4, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Over a lunch, coworker and now volunteer firefighter Nick gave me a short tour of one of Maplewood's five fire stations. I hadn't been in a fire station since I was a small child so I took the opportunity to visit one.

The majority of the fire fighting force in Maplewood is essentially volunteer. They are paid-per-call but the payment is so small I'd consider it a stipend that pays for fuel to get to the fire station. There's about fifteen full time firefighters as well and across the five stations they handle over 3,500 calls a year.

I asked Nick, who's also volunteers in the Maplewood Reserve Police, why he decided to get involved. "I saw the kind of work they were doing when I was on patrol and I wanted to get more involved in helping people out." He added he has a friend at another station and his uncle was also a retired volunteer firefighter as well. Nick wears a receiver on his belt to hear calls and he gets to choose which ones to follow up on. They're required to participate in a certain number of calls a month. It's truly a noble activity considering there's basically no compensation.

For safety and legal reasons, he didn't let me drive the fire truck.

Check out a few more photos on Flickr.

My Neighbor's Holiday Lights, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Remember my neighbor's holiday lights?

Well, they're still up. It's the 13th of May. He doesn't turn them on at night anymore but a robin has made a nest in one of the wreaths.

style.css, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I was supposed to go on a photo shoot with Amber today but she emailed this morning saying she was tested positive for Strep throat. (Get well soon!)

I turned the situation into an opportunity for me to finally finish up some web work:

I wrapped up a website for my friend Alex with Eaton Investment Group.

I came to terms with the fact I wasn't giving Minnesota Meow the attention it deserved and announced I won't be updating it anymore. The good news is that I migrated all the cats to this site and will periodically post about cats here. I cleaned up my categories so if people are here just for the cats, they can have just the cats. I even have a cat category RSS feed!

The noticeable change if you're reading this with a browser is that I finished migrating to another look here. I'm using blog.txt by Scott Allan Wallick. I like that it's clean, simple, well coded and focuses so well on the content. In previous iterations of this site I've taken an existing template and done dramatic editing to get it look exactly the way I want it. This time I wanted the challenge of seeing how few things I would manually edit and using WordPress 2.5's widgets and plugins as much as possible instead. The blog.txt template is so well coded that it made the challenge possible.

I think I did well but unfortunately I eventually have to make some code changes. If you're really curious, I have them listed below but honestly I'm posting these here so I remember what I changed:

• Added tracking code in footer.php for Google Analytics. Update: Figured there might be a plugin for that and sure enough, there is. I reverted my code changes.
• Added Flickr-specific CSS in style.css so it's not embedded in the post every time I post directly from Flickr:

  .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
  .flickr-yourcomment { }
  .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 10px 0 0 0; }
  .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
  

• Commented out part of archives.php so I could use the SRG Clean Archives plug-in instead.
• Changed

  < ?php the_excerpt('<span class="more-link">'.__('Continue Reading &raquo;', 'blogtxt').'') ?>

  to in search.php and archive.php to show the entire post when searching, browsing by category or looking through archives.
• Commented out the tag cloud in sidebar.php because I thought it was annoying and not very useful because only a small percentage of my posts have tags so far.
• Changed some margin values on lines 765-773 of functions.php so there wasn't such a large amount of white space on the left and top:

  if ( get_option('blogtxt_layoutalignment') == "" ) {
  $layoutalignment = 'body div#wrapper{margin:2em 0 0 2em;}';
  } elseif ( get_option('blogtxt_layoutalignment') =="center" ) {
  $layoutalignment = 'body div#wrapper{margin:2em auto 0 auto;padding:0 1em;}';
  } elseif ( get_option('blogtxt_layoutalignment') =="left" ) {
  $layoutalignment = 'body div#wrapper{margin:2em 0 0 2em;}';
  } elseif ( get_option('blogtxt_layoutalignment') =="right" ) {
  $layoutalignment = 'body div#wrapper{margin:2em 3em 0 auto;}';
  };

Overall I'm pleased that those are the only things I had to manually edit (so far) to become pleased with the layout. I still have some things to work on with the site but it's 5:45 P.M. Time to take a shower.

Taylor Grinning, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Taylor brought a bunch of friends to Bill's Gun Shop & Range on Saturday for his birthday. This is his grin after shooting a 9mm.

I got there and ran into Nick, Patty, Anna and a bunch of their friends out for Nick's birthday.

Then ran into Rich, Jen, Max, Courtney, Ang, Jeremy, Lesley and others. They were going even though it wasn't for a birthday!

Who knew all my friends were gun nuts?

This weekend was also Bill's Gun Shop & Range's 2008 Spring Shooter's Show where gun manufacturers showcase their guns and you can choose any of them you want to shoot for free as long as you buy the ammo. Great deal.

Bill's Gun Shop & Range
4080 W Broadway Ave
Robbinsdale, MN 55422
763-533-9594

More photos on Flickr.

Facebook Security Settings, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Ed Kohler earlier this week wrote about friends on Facebook and decided to disconnect from anyone on the service that wasn't using a real name or used a real photo of themselves. I did the same thing, although I did keep a few people that didn't have a profile photo yet.

I think a part of one of Facebook's developer resources says it best:

The Facebook profile is the online representation of the user's real world identity.

I don't use Facebook as an alternate universe for real life, I use it as an extension to real relationships with real people. But some people site privacy concerns. I have a couple opinions.

My first opinion: if one wants to make fake profiles that hide your identity, there's a ton of other services that are designed for this kind of flexibility. Having fake profiles on Facebook dilutes the quality of the service. It's part of their terms of service and it's why they will remove people with falsified names and fake profiles.

My second opinion: Learn about Facebook's privacy settings. They're extensive. I think the defaults are generally suitable for most people but the option is there if you are not comfortable.

My third opinion: Journalists have three magic words: "off the record." It means that things that are shared verbally or through another medium do not get published. For the sake of argument, anyone that publishes photos and video (potentially of you) on Facebook could be considered a citizen journalist. If you don't want photos of you doing certain things showing up on Facebook, tell your friends it's "off the record." I get asked all the time to "not blog about this" or "don't post this photo publicly" and I always respect those wishes.

If I've removed you from Facebook, don't take it personally. It's just how I want to use the service: an online extension of real relationships with real people.

Frattallone's Ace Hardware T-shirt, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Three short stories about local T-shirt marketing:

Frattallone's Ace Hardware

The other day bundled with a local newspaper was a T-shirt for the new Ace Hardware store that moved in two blocks from my house. The photo on the back is kinda strange and the logo on the front isn't aligned very well. On the back is a "coupon" saying that if I'm wearing this shirt "visible for everyone to see," I get 10% off any private labeled items I purchase. I thought it was a humorous marketing ploy.

Fashion is certainly not my forte but I don't think I'll be caught wearing this one. One never knows when you'll show up on Flickr. Oh, by the way, a shoutout to Voltage: Fashion Amplified for thinking of me despite my lack of fashion sense and sending me an advance copy of their 2008 compilation CD.

Anyway, while I am happy to have new businesses in town, and to see fun marketing ideas, I am a bit concerned that they moved in just four blocks from River Lake True Value Hardware, a locally run hardware store that usually has my business. Ed has more on Frattallone's.

I wonder how many people I'll see around town getting their T-shirt discount.

East Lake Liquors

East Lake Liquors is also two blocks from me and sometimes I'll see neighbors wearing an East Lake Liquors T-shirt with a logo that resembles that of a softball team. For a liquor store, they're not bad shirts. In the store there's a sign hanging in the back corner saying "T-shirts" and the price. Ignore that you noticed that though. Here's a tip: show up to buy beer a few times some month and on the third time ask, "say, what do I need to do to get one of those cool t-shirts?" and I bet they'll only ask you one question in exchange: "what size you want?"

Stook

When Stook had his latest CD release at the Varsity Theater he came up to me at some point in the night and asked if I got the T-shirt. I asked, "what T-shirt?"

"The one I gave you!"
"I didn't get one."
"I put it in your mailbox."
"I didn't see it."
"You're at thirty-two hundred forty-third avenu...."
"Forty-first."
"I thought forty-third."
"I live on Forty-first."
"Oh shit! Well, if you ever see your neighbor wearing a cool shirt while he's out mowing the lawn..."

I've yet to follow up with my neighbors and ask if they got a cool T-shirt in their mailbox. Maybe they're new Stook fans though.

7:05AM, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I spoke this morning at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits' Message+Medium+Message Technology+Communications Conference on "Web 2.0" (and how yeah, there wasn't really an upgrade but it's a philosophy on utilizing the strengths of the medium.) The photo above was 40 minutes before it filled up.

It was good to meet Beth Kanter, who had a great turnout and Peter Fleck who also got a good turnout. I suddenly got a ton of new Twitter friends from the conference and I never mentioned Twitter once!

Good to see some old friends and meet some new ones too.

It humored me that when I was using Parents for Ethical Marketing in my presentation the woman behind it, Lisa Ray, raised her hand to let me know she was in attendance. (Good thing I was using her online presence as a good example!)

It was especially funny for me to have Erin Stojan add me on Twitter and then for me to realize she was sitting a couple rows in front of me. I haven't met anyone in quite that manner before: getting connected on an online social network as the first point of contact even though you're in the same room. So we met in real life a few minutes after we connected online first. (The world we live in now!)

Overall from the parts of the conference I attended it's something I'd absolutely recommend for non-profits next year.

If you attended my session, I had a good time and I hope you enjoyed it as well. I didn't get to answer everyone's questions and I didn't get to meet everyone that tried to talk to me afterwards. If you were there, please comment to say hi or feel free to contact me directly. For a few of you, it might be your first time commenting on a blog. I say go for it!