I had a blast working with my fellow Gauged2 teammate, Keith Burson, as he brought my slogan to life using his awe-inspiring design skills. Now we need your votes to get it printed!

If you aren’t sure what “Asynchronous” means, it means “not occurring at the same time”. So “Asynchronous Communication” means communication where you don’t receive an immediate response. Synchronous communication is talking in person or on the phone. All these new types of Internet based text communication are asynchronous because the person you are talking with doesn’t necessarily reply immediately. So its a programmer’s term, however, its becoming mainstream thanks to Twitter, Email, Facebook, Texting, Chat, and Google Plus.

To help us get this printed, be sure to give it a 4 or 5 and check the box that says “Notify me if… [checbox] as a tee!”. We would also appreciate any encouraging comments. Thanks!

Score this design: “Asynchronous Communication,” to help it get printed on Threadless!

Share your answer in the comments and then share the test with those you care about.

The Scenario

You are old. Too old to do much more than sit on a front porch and rock in a rocking chair. Though you do get up throughout the day and do your best to “stay active”, the majority of the time is spent staring your own mortality in the face, and looking back on life. You have lots of time to think.

The Question

As you rehash your life over and over in your head, what will you regret not doing more of?

Follow Up

You might be quick to say, “Sky diving” or “Alligator wrestling” or “be a rock star”, whatever challenges you once upon a time listed on your bucket list, or whatever you once dreamed of becoming. Give it deeper thought. This isn’t the time to be cliche, or quickly move on to whatever you were doing before you clicked on this post. This is serious.

One thing I will bet you is that you won’t be wishing you had worked more hours. You won’t be wishing you had worked harder and sacrificed more so your rocking chair could be made of more expensive materials and be in a nicer location with a better view. That’s not how you’ll be thinking at this time; not in this situation.

Most likely, you’ll be wishing you had spent more time with your spouse, your children, your family, and your friends. Consider at your current age how you feel when you lose someone you care for? Imagine being of the age where you’ve already lost most of your friends, your parents, and your older family. Your younger family members aren’t with you regularly but are off living their own lives.

Whatever great things you accomplished “on the job” they just won’t matter anymore and in most cases won’t even exist anymore. Sure maybe if your thing was curing cancer it will have been worth the personal sacrifice, though you’ll still regret not spending more time with the people you cared about. But most of us aren’t curing cancer. Is making the cover of Wired magazine, or being written about in TechCrunch really going to matter then? While you are sitting there all alone, knowing you have no time left to see the things you wanted to see, proclaim the love you felt inside, help others you knew needed help, will you be happy that at least you got that VC investment to help build that million dollar startup…what’s it’s name? Oh yeah, the one using that now ancient technology to provide a service no one uses now, that all of today’s 20 year olds would roll their eyes at the mention of…if they even recognized the name.

You might love your job, have a career that is on fire, have a burning passion for a venture or idea, or be on the verge of landing a huge investment, but sacrificing time with people you care about is not worth it in the end.

Take Action

Unless you are in that rocking chair already while reading this, it’s not too late.

Go spend time with someone you love, and then another, and then another. Call someone you’ve lost touch with (no, don’t Facebook them, it’s not the same). Tell someone how much you care for them, admire them, enjoy spending time with them. Apologize to someone you are feeling guilty over the way you last spoke with them. Buy someone a coffee, take someone to lunch. Share your skills, experience and knowledge with someone who could use it, without charging them for it. Spend time with your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend; really get to know them and spend every moment with them as if its your last…because it may be, for either of you.

If you have kids, keep in mind, they grow up and out so fast. Time to spend with them will be gone before you know it, and you can’t get that time back. You should be their greatest influence, not friends, or their school. Are you sure they really deep down inside know and feel that you love them more than what you do for a living? Do you show them that daily? Telling them isn’t enough, just as telling your boss you enjoy your job every day wouldn’t get you out of having to work it.

Assess how you spend your time during the week, even if you have to log it all for a few weeks and make a pie chart to see where it all goes. Is there anything you can cut? I’d bet most of what you do each week won’t matter when you reach that rocking chair.

Finally, read through the resources below for further help in passing the Rocking Chair Scenario.

Make a change. Save a life…yours.

Further Reading

I’ve been sharing this scenario for most of my professional life, so it was great to see this recent article from someone working with those in this very situation: Regrets of the Dying.

To learn how to reduce your number of work hours and be more productive with your time, which leads to more free time, read The Four Hour Work Week. If you’ve never read it because you think it’s a hoax, please realize its not about how to work only 4 hours a week. The author never intended that. That’s just a title, but the book itself is worth your time. Please read it.

To learn to make your work more about people, and how you can serve them, than punching a clock and making money, read The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary. This is the kind of book you should read once a year.

I’m blessed that I have always had other opportunities, but at times it can make decision making overwhelming when there are so many good choices and good people to work with. I appreciate all your interest and offers and considered them all carefully, but in the end, my heart spoke very clearly to me, with what fit me the best.

There is a local team who thinks, lives, builds, and interacts the way I do. This group holds to my same principles and ethics, all have family they treasure, all have a deep desire to do their best on every project and provide their clients with the best service they can. All strive for excellence, but not at the expense of their morals, their health, or time with their family. Equally important, my skills and experience are a perfect compliment to theirs, and vice versa. As a whole, we will all be much greater together than any of us could be individually.

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dori, Hugh, Keith, and Tim over the last 6 months, and have really enjoyed all the time I’ve spent with this wonderful team.

So, it’s with great excitement, I’m pleased to announce I’ll be joining the Gauged2 team. For the last few months I’ve been referring many of you to them for work because I believed in them and felt fully confident in my recommendation. Now I’ll be part of that team, bringing full Ruby on Rails development services and more than 16 years of IT solution experience to their offerings. We can take your project from concept to a finished online product, providing all the skills needed in between, from creative to design to video production to development, both web and mobile. Our reliable and trustworthy team will provide excellent customer service and a high quality of work. Whether you are a startup in need of consulting and technical advise, an agency in need of a strategic partner, or a large corporation in need of any of our services, I guarantee you won’t regret choosing the Gauged2 team.

I will still be working on my current startups and microprojects, and hopefully launching more in my free time, but the bulk of my focus, time, and passion will be on helping Gauged2 grow even further than they already have in the last 6+ years. It’s a great opportunity and I’m thankful that everything came together to make it happen.

If you’ve been paying attention to the startup world over the last few years, you are very familiar with the emphasis on company culture. 37 Signals and Zappos might be two of the most famous companies for stressing the concept, but many of the successful startups have discussed the importance and purposefulness of it as well.

When you think about company culture, you might think about the way the office is designed, the clothes people wear to work, the benefits provided, and the company mission statement for dealing with customers and employees. But what you don’t often hear about are all the other pieces that I believe come together to form the company culture.

Every element that impacts an employee during their work day influences the culture. From where they park in the morning, to the chair they sit in, the computer and software they use, the temperature in the office, any music played in the office, the colors in the room, the bathrooms, the location and commute, what employees do for lunch, expected work hours and the way they are enforced…all of these items impact the employees emotional mood. Their emotional mood directly determines how happy and productive they will be. These items make up the aesthetics of the company culture, the ambience, and they have an effect on how well an employee can perform over a period of time.

Even more important is your company’s project methodology. How are you organized and how do you communicate with your team? Do you only give the team the tasks they can handle at that moment, or do you give the team a list of the next several month’s tasks? Do you include the team on business direction and strategy planning, or fill them in once a decision is being made? Are the developers given long periods of focus time to develop, creatives to create, designers to design, or do you ask them to frequently change directions, and multitask? Do they have to work in an environment of constant interaction and interruption? Additionally, do you trust your employees and in doing so treat them like you believe they can and will do the expected job? Do you build a relationship with them, or stay more removed? All these variations come together to form the overall company culture.

In my 15+ years in IT, I’ve worked in about every variation of culture imaginable. Some have worked for me, some haven’t. I know what works best for me; what allows me to reach my fullest productivity levels. For me, being fully productive at work is what brings me happiness and the stamina, energy, and passion to work every day at my full potential, and deal with the difficulties that will always arise in any tech company or startup. It’s what allows me to not just crank out widgets, but think creatively and solve problems in a way that best helps the company achieve its goals. If the company culture isn’t a fit, then I can’t perform at my best, which means I can’t maintain productivity levels; stress rises, happiness fades, and my uncomfortableness with the situation will cause bigger problems in the company.

You can try and change a culture, but if you aren’t at the top, that’s nearly impossible to do. The culture will be set by the company visionary, even if unintentionally. And that is another important point I want to stress. If you are the company leader, and visionary, please be sure that you have put thought into all of these elements and your company culture is a result of planning and not an accident. If it’s an accident, you probably aren’t even aware of what it is, nor able to communicate it to prospective employees. Which means you’ll have a much higher turnover rate. Even if you are only hiring experienced and highly skilled people, if they aren’t a match for your culture, they will either leave, or, drag down the entire team.

I’ve often advised companies that they can get away with paying less than the top rates if their company culture is a good one and if they hire to match the company culture. It’s difficult for an employee to leave a culture they love for any kind of pay raise. However, it doesn’t take much encouragement to leave a company whose culture isn’t working for you, even for a pay cut.

Company culture is why I have decided to step down from CTO at Tour Wrist and move on to other things. It’s not that the culture at Tour Wrist is “wrong”, simply that it’s not the culture in which I work best and in which I am able to be my fully productive and creative self. As a result, Tour Wrist isn’t getting what they need out of me either.

Even worse, as CTO I am more likely to hire people that I work best with, who also aren’t going to fit in with the company culture. I realized this was not good for the company and its future. I didn’t want to be an obstacle to their growth and for that reason have decided to move on to other opportunities and allow them to fill my position with someone who is a better fit.

As with all experiences, I learned more about business and myself and so I have no regrets. I am most appreciative to Tour Wrist for hiring me and giving me the opportunity. I enjoyed working with the highly talented team and wish them all well. Keep an eye on all of them and the Tour Wrist platform for all the things they have in the works.

As for me, stayed tuned for my next announcement of what I’ll be moving on to. The saga continues…

The Original iPad
I purchased the original iPad when it was first released, and have used it almost daily since its purchase. I use it mostly to consume Internet content, nightly before bed, and to play games, and have watched some video on it as well. I take it with me daily to work, to every conference, and whenever I travel. I use it for taking notes at conferences and in meetings, and have created a few presentations with it. I also bring it with me to lunches to demo web sites. I’ve blogged from it, accessed files from my home computer on it, done some server administration and web site monitoring, and even edited some code. Overall, I would say I’m a heavy user of the iPad, and that it’s been well worth the investment and has benefited me significantly in my lifestyle.

The iPad 2
I purchased the iPad 2 Friday at 6:30, after waiting in line for about 90 minutes. Not bad at all compared to the iPhone 4 purchasing experience.

Speed
I ran extensive side by side tests between the two. I browsed the Internet, some videos sites, like You Tube, Netflix, Hulu, and played some games. Overall, the experience appeared not as though the iPad 2 was any faster, but instead, that it had a slightly faster Internet connection. This was true particularly when loading video. YouTube videos always started a few seconds earlier on the iPad 2 than on the original. Video games had no perceivable change in speed or playability. Scrolling was noticeable less choppy on content lists, but again that felt like it was because it had downloaded more of the content.

Of the 20 or so apps I tried, the most noticeable improvement was on Google maps. On the original iPad they were sluggish at best. Now they zoomed in and out with far less time to download and fill in all those squares.

I’m sure the perceived Internet speed increase is due to the improved graphics capabilities and therefore being better able to handle loading and displaying of the downloaded content.

Size
My first impression when I removed the iPad 2 from its box, was that of feeling like something had happened to my iPad; like some part of it was missing. After handling the iPad so frequently over the last year, it took some time to get used to the thinness and lightness of it. It was just enough that it almost felt like something was wrong. I prefer to use my iPads naked, so that’s how I compared the feel of the two, and it was a noticeable difference…at first.

However, prepare to be a bit disappointed if you purchase the magnetic cover, which, I would say the majority of people did at Best Buy yesterday. With that cover, and its magnets, the new iPad 2 feels almost exactly the same as the original in weight and thickness. What apple took off in size and weight, it put right back on with the cover that is essentially standard issue because of the way it integrates so impressively with the magnets.

However, after typing on it for some time the next day, I did notice some advantage due to the thinness. I like to type on the iPad with both thumbs, QWERTY style, while holding the iPad in each palm. That hold was always a bit of a stretch to pull off for me, and impossible for others with smaller hands, but with the new iPad it’s much easier, and will now be an option for faster keyboard entry for many with smaller hands.

Cover
I purchased the black leather cover. The most common case purchased at my Best Buy was the blue, it was the only color sold out, and next was the orange. Few opted for the leather. My personal opinion is that the vinyl covers look like a cheap 3 ring notebook. I can’t imagine wanting my $700 tablet to come off as a 3.95 paper binder, but to each his own.

The cover does work exactly as advertised. It’s easy to put on, lines up perfectly, and turns the iPad to sleep and wakes it up, though I need to retrain myself, because I keep turning it off before closing the cover. When I purchased the case I fully expected to return it in a few days, but I’m really loving its feel, other than the added extra weight. I’ll have to see if other non-magnetic cases feel as thin, and make the iPad as pleasant to use without the added weight.

Sound and Speaker
During the build up to the announcement, the rumor was it would have an improved speaker and sadly there was no mention of improving this on the iPad. However, as my son and I played video games, not thinking about the sound, but instead focusing on game play, we both independently came to the conclusion that the sound was better. We began doing blind tests on each other and could always determine which iPad was in use by the sound. A nice added, and unexpected bonus. The new iPad has a louder and clearer sound; the original sounds more muffled and dull. Perhaps its not the speaker but instead is the simple change in case that is causing this improvement which may explain why Apple didn’t mention it. Either way, it’s a noticeable improvement.

Graphics
It’s unfair and difficult to compare this yet as companies generally have not had enough time to make improvements. You won’t see any improvement by playing the exact same version of a game. It’s not smoother, not faster loading, not better looking.

There was one exception that was noticeable and that was in my company’s iPad app, Tour Wrist. With our app, you can use the iPad to spin and move around a full 360 panorama of thousands of locations worldwide. It’s an enjoyable experience for anyone who loves traveling, or nature, or architecture as I do. On the iPad original, spinning fast (for example while seated at a spinning desk chair) causes the iPad to fall behind. It’s then choppy in skipping ahead to catch up. With the new iPad no matter how fast I spun, the iPad did not get behind. It never had to skip to catch up. It remained smooth throughout full speed chair spins. Not that you’ll necessarily ever need to spin around in your chair that quickly, but I thought it was a good demonstration of the improved graphics processor and I look forward to the day when games take advantage of this.

Cameras
There are two cameras on the new iPad. From my perspective, they are useless. I don’t think consumers are going to use them as much they think they are. It’s extremely awkward to get it at the right angle that someone seeing you would expect. It can be hard to even center your own face. The quality is poor particularly if you aren’t in perfect lighting. The only use I can see for either camera is entertainment. My kids already had some fun playing with it. I think this was added simply because “everyone else is doing it” and not because its a real world use case.

Conclusion
My overall conclusion is that the iPad 2 is certainly another step toward having a lightweight computer you can take with you almost anywhere. It’s faster, lighter, thinner, and sounds better. For the first time buyer, they will have an even better experience than those who purchased the original. For those that already own the original, I can’t recommend an upgrade unless you are a tech junkie. This new version represents a 10% improvement at best. Probably worth about an extra $75-$100 over the original. I was able to sell my original iPad for half what the new one cost. Certainly nice to offset the difference in price, but for the masses, simply can’t recommend that option.

There is one catch however. I do think that within the next six months, we’ll see more and more apps taking advantage of the improved CPU and graphics chip, and I’d bet that many of the improved apps won’t work on the original. We’ve seen that happen between the iPhone 3GS and 4, and this should be an ever bigger difference in speed and graphics capabilities. If this happens, you may find yourself wanting to upgrade to take advantage of these apps, and the 10% difference between the two versions could increase exponentially if apps take advantage of the speed boosts.

At present, that difference isn’t noticeable enough to warrant taking the hit on selling your old model and buying the new one, unless you can pull of the switch for around $100.

Over the year’s he’s helped his church, raised thousands of dollars to support unwed mothers in their unexpected pregnancies, and helped out numerous times at our local community center. And, while he prefers playing football, skateboarding, firing guns, and many other things that boys his age love, he still has no problem finding time and energy to play with his little sister, and do the things that she enjoys that he would otherwise have no interest in.

He’s a huge help at home, both to myself and his mother. He does his chores reliably, gets his school work done, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to discipline him in the last several years. He has become more than just my son, he is one of my best friends. In many ways I look up to him, and on his birthday today, I wanted to take a moment to say, thank you to him for his love, his commitment, his friendship and for often times being the person that I myself wish I was.

You sir, are commendable. Happy Birthday. This badge is for you.

Though I recently left my previous full time job, it was mostly because that job had reached an end on its own. MileyWorld wasn’t looking good as a product for the future, and I had so many prospective clients requesting my services, that I decided to leave my full time job at MileyWorld and work for myself and with those clients. It was the right decision in that situation. I worked on some great projects with some great people over the last two months. I only wish there had been more hours in a day so I wouldn’t have had to turn down so many other projects.

Through it all, however, I missed one thing. I missed being able to really focus all of my energy singularly and consistently on a specific project with a specific team. Then, an opportunity came up that grabbed my attention. After several discussions to ensure it was a good fit for both parties, I accepted an offer from Spark Labs and begin working there on November 15th. I’m looking forward to working with the team and the organization. The products are very innovative and challenging and I believe we are a good fit for each other.

While my focus will be on helping Spark Labs, I will be spending the remainder of my free time and focus on Commendable Kids. I strongly believe in its purpose and the benefits it brings to children and families. I fully intend on building it into a successful business over the year ahead and working with my own team of incredible people to accomplish it.

It’s amazing to me that this big change has occurred so quickly on the heels of my last announcement of major life changes, but to me, responding to each and every situation in life with the best decision possible at the time is in itself a wonderful challenge. I’ll spend the next two weeks wrapping up other client projects, and then make the transition to working with Spark Labs full time and give all I can to help them achieve their goals.

That got me thinking, that it would make for an interesting online service, to have a front account, complete with checks and debit card, that you would always use, but then hit whichever account you had setup with it at the time. This could also be a great solution to security issues. No one would really ever have access to your true accounts, only this account facade. The service could also easily help track all expenses across all accounts and log them all. You could setup that certain expenses pull from one account and other expenses pull from another. You would have a grace period of a day on all purchases before it hit your account, to report a false payment, and decide which account that particular expense should come out of.

With this, you could actually keep your money in multiple banks, benefiting from various different features at different banks, without the hassle of bank switching.

Just a thought. If anyone decides to go with this, let me know.

The point of the Rumble, of course, is to show how much can be done in one weekend with the powerful web development framework, but too many of them seem to have taken the opposite approach and tried to see how little they could do in 48 hours. I’ve always felt this competition needs a ‘How much did you get done’ category, since I assume that was the point of the Rumble in the first place. Now it seems to be more about micro apps that could be built in 12 hours, which is safer, but less impressive regarding what Rails can do.

There were several concepts that I’d hoped I could put here but they didn’t deliver on their promise, maybe due to time, others due to poor execution. It happens, but I hope many of the ones I don’t list here continue to improve on their concept because I think they have potential. Others, sadly, seem to have hoodwinked users and are getting undue attention for a functionality that either doesn’t work at all, or does nothing more than a better, existing site has already provided for a long time. But, in the spirit of friendly competition, I’m not going to point out any sites I don’t like…at least until the competition is over.

All that said, there were some truly great entries that I believe should be the finalists. Note: I repeated my initial favorites from the first half so they are all on one page. I’ve thrown my own entry on here too to lay out my case for why I think it deserves attention. This is a solid top ten. Check them all out. They deserve it.

Finalists

doconnect
Provides a very simple, yet helpful community for your development project. I love the simplicity and was actually looking for something just like this last month. Great job to Thomas Mango.

Awesome Fontstacks
This site is properly named because its full of awesomeness. Designers might not appreciate it, but its a fantastic service for those of us with less font selecting experience. It uses a WYSIWYG wizard to select the headline, body, sidebar, and mono text and then provides you with the cross-browser CSS you need to make it happen. No doubt I’ll be using this, a lot.

Logbook
This looks very promising for Rails devs. I’ve been using services like Hoptoad or GetExceptional since they came out, and that’s great for errors, but it bugs me that I can’t send non-errors to those services. Logbook allows you to send any log messages to their online service. I would like to see them change the interface so I can do it with the traditional logger, but they say its on the horizon and I certainly understand the time constraints of the Rumble. I also would insist that they prove it won’t slow down my code and that the push of the messages to their services is multi-threaded and queued. I’m going to keep an eye on this one and if you are a Rails dev you should too.

Wrappp.it
This one is very similar to Let’sGiveThis. It also allows you to suggest gifts to purchased for the intended recipient, and like Let’sGiveThis then allows people from a group to commit to a portion of the target money to be raised for the gift. Nice design. Easy to use and figure out. Could come in handy.

Newspaperly
Creates an online “newspaper” of your tweets. I love feedly (firefox plugin) and use it daily for all my RSS feeds. This is that idea but for links from Twitter. I think it needs designer work, but the concept is sound and useful. If it becomes as nice to use and visually pleasing as feedly, I’ll also use this daily. (This was one of the ideas on my list for this year).

PDFme.org
Creates a pdf for you to download from any URL you enter. Needs a designer, but its functional and I could definitely see myself using this to grab quick PDFs to take with me to read offline on a device.

Let’sGiveThis
Collect money from a group to give a group gift. Nice design, easy to use. Quick to get started, and I could definitely see this being used.

Workrz
Other than my own site, this one is my favorite so far. Beautifully designed and having worked in retail and dealt with workers and shifts, I can see an app that helps manage that online being hugely helpful, providing all your workers are on the Net. If not, this site might make it worth it to get them all on the net.