Joe Cotellese

  • PhillyHistory - Detail View

    Pretty sure that the 3rd or 4th house on the left is the one I grew up in.

    PhillyHistory - Detail View

    PhillyHistory - Detail View.

  • Is your content your own?

    If you ever needed an example as to why you should be publishing content you care about on a platform you 100% control, look no further than MySpace.

    In the latest attempt to pivot, MySpace removed the blog feature from the site. Why they would do this knowing full well that it would annoy their existing users is really besides the point.

    If you are publishing on any platform your content is a prisoner to the whims of a business outside your control. Whether you use Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, MySpace your content could go away at any time.

    If you are a content publisher you can avoid this doomsday scenario by developing a publishing workflow where content originates on a device you control.

    • For long form content (i.e., blog posts) you can write your posts on your computer or iPad and upload it to your platform of choice. I often do this because I like to write in Markdown on my iPad and Mac. So, even if you were posting to MySpace you still have all of the originals locally.
    • If you wish to post photos from your phone, install Dropbox and have it backup all of your photos for you. Then, if you use Instagram, Hipstamatic, or just the built in camera the Dropbox app will create backups that will sync onto your computer.
    • Install Wordpress on your own webhost. It’s not really that hard and if you create a regimen that backups your Wordpress database you can easily move from one hosting provider to another without losing your data.
    • Status posts - if you are publishing to Twitter you can periodically get an archive of your Twitter posts.

  • Does Your iPhone 5 Battery Suck This Hard?

    I bought an iPhone 5 about a month ago. I like the form factor, I like the weight. What I don’t like (actually hate) is the poor battery life.

    On my iPhone 4, I could use my phone all day without worrying about charging it. Regular use for my was a mix of WiFi, Cellular data and text messaging. I rarely used the phone for calls.

    Now, with my iPhone 5, I woke up this morning at 6:30am with a fully charged battery. I unplugged the phone, sent about 6 text messages and then went for a run.

    I ran 3 miles, listened to a locally cached Spotify playlist (didn’t stream over LTE) and used Runkeeper to track my run. Upon returning, I looked at my batter an noticed that I’m down to about 60% of a charge. It’s 9:53am.

    [caption id=“attachment_1426” align=“aligncenter” width=“347”]iPhone battery after three hours normal usage iPhone battery after three hours normal usage[/caption]

    Is this normal or do I have a defective battery?

    If it is normal then Apple has really released a crappy phone. Better speed and larger screen isn’t worth a damn if you can’t use the phone because of a dead battery.

    Apparently I’m not the only one with these problems either.

    I’m wishing I went with an iPhone 4S

  • Dunkin' to introduce bacon, egg, doughnut sandwich - chicagotribune.com

    “We want to help guests discover their love of combining sweet and savory, and I think the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich is a great way to do that,”

    via Dunkin' to introduce bacon, egg, doughnut sandwich - chicagotribune.com.

  • M. Night

    Explain to me why M. Night Shyamalan is still making movies?

    Screenshot_6_3_13_9_10_AM

  • Like your cheap crap from Walmart? It has hidden costs.

     

    democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/dem…

  • Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit - Jon Lovett - The Atlantic

    One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit . We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, making it harder to achieve anything.

    Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit - Jon Lovett - The Atlantic.

  • Get off your fat ass (for 7 minutes)

    NY Times 7 minute workout

    Via NY Times

    This article is based on a paper published here. The author’s advocate that a 7 minute high intensity workout that is just as effective as longer workouts.

    To address the limitations of traditional exercise protocols and provide an effective and efficient program for our clients, one of the exercise strategies we use is high-intensity circuit training (HICT) using body weight as resistance. Our approach combines aerobic and resistance training into a single exercise bout lasting approximately 7 minutes. Participants can repeat the 7-minute bout 2 to 3 times, depending on the amount of time they have. As body weight provides the only form of resistance, the program can be done anywhere.
    What the NY Times article misses is that you can't really do this in 7 minutes. You should do multiple reps for 20 minutes.
    Because most individuals may not be able to execute the program at an intensity significantly greater than 100% of their V?O2max, following the established ACSM guidelines for high-intensity exercise of at least 20 minutes is recommended (3). This may require multiple repetitions (or circuits) of a multistation exercise circuit.

  • Finally Watched "The Phantom Edit" & "Attack of the Phantom"

    For those unaware, these were versions of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones that were re-edited in order to improve upon the movie.

    The verdict, no amount of editing can add humanity to those characters.

    I couldn’t get through thirty minutes of “The Phantom Edit.” It’s still an utter pile of garbage. I am ashamed to admit that I paid to see it three times in the theater because I couldn’t believe it was that bad. I kept telling myself, I must be missing something.

    “Attack of the Phantom” was a bit more watchable but that is largely because it was a slightly better movie. Still, there are plot holes that you could drive a truck through. The most glaring, why wouldn’t Anakin in all those years check in on his mother and after slaughtering the sandpeople, why would Padme stick around?

    It was that point that I turned it off.

    Here’s hoping JJ Abrams can pull a rabbit out of his hat and make the next movie work.

    For a much better explanation about why these movies suck check out these beautiful, hilarious reviews.

  • What online services exist to help identify and segment customers for a product?

    What online services exist to help companies understand, identify and segment their customers before the product is actually developed?

    One of the major difficulties we face as a small startup company is identifying our  target customers and understand who they are.

    Sure, getting out of the office, doing the footwork and talking to as many people we can find helps, and is the right thing to do.
    But it could be a real time saver if there were online services which could narrow our search, help us focus on specific groups and test our hypothesis.

    I would like to know if you are aware of any solutions like that.
    Thanks in advance!
    View Question on Quora
  • "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die." - Ned Stark
  • “If one does not know to what port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." - Socrates
    💬

  • Stop Treating Your Users Like Children

    I spent about 15 minutes yesterday bulk deleting photos from Google+. Each time I clicked delete on a photo the computer so kindly asked me "Are you sure you want to do this?" I dutifully clicked "Yes", as I've done thousands of times over the last 20+ years.

    Then, it hit me. Why am I still doing this? It’s 2013.

    If my computer were a sentient being and asked me to confirm every time I took some slightly dangerous action I would respond with something very sarcastic. “No, I don’t really want to do this. I just love clicking buttons.” Actually, I don’t. It made me feel a little like this guy.

    Why do we continue to think that we know our users better than they do? Why are we treating our users like children that we must protect because they aren’t able to protect themselves?

    Actually, that’s really not what’s going on. I’ve designed enough product to know that we’re not all sitting around thinking “Poor users, they just don’t know any better.” I think there is a much simpler explanation.

    We are lazy.

    Why are we lazy? It’s just so much easier to specify that a developer throw up a confirmation box then think through the problem. The thing is, it really doesn’t need much thought at all. The pattern for dealing with safely managing destructive actions has existed for almost as long as the computer.

    It’s called Undo.

    Ah, the Undo. You have saved my butt more times than I can count. And that’s exactly what you are there for. You are like Lindsay Lohan’s personal assistant. Never seen but always there to clean up the mess she makes.

    Why doesn’t every application implement Undo? Well, building an Undo system isn’t easy. It’s actually kind of a pain and you must plan for it up front. Despite that, every destructive action should have an Undo function. Why?

    Because your users have conditioned themselves to just blindly click on dialog boxes without reading them. Especially if they need to click many of them in a single session. They may just end up doing this.

    Confirmation boxes are a way for the product team to wash their hands of any responsibility for the actions their users take.

    Undo however, puts the responsibility back in the hands of the computer, the software team and the product owners. It’s harder to implement but provides a much better experience for people like myself.

    Exceptional design, not designing for exceptions.

    In the example I mentioned at the beginning, I needed to bulk delete my files. I clicked, confirmed, clicked, confirmed until I deleted each file. That was normal usage. The exception is a click that accidentally deleted a file. Despite that, the developers thought that I would need hand holding because I would potentially shoot myself in the foot each time I deleted a file.

    Just let me delete the files! If I click on something by mistake I’m going to realize it. I can then just click the Undo button and poof, the file is back. It collapses 20 button clicks down to 10 + 1 undo. This is a much politer user experience.

    The Undo has been around a long time. If your application needs to do something destructive, consider implementing Undo before putting up a confirmation box. Doing so will go a long way toward treating your users like peers instead of children.

     

  • Never worry about your site going down again

    A few months ago my website was hacked. I didn’t realize this for a few weeks because I don’t check it very often. It occurred to me the other day that I could use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to keep an eye on my website. The alert system will notify me when something goes wrong.

    This technique is also good to notify you in case you forget to renew your domain name (which I’ve also done.)

    Here is how to set it up.

    Open up your analytics dashboard for the site you want to monitor. Click on Intelligence Alerts as shown in the screen shot below.

    Google Intelligence Alerts

    Then, setup your alert as follows.

    1. Choose the property or properties that you want to moni1. tor.
    2. Set the period to1. Day
    3. Set the alert to go to email or even better, your mobile.
    Then, set the Alert Conditions as follows.
    • This applies to “All traffic”
    • Alert me when visits “is less than” "1"
    When you are done, it should look like this screenshot.

    Google Analytics - Intelligence Alert

    Click Save alert and you’re ready to go.

    Do you have any cool Google Analytics tricks? Let me know in the comments.

  • Enlightenment

    “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

  • Learning OS X?

    I dusted off an old website this weekend. Cleaned up some content and relaunched it. The site is LearningOSX.com. I started it a few years ago when I switched from a PC to a Mac, grew tired of posting content and let it sort of gather weeds.

    If you are a Mac geek and want to learn some of what I know about using the Mac, check it out.

     

  • Peter Senge on Product Vision

    “A vision is truly shared when you and I have a similar picture and are committed to one another having it, not just to each of us, individually, having it” - Peter Senge

  • Do product managers need to have more power inside Google?

    Do product managers need to have more power inside Google?

    No, I don't think so. We bring together a team of people who are really passionate about [a] subject. I think it's interesting: We still don't do very high-definition product specs. If you write a 70-page document that says this is the product you're supposed to build, you actually push the creativity out with process. The engineer who says, you know what, there's a feature here that you forgot that I would really like to add. You don't want to push that creativity out of the product. The consensus-driven approach where the team works together to build a vision around what they're building and still leaves enough room for each member of the team to participate creatively, is really inspiring and yields us some of the best outcomes we've had.
    via Inside Google's New-Product Process - Businessweek.

    I wonder if 7 years later that is still true?

  • How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium

    Great article on #productmanagement.

    • The myth of productivity: means you won’t complete the most important things because group parallelization will occur based on erroneous scoping and estimation.
    • The myth of productivity: means you will hemorrhage what precious output you have with reckless abandon into dozen of disconnected initiatives, pet projects, and low-priority tasks.
    • The myth of productivity: makes more external commitments than you can fulfill, introducing more urgency but no more value to your work, preventing new opportunities, and dooming medium-term projects to the murky unforgiving sea of “long term projects”.
    Dealing with the myths:
    • My rule of thumb is to take a list of to-dos, cut it in half, and double the time estimate. Most of the time, it’s eerily on-point. Hey, you can always add more in. This is always less expensive than taking things out.
    How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium.

  • The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral

    Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at Wharton just wrote a book exploring the reasons why products go viral.

    The book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, covers six key features that all viral products share.

    1. Products should have social currency and make their owners feel special

    2. Products should have triggers to keep people coming back. At MeetMe, we call this reengagement

    3. Your customers will evanglize your products if they have an emotional impact.

    4. Cool looking products with high visibility.

    5. A truly useful product is often recommended.

    6. A good story to tell.

    via The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral | Entrepreneur.com.

    Also visit the companion website Virality Explained.

  • Voice and Tone of your site

    Really cool website talking about the Voice and Tone of Mailchimp’s website.

    Welcome | Voice and Tone.

  • Social products win with utility, not invites

    Really good essay on why, if you are building a product with a social layer, you should focus on providing utility for your members first and the social graph second.

    Social products win with utility, not invites Guest Post | @andrewchen.

    or as Bill Gates said back in 1996 - “Content is King!”

     

  • 26 Time Management Hacks

    There are a ton of great gems in here. One of my favorites -
    Yesterday's homeruns don't win today's games.
    What's your favorite?

  • Gratitude

    “Gratitude is a lens through which you view the past. Through this lens, you can choose to see all the events in your life as crucial for becoming the person you are, and the person you will be.” - Michael Ellsberg

  • Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad Recipe

    If you are a fan of Sirachi this is a very good tuna salad recipe.

    Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad
    Rated: rating
    		Prep Time: 5 Minutes Ready In: 5 Minutes
    Submitted By: AmericanInZurich Servings: 4
    "Serrano chile sauce provides some kick to this tuna salad."
    INGREDIENTS:
    1 (6 ounce) can water-packed tuna,
    drained
    1/2 cup mayonnaise (such as Hellman's
    ®)
    1/2 cup sweet pickle relish (such as
    Heinz®)
    1/8 teaspoon chile-garlic sauce (such as
    Sriracha®)
    DIRECTIONS:
    1. Stir the tuna, mayonnaise, relish, and chile-garlic sauce together in a bowl; serve.
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2013 Allrecipes.com Printed from Allrecipes.com 3/30/2013

    Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad Recipe - Allrecipes.com.

subscribe via RSS