Alice

Dec 30, 2012

Alice, a photo by JoeCotellese on Flickr.

Light

Dec 30, 2012

Light, a photo by JoeCotellese on Flickr.

Here are the most pirated movies and TV shows of 2012 | VentureBeat

Dec 28, 2012

Here are the most pirated movies and TV shows of 2012 | VentureBeat.

Dec 28, 2012

Gonna be here a while.

P2 Didn't Quite Cut It

Dec 28, 2012

I’ve thought a lot about where I’m posting content and don’t like the fact that where my inane posts end up are in locations that I don’t control.

I’m likely not going to stop posting content but I’d like to at least own it and be able to move it from place to place. So, I decided to dust off my blog and give it a face lift.

I really like the Tumblr model and set out to find something similar. I started with the P2 theme from Automattic but it was ugly as hell and I didn’t have time to tweak it.

Instead, I settled on what you see here. It is the Mindstream (aff) theme from Studiopress. I’m pretty pleased with both the framework and the look of the theme and think it was worth the money.

Bodymedia System Wishlist

Dec 28, 2012

I bought myself a Body Media On Body Monitoring System. It seems to work really well and I got a good deal on Amazon. It was under a hundred bucks.

This is less about what is great about Body Media and more about what they need to improve.

My confidence in the step counter. I switched the iOS app to workout mode and walked around my house while it the app and armband were communicating. The updates weren't realtime, instead it looks like they were batched. It wasn't clear to me whether it was working properly. You should provide some notification in the UI that explains this. Not something overt like a pop up message but instead integrate the behavior in the UI elements.
The calorie intake. No one does this well, your setup is especially bad. If I can't easily log what I've eaten I'm not likely to use the tool.
1. In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to take a picture of a nutrition label and the software would OCR the data. These labels are standardized so this doesn't seem like a hard problem.
2. In a less than ideal world, take a picture of the label, upload it to you and display your form and label side by side to make data entry easier.
3. Do you store items that are manually entered by users in your database for public use? It feels like this should be shared pain. It will help improve the database.

Otherwise great product, I am interested to see how well I do with it after the holidays when I'm thinking about what I eat again.

Spicy

Dec 28, 2012

Spicy

Congress Almost Certain To Blow Unemployment Deadline

Dec 28, 2012

Happy Holidays from +John Boehner

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives will convene on Sunday in a last-minute effort to avoid the steep spending cuts and tax cuts scheduled to take effect at the end of the year. But Sunday...

As Swing Districts Dwindle, Can a Divided House Stand?

Dec 27, 2012

It may not be GOP congressman are irrational after all. #link

Most members of the House of Representatives come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party - and have little incentive to work across ...

Use the "Layoff Test" to Build Your Professional Network

Dec 27, 2012

If you were laid off today, who would be the first ten people you'd reach out to for advice, or to catch up with? When is the last time you spoke with them? If you can't even list ten people, much less remember the last time you caught up with some of the people you would normally call references, it's time to start reaching out now, while you're comfortably employed and don't need anything in particular.

via Use the "Layoff Test" to Build Your Professional Network.

Blech I ended up going back to Zoneedit...

Dec 27, 2012

Blech, I ended up going back to Zoneedit because I couldn’t get setup SPF and DKIM DNS entries through Dreamhost.

Blech I ended up going back to Zoneedit...

Dec 27, 2012

Blech, I ended up going back to Zoneedit because I couldn’t get setup SPF and DKIM DNS entries through Dreamhost.

Hey, America! Republicans want to raise your taxes

Dec 27, 2012

The always spot on Ezra Klein writes in the wonk blog today.

The big lie of the fiscal cliff is that the argument is between Democrats who want to raise your taxes and Republicans who want to cut your taxes. That’s wrong. Republicans want to raise taxes on more people than the White House does.

via Hey, America! Republicans want to raise your taxes.

Whoops forgot to update my MX record I...

Dec 27, 2012

Whoops, forgot to update my MX record. I guess I am having #DNS problems after all. My email is totally borked right now. If you need to get a hold of me DM me on Twitter @JoeCotellese or find me on Google+

P2 Theme Kill Sites with Many Users

Dec 27, 2012

I recently updated my blog theme to use P2. P2 is a free Wordpress theme that gives your site more of a Tumblr / Twitter style look.

In general, I liked it. However, I noticed that the performance really sucked. Digging in deeper it turns out the culprit is the P2 variable “mentionData.” I presume it is used to allow the mention feature to work. What it does is preload all of the user profile data onto the page. This can be bad news for a Wordpress instance with a lot of users.

I had over 700 users on the site (that was another problem that I rectified), on each page load it P2 will fill in the mentionData variable with all 700+ account holders.

I’ve since deleted the offending users and my performance is great again. I don’t know enough about the theme to want to dive in and take a look at it. Hopefully the guys at Automattic can fix this.