Movin’ on over

As you probably can tell, I’ve gone quiet on the blogging front for a while. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been lacking creatively for quite a while, being energetically drained by numerous sources that you don’t really need to worry yourselves over. Needless to say, I’m back into blogging form, or am attempting it yet again.

I’ll likely be transitioning over to my new blog rand9.com. I had initially intended to only post tech-specific things on that blog, and keep more personal matters over here, but this post changed my mind. I want to focus my energy on one blog, and I feel like the rand9 name is what I want to put my energy into.

Fear not, I will continue to strive to put more content than just tech stuff over there, so you will still get the usual banter and rantings. I still plan on posting a lot about entrepreneurialism and projects that I’m engaged in. So head on over to the new blog and give the few articles a read. Oh, and if you’ve subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed, be sure to do so over there as well. Thanks for all the feedback over this last year on these posts!

BJ

Just to complete a goal people…

Mission Accomplished

As you may (or may not) have noticed, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Life has been life-ing and I’ve had a plethora of things to write about, just not a lot of time, since most of the things I want to write about require tact and skill so as not to offend one or more parties who read (or more likely don’t read) this blog. Ugh, that was a mouthful. So why the post tonight? Well, mostly because I forced myself to.

Jumping Straight In

Let’s just say, when I clicked the button to pay for the triathlon, I got a mini panic attack well up inside me. If you want to tie yourself in to doing something that will be hard or uncomfortable, put money on it. Such was the case for me in signing up for my first ever Sprint Triathlon in which I’ll be competing tomorrow morning. The funny thing is that I only signed up for it 3 and a half weeks ago, and really haven’t done much training to get ready for it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Triathlon format, I’ll give you a short rundown. The normal Triathlon disciplines are Swim, Bike, and Run, in that order. From the time you enter the water on the swim till you cross the finish line running, there is really no stopping. Racers are given a transition area where they can place essentials for transitioning from one discipline to the other: T1 is the first transition (swim to bike), and T2 is the second transition (bike to run). There are four major distances that are used for Triathlon races: Sprint, Olympic, Half (or 70.3), and Ironman. As mentioned before, I’ll be doing a Sprint Traithlon: 300 meter swim (usually 750 or 800 for the Sprint distance), 11.6 mile bike, 5k run (3.1 miles).

I really can’t describe how excited I am to test my physical fitness and endurance in this race. I’m definitely not in the race to compete, but would be satisfied with a sub-2 hour completion time. If you are interested in coming out to cheer me (and 349 others) on, come on down! It’s in Riverton, and the swim starts at 7 am (Directions). Wish me luck!

PS, I should give credit to Joel who has inspired me to do this race (and is doing it with me). He’s gonna smoke me…

Small Jaunt Across

Last saturday Tyler, Tyson, and myself took a short motorcycle ride behind Squaw Peak. We were expecting some fairly easy riding since the dirt road is quite broad and well-travelled. Adventure ensued due to large snowbanks and general gooniness. Below are some videos we snuck in of riding and pre/post ride interviews. Enjoy!

Pre-ride Commentary

Tyson tackling the Monster Snowbank

BJ trying the snow… again

The end of the road

Snow rally

The Long Way Round shot

Tyler destroys the Snowbank

Post-ride Interview & Commentary

Client Work

This puts a great perspective on how to bill your clients (and if you’re a client why you probably sound ridiculous).

Playing For Change: Peace through music

Dustin sent this along today, and I have to say it is one of the coolest music projects I have ever heard of. The producers travel around the world recording tracks with various musicians, then mix it all into a great video/musical journey. SO COOL. The project/documentary can be found at playingforchange.com where their tagline is “Peace through music”. Apparently you can buy their songs on iTunes as well. Absolutely fantastic idea.

Introducing: One Simple Goal

In my recent post In a rut and tired of it, I mentioned a possible solution to some nagging issues that continue to be difficult for me to overcome. May I quote:

So, here’s what I’m going to do. Set One simple goal each night before going to bed, to be completed the following day. The goal can range anywhere from spiritual to entrepreneurial. Simplicity will be favored over complexity, but I won’t be shying away from possible complex issues. The point is to do SOMETHING. It is my desire that each day I will produce a favorable gain in removing some obstacle that has stood in my way recently.

That was four days ago, and I have already been getting amazing results out of accomplishing a simple daily goal. My first four goals were: Tuesday) wake up at 8 am; Wednesday) Begin building a website to track goals, pushing it to the server; Thursday) Finalize the beta features of the website and start getting feedback from people; Friday) Contact a friend I’ve lost contact with. I have accomplished all four goals. The first and last goals were fairly simple, though still required determination to complete. The middle two goals were much more complex and time-sensitive, requiring even more determination and willpower to complete within one day. It was a good test to see how simplicity vs. complexity affects the decisions you make while accomplishing the goal.

By setting the goal to work hard on the website to get it out, I incentivized myself to put away distractions (like email, facebook, twitter) and focus more. I continually was assessing the amount of time I had to accomplish the goal, making value judgements based on the end goal I was desiring. Several times last night I had to abandon the feature I wanted to build because it was taking too long. This was a fabulous way to learn about the power of constraints that Jason Fried was talking about.

OneSimpleGoal.com

OneSimpleGoal.com - Creating a New Goal

The purpose of OneSimpleGoal.com is to provide you with an opportunity to simply set and complete daily goals. There are (and will be) very few bells and whistles to the app, I want the simplicity of the concept to shine through. As such, there isn’t much color, imagery, or content. All things are focused on you setting a goal for that day (or the next), and then empowering you to get it done. Upcoming revisions to the site will address some of your initial ideas about how to improve the site. I am so excited to have this app out early and having people using it, even in an infantile or beta state.

You can get daily updates on the status of development on the app through twitter.com/onesimplegoal and the One Simple Goal group on facebook. If you have any ideas, concerns, bug reports, testimonials, or any other feedback about the app, please let me know by commenting on this post, replying @onesimplegoal on twitter, posting to the wall on the facebook group, or emailing me at bj [dot] neilsen [at] gmail [dot] com.

Now go out and start changing your life by accomplishing your simple daily goals!

Gellin’ for Great Experience

Saw two really great videos from the GEL conference aimed at understanding and implementing better experience for users and customers. 

Seth Godin talking about how and why things are broken (from an experience and interaction perspective).

Jason Fried of 37 Signals talking about using Less to propel your business to greater success. The beginning is a bit muddy, but it gets pretty good from the middle on. My favorite part of the talk is the very end, here’s a transcript of the last minute of the talk:

Less software has less mass, and mass is a very important point, because just like in the physical world, the more mass an object has, the more energy it takes to change it’s direction. The bigger a software project is and the more code it has, the harder it is to change it. And if you can’t change your software, you’re going to die. [...]

My suggestion to people is to keep your software small, less software, less mass, make it easier to change, and think about opportunities to embrace constraints. That’s the only thing I’d recommend more of: constraints. Less money, less people, less time, less abstractions, less software. That’s where you’re actually truly creative, in the space where you have constraints. If you have nothing constraining you, you’re not going to be creative because you simply don’t have to deliver. But when you have constraints, and you have less money and less time, you have to get stuff done. And putting yourself in a position to get stuff done is the best possible thing you could ever do.

In a rut and tired of it

 

gonna make it.... gonna make it....

You may or may not know me very well. Truthfully, I doubt any of you really know me, except for Tyler maybe, and my wife of course. I’ll just fill you in a bit since you’re on the outs: I’ve been in a big time rut for the last few months. Any semi-regular readers of this blog will know that I have a passion for programming and design, and that I have the entrepreneurial spirit of an eagle (or mongoose?). I have an incredible desire to work on my own businesses (or with a few well qualified individuals) and to have the opportunity to do something more in my life than sit at a desk and perform the whims of an employer. 

 

Purge and Simplify

And so it begins: 136 feeds slashed to 99, 54 follows tumbles to 26. Perhaps it had something to do with me being in a quaint little town in central Utah earlier this evening to realize one huge thing that has been really frustrating me lately: I am on information overload, and it is driving me crazy. So it was that after a good chat with my wife on the way home tonight that I decided I was going to clean house a little.