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Oct 01

Burrito Envy

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I’ve been craving a burrito for weeks. My friend Caitlyn goes to Chipotle for a burrito nearly every day for lunch (between 10 and 11 AM Eastern, or around when I’m leaving for the lab), leaving me with burrito foodlust and a packed turkey sandwich for my own noonday meal. This was heightened when the Producteev crew (Judi, Mark, Farhana, and Tushar) had a burrito lunch in the office and bragged about it all over Twitter.

Since then my unslaked desire for meat, rice, and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla has been a bit of a running joke amongst many of my online buddies. They decided I needed to make a video of myself eating a burrito when I finally had one, but that day did not come. After a while it had built up to the point that I couldn’t eat just any burrito, it had to be a fantastic one. I started passing up burrito opportunities so I could hold out for a burrito worthy of the event.

This week, Rachel and I went to Chipotle at last. I got a chicken burrito with rice, black beans, onions, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and hot salsa. You know it’s going to be good when they can barely keep the tortilla closed.

That burrito tasted incredible.

Chipotle_Burrito.m4v Watch on Posterous

Sep 23

These cells are ready to be split

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Fibroblasts as seen through a 10x magnification. These are live cells, unlike my pretty color pictures. The density of the culture means we can safely split it into a number of parts, where they will continue growing to yield a greater total number of cells.

Sep 21

Mounting Coverslips

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One of the many steps that precedes the pretty fluorescence pictures I get. Cells are on little glass coverslips in the plate, and get mounted onto the slide with a special liquid and sealed into place with clear nail polish. All in dim light, since some of the stains are light-sensitive.

Sep 20

How to Engage with the Community

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I don’t consider myself a “blogger” or a “social media guru,” but I do enjoy sharing things with my friends and meeting new people online. I also don’t like when companies try to force buzz, such “retweet this message ten times to enter to win a prize.” Instead, I share things with people because I like them and think they will too – which is why I’ve been so enthusiastic about Producteev.

The folks at Producteev have been amazing about connecting with their fans online – they’re a team of interesting, engaging people in their own right, sharing stuff about themselves with the rest of us. They also happen to work for a company that provides a great service (take note how these two statements are ordered). By being who they are, they make it more fun to share something I was talking about anyway.

Today I got a thank you card from Judi, Farhana, and Tushar. Not going to lie, it totally made my day. Enclosed within the card were a few Producteev punchouts, so Appy and I decided to have a little fun with them as a way of saying thank you back.

Connecting with people is the first part of any successful business model in today’s world. Here’s one example of people who are doing it right.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Sep 20

Netflix’s War on Customers

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It's no secret that the big media "old guard" want absolute control over how we as individuals experience culture. Rather than viewing the internet and the technologies and services it enables as exciting new opportunities to eliminate the cost of distribution and reach a global audience, they have insisted on clinging to a scarcity-driven business model that becomes more outmoded every year. From the "sue 'em all" campaigns of the oughties to the one-sided laws they continue to force through governments around the world, their desperate attempts to turn back the clock have met with utter failure.

Enter companies like Netflix and Redbox who focus on giving customers what they want as conveniently as possible, at a reasonable price point – what the studios should have been doing years ago. Their existence breathes new life into the doddering DVD rental business. Naturally, the studios respond not with effusive praise but by drawing battle lines – erroneously assuming that the success of these companies is driven by worthless studio content, and not by a quality service. They demand exorbitant sums of cash (a la Pandora) when the money should be flowing in the opposite direction. In these kinds of conflicts, the customers lose. The companies have little choice but to acquiesce to the studios' demands, even at risk of destroying their own business. Redbox negotiated release delays, while Netflix tried to avoid this by passing the cost to us in the form of a 60% price increase.

I had some good back-and-forth on twitter with Mark Hamilton, Caitlyn Mayers, and Ross Pruden about this. Here was an opportunity for Netflix to take the side of their customers. They could have explained that the increased prices were the result of the studios' demands, charging the premium only to those customers who wanted to see the studio movies – directing at least some part of the resulting customer outrage at the correct target.

Instead, they tried to pass off corporate codswallop as honesty, providing hastily penned excuse after excuse to explain, justify, and apologize for what happened,, shielding the studios from any responsibility. The half-baked decision to split the company and "rebrand" is only making things worse. Customers have clearly shown that they want to obtain videos from a convenient source at an affordable price, and the company is quickly becoming one that provides neither. Netflix had a choice, and they appear to have sided with the media dinosaurs in their futile war on customers to regain control over our culture – and as a result, the company is paying a terrible price.

Sep 19

Wishing

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Threadless printed a delightful shirt years ago, that I was too foolish to snap up immediately, instead hoping it would still be available during their next sale. I’ve been waiting for years since then for them to reprint it, and the finally did – only now, I’m too poor to afford the full price $20 + shipping. If anybody is feeling especially generous and wants to buy it for me, I’m a guy’s small. Also, I’ll love you forever.

Sep 17

Graduate Productivity

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For me, digital task management began with Microsoft Outlook somewhere in my “tween” years. By the time middle school came around, I was syncing it with a Windows Mobile PDA, awkwardly carrying it around wherever I could. Today, I find myself using Producteev to try and wrangle the myriad of to-do items that come with being a married MD/PhD student who has too many hobbies. I wrote a post about how I use the service that appeared on their blog, but since its helped me a great deal I thought I’d share a similar version here so more people I know could read it.

Producteev Everywhere

I use a number of different devices, so I interact with Producteev in just all about of its forms in the course of my day. On my desktop PC, I use the web interface and try to process anything I woke up remembering that I needed to accomplish. At school or in the lab, I use a MacBook Pro, and have recently fallen in love with the desktop app. It allows me to break Producteev out of the browser, sorting it to its own space and minimizing the ability of the rest of the internet to distract me while I am processing my tasks. Finally, on the go I use my smartphone, running the superior Android OS. Unfortunately there is currently no native Android app for Producteev, so I sync with Astrid – which is actually how I discovered Producteev in the first place.

Adapting GTD

I’m not a strict follower of Getting Things Done (GTD), but I am enamored with the idea of organizing and breaking down tasks into items with clear contexts and end points. Heavily inspired by this article, I set up a number of different context-related workspaces. Each one contains tasks that I must complete or remember in that specific context: Home, Lab, School, Errands, Computer, and Communication. I also have a workspace for projects, and a brain dump. Keep in mind that each new workspace will need to be separately configured to integrate with Google Calendar and other services.

With this many workspaces, the overview pane becomes quite valuable – I can quickly get an idea of what has be accomplished over the next few days regardless of context. I can also switch to a specific workspace to keep other types of tasks from looming and overwhelming me. I’ve found that this has helped me focus a great deal – I can concentrate on lab tasks while at lab, even as I think of and add things I’ll need to do later at home.

Smartphone Challenges

One of the many things I like about Producteev is how easy it is to assign all of the relevant meta-information to a task as you are creating it. While my fingers are still on the keyboard, I can set priority, due date, workspace, and tags, so as soon as I press enter, the task is formatted exactly how it needs to be, no further processing required.

I’ve found, however, that adding that extra information is more than a little cumbersome on a soft keyboard smartphone, simply because the symbols take extra effort to access. When I’m on my phone I’m usually in the middle of doing something else and don’t have the time to carefully format a task. I deal with this by having Astrid set to put all new tasks into the brain dump workspace. If I think of something while mobile, I enter it as quickly as possible, saving the categorization and cleanup for when I have time at a full-size computer, such as at the beginning or end of the day.

Projects

I’ve found that having a separate workspace for projects and other “some day” items is helpful. This is where tags come in especially handy: A project often has a number of steps, which I try to break down into individual tasks. Tagging all of these with a project helps keep them together, and priorities can be used to assign them a kind of hierarchy so it’s obvious which one has to be tackled first.

Other Integrations and Experiments

I’ve been playing around a bit with integrating Evernote with Producteev. If I take meeting notes in Evernote, I can not only search through them later, I can also email the entire note to Producteev as a task, with all the surrounding information attached. Be aware that if the note has a lot of images and other content (such as a clipped web page), it can generate a good deal of garbage notes as well.

For processing email-based tasks, I generally either still forward the email to Producteev with the appropriate syntax in the subject line or switch to the app and enter the task myself.

I’m hoping in the future to make more use of the shared workspaces, both at home between myself and my wife and between the members of my lab. I see this as being helpful for identifying tasks that require cooperation to complete and for sending others to-do items that they can prioritize as they see fit.

Final Thoughts

At this point I’ve been actively using Producteev for about nine months and it’s been extremely useful for helping me organize and remember everything I need to accomplish. It’s always a struggle to not get overwhelmed and to take decisive action to complete a task, but anything that helps lower the activation energy required is a boon – and Producteev makes for a wonderful catalyst.

Sep 15

DM & M

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Picked this up from a vendor at the symposium yesterday. I do enjoy some science humor.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Sep 15

One Long Week

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I stayed up writing a post last night, attached images to it this morning, and sent the email to Posterous before leaving for the research symposium – only to have it disappear from existence between my phone, Sparrow, and the Gmail servers. During the beginning of the symposium I wrote a new post on the back of my program, only to lose the program. It’s probably for the best, unless you were particularly interested in what I’ve been doing in lab since Friday.

I’m convinced that my friends who work in finance, at startups, or on secret Army projects, or are who are in grad or med school, consistently outwork me. Still, it’s been the kind of frayed, coffee-fueled week even they can appreciate. The punchline? It’s only Wednesday.

Sep 14