all hail the shag

Its been a busy few weeks for us in the office at Filtrbox. We just put out a new release with some big improvements we’ve had in the works for awhile. Between defrag, a board meeting, the boulder.me job fair, and the new version - the lights have been on late at the new digs. Even the dog is doing code reviews…

The Filtrbox team is pretty excited about the new release for a lot of reasons, but the biggest thing is the new search functionality. Previously, we had a pseudo-realtime search mechanism that went off and ran a one-time data collector when you added a Filtr. If content was found quickly you’d see new articles in the dashboard, but in many cases if the search took awhile or timed out due to slow sites, and you wouldn’t get immediate results. The lack of instant feedback on your new Filtrs was a big frustration of ours. In this new release its totally different and the system runs a realtime search, hitting our mainstream news index, blog index, and twitter (if you have social media enabled). It takes a few seconds but returns the same articles you’ll get with the ongoing persistent search.

Personally I’m also glad to have the “delete article” feature in the new release because its something I like to use to get rid of articles I never want to see again. Feedback has been good so far - check out the “filtrbox love on twitter”…love to hear from you too! 

filtrbox, startups boulder.me, defrag08, filtrbox, startups

I was doing pretty well for awhile. The whole Inbox Zero thing was working for me, even though its mostly BS. I managed to stay on top of the inbox clutter for about 4 months. Then something happened, some increase in busy and decrease in time, and inbox zero faded into the rearview mirror like a geriatric in the slow lane. My inbox is now at 1400 messages. This works for some people but not for me…I can’t help but feel I’ve dropped the ball on 1400 items somehow.   

I keep thinking I’m going to get the time back, or that I should just wipe the whole inbox and admit defeat. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to recover and process 300 messages a week of the backlog. Most get deleted, some require responses. I have noticed a 90/10 rule in effect also - 10% of the emails require 90% of the time to deal with. The other 90% of the emails are easy to file or delete.

Wish me luck…

info overload email, InboxZero, info overload

I’m at the Defrag conference today with lots of other folks who care about “accelerating the ah-ha moment!”, according to the conference. Really, this conference is all about putting meaning and context around the insane amount of information available online. What I care about, even more, is how we find the RIGHT information in a timely and painless manner and deliver that in a way that is effective.

I just saw a screenshot-demo for a product called Sxipper, the current version holds your passwords but I already use 1Password for that. The new version brings a vast amount of meta-info to the browsing experience - this is being called a “flow app” and I think it has promise (think “adaptive blue” for social info).

As I listen to the discussions, there is an underlying conversation around doing better filtering, separating information, dealing with information overload, and finding the value in all the info. Of course this all is very much related to Filtrbox’s mission and is why I’m here.  There is much we can (and should) do at Filtrbox to deliver valuable meta-information around the content we discover. Presenting the right meta-info without just amplifying the noise problem is something we are focused on. It will be interesting to see if “flow apps” like Me.dium or Sxipper can figure out how to do this in a more streamlined manner. I don’t think sidebars/sidecar browser apps are it. For me these are too distracting and make the problem worse, even though the info they provide is helpful.

What is clear to me is that as smart as we humans can be, and no matter how good and intelligent we try to make the filters and the software, there is, and will be a NEVER-ENDING quest for the better, smarter filter.

Although humans can be predictable, the brain is not a binary system, and predicting what we care about or don’t care about at a given moment is non-trivial. When the information and its profile is contstantly changing, and the attention, interest and focus of the mind is changing - finding those patterns programattically is a “holy-grail” mission. Lets see how far we can get…

filtrbox, info overload, startups "information overload", defrag08, filtrbox, me.dium, sxipper

Sadly my vacation is coming to an end and its back to Boulder soon. In the meantime, here’s my “office” away from the real Filtrbox HQ.

After almost two years without a real break, this has been a great week of downtime and recharging. I haven’t done all that much work, and got no where on the projects I thought I’d conquer on the trip. Guess this is a good sign that I really needed the break. No, I never took the laptop to the pool…

Not too bad… That’s Lanai in the background! 

travel hawaii, maui, ocean

Pretty much sums up the current state of the economy! 

humor

NoHardware.com :: Your Servers Will Melt in the Rack…Not in the Cloud
Hilarious - and brilliant

tech bits cloud computing

Justin from Filtrbox pimps our new Olympic widget - go Team USA!

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I’ve been trying to use to tumblr as my primary personal blog for awhile now and the party’s over. Its simplicity is great but ultimately I found I want more control over the posts and formatting than what I can get here. I end up posting less and thinking about posting less because I feel like the format is limiting. 

Trying to manage a tumblog and and another blog is too much for this guy…so I’ll be moving back to a wordpress based blog soon.

tech bits

It feels like I got a bit lucky perhaps, but the folks at the Genius Bar at the Boulder, CO 29th st Apple Store earned rockstar status yesterday. 

My MBP started acting strange on Saturday morning out of no where. The keyboard and trackpad started intermittently repsonding, or not responding at all. I even got two kernel panics after hitting keys repeatedly. It was pretty odd and I figured it was a firmware problem so I rebooted a few times, zapped the PRAM, etc. Nothing worked so I gave up for a few hours. 

I managed to get a 3PM Genius Bar appt and within 20 minutes of sitting down we figured out it was either hardware or firmware but the firmware could not be upgraded or flashed cause it was already up to date. I left the laptop with them and they replaced my top deck (the top of the laptop that has the trackpad built in). Luckily they had a spare at the store…and the root problem wasn’t the keyboard (which they didn’t have in stock).

 I got a call around 7pm that it was fixed. Same day fix, a few hours really. The person I was working with knew I couldn’t be w/o this ‘puter for even a day so she made it happen. Cost me $0 since the MBP is under warranty. 

As a bonus, I brought in my leopard DVD which wasn’t reading properly in a few machines and they replaced the DVD with new media w/o hassle.  

 Awesomeness…

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Installing XP on the MBP (bootcamp)

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