One - Jud Valeski's blog

Amazon Alexa And Rewiring My Brain

I took Amazon's Whole Foods bait the other day and bought an Echo and a Dot while buying groceries (yup... weird). Here are my first impressions after about a week's worth of use. I set Alexa up in a new space that doesn't have

protocols

The Three Mobile Notification Tiers

Mobile device notifications have probably become the primary UI I use to engage with my mobile device. I'm constantly amazed at how poorly mobile app developers implement them. Here's an awesome post by Stan Otrovskiy (iOS engineer at AMEX) that gets into how to do the

That Was So Stressful!

I just successfully used http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/ . I got it on the second try. Here's my text. I would love to see the world's editor windows support this feature by default. I wonder what everything would look and feel like if we all wrote this

data

CARMERA

I can finally talk about this product and company! CARMERA is building a marketplace for real-time, in-depth (3D), street-level environment information. Autonomous vehicles and smart city efforts have insatiable appetites for this kind of data, and collecting it is expensive and hard. CARMERA brings it to market in a scalable,

vulnerability

Women, Confidence & Trying to Father A Daughter

carrying on with the vulnerability theme, I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that I perceive to exist around being a woman, and get into some of my parenting inadequacies. I am not a woman, and I am no doubt coloring outside my lines here, but,

vulnerability

Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) & Vulnerability

I'm reading Brené Brown's "Daring Greatly" book, so... in a vulnerable/sharing mood. when I think about the experience our children (Logan, 14... Annie, 11) are having in middle-school I am so profoundly grateful. I'm not oblivious to the reality that there

browser

The Independent Web; Pocket, Highly & Mozilla?

At a recent dinner I sat next to an exec from a large adtech company. I tend to avoid adtech discussions, but this one was fascinating. He described his, successful, platform as increasingly fighting a silo'd/walled-garden web where advertisers were hunkering down with specific platforms (e.g.

politics

My Americanism

I'm a citizen of the United States of America by birth. I've noticed some things shift as I've grown up here in the States (I'm 43 years old now). I don't fully understand how they've impacted me/us

cooking

June Oven: First Reaction

I gave up pre-ordering/kickstarting a long time ago because the commitment-to-successful-delivery ratio got too low. One of the few to pull through though was June Oven [https://juneoven.com/], and mine arrived yesterday. It's been a great initial 24-hrs. So far I've reheated pizza (nice

photography

Day In Pictures: Tuesday

Steve Pockross who's happy running blogmutt [https://www.blogmutt.com/]these days. Wonderful Valley transplant whose roots are now in place.Christian Braun who's been building something awesome in hobbydb [https://www.hobbydb.com/]with intense clarity and focus.Srinivasa Venkataraman (Venky) just moved to Boulder

business

How Did Gnip Get The Twitter Deal?

I get asked this question a surprising number of times, so I'm going to try answering it here in hopes of killing multiple future birds with one stone. The question comes in the "hey, can I pick your brain for thirty minutes" form, and winds up

news

Understanding What We're Consuming

When we realized all the processed food we were eating was causing us physical pain, we created Nutrition Labels that allowed us to better judge for ourselves whether or not we wanted to eat something. Online content is our new processed food, and we need a way to better, and

Airplane Decibel Notes

I collected measurements of real-world decibel levels on a handful of commercial flights. Here they are. All seats, except one, were positioned in-front of the engines, and measurements were taken once we reached cruising altitude. The leading number is the decibel level. 82 - Airbus 319, row 12 82 -

technology

Virtual Reality (VR) Observations

Google and Facebook have popup stores splattered around technology influencer cities this holiday season; both include their Virtual Reality goggle setups. After trying out the Google Daydream version with my son in NYC, I opted to buy one to play around with it a little more. A few weeks later,

photography

Day In Pictures: Friday

Got to hear all about Gayle's incredible Morocco trip and talk Iceland itineraries.Long time since I'd been able to hang with the big guy (and new father) Brad!Talking app scale, network infrastructure limitations, and new ideas with Wyeth.Bouncing ideas around with Deb from

life

Thankful For... Life.

Several months ago April and I took part in a rescue effort that wound up saving a young woman's life. It was one of the most remarkable experiences either one of us has ever had. It showed us how fragile life is. It showed us how there is

movies

Arrival & Linguistic Relativity

The movie "Arrival" explores a concept I've loved since my first trip to Europe as a young man; Linguistic Relativity. Immediately the new world I dropped into felt different in ways I couldn't explain. Sure things were "different." Architecture, the "age&

browser

A Few Months of Ad Blocking

Two friends each have competing ad blocking companies/products (Brave [https://brave.com/] and Optimal [https://optimal.com/]) that I've been trying out for a few months now. Detailed reactions below, but let me start by saying how much faster the web is without extraneous connections/bandwidth being

GNIP

Can You Put a Price On Data?

Here's another Dee Hock transcription from The Birth of the Chaordic Age. He does an impeccable job describing the material surrounding so many sleepless nights while we were building Gnip (and while our partners were trying to understand their value propositions as well). If you're building

management

Are You Really a Leader?

The following transcription from Dee Hock's Birth of the Chaordic Age says it all. Whenever I'm asked about leadership, I always fumble around with some incongruent response that only makes sense to me. What I really need to do is memorize this and just regurgitate it.

news

Main Stream Media And Me: A Year Later

A year ago I cut myself off from going to mainstream media sources for content [/main-stream-media-and-me.html] consumption (with the notable exception of the New York Times in paper form Sunday mornings). I'm here to report that I generally feel more calm, balanced, smarter, and informed. I also

music

(Timeless?) Music Today

I've been meaning to write this post for awhile. A conversation with my brother today finally motivated me to do it. He has two kids (9 and 5); mine are 14 and 11. A few nights ago our family spent the evening with another family. Drinks were had

photography

Day In Pictures: A Wonderful Thursday

My early bird. She gets up a little after me.Biker Chic. She thundered in during morning coffee meetings and graciously let me take her picture. #badassLovely Gayle. Lovely catch-up.Annie. Relaxed after some well used time-off.Casey (with PrintReleaf [https://printreleaf.com/]) building the right software to reforest Earth.

money

Investing: Humans or Machines?

I ran a test to try and compare human money manager strategy against machine money management strategy. It wasn't scientific and it had a handful of holes, but, I looked at 14-months of returns (from 02/2015 to 06/2016) for both the professional (1'ish % fee-level)

sex

"The Talk" With My Son

He is thirteen and thinks he's seventeen. Everything went from zero to sixty about a month ago when school let out for the summer. I feel like he was a little boy on the last day of school, then a week into summer break, he became a teenager;