Minifying Life + Backups

Ya know, I was looking around today and starting to realize the fruits of some of my labours over the past couple of months.

If there were to be some disaster today, and I only had a few moments to grab my valueables, I would be very confident that all I need to do is grab my dog and maybe (big maybe) something like my wallet or cell phone.  I’ve been removing clutter of late and been trying to continually get down to the “bare essentials.”

So what does that actually mean?  More peace of mind than one might realize.

Many people dread losing items that have sentimental or intrinsic value — for me that would consist of pictures, gifts from family/friends, and items I tend to cary on my person or that otherwise identify myself (drivers license, credit card, phone, passport, birth certificate, etc).  The entire goal of planning for the worst is something of an optimization problem (there’s likely a mathematical proof or equation floating around for this already—if so, go read that). 

In this day and age, we have things like “cloud computing” that consumers can now take advantage of.  Being a person who loves the subscription economy we’ve dived into as consumers (more on this in another post), I’m totally biased to solutions that might cost a small dime, but provide great value over the course of their service.

The simplest solution to ensure that, given the worst disaster where your house burns down and you lose everything you own, how do you recover priceless memorabilia or family herlooms or photos/family videos?  The answer is: digitize that, damnit (DTD).  In using DTD, you can quickly realize just how little you may lose in the worst of events.  Further, it’s always worth noting the services you can utilize to ensure that should you lose everything you own, there’s a path to getting those items back.

Backing up your content online is the easiest means of ensuring data loss prevention in the long run.  Things you might be interested in scanning and storing would be items like a birth certificate, social security card, drivers license, passport.  DTD and then throw those items on a backup. 

Family photos and such are priceless.  Once they burn or get soaked, you’ll never be able to restore them to what they were.  Accidents happen more ofte then not, and it’s best to store and organize those images.  What to do?  DTD and then throw those items on a backup.

Aunt Nelda’s pearls or Uncle Ed’s gun collection will be a tough go to replace.  I’m leaving you, dear reader, to figure out how best to protect those valueables.  If you leave them on display because they give you pleasure, it’s naturally a risk for theft/disaster.  If you lock something away in a fireproof cabinet of sorts, then it kind of defeats the purpose of enjoying those artifacts.  Nonetheless, whatever you decide to do, know that your dear old pictures of Aunt Nelda and Uncle Ed will be meticulously maintained.

Once you have your backups, the most critical (and by most critical I mean *the* most critical) step is get those backups onto the cloud.  Backup everything.  It’s cheap, it’s easy, and works for you.  Where do you go to find a backup service?  Try googling Carbonite or something along those lines.  After you’ve got that running, be sure to back up all of your documents, photos, and files on your computer(s) as well. 

Assuming you’ve got an interest in doing the above steps, what did you get?  For about $15 a month you likely have a new backup service, you’ve digitized your entire photo collection, identification documents, and any other personal documents of interest, and guess what?  That wasn’t so bad.  Fifteen dolllars a month (depending on the service you use) is relatively cheap, and buys you a good bit of peace of mind.  That’s one small step on the way to a much less worrisome scenario should the worst happen.

Another item that you should consider heavily (assuming you’re a renter) is renters insurance.  This is on the order of $20/month depending on where you live, but it reimburses you for physical items that you’d be likely to replace in the event of a disaster.  This one’s kind of obvious, and homeowners insurance can serve a relatively similar purpose here as well.

So what about the rest of your stuff?  How can you minimize risk when it comes to other items you own?  Aside from replacement, there are plenty of other options available.  I used to have a (very) large collection of books and movies.  I amazon-ed/ebay-ed all those suckers and am getting digital copies as I go.  Magazine subscriptions are moving that way as well.  I bought my first digital edition of .Net magazine recently, and am looking forward to cancelling all my physical copies and just going with the digital version in the near future for all magazines.

Music is another area that is very hard to part ways with.  Certain records have a good bit of sentimental value when listening to them.  I’ve kept a handful of my favorites, but the rest of em’ I sold online as well.  With subscription services like Spotify, Pandora and Amazon’s cloud player, I’m a pretty happy camper having everything in digital format.

Services are again starting to creep into the discussion of this post.  Overall, I’d guess that for well under $100 / month I have relatively easily replaced most all of my CD’s, DVD’s, books and now backup as many items as I can think of to the cloud without issue.  Next up?  I’m selling a bunch of extra computer components, furniture and other trinkets lying around to get ever closer to my goal of owning only 100 things.  I’m not far off now… not far off at all.

Some Cool Coding Tips

I was doing some nighttime programming for fun, and came across a bit of code I had to look up (i.e. search on the web).  In C#, I was familiar with ternary operators.  I love using them when appropriate.  It turns 3 ~ 5 lines of code into one pretty, simple statement.

When I came across a coalescing operator, my head exploded (ok, that may be a bit over-the-top…).

Coalescing operators have a fantastic usage (particularly in C#) with nullable objects.

Example time!

Lets say we’re posting data to a form.  The form contains a name (which is an optional field) and birth year (another nullable field).

Assuming we have a “Person” object, that takes a string and integer for a birthdate, we could code that up as follows to handle the null-case of those objects being passed in.

public void doThis(String? name, int? birthyear)

{

Person p =  new Person();

  // option #1 - if statements

  if(name!=null)

p.name=name;

  else 

        p.name = “Bob”;

  if(birthyear != null)

        p.birthyear = birthyear;

  else 

        p.birthyear = 1902;

  // option #2 — ternary operators

  p.name = name!=null ? name : “Bob”;

  p.birthyear = birthyear != null ? birthyear : 1902;

  //option #3 — coalescing operator

  p.name = name ?? “Bob”;

  p.birthyear = birthyear ?? 1902;

}

How about that for a super quick example? I’m not sure how useful this is, but it seemed like a cool little tidbit of information to come across that I was previously unaware of.  Maybe it’s time I start reading up on the changes between C# 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0.   If I start doing that, I’ll need to look in the differences between Java 6 and 7 (I have 5 and 6 down pretty well), and don’t get me started on PHP 4 and 5…

Ah well, that’s all.  Hope someone on the interwebs finds this useful!

$100 in 100 days. Making Money on Android.

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of three blog posts discussing monetization on Android.  I recently attended O’Reilly’s Android Open Conference held here in downtown San Francisco.  It was a great event with plenty of fantastic speakers.  One speaker presented 50 business models in 20 minutes.  While the talk was great, I thought I’d try and bring about a slightly different focus on app developers monetizing their hobby apps.

I’ve been curious about making money on the Android marketplace for a while, and have read a few other blogs and articles about such information.  I’m inclined to start fresh.

The question I’m setting out to answer is: what does it take to make $100 by making an Android application.  I plan to launch three different types of applications.  Each of these applications will be in a distinct category within the marketplace.  Each app will also be infused with as much analytical information as I can possibly gather.

The soul purpose of the analytics is so that I can share some pretty charts and graphs about what my apps users are doing.  What types of users respond to advertisements, what types of users are willing to pay an up-front fee for apps, and what in-app purchase mechanisms work well for an audience, etc.

If this were a scientific test, I would do three different apps in three different categories and do a comparison based on that information.  Due to the fact I’m only composed of two hands and one brain currently, I’ll be a little bit more limited than a team of developers looking to answer my rather basic questions (for only $100, too). 

My hypothesis is that in-app purchases will be more difficult (i.e. not as fruitful) on the Android Marketplace than the Amazon Marketplace.  Further, I  think advertisments inside of apps will be almost useless in terms of monetization.  Lastly, I think the freemium / premium app versions will be the best bet.  Give a user a decent ad-enabled free app, and remind them that they would really like to drop a buck or two for the ad-free version at a later date.

I started some small development on these apps this weekend, and after I get some UI help from a friend, will launch them with Google and Flurry Analytics.  From there, I’ll wrap the apps up, launch them in the marketplace, and report back accordingly.

Moving from paperback to eBooks... Is this the future?

I’ve recently decided that I wanted to minify my life, much like one might minify javascript on a webpage (really bad example, but they both use the word minify which works out well).  I got the idea from the “100 things challenge”.

My parents consider me to be a minimalist already, but that’s part of what comes with living in a city.  People in cities tend to be more conscious about the space they live in because the dollar per square foot ratio is a bit higher than rural areas. The question I started to approach was how do I run a minify operation on my life, such that I can really understand what a functional person needs in order to be satisfied in the technology age.  My motiviations are purely economical.  It’s not that I’m looking to save money by selling or donating a ton of junk, rather I’m trying to see a business model that might be interesting to a recent college grad with his or her first apartment and job after leaving school.

I’ve noticed advertisements to rent a neighbors call for a few hours which directly competes with the City Car Share and Zip-Car services in the bay area.  Spotify launched in the U.S. and I’ve noticed facebook friends who I don’t view as nerdy/geeky to be using subscription-based streaming music services to get their music fix (e.g. Rhapdsody, Spotify, Rdio, etc.).  I also took a class in grad school in understanding technology and the services industry a good while back and have found the subject to be a bit fascinating.  I think the world is moving from product to services, and technology will be a major player in that movement.

What does this have to do with moving from paperback books to eBooks?

This is a step that I think the next generation won’t be making.  The future won’t have people moving from paperback to eBooks, they’ll already be using tablets to buy, rent or checkout books, magazines, and newspapers.  The concept of buying a physical book is going to foreign to many kids in the very near future.

I’m willing to bet that the government will take a look at public education in the near future and realize it’s cheaper to get kids new textbooks by giving them a tablet and sending them an eBook version rather than buying, shipping and re-using (outdated) textbooks year after year.  These kids will be looking at the economy in a vastly different way than the likes of anyone not having experienced this.  This group of individuals will look at the world wanting to understand what method is easiest to consume the content they’re looking to utilize.  Before this generation of kids, we decided we liked a particular magazine and bought a subscription which was delivered to our door every month.  This group of individuals may buy a service which allows them to look at the last 50 issues of any one of their favorite magazines and new ones as they come out on a digitial device.  That’s a good bit different from the way we do things now.

I am a massive fan of the subscription economy, which I plan to blog a whole lot about in the very near future, and think that’s the way our entire society will move towards.  It will be a massive shift in focus from a product / ownership-based economy in the short future.

As I started looking through my collection of books, I realized that some I’d read and kept on a bookshelf with no intention to read them again.  Others were textbooks from my undergrad or grad work that are very specific in nature and likely nothing I’d need that I wouldn’t be willing to buy again should I need a copy in the future (assuming a digital copy wouldn’t be available at that point in time).  A small set of books I realized I couldn’t part with.  These are books that an author had signed or had some special significance to myself.  The last set of books were mostly technical reference books that had an e-book version I could replace it with.

To help get the ball rolling, I shipped all the books to Amazon (including a few DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s I didn’t have a need to watch anymore).  The “Fullfillment by Amazon” feature is fantastic.  Ship your books to them, set a price, they notify you when something sells.  That way, the books are immediately removed from my life, and I get some money from month to month as they sell.  Granted, Amazon takes a bigger chunk out of the profits in this scenario than if you were to sell it yourself on Amazon or trade it in to a bookstore.  I found this to be the easiest method for me.

Step two was to order a kindle (I opted for a Kindle Fire, but think I may get an e-ink version as well).  When my Kindle Fire arrives, I’ll be purchasing replacements of a few books I know I’ll need (as many raw PDF copies as possible for backups and portability to other devices) and only buying new eBooks through early March 2012. 

I believe this will be enough time to evaluate what life is like when getting rid of most of my technical books and opting for electronic copies.  Part of this results in me getting rid of my bookcase/desk which became a storage haven for most all books, and cleaning out a few dust-balls collected behind those pieces of furniture.

I’ll let you know how it goes in a few weeks when my Kindle device arrives!

Cattle Prod + Work Environment

Looks like a coworker of mine decided to evaluate the newest addition to his desk.

As long as my coworker does a good job of hiding it from HR, he’s set.

Check out the Amazon Cattle Prod Review