Hey, I'm J.R.

I love Google Analytics.  It’s phenomenal.  It really helps me track how a site is doing and optimize the visitor experience.  However, there’s one thing about it that bugs me to no end.  It defaults to showing you the last full day’s statistics.

Well, I’m a statistics junkie, so that doesn’t make me happy.  I want to see how I’m doing today, as close to real-time as I can.  As far as I can tell there is no setting you can set to make it default to view today by default.  The only way to do that without manually changing the dates is to set the pdr variable in the URL.

So, here’s how to create a bookmark that will take you to today’s statistics (these instructions are for Firefox, but I imagine Safari and IE can’t be too different).

1. Drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar: Today’s Analytics
2. Find out your Analytics ID: You can do this by visiting your dashboard and looking for the id parameter in the URL.
3. Replace XXX in the bookmark with your ID: Right click on the bookmark you created, and go to Properties.  Scroll toward the end of the URL, and find “XXX”.  Replace this with the ID you found.
4. Click the bookmark

You should now be able to use that bookmark to view your Google Analytics with a default end date of today.

If you don’t like any of the other settings, you can change around the URL at the end to suit how you like to do things.

Now you don’t have to always change the date as soon as you log in.  Enjoy!

Well, Wordpress seems to have messed up the link. I’ll fix it as soon as I can…

Questions, comments?  I’d love to hear from you.  Just leave a comment down below!

First off, just go take a little peek at this graph. I’ll wait.

Yep. That’s right. Gas prices now, even adjusted for inflation, are worse than the oil crisis of the 1970’s. Gasoline prices are getting absurd, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Why’s that? Because we rely on a veritable Gasoline Mafia. OPEC is a mob, a cartel. They use thug tactics to manipulate us like little marionette puppets.

And we keep giving them more and more power!

Think I’m exaggerating? Check out this report that came out today.

OPEC has our arm behind our back and is twisting until we say “uncle”, and we are allowing them to manipulate us because of our foolish dependence on oil.

Fighting them is not the answer. We need to make them irrelevant. It’s our own fault for being so all-out dependent on oil. Even if they liked us, it’s just plain near-sighted and irresponsible to depend so heavily on a non-renewable resource.

And they don’t like us.

I fear that oil prices are going to be a very major issue in the upcoming election, but not in a good way. Both sides will be trying to buy votes by promising to lower gas prices, because that’s what people want to hear.

But the issue shouldn’t be lowering gas prices. Find me a candidate who is dedicated to the vision that, come the next election, gas prices won’t matter at all because gasoline usage is on its way out the door, and I’ll show you the guy I’m voting for, regardless of party.

It’s not about making oil cost less! It’s about realizing that we shouldn’t be using it. We have grand visions for the future (well, I do anyway) but we will never realize any of them while we are still relying on gasoline as our major source of power.

There are many reasons using gasoline is such a terrible idea, but today’s article about OPEC just brought this particular one to the front of my mind. So, in sum: It’s an amazingly stupid idea to put so much power in the hands of people who don’t like us. We are letting OPEC push us around, or at the very least have given them a good reason to think they can, and that will only end badly for us.

There’s something to be said for a piece of software that does exactly what you want it to do, behaves exactly how you expect it to, stays out of your way until you need it, and makes you happy. That’s exactly why Rhythmbox is so darn great. But let’s back up a little bit… Rhythmbox is a Music Player / Library Organizer for Gnome. It’s comparable to, though quite different than, Amarok for KDE. I used to use KDE and was madly in love with Amarok. It was and still is a phenomenal piece of software, but I think Rhythmbox has stolen its place in my heart. Amarok has some features I’d love to see in Rhythmbox, and it has a much stronger community, but

Rythmbox does what I want it to, the way I expect it to, without getting in my way

and that’s why I love it so much.

For instance, when I’m browsing music, the next song played comes from the list I’m viewing just like you’d think it would. Rating songs is one-click simple, but out of the way. The play queue lets me queue up songs (imagine that) that I want to hear, but don’t want to interrupt the currently playing song for. Oh, and it minimizes to the tray (if you want) for the ultimate out-of-the-wayness.

None of these things are unique or particularly innovative, but what makes this software so wonderful is that it does just what it should, how it should. You might say that it follows the Principle of Least Suprise. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not, but it is a fully-capable, powerful music player. It’s built on a plugin architecture and has an integrated Python console, so if you want more raw power, you can get it.

It does what I want, the way I expect, doesn’t clutter my interface, and lets me harness its full power easily if I want. I think that’s a goal all software should aspire to.

So here’s to you, Mr. Heretofore Unglorified Music Player. You don’t get a lot of attention. You’ll never get downloaded 8 million times in one day, but I wish the rest of my software would be more like you.

Despite my seemingly empty promises, I have not vanished from the face of the earth. There will be more mind-expanding, earth-shattering, nobel-prize-quality, world-changing, hyphenated-word-described written works of art to come.

Don’t touch that dial. The mouse and keyboard you may caress to your heart’s content.

If you’re looking for something wonderful to read in the meantime, try a book. Short of that, internet writing doesn’t get much better than Killing Batteries.

Not only have I not written anything for a while, the site was down due to one of ThePlanet’s datacenters having an electrical explosion.  Now I know where my site is hosted 

Anyway, I’m going to be doing some upgrades to the site, and start posting again, so stay tuned (all 0 of you)!

… because if you look at the rock, you’ll run right into it. I promise. Let me explain…

The Story

I recently took a 5-week whitewater kayaking course. Kayaking is a blast. It can be very dangerous (despite what Into the Wild might have you think), but it’s complete and total fun and exhilaration once you get the hang of it. Nothing beats spending a day on a wild and scenic river. You’re peaceful, relaxed, and quiet one minute and the next minute, adrenaline is screaming through your veins while you’re screaming through a rapid. On the first few trips, though, we (the students) kept running into everything. That’s to be expected when you don’t even really know how to paddle straight in moving water, but even once we got the hang of that we still kept running into stuff.

The instructor would tell us, “There’s a big rock on river right. Be sure to squeeze left of it, or you’ll get stuck.” So we’d start paddling down the rapid, spot the big rock they told us about and try our best to squeeze to the left of it. Then we’d run smack into it. Almost every time. No matter how hard we tried to avoid things, we kept running into them. Then they told us a secret, and after that I didn’t run into the big rocks anymore (that’s not to say I didn’t flip or take terrible lines down the rapids. I did. But I didn’t run into anything they told us to look out for).

The secret didn’t involve any paddling trick, some weight-shifting maneuver, or how to lean the right way (all of which are actually important). The trick they told us was this:

Quit looking at the rock. If you look at the rock, you’ll hit it. Know the rock is there, but instead of looking at it, look where it is you want to go instead. If you look where you want to go, you’ll go there, and you won’t hit the rock.

They were right. We were concentrating so hard on the rock that we unconsciously steered the boat right for it. The harder we tried to avoid the rock, the more likely we were to run into it. Once I stopped looking at the rock and focused my attention on where I wanted to go, my skill improved dramatically, and I had a lot more fun. And I stopped running into the stuff they told us to look out for. Finally I was going where I was trying to go instead of getting stuck on obstacles.

The Moral

I think the parallels to life are pretty obvious. When you’re working at something — be it a business, school, a hobby, or a personal goal — there will be big rocks that you’ll have to avoid. The key is to not look at them, not dwell on them. If you spend your time thinking about them, you’ll run right into them. Instead, just know they’re there. You don’t want to be oblivious to them, but don’t dwell on them.

Focus your attention on where you want to go, and you’ll stop running into the obstacles and start moving in the right direction. You’ll get a lot better at whatever it is you’re doing, and you’ll have a heck of a lot more fun, too. I guarantee it.

Got a good story about running into stuff (metaphorically or not)? Like to kayak? Have other advice? I’d love to hear about it! Just leave a comment below.

There’s been a lot of talk in the intarwebnets recently about the benefits of CSS frameworks. I insist on hand-coding, but I really don’t like working with CSS (particularly haggling with a certain 6th edition browser that starts with Internet and ends with Explorer) so I’ve always like the idea of a structure to make it easy for me, like a GUI framework for desktop apps. I’ve looked into some of the more popular, like Blueprint and YUI, but haven’t liked/used either for whatever reason, though I’ve always liked the concept.

Then, I decided to make this site, and I didn’t use any framework. I started with a pre-made theme and smashed, manhandled, sliced, and diced it until it was something kind of like what I wanted. I had floated div’s, crazy margins, and all manner of other hacks for whipping the stylesheet into submission. I got it working and I wasn’t really with how messy it was, but I didn’t have time to do anything about it with final projects and final exams taking up all of my time. Now that the semester is over, I decided to re-do it.

I decided on 960.gs after reading a blog post about it (wish I could remember where, so I could send some link love). I looked into it and found a professional, well-developed framework that had some good ideas that I was interested in, so I decided to give it a try. Boy am I glad I did. It took only a little more than 2 hours, and it looks better than it did before. Here’s a quick overview of how to use it:

Downloading and Installing

There really is no “installation”. You just download the ZIP file, and extract it into your CSS directory (or your theme’s CSS directory if you’re using Wordpress). Presto! Working framework. I changed the folder paths around a little bit, but you can really use it without changing anything.

The ZIP file comes with a lot of stuff to help you design with the 960 system, including “PDF grid paper, templates for Fireworks, OmniGraffle, Photoshop & Visio, and CSS framework with demo HTML”. I only used the CSS files, which is all you need for coding your site. The system comes with 3 CSS files.

1. 960.css – Sets up the grid system, the 12-, and 16-column containers, alpha, omega, and prefix. This file is necessary to the grid system.
2. reset.css - “Initializes” the system so that all margins and paddings are 0, outline is 0, etc… This file is necessary to the grid system.
3. text.css - Sets the font sizes including headers, adds margins to lists, etc… This file is not technically needed for the system, as far as I can tell.

Also, the CSS files are very lightweight, and won’t add any significant loading time to the page, which is something that other frameworks struggle with.

Using it

The system is based around a 960 pixel-wide grid (hence the name). The grid system is a great way to produce good designs without a lot of overhead (Smashing Magazine’s got a great article about grids). You have the option of dividing the 960 pixels into 12 or 16 columns. 960.gs uses the following classes to structure the page:

• container_XX is used in the outermost box to determine how many columns. You can use container_12 or container_16.
• grid_XX is the bread and butter of the system. XX is for how many columns you want the block to be. For example, grid_10 will be 10 columns wide. The exact pixel width is determined by how many columns you’ve divided the grid into.
• prefix_XX allows you to add in blank columns before a block. XX specifies how many blank columns you want.
• alpha is for if you have children blocks. If you do this, you’ll want the first child to have no margin on the left side. alpha makes that happen.
• omega is similar to alpha, except that it gives no margin on the right side. Use it for the last child.

That’s it. All you have to do is apply classes to boxes. It’s that simple to use. In the outermost container, decide how many columns to use. Then, all you have to do is add classes to your elements to lay them out on the page. It couldn’t be any easier.

Some gotchas

The padding problem: This isn’t really a problem with the framework. It’s just standard CSS, but it’s good to know. If you want one of your grid_XX cells to have padding, you can’t apply the padding directly to the cell, since that padding will add to the width of the cell, throwing off the grid. The way to pad the grid cells is to add another, non-grid_XX cell inside it and pad that one. The sample code uses <p> for that purpose, but I’ve used <div>. It doesn’t really matter.

The width problem: What if you want your grid to be more or less than 960 pixels wide, or you want it to be fluid? You choose another framework. The framework is named 960 for a reason. It’s 960 pixels wide, and short of hacking the CSS, there’s nothing you can do to change that. However, as detailed on their site, 960 pixels is a great width. From the site:

All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.

Summary

I’m very impressed by how easy the system is to use, even for a CSS-klutz like me. The class-based layout design makes it extremely easy for me to translate the ideas in my head into CSS code without having to fiddle around with fragile floating and margin-ing.

I haven’t used the system in the most ideal or pure way (see the sidebar in particular), but the overall layout of the site is done totally with 960.gs. It worked perfectly. I didn’t have to hack their files to get it working like I wanted it to. It just worked as advertised, and made me happy.

I didn’t use the other files that came with the package, like the Photoshop template or the PDF paper since I already had the site designed, but I’ve looked at them, and they allow you to design exactly how the page will look, and when you code the site, I’m sure you’ll see it stays true to the design.

Thanks, Nathan Smith, for the great CSS system. You’ve made my life easier, and I appreciate it!

There seems to be two ways to make money working for yourself doing development, and they have parallels in the music industry (bet you never would have guessed).

The first way is to start a company. Get a co-founder or two, find a great idea, do some magic, then become fabulously rich. It’s just like starting a band, really. Find a couple of other musicians, create a great sound, do some magic, then become fabulously rich and famous. If it works, it’s awesome. You get rich, you get famous, and it’s all a piece of cake. Except your chances are slim to none. The chances you’ll found a tech company worth billions are about the same as your chances of founding a #1 rock band.

The other way to make money on your own doing development is by freelancing. Chances are, you won’t make a billion dollars doing freelancing, just like the chances are you won’t be world-famous being a session musician. However, there’s much less risk, you control your destiny, and you make a reliable and good living.  And if you want, you can grow your freelancing until it becomes a good-sized business or consulting firm.  You’ll be sustainable in the meantime, and you’ll start making the big bucks with a few years of hard work instead of one or two living in a box wishing on a star.

Then again, you might even turn your freelancing business into a billion-dollar company. After all, Jimmy Page, Luther Vandross, Duane Allman, and Slash started out as session musicians. It wouldn’t be too bad to end up like them (minus the drug addictions and crazy clothes/hair), would it?

Got something to get off your chest? Leave a comment!

So you want to be the next Michael Jordan? Pablo Picasso? Bill Gates? Béla Fleck? Yoda? In the last article, I talked about the importance of having something in your life that you strive to be great at. I also promised that I’d tell you how you could go about improving at whatever it is that you’ve chosen. Well, here we go…

There are a ton of things you can choose to do, and I can’t give you a formula on how to be an expert at all of them (actually almost any of them). But, there are a few things you always do when starting out, and some ways to keep improving that apply to almost everything. I’m just trying to get you pointed in the right direction, hand you a map, and maybe help you bum a ride.

The number one way to get better at something is to DO IT!

Besides that, there are a couple of ways to get better at something:

1. Learn about it. How can you get great at something if you don’t know anything about it? You will learn a lot by doing, but there are some things you can’t teach yourself (or won’t know to teach yourself).
2. Get cultured. Whatever it is you’ve chosen to do, there’s most likely (read: most certainly) someone else who’s doing it too. In fact, there are probably a lot of people doing it too. Every activity, no matter its popularity, has a community, and this community has its own culture. This culture is invaluable for quickly getting yourself up to speed (and making great friends).

The culture surrounding an activity is a fantastic way to dive in and get your mind tuned to what it is you’re trying to do. The best way to get involved in the culture is to go to events (be they jams, races, etc…) and joining clubs. Any time and place you can find a group of people interested in the same thing is a great time and place to start getting cultured.

Mostly, though, I want to discuss where to find knowledge. You’ve got two main sources of information for new topics (besides people themselves): books and the internet. Books are usually more professional but can be pricey, while the internet makes no guarantee of quality but it’s (mostly) free, and there is a ton of great information.

Books are the classic way to learn about things. You’ve probably used books to learn about things your whole life, and there’s a reason for that. They’re great! They contain tons of information, they’re well-organized, and they’re professional. If you’re willing to spend a little money, you can get great information from a book. Plus, there’s something you just don’t get from looking at a screen that you do with a book, where you are literally holding knowledge in your hands.

The best place to get books about anything is Amazon. They literally have books on every topic you can think of. Want to paint, play banjo, play tennis, learn to program computers, run a marathon, or invest in stocks, or learn to do everything? Amazon’s got you covered. A quick search should turn up a great list of books.

There’s also the For Dummies series that covers a lot of common topics and is very good.

The internet is a phenomenal resource. There is an immense amount of information at your fingertips if you know where to look. Where might that be, you ask? List time!

• Wikipedia The online free encyclopedia contains pages about literally everything you could wonder about, and then some. Check the bottom of the pages for links to external sites to dig deeper.
• Google Google knows everything. If there is knowledge on the internet, you can find it with Google. I mean it. Everything.
• Forums Do a google search for “[insert topic here] AND forum” and you’ll find the online hangouts for the community you’re interested in. People post questions, get answers, complain, praise, and generally talk about whatever it is you’re trying to learn.
• Blogs Blogs are fast becoming great authoritative sources of information about niche topics. There are several great places to search for blogs about specific topics, in addition to appending “blog” to any Google query, but the best way to discover new blogs on a topic is to follow links in the blogs’ “blogrolls”. These are usually the author’s favorite blogs, and usually lead to great stuff. Within 2 levels or so into this “link network”, you’ll probably know about all the major blogs in your niche. Subscribe to their feeds to get great information on a regular basis.
• Social Networks A big trend on the internet is social networks that target niche interests. Find one in your topic area, and you’ll have a great network of people to learn from.
• Social Bookmarking Sites These are sites where users submit links to various things that usually get voted on. Search one for your topic. Often, the most popular posts are mega-lists of resources on a certain topic. The best ones are: del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit. del.icio.us is likely to contain a broad range of interests, whereas Digg and Reddit will be slanted toward technology topics.
• EDIT: MIT OpenCourseware is a phenomenal place to learn about new things. MIT has published a large amount of free lecture notes, exams, and videos for a lot of the classes they teach. It’s like going to MIT from home, and not having to worry about passing! If what you want to learn is something they teach, you really can’t beat this content, besides actually enrolling at MIT. I can’t believe I left this out when I first posted this, but now you know!

Using books and the internet, you can learn just about everything there is to know about whatever you’re trying to learn. But, again, the best way to get good at something is to do it, do it some more, then do it until you dream about it.

Did I forget any great places to get information? Are there better ways to start getting great? Want to get something off your mind? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s to being great!

You can’t stand still in life. You’re moving in one direction or the other. Either you’re improving yourself, or you’re slipping into apathy and letting yourself die. It is impossible to be at a halt in life. Your body, mind, and spirit will constantly decay unless you actively do something to stop and reverse them. This concept of always striving to better yourself is called “constant improvement”.

Before we go any further, let’s clear up the definition a little bit. From just the sound of the phrase, it may seem like I am suggesting spending every spare moment training, practicing, or otherwise pro-actively working at something. That’s not the case. Constantly improving does not mean you can’t take time to hang out with friends, play video games, watch movies, or just otherwise slug it. You can and should! Heck, look above. Right on this very page I call myself a “relaxation connoisseur”. I don’t mean you have to spend every waking minute working. What I mean is this:

There should never be a moment in your life when you don’t have at least one worthwhile thing you are trying to make yourself great at.

Note the emphasis there. If you are trying to be great at whatever you’ve chosen, you’re guaranteed to be putting full effort into it, and getting the most you can back out of it.

There are lots of reasons to be in a state of constant improvement:

• The effort and passion you put into getting great at one thing will automatically raise the level of effort and passion you put into everything else in your life. That’s a free bonus. It’ll just happen. Once you begin really going after something, that passion and focus will spill over into the rest of the things you do. It’s a mindset. You couldn’t stop it from happening if you wanted.
• Your life will be more fulfilling. If you are dedicated to gaining this new skill, you should be making short-term goals to measure your progress. Each time you achieve one of these goals, you’ll feel great, and looking back to see how far you’ve come provides an amazing sense of accomplishment. You’ll soon begin to feel like you can do anything, which leads me to the next reason…
• You’ll realize you can do anything. Once you see yourself succeed again and again by your own merit and hard work (and succeed you will, I promise. Just don’t give up.) you’ll quickly begin to realize that there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it. It sounds cliché, but trust me, it’s the absolute truth. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t run 3 miles without stopping. Now I run ultramarathons for kicks. And you can too, if that’s what you want to do!
• You’ll enjoy it! Phrases like “hard work” make it seem like you’ll be toiling away under the oppressive whip of self-improvement, but it’s not so! Learning new things and becoming great at them is a blast. Chances are, if you’ve chosen something to pursue, you like it and you’ll only start liking it more. Plus, if you take the time every once in a while to reflect on all you’ve done and accomplished, you’ll realize that not only are you be for your efforts, you’ve had a great time and made fantastic memories along the way.

At some point, you’ll get interested in something else, and you’ll find you’ve switched gears and are focusing a lot of energy on that. Great! That’s exactly what should happen. As you repeat this cycle of learning new things, after a while you’ll have compiled quite the arsenal of skills and talents, built up a huge new group of great memories and stories, and met tons of interesting people. Those last 2 alone are worth the effort and work you’ll put in.

Hopefully, I’ve now convinced you that it’s worth your time to spend time really putting effort into becoming great at something. But what should that be?

It can be just about anything! The important thing is to pick something and get started. Quit putting it off.

Let’s clear up one more thing here before we move on. You can choose almost anything you want, and you will benefit from the effort you put into it, but some things are inherently better than others. For instance, learning to play guitar or photograph wildlife is going to enhance your life much more than learning how to best nap on the couch. You don’t have to choose something traditional, but you should choose something that’s actually going to make you and your life better.

Now, for some things to choose from, if you don’t already have 100 ideas in the back of your head.

• Sports are fantastic things to focus on. They’ll get you active, and get you working out your body and not just your mind. But that’s not all. Exercising physically actually helps your mental health as well. I even find I think more clearly on the days when I get to exercise in the morning. Along with getting in shape, sports will help you tone down and look great, which is a big confidence booster.
• Traditional Art, in all its forms will enhance your mental acuteness and open up your mind to creativity. Music, painting, sculpting, etc… are just the surface. There are thousands of ways to express yourself artistically and creatively. Find one that interests you.
• Photography is a fantastic way to bring out your artistic or journalistic side and have some fun while you’re at it. With the cost of high-quality cameras dropping, it’s easier than ever to get started.
• Computer skills are a great thing to have in this day and age. Particularly programming skills will help you to think more clearly and logically. Once you “learn to think” you’ll find that you can apply the skills you learned in the rest of your life – making decisions clearer and helping you to think logically. Not only that, you will have added a very marketable skillset to your resumé. The computer industry is red hot.

There are plenty of other things you can learn to do, but the most important thing is just pick something! Choose something you’re interested in or you think you’ll enjoy. If it turns out it’s not for you, you’ll realize it quickly and you can pick something else.

Don’t put it off. If you don’t have something in your life you are actively striving to be great at, find something now. You’ll find yourself enjoying the rest of your life more, you’ll be happier and more productive, and you’ll lead a much more fulfilling life than if you simply drift through existence.

In the next article, we’ll discuss how to go about getting better at something once you’ve picked it out and decided you are ready to dominate it. Everything you need to excel is easily available to you, and a lot of it is free, if you know where to look. Stay tuned!

Cheers! A better life awaits.