If my nearly 14,000 public tweets haven’t given away my opinion already, let me share it: I don’t mind.

Why? Nobody cares WHO I am, they care about WHAT describes me. I’m a number on a spreadsheet, just a line in a database. They know my age, where I live, what I buy, where I go, what I like to watch, eat, listen to, and play. When companies know this, they can process these facts with an algorithm and make suggestions.

Coming from a Christian, this may sound odd, but I want buy happiness. We live in a consumer culture and we all want to buy it. It comes in many different forms (Android vs. iPhone, Windows vs. Mac, beef vs. chicken vs. pork, Beiber vs. Adele) and answers the question, “Out of all the options available, what do I want most?” Since I can only draw on my experiences and knowledge, my answer to that question may be incomplete. If something exists that offers more happiness to me than the options I am considering, I want to know what that option is. I have a limited amount of time and money and therefore I want to maximize the happiness that I’m buying.

Before computers, you gave up privacy to friends: “Hey Joe, I like X, but I want to try something different tonight. Thoughts?” or “I’m new in town and like Mexican. What’s a good place for supper?” Why would you trust a friend with your preferences but not a company? What makes that the line that people won’t cross? Because companies are trying to make a profit? Companies want nothing more than to maximize the happiness of their customers, because a happy customer comes back. By sharing my preferences with companies, I’m enabling them to help make me happier, just as my friends did before.

1. Create profiles for my friends that I can view to see their activity: recent games, achievements, high scores.
2. Let people create games with multiple people. This seems like one of the most obvious ones. Without this, you could go ahead and call it “Words With Friend”.
3. Let people mark themselves as “Looking To Play”. This status would last a few hours and make it easier to find friends who currently are interested in playing.
4. Color code the tiles so you can see who played which tiles.
5. Make a list of ten or so “Words of the Week” to teach new vocabulary (with definitions). With the list, show friends who have successfully played those words in games and award achievements for playing all of them.
6. Add leaderboards with statistics like average points per word, average points per tile, highest scoring [1-7] tiles, and more.
7. Some people cheat. You can’t remove that but you could build in a dictionary to let people look up questionable words and provide an accessible list of the two letter words. Take advantage and make this a learning opportunity.
8. Build a newsfeed into the front page of the app to list friends’ recent plays. Engage me in their games.

Can you think of any more?

http://jsfiddle.net/fg9TL/

“Moths circle porch lights because they think it’s the moon. They fly in a straight line by keeping the moon in a fixed position to one side of their vision, so, if they get close enough to a light bulb, their desire to fly straight results in a spiral that eventually fries them to death. I know, from a lifetime of observation, that I am capable of spirals and frying, unless I keep something big and glowing to the side of my vision.”
Dan Harmon. Source

I love this sentiment. Human nature is the same way. If the wrong thing catches our attention and we depend on that as our guide, we’re bound to crash and burn. Make sure you’re following the right thing.

Cy in the Badlands

Cy with a giant tortoise at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, SD.

Cy hanging out in my camera bag with some of the Rocky Mountains behind him.

Cy the Astronaut

Cy giving a NASA press conference.

Cy with NASA Astronaut Doug Wheelock

Cy keeping watch on my laptop.

Me and Cy with ISU Alum Jeremy Bingham (@iowaradioguy)

Me, Cy, and Timmy from Thinkgeek

Cy, Elmo, and Me

]]> http://adam.reineke.me/2011/cy-on-the-road/feed/ 0 http://adam.reineke.me/2011/back-to-florida/ http://adam.reineke.me/2011/back-to-florida/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:00:29 +0000 Adam Reineke http://adam.reineke.me/?p=128 Last year, the week after school got out, a friend and I took a road trip down for the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis for STS-132. We stayed in Tampa and had a blast at Busch Gardens and Sea World, and drove over to Titusville to watch the launch from from the shore, which was about 8-9 miles away from the launch pad. (Video on YouTube, photos on Facebook.)

If you follow me on Twitter, you may already know that in just over a week, I’ll be going to back to Florida to watch the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch again. What would inspire me to return to Florida?

I was fortunate enough to be selected for #NASATweetup. What is NASA Tweetup? From their website:

A Tweetup is an informal meeting of people who use the social messaging medium Twitter. NASA Tweetups provide @NASA followers with the opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at NASA facilities and events and speak with scientists, engineers, astronauts and managers. NASA Tweetups range from two hours to two days in length and include a “meet and greet” session to allow participants to mingle with fellow Tweeps and the people behind NASA’s Twitter feeds.

There were over 5000 people who applied, I was one of the 150 people who were selected. I don’t exactly know what we’ll be doing yet at the two day event, mostly because every one is different and the agenda hasn’t been e-mailed yet.

Words can’t express how excited I am. Over the next two weeks, look forward to a bunch of posts both here on my blog and on Twitter about the Tweetup, NASA, and the Space Shuttle program. I’m super excited for several reasons: an up-close look at NASA, meeting 149 other people who love Twitter and NASA, and watching the FINAL LAUNCH OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM from the press site.

Being a part of this historic moment is a HUGE honor. Come back soon for more updates!

I just realized what I’m doing at work: I’m hacking together a wiki! MediaWiki would be perfect for this. Guess I’ll keep dreaming.

I had a moment of clarity and realized what I was doing at work this week. Of course I immediately I tweeted it out to my followers. Jim Cahill, an Emerson blogger who started following me after I checked in to my building on Foursquare (I assume I popped up on a keyword search), sent me a DM suggesting I check out Yammer and see if other Emerson teams were using wikis.

Yammer is basically Facebook for corporations. You sign on with your work e-mail address and it automatically places you in a social network exclusive to your company (in my case: @Emerson.com). There were a few groups, I assume created by the Emerson employees. I joined the group for my section of the company (Emerson Process Management) and posted a question, asking for information about how people in Emerson were using wikis.

I got two replies, both with information about how wikis were being used. In addition, both replies mentioned other people: one referred me to someone who was using wikis in the Northeast, the other pointed me to a head web person at Emerson (who works in my building, I just haven’t met him yet). To try to learn some more, I e-mailed the person in the Northeast, asking for more info about his deployment.

This morning, we chatted for 20 minutes about their deployment of DokuWiki and he shared some of his thoughts about wiki usage in business. As we talked, he e-mailed me four presentations that his team had put together as they were evaluating their options.

All told, I walked away with a better understanding of how wikis could potentially help, or hurt, the project I’m working on. The craziest part: all that insight came from people in my company whom I’ll probably never meet — I don’t think any of them even work in my state.

Corporate social networking… I’m a believer!

The Work
I spent today mostly doing paperwork: lots of forms to fill out. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I signed my name. It seemed like a ton. Besides the paperwork, a guy I will be working with a bunch explained the basics of the valves and their related pieces to me. There are several parts: the valve itself, the actuator that opens and closes the valve, the transducer that takes a electrical voltage and outputs some stuff (often just air) at a specific pressure to control the actuator, … and something else, I think. Good thing I have notes at the office.

Honestly, this whole concept of mechanical stuff is a little strange to me. I’m a software engineer. I sit at my desk and write code. Wrapping my head around these mechanical products will take a few days.

The YMCA
After work, Paul and I checked out the YMCA. We’ll probably sign up for memberships tomorrow after work. One thing that blew me away was this awesome Fitlinxx system that tracks your workout activity. It tracks your progress and helps keep you on track. The coolest thing is the tracking of total weight lifted for the month — I’m hyper-competitive and they post the top 30 people every month on the wall. New goal: make it on the list. I’ll make a note tomorrow of the weight for #30 for the men. I’m pretty sure it was under 200,000 pounds, which based on some math seems pretty reachable.

The People
I’m pretty sure I’m the only software engineer at Fisher. Well, not really, but it feels that way. I ate lunch with 4 electrical engineers… I didn’t talk much as they discussed wireless antennas and other related electronic stuff.

Following work and visiting the YMCA, we got back to the apartments just as a group of interns were leaving to play volleyball (which will now be a regular Monday night activity), so I tagged along. They’d all been here since January, so I was the new kid. Apparently, at least four of us have motorcycles, so that was cool to discover. Volleyball was awesome — I was pretty much the worst, but I have all summer to get better and I had a ton of fun.

And speaking of people, the guys across the hall are watching Ocean’s 11… With so many distractions, it will be hard to get everything else done that I want to work on.

Thanks for tuning in! No promises on daily updates, but I’ll try to write at least once a week.

The Apartment
It’s a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment with a decent kitchen and living space. The place is furnished, complete with bedding, so we didn’t have to bring too much stuff. Pretty nice setup. I’ve thrown some photos on Facebook if you’re interested in checking those out. I’ll post a photo of my room once I’ve settled on the arrangement of my stuff in the room. I forgot a power strip, so my stuff is in a less than optimal arrangement.

The Roommate
My roommate goes to Kansas State and is an Electrical Engineer over there. I guess the major there is a cross between CompE/EE. He brought a four wheeler. Gotta say, that’s pretty exciting. I’m looking forward getting to know him better. He seems to be quite the opposite of me: he’s totally a hardware guy and I’m totally a software guy. This is pretty cool because I’d love to learn some more of the hardware side of stuff. We spent a bit of the evening watching FAIL videos on Youtube, then I introduced him to the concept of eSports, specifically professional Starcraft II. As I write this, I’m watching the replays of a SC2 tournament that had 70,000 live viewers yesterday. Once I get some speakers over here, I’ll introduce him to the magic that is Day[9].

The Work
Well, I guess I’ll have to post again pretty soon… I report at 8am in the morning.