Greg Jagiello

Sheets of Silver's 3rd EP: Beg

Yes, we still exist! Sheets of Silver, the band spawned from employees of IMVU is still going strong. Our lineup is still Marcus Gosling, Matt Danzig, Rob McLay and me, Greg Jagiello. (Trivia: all of us were at one point IMVU employees, but currently only Matt can claim that status.)

We've recently recorded our third EP, this time at Tiny Telephone recording studio in San Francisco, and you can grab it from the usual places, such as Amazon (dowload here: http://amzn.com/B004Y8W9DK) for about the price of feeding a starving child in Africa for a day. It's your call how you want to spend your money, but I think the EP is your best bet.

This session of 3 tracks was another analog recording and mixing session for us, using 2" and 1/2" tape. Great place to record, and we had the fantastic Jay Pellicci as our engineer -- highly recommended, as he's got a great ear, is very patient, and is a master of efficiency behind the board. He barely rolled his eyes whenever we wanted to use the house Hammond B4 on every song.

A VERY hearty thanks to honorary SoS member David Hostetler for coming up to SF to play bass on these tracks. Learning from only rough practice session iPhone recordings, with only a single rehearsal session session the day before the studio, he rocked each track using only an improvised bass guitar made of a broom and some undercooked pasta. And thankfully he was able to taste the incredible sandwiches from Pal's Takeaway during the session. (That's about all we could offer him for his time...hopefully we'll have a larger budget on our next world tour.)

There is also a remix project in the works! This should be great, and I suspect the results will far exceed the original tunes. Contributors including Mike Fisher, Steven Tracey, DJ Nick Garcia, and David Hostetler and possibly more. Thanks in advance, guys, hehe.

Oh, I have one Beg t-shirt, since large -- if you want it, let me know what your favorite song on Beg is and I'll get in touch and ship it your way.

Thanks for reading!

I like 2011 so far! TripIt joins Concur in $120m deal.

This year is starting off great, and I'm very excited about the news that TripIt has signed a deal to be acquired by Concur in a $120mil deal.

I'm very happy for the whole team, especially Scott, Gregg, and Andy. Not only are they a great team with a great product, but they have a tremendous integrity that personally inspires me.

I recall my first few working sessions with them, in their large shared office with a half-dozen start-ups. 6 people, working on modest desks made of doors laid across wooden sawhorses. Seems like just yesterday.

Pretty cool to see all the hard work on everyone's part pay off, so congratulations to all involved.

Another project: Whack-a-Larm

Another personal project went live recently: an iPhone app that Steph and I designed called Whack-a-Larm for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The concept is a variation on an idea Rob McLay and I brainstormed. It is up on the iTunes store now:

It's an alarm clock with a simple game you have to play to stop the annoying sounds.

Steph created a revised Nexxtep Interaction site with more of a focus on the app, as we have a number of increasingly interesting and complex ideas we hope to build out over 2011. This app was basically a prototype for the process we'll use, as well as a real-world way to try out a 3rd party developer.

I'll be posting about the experience of designing and creating the app, as well as some of my experience promoting and supporting it. If I can figure out a way to earn some (relatively) passive income with it, great. But the real intent was to try and tackle some projects with a lighter attitude, some humor, and some authenticity -- something I don't see very much, but like when I do run into that attitude.

Thanks for coming by!

A nice way to start the new year

My mom was working on two books prior to her passing away in November 2009, both on medical transcription. She had everything but distribution taken care of, including several hundred printed and bound examples with proper ISBN codes.

Needing a project (ha!) I decided to help bring her dream of being a published author closer to reality, so this weekend I found her book source files, tweaked and converted them to the proper format, and submitted the first of her two books to Amazon:

Dictation - An Art Within a Science

I also created some basic PR/marketing support, such as a Twitter feed and a Posterous blog. I plan on spending some amount of time each week trying to promote the book to medical transcription students. (I'm always open to marketing advice, if anyone out there has suggestions on reaching the right audience, btw.)

And because I know she would like it, I am donating the proceeds (if there are any!) to the Hermitage Cat Shelter in Tucson, where she picked up several of her fuzzy friends that worked along side her as she did home-based medical transcription.

So although it's not a huge accomplishment, I'm quite pleased to start 2011 off with this small project milestone and hope I can end it with a nice donation to the Hermitage. Here is hoping your year is getting off to a great start!

 

Citizen Groove gets recognized

I'm on the board of advisors for Citizen Groove -- a startup NOT located in the Bay Area -- and things are going well. Here's a nice article that came out recently:

http://www.inside-business.com/Main/Archive/Musical_Chairs_11812.aspx

Great team and a solid product with a paying customer...exactly the type of startup I want to be involved with. It's just a nice bonus that there is a music angle, and even more so that John is a heck of a piano player, even if he has been busy with CG recently.

And thanks to Weston Stander for introducing me to the CG team, good call that.

Finally, a pre-order I can get into!

I'm very much looking forward to Call of Duty: Black Ops. And I rarely (maybe once?) pre-order any games, and always avoid the big packages with tons of plastic crap that fills up my apartment.

But the Prestige Edition pre-order got through to me. Check it out:

Yes, that is a remote-controlled car in there, and it sends audio and video to the controller. This offers an unprescedented way to chase the cats around the house, so I pre-ordered this from Amazon.

Look for me on Xbox Live, gamertag Mint Octopus. I'm still playing CoD:MW2 so send an invite!

Hostile firmware and high tides

This summer I fulfilled a decade-old yearning and took sailing lessons, earning a certification to charter sailboats on my own. As with any new hobby, time came to outfit myself with a few useful gadgets -- including, in this case, a wristwatch with local tide data.

This post compares two watches that I purchased, with a focus on the initial UX of setting the watch for the first time, using a real-world use case to get us all on the same page. As you may suspect from the post title, one of these watches was less friendly than the other.

The Use Case

OK, so imagine you are a surfer, sailor (me), or otherwise care about your local tides. Or tides away from home, perhaps an upcoming vacation destination (me)...or a spot you aspire to visit (if you set your dual-time to Tokyo or Paris but have never visited, you know what I mean.)

A quick trip to your local surf shop and you've a new watch in hand. But of course, it isn't set for your local tides -- instead it's set to some default location, perhaps the port in China it recently arrived from. You easily set the date and the time. And maybe you even got the daylight savings setting correct.

Now it's time to let the watch your location, so you can see correct tidal data. Here is how this step works for two different watches.

Watch A: Casio G-Shock G-Lide Surfing Watch ($100)

My home port is San Francisco. I know this already. What I don't know offhand, however, is basically everything this watch requires to show the correct tide: longitude (in +/- degrees), UTC (coordinated universal time differential), and lunitudal interval.
Gathering all of this information required internet searching. While longitude and UTC were readily available, the format expected by the watch didn't match the common format online. For example, the longitude of San Francisco is 122 degrees West, but the watch wanted a +/- instead of a compass heading, requiring more research. Lunitudal interval -- the difference in time between when the moon passes overhead and the high tide occurs -- is an esoteric measurement required only by a few Casio watches, although it is calculated from data you can find on detailed weather websites.

This took at least 20 minutes of research. Sadly, the watch tide display was completely wrong when compared to the real tide chart (easily found online) so I used trial and error until my chart matched the real one online. Not confidence inspiring, having so many possible points of error.

Watch B: Nixon The Lowdown Surf Watch ($90)

As I mentioned, my home port is San Francisco. Thankfully, this watch cares enough to offer me a choice of nearby beaches in human readable form: world zone and beach name.

This required exactly 10 seconds and 0 minutes of research. It has about 200 beaches in a half dozen world zones. Dual zone was easy to set. This is the watch I'm wearing now, and wore while sailing last weekend in San Diego's Mission Bay.

Conclusion

The Casio is simply hostile to whoever is setting it. What value is there in allowing a user to set a home location of the middle of China? Or even the middle of the Atlantic? Tides are irrelevant to our use case in both case. Sure, you can program any home location, but I'd wager that 99.99% of surfing and sailing worldwide happens at one of a couple hundred points on a coastline, well known enough to have a name. The Casio approach is a recipe for inaccuracy, and if you're sailing and get grounded, knowing that the tide is rising and you'll float away soon (versus knowing you are 5 hours away from moving and having to call for help) is a pretty big deal.

Therefore, the Nixon wins the first time user experience (FTUX) challenge for me.

(That said, it is not the perfect watch, and I'll keep and occasionally wear the Casio...just not when I need to know the tide.)

Sheets of Silver: New EP from our band

The second EP from my band Sheets of Silver is available on Amazon!

Fun times in the studio recording these three tracks. In case you don't know, the members are:

• Marcus Gosling, bass
• Rob McLay, guitar
• Matt Danzig, vocals
• Greg Jagiello, drums

We're trying to get one EP per quarter recorded, so let's see if that actually happens. Enjoy!

My iPad review (part 2 of ongoing)

I've been using my 16gb WiFi iPad for almost 2 weeks now and overall it's greatly exceeded my (lowly) expectations, mostly due to a couple of key additions I consider requirements:

• 3G access via my Verizon MiFi is fantastic and a necessity for one of my major use cases: riding Caltrain for 80 minutes a day.
• Dropbox because of...
• GoodReader for iPad! With this app, I can browse my DropBox files, copy files locally to my iPad, view them (including formats Ike PPTX, PDF, AIF, and PNG), and even email them. This is huge and allows me to do actual work, and not just consume media.
• Evernote! Hopefully enough said.
• Nuevasync! This is a freemium service that I use to sync the built-in calendar app with Google calendar. Essential and my usage is free (also essential for my iPhone.)
• IMAP and LDAP! Not having to sync to actually manage email and contacts is fantastic. This is true on the iPhone via Mail, of course, but I care more with the iPad since I'm using it for lengthy, meaningful email interactions (vs. my iPhone emails of "@trn rite now n will folio up l8r")

I am often annoyed at the lack of Flash, since I love me some casual games. And minor issues with web apps that don't quite work right with Safari do come up now and again. But overall I am certainly glad I bought this device and expect to keep using it.

Sent from my iPad

Initial iPad thoughts

Obviously still early, but here are a couple of thoughts about the iPad.

- The on-screen keyboard is surprisingly usable in landscape mode. I'm using it to compose this and keyed in a couple dozen emails over the weekend. - It feels like a computer, and not very much l Ike a big iPhone. Screen size, overall responsiveness, and capabilities trick you into thinking of it as a net book, to the point where I was about to do my standard "new pc" installation checklist.

- My initial batch of app purchases came to about $40: SketchBook and some mockup app were half of that, with a couple of games. Also bought an ebook, but not counting that in that amount.

- Best digital photo frame ever.

- I was never very interested in the ebooks thing with the Kindle. The ugly device, lack of backlighting, single purpose utility turned me off completely. The iPad is much more appealing to me for books, though, and I'm already halfway through SuperFreakanomics, a $13 purchase.

- I hope the iPad is the Garageband of Apple tablets. Def want more capabilities in this form factor.

So overall, I'm impressed and for curiosity I'm using it as my daily commuting machine for a week. Last time I tried that, with an HP net book, I gave it up and that machine is covered in dust somewhere in my closet.

Sent from my iPad