Ben Benner’s Blog

For those that don’t know, Austin is sometimes referred to as Silicon Hills, a play on the whole Silicon Valley name.

As far as music goes, Austin is the LIVE music capital of the world, so it seemed only a matter of time before someone made a web page that would show you all the shows until the end of the year.

That time came this afternoon, AYearOfAustinMusic.com was born. Daniel was showing Kevin some stuff that he had been working on for his own personal use, in regards to tracking musical shows and within those few moments Kevin found himself some inspiration.

Kevin showed me what he had thrown together and asked me to put it up on Jules, my beloved server up in Dallas. I got everything setup and within a few minutes of Kevin finishing the DNS up on GoDaddy, the site was live on Jules.

I took a few minutes after work closed up and got the code checked into my personal repository and also took the liberty of installing Google Analytics.

Before Kevin took off he was already talking about some cool JavaScript effects that he could work into the next version.

It is amazing how quickly one can create a very dynamic web app. Just sprinkle in a little RSS and throw on some CSS to make it all ‘purdy’ (some PUN intended).

Anyway, I have finished my acceptance testing of Release 2.0 and need to get out of here.

Laterz.

(almost forgot, if you scroll to the bottom, you will see the “credits”)

bdbenner austin, kevinNuut, music austin, ayearofaustinmusic, daniel, kevin, music, web app

I made pizza, from scratch, recently. It was quite good.

I made the pizza dough from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes cookbook, with the exception of swapping out 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

(Before)

(After)

The last time I made this dough I followed the recipe exactly that time and in the end felt that the dough could use a bit of whole wheat. The other thing I did this time around was to roll-out the dough much thinner to get a nice crispy thin-crust pizza.

The first time, I thought I had rolled it out enough for a thin-crust, not like cracker thin, but thin. Instead, I got a much more “original” crust style. It was good, but a little too doughy for my liking.

I followed Gina’s lead of putting the toppings under the cheese, with the exception of the tomatoes, which next time I will slice thinner and put under the cheese. My thoughts at the time was that the grape tomatoes on the top of the cheese would have a chance to release their water into the heat and keep the pizza from getting soggy at all.

More of my pizza pics.

Back to the grind.
Laterz

bdbenner food, pizza Cooking, homemade pizza, pizza

I am researching a blog post for Jaduka and in doing so, I needed to review some of Eddie Izzard’s work. So I turned to YouTube as most folks should do, if you need to find comedy routines.

Well, I found a few clips from one of his live performances, which I was expecting. What I was not expecting was to find someone who had taken the time to work up Lego based stop-motion animations of Eddie’s work.

I have to say that his comedy bits usually already have me laughing my ass off, but watching them with the little Lego figures act out the comedy routine is even funnier!

I was looking for this clip…

This clip was a pleasant surprise, the material was new to me.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Random animation, comedians, eddie izzard, lego, youtube

Unicorns?

Kevin (aka @kevinnuut) came in and showed this to me.

You go to ESPN.com and then put in the old Contra cheat code.

Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right B, A, Start (Enter) and as you hold down the enter key the page is just filled with unicorns. (I left off the final “Right” when I posted this originally.)

We don’t know yet what is causing this, Kevin said something about it is happening on the Google Reader site as well. It is cool, but I am hoping it isn’t some sort of “Unicorn-In-The-Middle” attack.

Laterz

bdbenner kevinNuut ESPN, hacks, kevin, unicorns

December 1980 to be exact, per the little month and year stamp in the lower left-hand corner.

It would appear that even at 2 years of age, I had an interest in telephony.

Back to the grind.

Laterz.

bdbenner pictures

Actually, rather out of pickles.

I just finished off the small jar of ‘Hot Garlic DIll Pickles’ that I bought at the farmers market a few weeks back. I won’t be able to pick-up another jar this coming saturday, as I will be over in Hondo, TX. My mom has been on quite an adventure of her own for the last, well I think it has been almost two months. She flew into Mexico and spent time with her parents and has been hanging out in Eagle Pass for the last couple of weeks.

She will be with us for a few days, before heading back to Michigan on the 14th.

I must say that if you like garlic dill pickles you should definitely give the good folks at Hill Country Homestyle Canning a try. They are more expensive than pickles at your mega-mart, but they definitely make up for it in freshness and taste.

I am regretting not having bought the LARGE jar of pickles, so that I would not be out of pickles at the moment. Next time I am there, I am going to look for their pickled jalepenos and carrots. I saw those on the website and they look pretty good!

I did a bit of yardwork today, but my days as a desk jockey have taken their toll on me, in that the last three weekenda have involved a significant amount of physical work and I have apparently pulled something. I am going to finish up tomorrow after work.

I am on the computer right now to look up a recipe for dog treats.

Just found it.

Laterz

bdbenner farmers market, food dog treats, food, pickles

Almost called this one Adventureland, but then it might get confused for a review of the movie I hope to see later this evening, but since I am old it probably won’t be until sometime tomorrow.

I managed to wake up early enought this morning to get some cleaning done before my 9am conference call, I also managed to bake the last of my rye bread dough, got two loaves. I am planning to send one loaf to my father and the other my my father-in-law, or as I sometimes call them, “The Toms”.

(Yes, I realize it is only funny if you happen to know both of them are named Thomas.)

I took Gina’s car to get a new stereo. I won’t give away what model until Gina has a chance to see it for herself. But she alreayd knows that it will allow her to control her iPod right from the dashboard.

I got the work done at Txr Custom Car Audio & Accessories, down on Burnet road. I need to write them a good review on Yelp, as that was were I found out about them.

In about 11 minutes I am supposed to be down at Taps Bar to meet up with Jeremy, Kearney and Kevin to watch MSU make it to the finals.

Laterz

admin Random adventure, basket ball, car stereo, MSU

My wife has recently become addicted to technology, one might go so far as to call her a TechnoSnob. I just got off the phone with Gina a few minutes ago, she is in Florida for the next few days on vacation with her mom and a few of her cousins. They are all in town for Bubba’s wedding, one of her cousins from Lansing who has since moved to the Florida (somewhere in the Ormond Beach Area).

Well, apparently there is no Wi-Fi in the vicinity of their hotel. Gina told me that she was not able to find any available networks when she booted up her macbook earlier.

NO INTERWEBS!!!!

Whatever is she to do?

Apparently, the correct course of action is to text me and ask for locations that are nearby that have wifi access. I found a couple of places, the one that actually looks pretty neat is 15 miles north. I didn’t bother to send her the link for the BeachHouse Beanery. Maybe if she gets online and reads this post, she might think about heading 15 miles north for some wifi and coffee on the beach.

The only time that I have ever really been without access to hi-speed Internet access was up at the cottage and well I kind of found a way around that as well.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

UPDATE: I was looking over the hotel website and it says “We also offer our guests a lobby business center with complimentary high speed internet access.” I read this as them offering wi-fi in the lobby, it could just mean they offer a computer that is hooked to the Internet. I have yet to hear from Gina as to what form the “complimentary high speed Internet access” comes as.

bdbenner Technology, gina, travel, vacation florida, gina, travel, vacation, wifi

I wish I could claim to have been the one to coin the term Freemium. Per Wikipedia, the phrase is attributed to venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

Freemium is a business model which works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. The word freemium is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: free and premium. The business model has gained popularity with Web 2.0 companies.

I wanted to write  this post a little while back, closer to when it happened, but cest la vie.

This post is about Kindlefeeder.com.

My wife has been an avid fan of Kindlefeeder for almost as long as she has owned an Amazon Kindle. It is a very cool service that pulls in the RSS feeds from the blogs (or news sites) that you want and packaged them up into one document. It then emails that document to your Kindle’s email address.

There are a few different services out that there that do this type of operation, some of them are web based, some are desktop software packages you install. I think that the web based ones like Kindlefeeder are the better way to go.

The web based ones are representative of a centralized system.  Whereas, the desktop software packages are representative of a distributed system.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds. In my opinion though the centralized way is the better way to distribute such a service, to the masses (particularly when you are doing it as a freemium). The main factor behind this is, desktop software requires a certain level of technical sophistication that you don’t normally find across the vast majority of “the masses”.

With a desktop software model you will need to push changes out via software updates, which HAVE to be installed to work. There is also the factor that your software organization will need to be prepared to support the different operating systems that exist.

The web based system on the other hand means that you can push out changes immediately and all users will see the new graphics or benefit from the bug fixes. While you still have multiple ’systems’ to support, the browsers are all fairly uniform.

But I am getting off topic here. Let me bring this back to Kindlefeeder.

Kindlefeeder is a service that sends a compiled document of all the RSS feeds that you want to your Kindle email address. You manage your account via the Kindlefeeder.com website. And the behind-the-scenes software processes there go out and get the RSS data and compile the document per the schedule that you choose.

Beautiful!!!

Of course, getting back to the centralized vs distributed comparison. A distributed software service, is typically cheaper to operate. Because the distributed service will use the software of the local machines where it is being run. Also, in the case of the Kindle these software services typically transfer the documents to the Kindle via the USB vs email (which saves the Kindle owner money).

The centralized software service requires that you have servers, bandwidth, disk space and if your service gets really popular you sometimes have to exponentially increase all of those things. At the Web 2.0 conference a few years back, one of the original architects of Digg.com stated that they were adding several servers a day. He also stated that they started with only one server, that in the beginning they optimized the heck out of it.

Kindlefeeder.com was registered in September of 2008, but on March 10th 2009, Kindlefeeder put out a notice stating that there would be a change in their service.

Because of the money and time required to keep Kindlefeeder afloat and improving has grown considerable, I am now asking for a small monthly subscription payment from higher-volume users and voluntary donations from others to help support this website.

So from now on there will be two types of service: free basic and unlimited.

Free basic: just by having a Kindlefeeder user account, you can subscribe to up to 5 feeds and use all the features of the servie for free.

Unlimited: For $5 a month, you can subscribe to an unlimited number of feeds.

From the first moment that Gina pointed the Kindlefeeder service out to me, I wondered when the shoe would drop. When would Kindlefeeder reach that critical mass point of either such severe popularity that the owner would NEED to start charging for the service because of the costs associated to supporting the service or because they felt that they could start to charging because of the fact that it was just such a useful utility.

This means that it took approx 6 months to reach the point where Daneil Choi, owner of KindleFeeder.com felt the NEED to start charging.

To me this transformation from a simple free service to a freemium service means that there is a potential market. That there might be room for two or three different paid kindle oriented feed services.

In terms of a looking at a free service and trying to apply what one might call traditional market logic, the ‘URL Abstraction’ market is one that is a bit saturated, particularly with free services. And yet there appears to be room out there for at least one freemium provider. Budurl.com turned up their freemium version a while ago.

From what I have heard, their ‘analytics’ package was drawing quite a crowd. I have also heard that once they started their freemium offerings, they lost some of their following.

In a related note, an article about what I am calling ‘URL Abstraction’ hit on TechCruch hit my radar recently. The article lists five different companies that ’shrink urls’ or what I would call ‘URL Abstraction’. The reason for the article is that apparently Bit.Ly recently received $2M in funding.

To that the article speculates that TinyURL, should be worth approx $46M. The interesting bit though, is that TinyURL doesn’t charge any money, they do not appear to have any direct monetization in their business model. Bit.ly does not have a direct monetization strategy either, yet. That begs the question, how did they get $2M of investment? Will we see them pump out a monetization strategy similar to BudUrl or will they take that money and produce some other kind of service.

Only time will tell.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology, business, kindle, newTechnology amazon, Bit.ly, freemium, kindle, kindlefeeder, techCrunch, tinyurl

As I type this, Gina is winging her way to Florida.

Her flight left Austin just about an hour ago. 6AM doesn’t seem like too bad a time to fly out, right?

The thing is though, the airport is like 45 minutes (the way I drive, closer to 30 the when Gina drives). Factor in that you are supposed to be there an hour before your flight, means that Gina was supposed to be there at 5AM.

She was there at about 5:10AM, she says you really only need to be there 40 minutes before your flight. So I guess she made it with a few minutes to spare, after you figure the line for check-in, etc.

Of course, one should not just roll out of bed and into the car. Figure another hour to get all cleaned up and what not.

That means that my today started at about 4:00, give or take a few minutes. (Though, the alarm went off at 3:30AM.)

After dropping Gina off at the airport, I needed to get some breakfast and caffeine. I wanted to hit up HEB, get a donut, maybe some fruit. No such luck, the HEB in the arboretum doesn’t appear to open again until 8am. It certainly isn’t open at 5:30AM or whatever time it was when I pulled into the parking lot.

The Randall’s across the street was also closed. Luckily though the Starbucks attached to the Randall’s opens at 5:30.  I grabbed a Venti Soy Mocha at 140 (degrees) and an apple fritter and headed to the office.

After catching up on some email, I figured I would write a quick post. I have to admit, I am finding it hard to concentrate, I am hoping that doesn’t last all day. I’m fairly certain a bit more caffeine will help with that.

I am going to try and finish up a blog post I started the other day.

Laterz.

bdbenner travel airport, caffeine, morning, starbucks