Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

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In January 2008 I tested and disliked the Callwave voicemail transcription feature. From my own testing, the quality of Callwave Vtxt didn’t compare to the far superior PhoneTag (formerly known as SimulScribe). 15 months later, Callwave is ending free transcription as part of their enhanced voicemail solution. Here’s the notice I received from Callwave this morning:

Dear CallWave Customer,

Thank you for using our Vtxt service. It has been our pleasure providing you service and hope you have enjoyed it.

We’re in the midst of restructuring the services we offer and the free transcription feature is no longer cost effective for our company. We regret to inform you that effective immediately this feature is not available and you will no longer receive voicemail transcriptions. You will still receive your enhanced voicemail, the ability to screen you mobile calls, save mobile minutes, manage your messages online and import/export your personal contacts.

If you choose to terminate your account due to this change in service please call 866-470-1989.

Thank you,

CallWave Inc.

If you are currently using the voicemail transcription feature of Callwave, you might try PhoneTag as a replacement.

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As I indicated in my newsletter earlier this month, I’m giving away one Kindle 2 at the end of April. I try to come up with creative ways to give away these various hardware devices and this time is no exception. There are two requirements to participate:

1) You must be subscribed to my newsletter on 1 May 2009 when I announce the recipient of the Kindle 2.

2) Between now and 30 April 2009, you need to write about your favorite worthy cause in a blog post or some other public way. Talk about what the cause is and why they need help. Be sure to link to the Website of your cause. Many non-profit organizations are suffering during the economic downturn we’re going through. Raising awareness will make a difference. After writing about your cause, email me a link to where you wrote about it. The cause you choose is entirely up to you. It may be a fund raiser for a school in your community through Donor’s Choose; you might promote clean water for a community somewhere; you may raise awareness about a program to help people get food and medical care they need; or you may opt to promote something else entirely. If you do not have an online space like a blog, facebook or myspace page, or somewhere else to promote your cause, you can write about it in the comments below (comments will close 30 April 2009).

The recipient of the Kindle 2 will be announced in the 1 May 2009 issue of the newsletter.

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Something I read a few years ago led me to go on a quest to reduce the number of things I attempt to do simultaneously. If I need to concentrate, I close my email, shut down my IM clients, and focus on the task at hand because there’s a fair amount of science indicating people waste more time when they try to do too many things at once. How much multitasking is too much varies from person to person, but it creates a struggle for priority in your brain that often leads to wasted time figuring out where you are in each task. I can’t find the original article I read about the negative impact of multitasking, but this highlighted article from Scribd does a good job of pointing out how the brain works (or doesn’t). The relevant section starts on Page 4, but the whole article is fairly interesting.

The Multitasking Generation – Multitasking in the Digital Age (Highlighted)

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I was a member of this cult long before my friend Bre Pettis spelled it out in a manifesto. While I’m known to procrastinate on occasion, I’m far more likely to try stuff, see it succeed or fail, and move on to the next thing. In a nutshell that is the Cult of Done.

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

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I’m a size conscious guy, at least when it comes to gadgets. I want gadgets that don’t waste space, so I’m constantly thinking about how the size of gadgets compare to other things I use regularly, especially as it relates to things I travel with. From a travel size perspective, Kindle 2 is one of the most space conscious gadgets out there. length and width match up with a trade paperback almost exactly. The Kindle 2 is actually thinner than the iPhone. Comparing Kindle 2 to my HP Mini 1000 makes the Netbook looks fat, although I wouldn’t trade the productivity of the HP Mini keyboard for the sake of a more sleek form factor.

Kindle 2 vs. Netbook side view:

Comparing Kindle 2 to various book form factors really shows off how much Amazon thought about design. It puts hardback books to shame in a size comparison. Trade paperback size is right on. And those little mass market paperbacks may be smaller length and width, but I never really liked the hand feel of them. All in, the Kindle 2 is a great form factor for the size conscious traveler.

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On January 29, I made a personal goal to lose 30 pounds by May 1. I told some of my friends about my goal at that time. If you subscribe to my email newsletter, you saw me reaffirm my commitment to this goal in the February 22 issue. At that point, I had lost 5 pounds. Today, a week later, I’m down a total of 7 pounds (you can see the tracking widget in the sidebar). Writing about my personal weight loss goal caused a flood of email from subscribers asking me what I’m doing to lose the weight – this post is the mass reply to those questions.

So how am I losing weight? I like the way one subscriber demystified his own weight loss of 65 pounds, so I’m going to borrow it. I’m losing weight by burning more calories than I consume.

I realize that’s a cop out – it doesn’t provide you any action steps you could take in your own quest to lose weight, so I’ll break it down with what I’m actually doing. There are basically three parts to my weight loss equation: Exercise, Eating, and Sleep.

My Exercise Program

My exercise program is incredibly simple and it may be that as I approach the end of my goal I’ll need to increase it, but so far it’s working. There are two key components to my exercise:

Walking 30 minutes 5-6 days per week

15 minutes of body weight exercises

One of the things that makes my exercise most successful is doing it first thing in the morning. I wake up, get dressed, drink some water, and head out the door for my walk. When I get back I do 15 minutes of additional exercise, then hit the shower and eat breakfast. I got the idea for doing exercise first thing in the morning from two places – Bill Phillips’ Body For Life, which suggests you get more out of exercise by doing it before you’ve had anything to eat and Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive which encourages you to create a morning routine to launch yourself into a more productive day.

What exercises am I doing:
Upper Body
Push Ups
Triceps extension with a chair
Abdominal / Lower Back
Crunches
Side Plank on a Box
“Supermans”
Legs
Single-Leg Squats
Box Jump
Lateral Bound
Squat Jump
Walking Lunge
Jumping Lunge
Calf Raises on a step

I’m definitely not an expert on fitness, so consult someone who is before coming up with your own exercise program. My primary motivation for doing body weight exercises is to pick things I can do anywhere. I can’t make the excuse of not being able to exercise if the only required equipment is me.

My Eating Program

For the most part I eat nutritious foods, but I tend to eat too much and too late at night. I have two eating strategies for weight loss. Strategy one is to eat smaller amounts of food more times throughout the day, which helps maintain energy levels and keeps me from ever feeling really hungry. Going back to Body For Life, Bill Phillips recommends 6 small meals. My target is 4-5. Eating 6 times a day became frustrating when I tried it about 10 years ago. Strategy two is to not eat after 8pm.

My breakfast following my morning workout is a smoothie comprised of blueberries, a banana, hemp protein, and flax oil (which tastes better than it might sound). The rest of the day the meals vary depending on my schedule, but the goal is to not over eat. I have flexibility to eat when I want now because I don’t have a boss to report to, but I used a similar strategy 10 years ago when I worked in a cubicle. By making meals the night before it is easy to stay on track throughout the day.

My Sleep Program

In doing a bunch of reading about metabolism, I’m inclined to believe there is a strong correlation between not getting enough sleep and gaining weight. One thing I’m doing is making more time for sleep. For my personal schedule, this means being in bed by 11pm most nights (which is about 2 hours earlier than my typical schedule). I’m awake by 7am to get started walking. The side benefit to getting more sleep is I actually accomplish more in less time because I’m less likely to become mentally fatigued during the day.

Fourth Key to Success – Day of Rest

I said there were three primary keys to meeting my weight loss goal. There are actually four. The fourth key to making my goals successful is to allow one day per week to break all the rules. I make Sunday that day. I don’t worry about getting exercise (although I occasionally still go for a walk). I eat whatever I want. And I generally don’t try to stick to a schedule of any kind. Taking a break one day a week won’t derail your weight loss goals because it has a great psychological benefit the rest of the week. When you feel inclined to cheat on meals during the week, you can easily remind yourself there’s a reward coming at the end of the week. Giving your body a day off makes it that much easier to pick back up exercising when you start your next 6-day cycle.

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One of the guys I met at Yanik Silver’s recent Underground conference sells garage doors online. I’m paying more attention to home improvement stuff since buying a house in April 2008, so I started asking about what’s cool in the garage door installation business.

I don’t currently need a garage door opener, because we have a car port, but the Hormann Supramatic E makes me want a garage. Just like the German engineering that goes into a BMW, Mini Cooper, or Mercedes, the Hormann Supramatic takes automatic garage door openers up a notch by opening 50% faster than standard openers. It’s also much quieter than most garage doors, so you won’t hear the garage door opening on your attached garage. For the security conscious, the Hormann Supramatic E is an electric garage door operator that can’t be forced open. Not sure if you can get the Supramatic E in the U.S. or not, but if you live in the U.K. or most of the EU, it’s the garage door opener to drool over.

If you plan on installing a new garage door anywhere in the world, I highly recommend watching this video on how to measure for you new garage door. It will save you a ton of time and money in a DIY garage door installation.

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I was recently at a conference hosted in a hotel at the LAX airport. There were roughly 500 people in attendance. At one point, people were taking too long to get back to their seats, so the host of the conference got everyone in the room to agree to paying $20 if we were late in returning to our seats following a break. Sounds harsh, but it was done with an interesting twist. All the money would be donated to Charity: Water. By the end of the two day conference, almost $5000 was raised for Charity: Water, which either says 500 adults are really bad at following directions or that it’s not so bad to be penalized when the result is a positive for someone else.

I don’t normally post about causes because I’d rather do something than talk about it, but I think Charity: Water is one of many causes that deserves more attention. The non-profit raises money to build wells in places where there is no clean water. Many of these places currently have only one source of water – a polluted river filled with toxic chemicals that make their kids horribly sick and kill local residents by the hundreds every year. Clean water is largely something I take for granted, if I’m not getting it from the tap at home, I can purchase bottles at the store. There are places in the world where that store simply doesn’t exist. For a $20 donation, you effectively buy 20 years of clean drinking water for one person. Approximately $5k builds a well for a village of people.

Coming up next week on February 12, 2009, something called Twestival is happening all over the world to raise awareness and money for Charity: Water. You don’t have to go anywhere to participate, you can simply donate from the comfort of your desk. iJustine does a great job of summing it up in this video:

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PriceGrabber.com recently completed a Consumer Behavior Report titled: Netbook Trends & Solid-State Technology Forecast. The report is based on a survey of 1,545 US online users of Pricegrabber.com conducted from January 6 to January 14.

The stats are interesting from a consumer adoption of Netbooks standpoint, but I don’t think the stats accurately reflect one highly probable reality: many people will buy netbooks instead of buying a new full-sized notebook PC. Pricegrabber.com cites the fact that all of the consumers polled who currently own a Netbook, 91% also own a laptop and 87% own a desktop. This is not a real stretch since very few U.S. households don’t already own at least one computer. Those stats also indicate that many netbook owners own both a laptop and a desktop.

According to the stats, 1 in 10 consumers purchased a Netbook. If you dig a little deeper in the survey, you’ll see that Netbooks represent 19% of all laptops sold on Pricegrabber.com during December 2008. 15% of all laptop purchases on Pricegrabber.com during November 2008 were Netbooks. One thing the survey doesn’t indicate is how many people purchasing Netbooks during those months ALSO purchased some other form factor.

Pricegrabber extrapolates from their data that consumers need more than one form factor because the Netbooks can’t handle local computing functions. While I wouldn’t edit video on a Netbook, or design a multi-layer Photoshop image, there’s not much I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing on my Netbook. I went 10 days with an HP Mini 1000 as my only PC and could have easily gone longer if necessary.

Read the full survey on Netbooks (PDF)

How about you? Do you have a Netbook? Would you replace your current notebook with a Netbook or do you need both?

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The business behind JakeLudington.com is a one person operation. The one person being me. My brother jumps in and saves my butt on occasion, but largely the decisions, both bad and good, are made solely by me. This works well most of the time, but as things grow sometimes undoing decisions I made two or three years ago cause some serious growing pains.

The month of January 2009 is definitely one of the most painful I can remember. I’m gradually making updates to the way JakeLudington.com functions so that pages load faster, all browsers display the pages well, and in general so that as site traffic continues to increase people will have a good experience. I’d rather be focusing on writing articles, answering questions, and making some new videos, but instead I’m upgrading and then unbreaking things as I upgrade.

Why am I telling you all this? Partly because it may have impacted you in some way. For instance, if you sent me a question in the past week, I may not have gotten the email. If you’ve been waiting a week or more for an answer, by all means, submit your question again. If you tried to download a file and it didn’t work, you might want to try again – many things are more stable now than they were two weeks ago. The other reason I bring this up is I’d love to hear from other people who have experienced growing pains in running a one-person or small company. What was one thing you did that made a big difference or changed your company for the better?

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