I got a little teary-eyed when I read that the humanitarian efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have saved over 400,000 lives in developing countries by “training medical staff and birth attendants how to resuscitate oxygen-deprived babies at birth”. Our little girl Emmy had problems breathing at birth and it was those skills combined with a loving Father in Heaven that allowed her to live. I’m glad that an increasing number of parents around the world can see doctors and nurses perform these miracles.
Category Archives: FeFNet
Interface Simplicity – Joe’s Goals
In a world so full of noise, sometimes it’s great to retreat to a place of simplicity. One of my recent web retreats is getting back into Joe’s Goals, where I’m digging the new 2.0 interface that keeps everything on one page. It’s pretty simple – every time I complete a goal, I click to put a check mark on the box for that goal. I can add another check mark by clicking on the box again, or click directly on a check mark to remove it. It’s pretty simple to use, but the great part is that I’m the one to choose what a check mark means. I’m not affiliated with the site in any way, but I am a daily user.
Joe’s Goals is a simple way to track productivity chains – I can set it to show me how long I’ve kept up my daily scripture reading or my exercise (and I can even exclude Sundays for that goal). It’s simple, free, and easy. Thanks, Joe!
Going Green
Ann Arbor, Michigan is planning to install LEDs in its streetlights to save money on lighting costs. Apparently this investment is going to pay for itself in four years. There seems to be a bit of a mini-green revolution right now, as just about every finance blog or personal improvement blog talks about replacing your own light bulbs with CFLs or LEDs. We got a pack of them from Wal-Mart to replace some 60-watt bulbs, and we’re pretty sure that the “60-watt equivalent” is brighter than the regular incandescent bulb after it warms up. Wal-Mart even has their own brand of CFLs, and that’s what we’re using now. It’s a bit of an investment, but we’re planning on replacing a few more bulbs each month to try to cut down on our utilities bill.
Be the customer
Seth Godin struck a chord with me when he discussed reorganizing for profit. He basically says that retailers should organize their stores according to the tasks that buyers will perform. Home Depot should put screwdrivers next to their saws, because a person working with wood would likely need both. I’ve done this a million times at stores like this, finding myself walking through nearly every aisle before I can find what I want. Apparently, there are many people that don’t like this idea, thinking that I’ll find something I didn’t remember I was looking for. They seem to forget that if I can’t find what I’m looking for in the first place, I’m likely to leave.
We all have customers, whether they go by that name or not. Those we’re trying to sell our services to should be the ones we think about first. I’ve met many brilliant computer programmers who sometimes add feature upon feature to their programs that end up being totally unusable because they don’t think about their customers. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail did this to me recently when they thought I wanted my web-based email client to be more like my desktop email (like say, Outlook or Eudora). Sure, Yahoo and Hotmail felt more like desktop mail clients, but Gmail is a million times faster and easier to use.
Who are your customers? Try putting yourself in their shoes, or better yet, asking them how they think something should be done. If you get yourself into their mode of thinking, then you can try to sell them on the stuff they didn’t know they always wanted.
Geocaching! Outside!
When I was little, our neighbors across the street invited us to play almost every day. My brother and I, of course, loved going over to play because they had all the best toys, like a Nintendo, every G.I. Joe figure and vehicle, and all kids of stuff. Of course we wanted to play inside every day we were there, because we didn’t have such fun, expensive toys (which certainly benefited us in other ways). However, my friend’s mom also made sure that we played outside every once in a while. This was only bearable because they had plenty of expensive outdoor toys, too, like a slip ‘n slide, a playhouse, and tons of sports equipment.
Since that lesson of playing outside, I’ve since moved to Los Alamos and been through all of Boy Scouting. I really do enjoy the outdoors, but it’s something that I haven’t done much since I was much younger. My friend Aaron and I used to go all over the canyons, and he and I even hiked across the canyon on our last day of Middle School, which took us about four or five hours to travel less than half a mile on a map, but it was a lot of fun.
So why all this talk about getting outside, especially since it’s obviously written on a computer, indoors?
I went outside again!
Some of our friends invited us to go Geocaching a couple of weeks ago, and we’re hooked. Part of the motivation is that we want to get out and walk around more to shed off some extra weight of being indoors practically since Emmy was born, and part of it is that we’re just ready to get back outside. I’m really exaggerating, though, because we definitely get outside, just not as much as we would like to. Geocaching helps us do that because it makes it fun to go outside. Basically, you look on geocaching.com for a cache that’s in a place you’d like to visit, whether it’s in the middle of town or in the middle of nowhere. Then you punch in the coordinates to your GPS receiver (that’s all the equipment you need, really) and follow the little pointy arrow to the cache on your GPSr. It’s not always that easy, but that’s the fun of it. You get to go treasure hunting, see some places you haven’t been before, and share it with the geocaching community.
For us, geocaching has been a lot of fun and an entertaining way to see new places. We’ve only done a few caches so far, but we’re very excited to take our friends and relatives with us this summer. It’s great because the only thing we had to buy was a GPS receiver, which you can get for less than $100. It’s definitely something that’s fun for us gadget geeks, but it’s also great for families or just about anyone else.