Joe’s Blog

Just a couple of quick Joe’s Goals updates. If you are logged in there is now a button in the Get Inspired section that lets you add a goal to your tracker right from there. Since there are hundreds of goals that you can check out in Get Inspired this should hopefully makes things easier and be an encoragment to track more personal goals.

Also, I updated the random quotes that go out with the email reminders each day. I found a bunch that I thought were powerful and meaningful and I hope you enjoy them.

Sleep related goals are some of the most popular on Joe’s Goals. Everyone needs help now and again getting out of bed and to help with that LifeRemix put together a list of 24 excellent tips and suggestions to help you be more consistent. Joe’s Goals doesn’t get mentioned until Tip #24 itself, but I consider that I place of honor.

For those needing that little extra push out of bed, a reader pointed out SleepTracker. This is a little tool that monitors your sleep and gentelly beeps you awake at the point in your sleep cycle that is least likely to leave you feeling groggy or tired.

Inspired somewhat by GearFire’s suggestion that Joe’s Goals is a good way to track “task chains” and by Lifehacker’s original article on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity techniques, I bit the bullet today and was able to hack together a long requested feature.

To make this work I wanted to keep with the spirit of Joe’s Goals and keep it as simple and as unobtrusive as possible. As such you can use it, or ignore it and go on about your business.

Chaining your goal’s progress is the practice of keeping track of the number of days in a row that you’ve completed a task. The goal is to keep the chain unbroken or, when you do break the chain, make a longer chain each time you work on a habit. Today I added a line to the far right column of the tracker that is called chain. This shows the length of the last chain you worked on.

After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. — Jerry Seinfeld

So, for example, if you haven’t worked on a goal for a while it will show the length of time you were able to consistently do it right before you stopped. Likewise if it is something you have been working on for a long time the number could be quite high - but if you skip a day the number will start over again at 1. The chain counter ignores days that are considered “off days” on your goal (configured under options) so if you don’t do something on weekends it won’t count that as skipping, nor will it count a check on those days as part of the chain.

The chain measurement only tacks number of times in a row that you complete your goal on the days you scheduled it.

In addition to the chain feature I also found and fixed a bug with the pop-up calendar where it wasn’t really letting you pick a day in the current month. Let me know what you think of the chain and any other ideas you have here.

The Children of Húrin is a dark tale filled with bittersweet success, looming doom, and ultimate defeat. Sacrifice secures but a little breathing room and gain quickly fades into the shadow of the overarching oppression of the time. Love is foolishly placed and wisdom is shunned as characters continually seek immediate gratification and, in so doing, destroy all those who matter to them most. J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale is a tragedy of the first order and a masterpiece in the telling. It is a world where the enemy’s pride and selfishness is equaled only to that held by the righteous. Valor and bravery are often seen, but without charity they amount to nothing more than arrogance and fool-heartiness. It is a story devoid of heroes.

The Children of Húrin is a post-modern tale at its core. It has more in common with recent works such as The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean than it does with The Lord of the Rings. And yet, because of this, it adds a sparkle to The Lord of the Rings that perhaps would not have otherwise been so clearly seen.

Through my own meager efforts at crafting fiction I’ve become convinced that the creation of heroes and stories in which your characters can really be heroes is the most difficult task a writer faces. I thoroughly enjoyed The Children of Húrin, but it is by no means equal to the master work that is The Lord of the Rings. For in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien boldly and unapologetically crafted a story that wasn’t about survival and selfishness or the deepening twilight of a world overthrown with war and an insurmountable enemy on the verge of total victory. That, in contrast, would have been easy. Instead Tolkien showed us the simple pleasures that can be found in a campfire, a warm meal, a soft bed, a redeemed heart, a true friend, and a set of heroes who would sacrifice willingly for a just cause and a binding fellowship.

This is the successor to the mythology of Middle Earth. Here, at last, before the end of all things, a hearty few are found who will choose to do the right thing.

Where have all the heroes gone? So many of today’s stories are left wanting as writers contrive to implant heroic characteristics in those who are simply caught up in the fray of the ongoing tale. The good and the bad are blurred and the cause of the just is little more than selfishness, paganism, and imperfection. We suspend disbelief and root for the “good guys” merely because the author tells us to. But the “good guys” in the end strive for nothing more than what their carnal hearts’ dictate. This isn’t heroism.

Gandalf warns the fellowship to “not look too far ahead” as they willing walk from darkness into night. They walk with little hope of success but with a firm knowledge that what they endeavor to do “must be attempted.” If all were to come to naught and the quest fail, then, at least, they would know they did all that was in their power to do. They had taken responsibility.

Heroes today don’t take responsibility. They are ordinary men and women sucked up into extraordinary events and being asked to perform impossible tasks they are driven to rage and desperation. In the end, firing wildly, they magically shoot the feet out from under the “bad guys” at just the right moment and so their story is ended. But who wants to invest heart and emotion and hope in heroes that are just like us? Subject to the same folly and degradation and lasciviousness. Rather the soul cries out for someone, anyone, who seeing the gathering storm would not be overtaken, would not run for the safety of port, but would order his ship into the hurricane. Would call the calvary to follow him up over the hill and then down into the arrows of the enemy. A true hero is one who rises to the challenge, raises the bayonet, and charges into the spearhead of the enemy’s offensive hoping and trusting in providence alone to see him though. A hero is one who is faithful in letter, and in spirit.

Both the worlds of fiction and nonfiction need more heroes. Heroes like Frodo Baggins who, when faced with all the safety and hope his world could still provide, stood up and said, “I will take the Ring to Mordor - though I do not know the way.”

That is a hero.

Here is a great video with some very easy survival tips that most everyone should keep in mind when they are out hiking or exploring the outdoors. Pretty much everything is briefly covered from animal attacks to what to put in your survival pack.

Some Quick Tidbits:

• Wear synthetic fabrics or wool - cotton gets wet and stays wet and holds the water and the cold close to your skin.
• The Rule of 4 - you can live for 4 minutes without air, 4 days without water, and 4 weeks without food. Water is much more important than food when you are lost.
• Don’t plan on sleeping at night - you’ll be cold and your mind will play tricks on you. Stay put and when it is warmer and lighter you’ll feel better and likely still have plenty of time on your hands for sleeping.
• The most dangerous place you can be is too close to a river - most wilderness deaths involve falling into the water and drowning. Even if you don’t drown you’ll still get wet and very easily hurt. Keep your distance but…
• Follow streams and rivers downhill to find civilization.

For many a developer JavaScript is nothing more than an old, buggy, unstable, and decrypted language from yesteryear. Like a skeptical Nathanael puzzling over Jesus Christ, these developers ask the age decade old question: How can anything good come out of JavaScript? And like a modern-day Philip, a growing number of influential engineers are eagerly proclaiming “come and see!”

Much of JavaScript’s sketchy reputation is no fault of the language at all, but instead can be laid squarely at the feet of browser makers and their implementations of the web’s Document Object Model (DOM). Since the DOM is outside the realm of the core JavaScript language itself it is hardly wise to attribute the failings of these platforms to JavaScript. If anything the persistent buggyness of web browsers is a tribute to the power of JavaScript in overcoming these wide ranging and browser dependent problems via libraries such as YUI, Dojo, and Prototype. JavaScript is unique in being the only language forced to work on such a wide variety of truly hostile platforms and, as we’ve seen over the last four or five years, to do it all with both extreme simplicity and kicking style.

For those who haven’t yet joined the reformation I wanted to list 3 of the best articles on the topic that I’ve found. These are invaluable resources illustrating the function, the power, and the prestige of possibly the world’s most under-appreciated language.

1. The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language

The article often credited with restarting everyone’s interest in JavaScript. Douglas Crockford works at Yahoo and is also the man behind JSON and JSLint.

2. A re-introduction to JavaScript

Since JavaScript has been largely static in terms of features for the last few years many developers have been forced to roll their own methods to do both simple and complex tasks. Thankfully JavaScript provides prototypes with which you can modify and append new methods to objects. Modify the String.prototype and add a reverse method and boom, every string in your application now has that method! This is easily the best article I’ve seen outlining how JavaScript is constructed as a language. It shows, in a very practical way, how to use simple and yet sometimes confusing features such as inner functions, closers, and objects.

3. HyperScript: A 16-line hack to make the JS DOM API a tad more humane

As many have pointed out, this type of script isn’t particular new or novel. But that doesn’t stop it from being absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsilate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly. Elzr’s 16 lines of code loop over every type of HTML element and create new global functions for each. table(), li(), b(), div(), form(), you name it. Now you don’t have to deal with any of the browser’s hocky createElement syntax.

4. Bonus: YUI Theater

Douglas Crockford’s free videos are well worth your time and provide much better information than you are ever likely to get from a book or a class. The videos provide a good overview of the history of JavaScript, the good parts, the bad parts, and why it is and it should be the most popular language in the world.

Once you are done with your websites you can buy domains through one of the various web hosting companies. You have to customize your website a bit through web design software according to the hosting server requirement. You should select according to your requirement and budget depending on the services you want to use like number of email accounts, hosting space, databases, shared hosting etc. Offering internet phone services on your website can improve site traffic. Various companies also offer services to improve your search engine ranking. A good example in this context is hostmonster.

Over at Download Squad I’ve posted a couple of quick interviews about up and coming changes in the tech world. The first is with Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin and covers Facebook’s apps project. The second is with Adobe’s AIR Evangelist Ryan Stewart and covered the Adobe Integrated Runtime. These a two very exciting technologies and open up brand new worlds to the web development community. They’ll certainly be on my mind as I expand Joe’s Goals or offer new products to public consumption.

John Boyle (a comedic improve actor/friend) and I partnered to put together this little project over the last month. The idea is that it is a search engine that returns the same high quality of results that you used to be able to find on any run of the mill search engine back in 1995 or 1996. You know, back when search engines returned little but crap. The whole project basically just a technology test but it is seeded with many gems of witty search engine humor (an obscure but vital branch of the comedy industry). I thought some of my visitors might want to take a look. Ironiclly I couldn’t get on TechCrunch or Valleywag with Joe’s Goals, but a crappy search engine turned out to be just the ticket.

Enjoy!

StoryPop is a free tool that lets you create storyboard style cartoons using a large library of clipart. It is very easy to use and quick to get started. Check it out here. You can also ready my full review here.

1. Built in AJAX widgets. Create AJAX windows, auto complete forms, calendar popups, grids, WYSIWYG editors, and much more. All using simple ColdFusion based tags and generating industry standard solutions such as Prototype and Yahoo User Interface Javascript.

Man I wish I could have built Joe’s Goals with ColdFusion 8! Cool stuff, read more over at DownloadSquad