Matthew Lang

Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich.

— World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together by The Daily Beast

How could this not be made into a movie!

via Execupundit

Love the paint job on this.

via FGGT

I’m a terrible person for saying I’ll do something, then I never do it. I’m not talking about the big important things like completing client work or picking up the kids. I’m talking about making improvements in my work flow. Adding little things here and there to save time. Well no more!

Here’s three things I did today to make my day a little easier.

Installed Instacast for Mac and Became an Instacast Member

Instacast is awesome. My buddy in British Columbia, Curtis, put me onto it at the start of the year and it’s been a great product for managing my podcast subscriptions. I think the best two features are the syncing between devices and the playback of podcasts at different speed. I’ve got my playback set at 1.5 times normal speed just to get through the podcasts that little bit quicker.

I have Instacast installed on my iPad but having that, a laptop and a monitor on my desk means I have little space for anything else. When I first read about Vemedio releasing an Instacast for Mac app, I removed the Instacast app from my iPad but didn't get round to installing the desktop app. I resolved this today.

It was about two months ago that I decided that I wanted to support the Instacast product by becoming a member. Today I took a senator membership with Instacast because I want to support a great product. Just $10 per year as well. Bargain.

Installed aText for Text Expansion

Back when I was a .NET developer I used a text expansion tool called AutoHotKey. I used it for everything. After moving to Ruby I didn't look for a replacement text expansion tool for my MacBook.

One of the things that I frequently run into problems with is using templates for Markdown files. I use a number of different tools depending on what I'm writing. Being able to generate the template for the file regardless of what tool I am using would be good.

I installed aText due to the recommendation on the Lifehacker website. This should definitely make writing posts for my Octopress blog easier as well as anything else I can think of.

Installed Broom for Disk Space Analysis

Space is a premium on my MacBook Pro at the moment. While I wait for funds to be released so that I can buy a NAS drive for the house, I have to keep and eye on how much space I use.

I installed Broom (Mac App Store) and straight away I was able to save myself over 20 GB in disk space.

I need to keep more of an eye on the tools that I use and should use to make my day easier.

At the moment I'm working on an application for a decision making tool for groups that uses email to track people's responses to a question that forms the basis of the decision. Basically this application sends an email to all the people you want feedback from regarding a decision. In the email are the responses they are allowed to reply back with. They click the appropriate response and it's done. With me so far? Good.

Collaboration tools like this in teams are okay because everyone knows one another and the team work together for the greater good of delivering a great product or service. In a team you expect to get emails from other team members that want your input on a decision.

What happens though when you receive an email asking for your input on a decision, when you know that person but not as well as you know your family or friends? Another way to look at it is this:

How would you feel about giving feedback on the decisions of others you know in only a professional manner?

This is where I am having trouble with this idea. On one hand I know that teams are always going to respond to one another's questions, but say we have a decision making tool for the masses that anyone can use. You want feedback from a group of people that you know on a professional level who opinions you might value, especially when it comes to getting feedback on a key decision, but your worried that they won't participate in your decision.

If these people who opinions you value, mark your request for feedback as spam, are they really people you want feedback from or are they simply too busy to provide feedback?

This has been a stumbling block for me for a while and it's led to two different strategies to allow people to be included in decisions.

First Strategy: No Restrictions, Include Everyone

This was the initial idea for the product. The decision maker can include anyone they want feedback from on a decision. Whether it's a member of their team, someone from a particular social network they interact with, or just someone who opinion the decision maker values.

Emails are sent out to everyone requesting feedback on the decision. The main benefit to this is that you can include anyone in on a decision easily and quickly. However there are a number of drawbacks:

• What if the email is marked as spam? - It doesn't do well for your product to be perceived an another form of clutter in the inbox.
• Should the user have the option of blacklisting themselves from all future emails from my product? - To combat the possibility of the emails from my product being marked as spam, users could have the option of automatically blacklisting themselves out from all future emails. This gives a greater form of control but it does limit the decision maker in who they ask for feedback.
• Should the user have the option of blacklisting themselves from this decision only? - A spin on the previous option, but again it does limit who the decision maker can ask for feedback from.

Second Strategy: Verify Respondents First

This is a more controlled form of getting feedback from the right people. You are pre-approving people to be included in your decisions, so you should be able to build a reliable network of people who you can ask for their feedback on any number of decisions. There are drawbacks to this though:

• You just can't include anyone in a decision - Initially I wanted a platform where people can ask others for their feedback on anything.
• More barriers to getting feedback - Even if a person does want to help we require extra steps to include them on your decision. After one click to verify who they are, they might just get bored and not bother taking part in the decision.

Test Group Will Provide Feedback

Thankfully, I have a test group who are keen to use this service to help them make decisions with regards to small investments as a group. I'll be providing a simple implementation of this application for them to use for a while as a group.

As an added test, I will ask the test group to use the application to create decisions that are not related to investments. I want to see if there is a difference in the number of responses depending on the topic of the decision. I expect investment decisions to generate more responses because that is what the application is for.

I still haven't decided whether to go ahead with this product in the long term, but sharing this here did give me a moment to weigh up the two options.

This goes right to the top of the wishlist. I've wanted to own a Rocky Mountain bike since I was a teenager, but only if it's was one of their top end bikes.

via Singletrack

I'm in between work at the moment. It's an odd place for me to be. I've worked in the full-time job market for over 10 years. If I wasn't working, I was on holiday or I was made redundant and I was looking for another job. This freelancing lark is different though and with some time in between gigs and I want to use the time I have wisely.

With a few days free in between gigs I had two choices today:

1. Work on products
2. Get some chores done

I opted for the chores.

It was a lovely day here in Scotland so I thought it would be a good idea to simply step away from the computer and let my head rest while getting a few things sorted around the house and the garden.

We're not all fortunate to have a day away from out desks like this, but I'm so glad I'm in the position where I can do this and not worry about the implications on my income by taking a day away.

Feedly has been my choice of RSS reader for about 2 years now. Initially I was won over by a service that provided a better user experience but still allowed me to continue to use Google Reader as my main RSS reader.

Feedly was a great application but lately I've become a little bit weary of it. One particular problem I have is the number of times I need to log back in. I've got Feedly running on my Macbook, iPad and iPhone. About once a week I would need to log back in on either the iPad or the iPhone. Logging in each week can be a bit of a pain. Especially as it's linked to my Google account.

It was time to look for something else.

After some searching I found the RSS reading service Feedbin. It's a subscription service with a web client that also works with the Reeder app for the iPhone.

At just $2 per month or $20 for the year, it's relatively cheap, but as a paid service it at least has more of a fighting chance of being around in the long term.

I've taken the $20 for the year offer as I want to try Feedbin for the long term. With the use of Reeder I have a supporting app for my iPhone that can let me use my Feedbin account. It will be interesting to see how Feedbin pans out as my main RSS reader over the next year.

Nice geometry on the Dart.

via Pedal Consumption

Curtis McHale sums up why clients should wait for their favourite consultant.

Think of Gandalf (Lord of the Rings wizard if you don’t know). He was always running from one place to another. Someone always needed his help. He was a busy dude and couldn’t just take on every issue at the drop of a hat.

Any decent consultant is going to be like that. Really if you need more than a few hours of work, you should be expecting to wait.
— Wizards are Busy People by Curtis McHale

Never thought of myself as a wizard before though, but I do like the idea.

No way could I build an online product.

That was me two years ago. Thankfully my confidence has went up since then, but it took me some time to get to the point of shipping a product online. To do this I wrote about my product and what I hoped it would do. I put it down on paper and then started to realise how simple it would be to build.

Michelle's 11 point list is a great place to start if you want to "pick yourself".

1. Write. Set aside time to ask questions, dream, think big. Put your phone on silent and set an alarm twenty minutes out.
   — 11 ways to "pick yourself" by Project Exponential

Read on for the full list. It's worth it.