Over the next year, General Motors will celebrate the start of its second century through GMnext, a dialogue-based campaign that engages people via social media and interactive experiences. As a platform to showcase GM’s commitment to transportation solutions employing technologies that are relevant to consumer needs, GMnext will demonstrate our focus on solutions to the challenges that will shape the future of transportation.

A huge team of talented professionals is responsible for GMNext.com and I was fortunate and excited to be part of it. I did the Flash piece top and center on the homepage of GMNext.com, with the 3D flying windows. Performance was crucial here, since each of the windows can be populated with a ton of dynamic content. The motion needed to be fluid and convincing and earlier attempts at producing the desired look and feel were not successful. I love to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my interactive projects and my capabilities were put to good use here.

Click the screenshot to visit the site:

Read More: GM Asks the World: ‘What’s Next?’ (Fox Business)

In my typical, ever-so-slightly dramatic fashion, I typed in “Adobe Reader is a bloated sack of crap” in Google and found a host of sympathizers and recommendations. A kind commenter on this post over at Rick Strahl’s blog pointed the world to a free PDF reader called Foxit Reader. Weighing in a whopping 1.6MB (compared to Adobe’s 20M–or 28MB depending on which option you select), Foxit Reader downloads in a blink of an eye and performs amazingly well. Suddenly, your Dual Core processor actually feels faster than your old Pentium 3 did with Acrobat Reader 5. Foxit is beating the pants off of Adobe with their own technology…badly. This is how is should be done, folks.

Over the course of my visit to Ticketmaster, I probably fail the test 25% of the time. Me, the programming-type, with 20/20 vision, and an itch to buy some egregiously overpriced tickets. Sites add these tests to their submission forms to keep sneaky people from doing things in an automated fashion, like posting comment spam on blogs on a massive scale. That’s nice and all, but it has gotten out of control on some sites to the point where users are regularly failing these tests multiple times in a row. That’s a serious impediment to users who are trying to give you money. Ticketmaster execs, I’ll bet you a cup of Starbucks per day for the rest of your life: you are losing a measurable amount of revenue at your captcha test screen. (more…)

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less
willing to risk failure. - John W. Gardner

Mmmhmm. Failure is simply feedback–so you can get your ass up and try smarter next time. Failure is education and must be treated as such. The only real failure is if you stop trying. Once again I’m reminded that action is everything. And just to remind myself: Think less, do more. Here’s a couple more pertinent quotes:

“A life which does not go into action is a failure.” - Arnold J. Toynbee

Don’t consider losses a waste of time. Consider them an apprenticeship. - Greg
Norman

Another huge problem has been error handling (less so since Javascript >= 1.5, which is included with the latest mainstream browsers). If your Javascript breaks for some reason, all the user gets is a little non-descript icon in some corner of their browser and the rest of your script stops working. They don’t notice it. Hell, I hardly notice and I’m usually looking for it. And depending on how much your application relies on Javascript, the user could end up with a blank, incomplete, and/or unusable user interface. That is an utter nightmare for serious applications, one I suffered with a lot when I was developing a prototype of my early-draft SCORM-based Learning Management System (LMS) a few years ago. It was 7-8K lines of Javascript at that point. And there were all sorts of gremlins that kept it from being as stable as we needed it, despite proper coding practices and numerous workarounds to keep things from flaking out. Ultimately, we scrapped that and re-wrote it mostly in Flash, where it proceeded to kick an enormous amount of ass. Honestly, there should be a standard, uniform, no-brains-required way to catch and report errors back to the server and handle them gracefully on the client.

Third, and this comes mostly from spite, although the point is still wholely valid: The same people that complained about HTML frames and those who complained Flash not being SEO-friendly, back button-friendly, or accessibility-friendly (nevermind being a proprietary product of an evil corporation) should be complaining about AJAX. Many of those same issues, which I agree with to a certain extent, still apply to AJAX as well.

“AJAX” is being hyped (along with its equally Buzzword Bingo-worthy illegitimate lovechild “Web 2.0″) as being some sort of magical panacea. It’s not, by any stretch of any imagination. But, like with XML in the late 90’s, we’re going to see AJAX is every web-related job description known to man, whether it’s appropriate, legal, or congruant with the laws of nature. All of that being said, it is pretty cool to be updating parts of your page dynamically that would otherwise require full page refreshes…and I’m using it on a few projects.

I read this post and thought about Van Halen (of course!). I’ve heard that Eddie Van Halen doesn’t listen to other people’s music much and certainly not for inspiration. I heard this from a critic who was whining about how Van Halen sounds the same after x number of albums. The beauty of this is that Van Halen sounds like Van Halen and nobody else. It wouldn’t be the same if the guys had tried to imitate Led Zeppelin. Van Halen would be a watered-down copy of the original like so many grunge bands where in 1993.

Bob then goes on and talks about how he has applied the principle inside of GoDaddy. From a IT standpoint, a lot of times it’s easier to just use whatever solutions are hot this month, especially where open-source is as prevalent as it is. But, sometimes is makes a lot more sense for your individual firm to go your own way. This was certainly the case at First Health, where I developed a Learning Management System for e-learning across the enterprise. There were numerous solutions commercially available. But we had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted and the other solutions were essential square pegs for a round hole. So, we went our own way, developed our own system, and in the end, there was nothing like us around. We offered a uniquely rich and interactive form of online training and our users loved it, after being subjected to the common, dry, ‘page-turner’ stuff for so long.

Also, it makes me think about market evaluation. I personally get caught up a lot in thinking about potential markets and their viability. The thing is, a lot of entrepreneurs I know didn’t spend a lot of time thinking if the market was truly a good opportunity for them or not. They just got to work. Skip the analysis paralysis. Action first, Guy Kawasaki-style. Of course, I don’t advocate reckless enterprising, but it’s a great counter-balance to getting caught up in details and information that doesn’t necessarily (have to) matter.

day 1 - light

1. squat 3 sets x 15 reps
2. power shrug (pull) 3 x 5 using light weight
3. shoulder press (push) 3 x 15
4. calf raise 3 x 15
5. ab crunches or swissball crunches 3 x 20

day 2 - heavy

1. squat 3 x 5
2. bench press (push) 3 x 5
3. Pullups (assisted if necessary) or lat pulldowns (pull) 3 x 5

day 3 - medium

1. squat 3 x 8
2. One-arm dumbbell row OR Seated cable row (pull) 3 x 8
3. Dips or Incline bench press (push) 3 x 8
4. Back hyperextensions (good mornings) 3 x 8

This is much different than the one I’ve been doing for a couple years (on and off). The old one was adapted from various routines I read about on MFW. It was informal, I did what exercises I wanted to at the time. And tried to mix in some HIIT in between. It was a very inconsistent effort, but combined with an unrestrictive yet portion-controlled diet, I lost 40 pounds over two years and changed my body composition quite a bit, just not to the extent that I am after.

One thing that always plagued me on the old routine was DOMs. Typically, if I squatted, I would be in pain for 5-7 days and would be walking around like I was saddle sore. Same thing for bench presses. I was making gains, but sometimes the DOMS was bad enough that I had to pop a couple ibuprofen and it’s not really easy to get excited about going through that all over again when you’re deciding which exercises to do. I was also a bit of a glutton for punishment–when I did weight exercises, they would be heavy enough to cause failure roughly 90% of the way through the sets. Probably another mistake.

Contrast that with how the new routine is gone. The first time I did it, I did a Light day and probably went too heavy on the weight. The weight was quite a bit lower than what I usually do, but the reps were 15 instead of my typical < 10. I was hit with DOMS that didn’t fully clear up until a week later, mostly from squats. But, I was determined to make this work, so as soon as I could, I got back at it. I scaled the weight back again. The DOMs were minimal. Over the course of last week, I’ve progressively increased the weight up to my old numbers and beyond. There are some exercises that I haven’t had increases in for months that I’m now doing 20 or 30 pound over. And the best part, I’m not getting hardly any DOMs. Squatting three times a week is no problem. Sweet!

Every single time I go, I regret it. Every time. I’ve given it several chances to redeem itself. I’ve even tried going during that 2-hour window of the week when there is more than one parking space available. But, it doesn’t work. It makes me feel dirty. And it’s of little consolation that I saved 18 cents on that bar of Zest I just bought, since I’m going to wear down half of it scrubbing off the stench of Wal-mart’s immorality. I’m much happier driving literally 5 miles right past the nearest Wal-mart to go to Target, a somewhat lesser evil. At least I can buy something that doesn’t suck there and the majority of my co-shoppers have showered in the past week. To commemorate my avoidance of Wal-mart, I’ve made a button you can use on your sites and blogs to show how many days it’s been since you set foot in a Wal-mart.