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Things I learned in Costa Rica

Greg — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:22:26 +0000

On his previous visit to Costa Rica, Josh drove two hours before realizing he and his fiance had left their passports in the safe back at their hotel.
Erik is the only TXIer with anything close to a useful grasp on the Spanish language. A bunch of us know how to say “hola”, “gracias”, and “arroz con pollo”.
When Ellen was 20 she read The Joy of Cooking cover to cover.
Samantha can name all the books of the Old Testament in order.
If you tie a bunch of $60 video cards together, you can build a processor as fast as a supercomputer. -Byron
John Gore likes pina colodas.
There are over 20 state parks within driving distance of Lucas’ home in Victoria, B.C.
“Mr. Bean” in Spanish is “El Senor Frijole”. -Daniel
Matt once programmed Blackjack on his TI-82 calculator while sitting in church.

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Introducing Bert, the new Table XI mascot

Greg — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:21:52 +0000

And…. we’re back.

We had a great trip to Costa Rica on all fronts. Tropical weather, beautiful accommodations, productive discussions, exciting excursions, and delicious meals. We’ve got a bunch of stories and pictures to share… too much for a single summary post.

In the meantime, meet Bert, the new Table XI mascot.

Sadly, we did not see any leatherback turtles, but we found someone even more appropriate. Bert is green, eight years old and likes to goof off, eat lunch and play with computers. Fits Table XI perfectly.

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Samantha’s superior diadochokinetic rate

Greg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:26:28 +0000

Katie Gore, John’s wife, swung by the Table XI office today. She is getting a masters in speech pathology at Northwestern and as part of her studies needs guinea pigs on which to perform “Oral Mechanism Exams”.

Part of the exam includes measuring diadochokinetic rates. This is a measurement of how fast one can articulate distinct sounds like “puh”, “tuh”, “kuh” and the combination of the three.

Being the overachieving, competitive bunch that we are, we wanted to know how we stacked up. Here’s Katie’s reply:

Here are the “results”:

I have tallied them into a total raw score to make it obvious who did “the best” for your competitive ranking purposes. Clinically you would never combine the scores, as it would be meaningless– it’s meant to give you a picture of an individual’s abilities with a specific articulatory parameter, which may be completely independent from their ability with a different parameter (e.g. in a young child, they may have excellent production of “tuh” but be completely incapable of pronouncing “kuh” sounds). I just added them up (your per-second rate for “puh” + “tuh” + “kuh” + “puh-tuh-kuh”) for a “for fun” overall picture.

The unit being measured is “articulatory movements” per second (??? like I said, I made this up, you would never average it…but I guess that’s as good a term as any)

1. Samantha: 7.4/sec
2. Erik: 6.1/sec
3. John: 6.0/sec
4. Jordan: 5.6/sec
5. Matt: 4.8/sec
6. Greg: 4.6/sec

The only thing I might clinically derive from this is that if Table XI was having some sort of speed-tongue-twister competition, my money would be on Samantha.

Also it might be worth mentioning that in many areas of speech, girls perform better than boys. So really she just had an unfair advantage.

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Diet Coke Explosion

Greg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:55:47 +0000

I sometimes worry that the gratuitous praise I heap upon Ellen’s kitchen exploits may be perceived as inauthentic. So in an attempt to present a balanced perspective and to add credibility to the descriptions of the incredible food she prepares for us, I offer this picture.

Alinea serves a dish called “Black Truffle Explosion“. This is Ellen’s variation on that theme:

Broadly speaking, Table XI makes its living solving organizational problems. Here is an example of “the management” applying those talents to our own internal challenges:

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Table XI takes a field trip… to Costa Rica

Greg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:38:53 +0000

I have tried for two weeks to write this post but couldn’t figure out how to do so without gloating. It’s hard enough to humbly write about the daily meals we have cooked in-house… but when your boss flies the entire company to Costa Rica for a week, how do you say that without sounding smug?

I decided the best way is to pretend I am objective news reporter. So this is me, as unemotionally as possible, reporting the facts:

On Saturday February 27, the 13 members of the Table XI team and five of their significant-others will fly to Costa Rica. The hope is that a reprieve from the Chicago winter and a week of rejuvenation, strategic planning, team building and corporate reflection will make Table XI more successful as an organization and better able to serve our clients.

We will be staying near Playa Grande and the town of Tamarindo.

Playa Grande is known internationally as one of the few places where endangered leatherback turtles nest. If we see one of these, he will become the official Table XI mascot:

The couples will be staying in two villas with kitchens, wifi and large living areas. This will afford us tremendous flexibility with respect to meeting, working, eating meals, and enjoying time together. The rest of us will be staying just a short walk away at the Bula Bula Hotel.

One of the benefits of running a web consultancy is the ability to perform your work anywhere there is internet access. Our clients are all aware of our trip and we will be fully equipped to deal with any emergencies that come up during our stay.

We have a good mix of leisure and business activities planned, as well as a bunch of free time mixed in for people to explore and relax on their own. Expect a bunch of updates here next week.

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If your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good

Greg — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:03:08 +0000

The opinions expressed in this post are the sole opinions of its author and are not representative of Table XI as a whole.

That’s because I seem to be the only one around here excited by the iPad. Most of the time (well, all of the time) when I’m in disagreement with everyone at Table XI over a technology issue, I’m wrong. But it was an article from Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail, that finally gave me the courage to go public with my beliefs.

His post, entitled When your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good, argues that the iPad’s success will be because of it’s limited functionality, not in spite of it:

I believe this “more features = better” mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design… What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise.

37 Signals has become rich and famous while being brazenly unapologetic about all the things their software doesn’t do. Give me the choice and I’ll use Google Documents over MS Word everytime for a single reason: simplicity.

My parents do 90% of their personal computing sitting in a recliner with a laptop. They need a device that can do three things: browse the web, listen to songs, and play Bejeweled. And yet, every single time I make the trip back to Indianapolis I spend hours troubleshooting an operating system built to support a bunch of applications they will never use.

Like Paul, I too have found myself using my iPhone for recreational web browsing more than I use a “real” computer. Even if the iPad is nothing more than a blown-up iPod Touch, I want one. That said, I will likely wait for kinks to be worked out and the price-point to drop before getting one. I didn’t pick up a first generation iPhone either, but when I finally got around to it, it changed my life.

Five years from now we’re going to look back and laugh at the archaic times when sitting upright at a desk was the standard way of browsing the web.

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Girl Scout Cookies have arrived

Greg — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:59:34 +0000

I realize the irony of this post immediately following one on fighting obesity.

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Table XI is saving our lives

Greg — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:14:59 +0000

One of the favorite run-in-the-background-while-you-work activities at Table XI seems to be listening to TED Talks. If you’re not familiar, TED is a well produced lecture series of really smart people giving short 20-minute talks on interesting subjects.

If you are a returning visitor to this site then you must have at least a smidgen of interest in food and cooking which means you’ll find this clip on Jamie Oliver’s efforts to fight obesity fascinating.

We are the first generation in modern history to have a shorter life expectancy than our parents. Jamie says that if he were holding the cure for AIDS or cancer, we’d be scrambling to get to him. But the greatest killers in the US are dietary related… and they are all preventable.

Of particuar relevance is his argument that companies should be providing healthy meal options to their employees. I swelled with TXI pride.

Take 20 minutes and watch this (or listen to it in the background)… especially if you have kids.

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Remember back when websites had counters? Its kind of like that.

Greg — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:03:33 +0000

In 2005 Google released Analytics, a product to analyze website traffic. Like most every other product Google offers, it’s free, better than the competition and has become the de facto standard in its class.

Through Table XI, I have access to analytics reports for a number of web properties, several of which receive hundreds-of-thousands of visits per month. None of these however, have captured my attention as much as the 300 visits received by the wedding blog I launched three weeks ago. In these three weeks I have learned more about Google Analytics than ever before for the simple reason that traffic just means more when you can put a name on each of the visitors.

Let’s take a look:

This overview tells us that 207 unique visitors have visited our blog. In actuality, the real number is a bit lower — if I visit the site from my laptop and then visit it again from my iPhone, analytics has no way of knowing it was me both times. But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that one absolute unique visitor means one person.

What do they do when they get here? On average, a visitor reads 2.8 pages in two minutes and 27 seconds. However, 49% of the time a visitor will land on our site and bounce right off of it, only looking at one page during their visit.

These 207 people accounted for a total of 308 visits. We can see that 67% of visits are new visits. Another way of looking at this is to say that 33% of the visits are return visits. This stat is of particular interest as it tells us how many people found the site interesting enough to come back for a second, third and fourth time. We can break this down even further through the visitor loyalty report:

Who are these people and where do they come from? Unsurprisingly, most of our visitors come from Illinois, New York (Rachel’s home state) and Indiana (my home state):

However, we were surprised to have garnered visits from 28 states:

Rachel has a brother in Alaska and my parents were vacationing in Hawaii when we launched the site so we knocked out the two most difficult ones right from the start. For no reason other than my own vanity, I have a goal of getting visits from all 50 states by the time we’re married (without doing something like purchasing geo-targeted adwords… though it has crossed my mind).

We were even more surprised by our international visits. We had to scratch our heads to figure out who we knew in in the UK, Australia and Japan:

We realized that our lone visitor from Japan must be Hizuru Yamamura, an exchange student Rachel met while studying abroad in Germany after highschool. Rachel hasn’t seen Hizuru since 2002.

Hizuru visited the site once, and read eight pages in five minutes.

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Carbolicious

Greg — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:38:41 +0000

It’s been snowing all day. By tomorrow we are expected to have fourteen inches of accumulation.

Southwest Airlines canceled all Midway flights for the next 24 hours. Over 500 flights have been cancelled at O’Hare. Public transportation is running up to half-an-hour late due to CTA cutbacks.

It’s a good day for some carbs. A good day for something warm and tasty that will just sit there in your belly and make you want to take a nap.

Something like… mushroom ravioli in a homemade plum tomato sauce perhaps?

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txilife.com

Things I learned in Costa Rica

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Introducing Bert, the new Table XI mascot

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Samantha’s superior diadochokinetic rate

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Diet Coke Explosion

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Table XI takes a field trip… to Costa Rica

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If your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good

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Girl Scout Cookies have arrived

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Table XI is saving our lives

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Remember back when websites had counters? Its kind of like that.

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Carbolicious

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