Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday was the AnswerLab quarterly company meeting. After the first half of the day, whereby we went over all the business-related stuff, we then went on a scavenger hunt on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Winning

I am not sure the name of the company that runs the hunt but they sure do make it fun. We split up into four teams and had to find clues and complete challenges. Many of the challenges are basically designed to make you look like a fool in public but that’s part of the fun, if you allow yourself to let go and get into it.

At the end of the hunt, which takes about two hours, we all converge and the person running the hunt shows pictures and videos from our day. Lots of laughter ensues and we vote on which team did the best job in the challenges.

I’m happy to say that our team, Nicks Gnomes, won! Not sure why exactly because the other teams did some funny stuff. In the end we were the victors and won these pink mustaches and a trophy.

More Status Board Goodness

Status Board is picking up steam quickly.

Today I installed two widgets that make it significantly more useful to me.

  1. Mint – Website Analytics
  2. URI.LV – RSS Analytics

Both of these widgets are courtesy of Maxime Valette (what an awesome name, eh?) the man who created URI.LV, the RSS analytics service that I subscribe to, as well as a whole slew of other things.

As well, Federico Viticci is adding Status Board links to his Pinboard. This is such a great collection of links that I subscribed to the RSS feed.

Having tons of fun configuring my status board. So much possibility with this app.

Panic Status Board

Panic releases another awesome app.. Status Board. I can recall the day they showed off their original status board in 2010. I wanted one so bad! Alas, I had to wait three years. The time has come. I installed it last night and referred to it throughout the day as I worked.

The basic configuration is certainly handy but I really want to get to customizing it beyond the clock, calendar, email foundation. I’m looking forward to adding my RSS analytics, maybe some Mint stats, and perhaps a few work related, project-specific things like budgeted hours on a project or my current NPS score.

Statusboard

Two loud Macs

In my office, I’ve got several Macs. My main machine is a 13″ MacBook Pro Retina. I’ve also got an older Mac Mini and a huge PowerMac.

I can’t stand the humming and buzzing that the Mini and the PowerMac make so I tend to leave them off for the most part. The problem is that my Mini is somewhat of a server and holds many of my files. I want access to those files but I’m no longer willing to tolerate the noise. And the PowerMac is just hanging around, consuming space.

So, I moved the Mini to another room in the house and unplugged the PowerMac. Now, all is well. Not sure when I became so sensitive to background noise like that but I simply can’t ignore it and it grates at me.

Tulips

Tulips

Some pretty flowers to brighten up your day