So like everyone else in the tech world, I am enthralled with Google Buzz right now. I wanted to find out how to implement a button to easily share the content on my site (MileSplit) on Google Buzz.

I found some help on some of the tech blogs who were also eager to do it; however, what they offered seemed to be incomplete and sometimes wrong.  So here is what I am trying to make a complete guide for the options available to you.

First of all, since Google Buzz is integrated with Google Reader, the basic thing that you are doing is actually sharing your link on Google Reader... which if they have hooked up their Buzz account to (semi-automatic) then it goes to the Buzz stream.

Here is a suggested image I threw together:   It is50x16 which is a pretty good size.

The basic link to share is start the buzz process is: http://www.google.com/reader/link  .  From there you need to add the parameters of your article in the query string.  Most of you reading this probably know what that means but it will look something like this:

http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://www.jasoncbyrne.com&title=Jason+Byrne's+Blog

Note that (of course) the parameter values should be URL encoded.

Parameters:

• title           The title of the page being shared
• url            The URL of the page being shared
• srcUrl      The URL of your main site or otherwise the source
• srcTitle    The title of your main site or otherwise the source
• snippet    Short description of the post, can accept HTML such as image tags

I am trying to figure out how to add tags to the article, but so far have been unsuccessful. 

 

So after long last, I have the Nook--er, I mean nook (I think Barnes and Noble wants it branded as a lowercase "n")--in hand.  While a few people have them already, especially professional tech bloggers, most people who have ordered them still have another month until the next batch ships.  It still amazes me that Barnes & Noble so botched the supply chain, under-predicted the demand... or more likely something more strategic, either wanted holiday orders knowing they wouldn't make the holidays or they know there are issues and are using us early movers as beta testers while more bugs are fixed for the masses. Since a lot of people love to see unboxing, those photos are posted below.  The packaging was fine and presented well, possibly over the top in my book but it's the trend in tech to try to present the product like a work of art in the packaging rather than just packaging to ship it safely.  It was in a hardened plastic case like it was on displa more...

My birthday is Februrary 5th and I'd really like a new Nexus One ("Google Phone"), but it costs $529. :-(  But YOU can help!  If enough of you chip in just a few dollars then, yes, you can deliver the birthday wishes of this sweet boy from Orlando. :-)

Turn my frown upside down! 

 

This past year a lot of tech bloggers have been saying RSS is dead.  I think that's a load of crap.  I love my Google Reader and no amount of Twitter list following is going to change that.  Twitter creates a whole lot of noise and retweets of the same information.

As any good member of the tech world does, I invest a lot of time to keep up with the latest developments so as not to be left behind.  And so I use any bit of downtime I have to stay on top of things.  My Android phone and my Google Reader parsing app of choice is very important in that process!  I'd say that easily over half of my news I consume on my phone now instead of my desktop or laptop.

So after rooting my phone, I decided to re-evaluate my options for apps that integrated with Google Reader. 

NewsRob (link)

This seems to be the most popular app, but it was actually the one I like the least.  It's not bad by any means, but I just don't think the interface is as slick or streamlined as the others.  The share button is to me annoyingly hidden under the menu button for some reason.  And the headline area takes up too much space.

NetaShare BETA (link)

I guess this is a new player from Japan and actually it's a very nice app.  When you are viewing an article, it has this bottom drawer pull up option (similar to the Android pull-up/down menus) that fills the bottom part of the screen and has some nice transparency.  It allows you to scroll (swipe) through all of the headlines and therefore jump to others easily... rather than just clicking next or going back to the complete list.  I really really like this.

One major disappointment is that, despite reading somewhere it had this feature, I couldn't find any share options.  It also crashed my phone once randomly.  Plus the ads on the top are annoying, take up valuable space, and I don't see a paid option to get rid of them.

Greed (link)

And finally... the app that I used before and still believe is the best is GREED! 

I opted for the paid version this time that added offline caching (which the others have also).  I do not mind paying $1.99 for this app that I use basically every day, even though the others are free.  Show the developer some support!  The new version also has some really nice features the old one didn't have (or maybe this is free vs. full?).

The home scree is really nice looking.  The list page gives you visual cludes of which articles you have read, starred, shared, and liked.  Once in an article it has the familiar left/right like NewsRob.  But it gives you almost full screen reading of the article.  The "meta" info at the top fades out after loading (also a nice status bar indicating the loading).  You can click on the status bar to show it again which gives you the ability to star, mark it read/unread, and share it.  Clicking menu gives you aditional optiosn like sharing it to other apps, viewing the full article, etc.  This means that you see a lot more of the article without scrolling!  It also has nice zoom in and out features.

Overall, I just think it has the best features and is cleaner.

WISH LIST...

Even though I really like Greed and the others are good, none of them are perfect.  Here is my wish list...

- Pinch gesture to zoom in/out rather than the buttons.

- Swipe/flick sideways to change articles... iPhone does this all of the time and I read Android has the ability to, but why is this never an option in Android apps???

- Share with note.... I like to add notes to my shared items, but none of the apps let you add a note.

- NetaShare's bottom drawer or otherwise an ability to flick through other article headlines to jump around in your feed is beautiful.  This should be in the other apps as well.

- Search... let me search in my feed for a keyword!

- I think Greed's top bar should not be those checkboxes.  Why not make this a toggle button read/unread, like/unlike, share/unshare, star/unstar?  And maybe put the general share to other app button up there also (I hate the idea of pressing menu for some reason).

- Add a long press or double-click option on the article body to pop up other options like go to the site or share with note, etc.

 

It's been a nice little run we've had here the last few weeks, coming off of the pitiful March 8 lows.   While things are starting to look a little better, let's not forget that year-to-date the Dow is still down 8.5% and the S&P 500 is down 5.6%. 

Over the last couple of years I have done a lot of reading, research, observing, and CNBC watching!  I'm sure everyone believes that they have an above average sense of things, but I do believe that.  I still have a lot to learn, but I have learned about what moves the market and how to make solid decisions with investments.

So I got to wondering this morning, as Ansley decided she wasn't going to let me sleep in the early AM hours.   How are my picks doing?  

First, I want to draw a few distinctions.  I think there are really three types of stock investments:  short-term trading (1 day to 3 months), medium-term investments (3 months to 3 years), and long-term investments (3 years to 30 years).  I only partcipate in the latter two and also believe that medium-term stocks can turn into long-term holds.  Most of the stocks that I have actually bought have been what I would consider more safe and long term... companies like Microsoft, GE, Pfeizer.  So looking at individual stocks I bought over the last 6 months, I'm doing so-so (down 2.5%, relatively good to the market).  Weighing me down is a combination of buying a little too early, buying mostly "safe" long-term positions, and also maybe a little crowd-following.  Actually my biggest winners have been those that were non-mainstream and less "safe".  As a consequence (darn it) they are generally the stocks that I took only a small position in:  Wendy's-Arbys (WEN) +68% and Dr. Pepper-Snapple (DPS) +42%.  (Interesting side note: both the #3 players in their industry... maybe there's something to #3s)

So the stocks below I did NOT buy (except for two:  AT&T and Verizon), but it shows me maybe I should start trusting my medium-term gut more!

Picks I made in a December post

On December 18th, I made a blog post here with recommendations of stocks that were buys.  Some I said were good buys at that level but suggested holding out for certain buy price for a limit order.  Others I just said "buy now".  Here is how they have returned... (listed with then price, now price, and return %)

Hit my suggested limit price...
AT&T (T)              $24.00*   $25.45      6.41%
Limited (LTD)     $7.00*     $10.38      48.29%
Macy's (M)           $7.00*     $11.56      65.14%
Verizon (VZ)        $27.00*   $31.69      17.37%

Did not hit my limit, but assuming you bought at Dec 18 price...
Administaff (ASF)                     $19.50**       $23.48      20.41%
Research in Motion (RIMM)   $38.44**       $63.90       66.23%
Scotts-Miracle Gro (SMG)      $28.76**        $35.08      21.97%
Yahoo (YHOO)                         $13.00**        $14.02       7.85%%

So you see if you would have put in limit orders on all eight of those, four would have hit and they would have collectively returned 34.30% for you!   Assuming you bought those did not hit the limit on December 18 they would have given you 29.12%.  Not too shabby, eh?

My Watch List

I use Google Finance to watch my portfolio, and I keep a second "portfolio" there that is my "Watch List".  They are stocks that I am interested in.  I keep it so that I can easily keep tabs on their price and look for good entry points.  I made some recommendations on January 20 in another blog post that mentioned a few of the ones blow... mainly dividend earners since that was the topic of the post, which would mean they were mainly large ("safe") companies that don't return as much.

Anyway.... so below are ALL of the stocks from my watch list (that were not already listed above from Dec 18).  This is assuming that you bought all of the stocks from my watch list on January 1, except for the *ed ones I used the January 20 price since I specifically made the recommendations for those on that date.  One other thing, the ** on Palm is because I did not add Palm to the watch list until after January, after the announcement of the Pre.  So I didn't want to cheat there because the return was even better from January 1... the Palm price is the day after the Pre was announced when the price popped and I added it to my watch list.

3M (MMM)                                        $57.54            $53.73     (6.62%)
Adobe (ADBE)                                $21.19            $23.64    11.04%
Amazon (AMZN)                             $51.28            $74.71     45.69%
Apple (AAPL)                                  $79.00*          $117.64    48.91%
Barnes & Noble (BKS)                 $15.00            $21.91      46.07%
Books-A-Millon (BAMM)               $2.54               $4.62        81.18%
Borders Group (BGP)                  $0.40               $1.45       265.5%
Chesapeake Energy (CHK)        $16.17            $20.93      29.44%
Chevron (CVX)                               $68.31*           $66.70     (2.36%)
Cisco (CSCO)                               $16.30             $17.56       7.73%
Coca-Cola (KO)                            $42.88*           $45.03        5.01%
CVS Caremark (CVS)                  $28.74             $29.24        1.74%
Exxon (XOM)                                   $79.83            $68.14     (14.64%)
Google (GOOG)                            $307.64          $379.50   23.35%
Heinz (HNZ)                                   $37.60            $34.16     (9.15%)
Hershey (HSY)                              $34.74            $35.89        3.31%
Intel (INTC)                                     $12.86*          $15.62      21.46%
Intuitive Surgical (ISRG)              $126.99          $117.41    (7.54%)
Kimberly-Clark (KMB)                  $52.04*           $49.13     (5.56%)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)          $56.75*          $51.77      (8.78%)
McDonalds (MCD)                        $62.19            $53.95       (13.25%)
Palm (PALM)                                  $5.96**           $9.22           54.69%
Netflix (NFLX)                                 $29.89            $46.59         55.87%
Nike (NKE)                                     $51.00             $52.11           2.18%
Tata Motors (TTM)                         $4.45               $7.81           75.51%
Toyota (TM)                                    $65.44             $77.11         17.83%
Transocean (RIG)                         $47.25            $66.31       40.34%
Wal-Mart (WMT)                             $56.06            $51.29       (8.51%)
Walgreen (WAG)                           $24.67            $29.04        17.71%
Yum (YUM)                                     $28.66*           $30.26         5.58%

So collectively, if you'd have bought an index of my watch list you would have made a 26.12% return... relative to the market that is over a 30% return!  Now... this is just a watch list.  I actually have to confess.  I would not have had the cajones to buy Borders Books at 40 cents.  So if you take Borders out of there and its collosal ascent, the above stocks would have returned you 17.86% (about 25% relative to the market as a whole).  So if I'm going to fess up and take off Borders, then I would also argue on my side that I would not have bought ISRG at the January 1 price (I was watching it at around $98) and would not have bought some others like MCD, WMT, or NKE at their January 1 prices... I was lookign at them a bit lower. I also don't know why Best Buy is not on my watch list because I have been wanting that stock since Circuit City died and it has returned over 30% YTD. But oh well, I'll eat those for the sake of the overall point:  my picks have hugely out-performed!

Additional Observations

The stocks performing the worse on the list this year?  It is the "safe" picks, the conservative picks, the ones all of the talking heads on TV are telling you to buy, and the "recession-resistant" stocks.  Those are your food stocks, medical stocks, your customer staples, and your budget-concious consumer stocks... McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, Heinz, 3M, etc. 

It is your consumer discretionaries that are performing well:  like Best Buy, Macy's, Limited (Bed Bath and Beyond), and Barnes & Noble.  And your tech of course like Google, Amazon, Apple, RIM, Netflix, Intel, etc.

Maybe it's just false optimism, but based on the way stocks are acting this year, the market is shifting away from safe, recession plays and seems to be anticipating a return to propserous times.  I haven't been around that long, but based on what I have learned and read from the people who have made billions over the years.... if you believe that we won't fall into a deeper, longer recession lasting into 2010, you should be shifting your portfolio right now.  You should be getting out of the stocks that the people on TV loved for the last 6 months like health care (JNJ), kitchen and bathroom stocks (Kraft, Kimberly-Clarke), and discount stores (Family Dollar, Wal-Mart).  Get into your tech, consumer goods, retail, luxary goods (Coach), travel (Carnival, Royal Carribean), etc.  If you want to get really crazy get back into your real estate and finance.

On the other hand, if you think this is a temporary bounce and we're headed back toward 7000 and below for a long period of time then double-down on all of those recession-proofs I mentioned in the last paragraph plus others like Coca-Cola, Kellogs, Heinz, etc. (or maybe just bonds of even gold, you pesimist!)

Or if you're just going long-term macro investor like I mostly am, then just buy a mixed bag of solid companies and stop thinking so micro anyway!

Am I wrong?

I like to be right.  But I'd kinda also like to be wrong here... would make me feel a little less bad about not following my gut on these!  So if you see false logic in my numbers above, tell me so in the comments!!!  But it seems pretty clear to me.... market down, my picks up big.

Something I have been wondering about today is why are there different internet packages for your mobile phone.  Like why is it that when I got my Android I had to ditch my BlackBerry internet data plan and get a Google internet data plan (which is $5 more a month for some reason).  Shouldn't access to the internet over a mobile phone just be that... a door to the internet?  And doesn't T-Mobile really facilitate it all?  So what am I paying for?

Is this like the early days of the internet where you were on CompuServ or AOL?  And then slowly people realized that it didn't really matter what network you were on.  You just needed to be on.

So why do I need a specific Google or BlackBerry plan??  I just need a TCP/IP connection to the internet!

Chrome/Firefox - Of course the first thing has to be a web browser!  I am having an internal struggle right now.  These two titans are battling for my heart.  I like Chrome better, but it's still a little buggy.

EditPad - Simply the greatest text editor for programmers EVER!

Putty - Dead simple SSH tool.

CoreFTP - Simple SFTP Client that I've used for years.  Don't mess with what works!

Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks - You can have your Photoshop and Illustrator!  They are great and all, but Fireworks gets the job done for everything that I need!

BucketExplorer - Great Amazon S3 browser with CloudFront capabilities.  I am starting to use S3Fox though and it's nice.  And have downloaded CloudBerry Explorer at the request of @cloudberryman on Twitter and it seems pretty impressive.  So maybe changing my mind soon!

CamStudio - Why pay $300 for Camtasia Studio, when you can get this one for free?

Carbonite - Lets me sleep at night knowing my computer's files are backed up to the cloud.  Who am I kidding I don't sleep at night!  But that's because I have insomnia.

QuickBooks Online - Moved from the local edition to the online a while ago so that others in my company could help with statements, invoices, and payroll.  Great move!

Visual Studio Express - For all my Windows application development needs, Visual Studio is awesome!  And I haven't found a compelling need to buy the full version yet.  Not that I could afford it.

NSIS - Great for creating Windows installation scripts.

Rhapsody - Although they're making me mad right now because I think they should come out with a version for Android, I still love them.  Listen to any song I want for a reasonable monthly price!

Audacity - Great when I need to edit audio files.

Adobe Premier - Worth every penny!  Best video editing program around.

Aptana Studio - Adobe Air is about all I use this for, but I could probably get a lot more use out of it.  It has debugging and auto-complete that gives Visual Studio a run for its money.... almost.  Great tool for developers.

Remote Desktop and LogMeIn - For accessing my client's machines remotely... simply wonderful.  Why commute??

Love Obama, but funny is funny!

 

I was amazed how much attention my last blog post about the speed tests I had done after after enabling CloudFront on my S3 static content.  The post was re-tweeted over and over on Twitter and today I even saw follow-ups of people saying they were going to investigate my claims.  If nothing else this post has finally made me realize the power of Twitter as a viral knowledge base!

So I decided to follow up on the post to give some more specifics and back up my claims.  In the last test I had migrated some static content such as images, stylesheets, and javascript files to S3 and then enabled CloudFront.  This was to get some load of our servers on this content that is hit every single time that a page loads. 

The speed tests that I ran last time around were on very small files such as stylesheets that are only a few kilobytes in size.  I ran some more tests today and the results were very similar.

2.33KB File

S3 Test 1 - .4954 seconds
CF Test 1 - .0117 seconds (42x faster)

S3 Test 2- .5189 seconds
S3 Test 2 - .0079 seconds (65x faster)

1.51KB File

S3 Test 1 - .5107 seconds
CF Test 1 - .0525 seconds  (10x faster)

S3 Test 2 - .2826 seconds
CF Test 2 - .0068 seconds (41x faster)

Now yesterday, I enabled the S3 domain where I host my videos for CloudFront as well.  I haven't started using it live on the site yet, but I ran some tests tonight to see what difference it would make with a larger file.

31.7MB File

S3 Test 1 - 43.8165 seconds
CF Test 1 - 28.7885 seconds (1.5x faster)

S3 Test 2 - 63.4555 seconds
CF Test 2 - 28.5563 seconds (2.25x faster)

So you see the same kind of ratio certainly does not hold up for a very large file... but I didn't expect that it would!  With that said though, downloading a full 15-35 seconds faster is nothing to sneeze at.  That can definitely make a big difference to a user's experience or allow for higher quality videos.

One more observation... as I ran these tests over and over on the same file (many more times than just the two tests above) I noticed something.  The S3 times could have a lot of variance in speed whereas CloudFront's speed was very consistent.  On S3 I could get the stylesheet to download as fast as .19 seconds and as slow as .60 seconds (.5 was about average) and the video as you see above from around 40 seconds to over a minute.  CloudFront meanwhile ranged from .0062 and .05 (average was around .0074) for the stylesheet and 25-30 seconds (average was 28) for the video.

For a long time I have been reading the various tech blogs (especially Tech Crunch) raving about the need for DRM-free music and also basically saying that music subscription services are the stupidest thing in the world.  They contend why would anyone want to rent their music when they can own it?

I contend why would anyone want to spend their money to buy a few songs that they "own" when they could pay a subscription service and have access to any song they want.  Maybe it's just the way that I consume music.  Since 90% of the time I am listening to music on a computer (and connected to the internet) it has never been an issue for me.  So to me in exchange for paying a modest subscription fee, I feel like I own virtually every song ever made.  So it's always been a no-brainer to me.  I subscribed to Yahoo! Music before it shut down and now subscribe to Rhapsody.

I was refreshed today to see someone else agreeing with this concept.  This CrunchGear post was pretty dead on in my opinion.

Last week I bought my T-Mobile G1, so now with the Google Android operating system and the 3G network I am ALWAYS connected.  I had my Blackberry before but it was the EDGE network so I was only semi-connected!  So with my G1 in hand I was at my in laws the other night.  We were talking about how country music star Chuck Wicks went to college with my wife and I.  The in laws hadn't heard his hit song before, "Stealing Cinderella", so I brought out the G1 and fired up Imeem Music Player and played it for them... streaming over the internet to my phone!

So the point is not everyone consumes 90% of their music like me:  in front of a computer.  But now with the broadband smart phones, tons of other connected devices being invented every day, WiFi everywhere, and soon with all the old television frequencies being freed up broadband internet access will be even more ubiquitous.  So with all kinds of devices being able to connect to high-speed internet from anywhere... owning music gets kind of irrelevant.  In fact having to "lug around" digital copies of the files from device to device is a pretty huge hassle compared to just having it live in the cloud.

The time may be coming when everyone will be subscribing to their music service of choice and just streaming their "rented" music from whereever they happen to be on what ever device they happen to be using.  Wow!  What a liberating thing the cloud is!

So Rhaposdy... your day just may be coming soon!  Now can you please get us a player for Android???