Coors Brewery Tour – Packaging from Nate Lewis on Vimeo.

Nate Lewis’s Coors pics on Flickr

I spent most of today working on one of my “learning” projects, Fifteenr.com.  I’ve been really interested in Twitter the last few months, mostly due to its simplicity and the way people seem to gravitate to sharing the most inconsequential details of their daily lives.

The idea is very simple — followers of the Twitter user Fifteenr are eligible for “15 minutes of Internet fame” on the site.  Kind of like a Woot.com of Steepandcheap.com for people looking for more followers.   Ideally I’ll have a job every minutes that goes through all of the followers of Fifteenr and selects one for the main page.  Some of my challenges today:

• I still have pretty basic CSS skills so the site looks…well like I’m learning the ins and outs of CSS
• My idea of getting the user’s main profile pic (not the thumbnail) has proven difficult
• I spent all of my time fighting various random issues that I’m still just making API calls everytime the page loads.  I haven’t even come up with an ER diagram for what the backend would need to be!
• I spent a lot of time dicking around with Facebox, Jquery, Thickbox, etc…
• The NFL draft was on…

It is an interesting side project for me — a nice departure from project management, SAP, and all things that I have to deal with in my real job.  If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Being a closet Steve Jobs fanboy, I have to admit I couldn’t put this one down.  The book runs from Steve’s childhood through Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, so no mention or even allusion to the Jesus phone.

How to lie with statistics

This book is very light, being 100 or so half pages, but it is quite dated with all of the examples being from the 20s through 50s.   The concepts are obviously the same and the book itself is a good refresher on the most basic principles of statistics, but it really could use a “modernization” update (I realize the author is probably either ancient or has passed away.)