It worked okay, but not great. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a gadget lying around the house that could output live composite video. Both my normal video camera and my digital camera had exhausted batteries that wouldn’t recharge, which is a gadget fail on my part. And while my Flip video camera is tiny and it can output pre-recorded video through a composite cable, it can’t output live video (?!). Lame. I didn’t care enough to buy a new battery-operated gadget that could send out out live video. I settled for projecting scary Halloween images and video, but it wasn’t the same as a hole going right through your body.

I found a plastic “Roman centurion” breastplate for $10, but that led to the second problem: the breastplate was too bulky. I trimmed the breastplate down a lot, but it still was too substantial:

Next time, I’d go with just cardboard and duct tape. On the bright side, the costume was comfortable and quick to take on and off. It wasn’t that hard to make, either. Just a little bit of cutting and duct tape did the trick:

I might circle back to this idea down the road, but I think it’s safe to call Halloween 2009 a mixed bag.

We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages. Now if you want to watch my videos but see the captions in Portuguese or German or Turkish, you can!

The second way we celebrated is with a fun video. As you may know, I recently lost a bet with my team and they shaved off all my hair. Click to see the 30 second explanation of why I’m bald. But you may not know that my team recorded a video as I lost my hair. Now you can watch and laugh along too:

I hope that you enjoy the video! You may want to subscribe to the webmaster video channel to see more free webmaster videos in the future.

Clearly I need to do a trip across the northern part of the country. If you run a website, the Google Chart API is a great/free way to add pretty charts to your website or dashboard easily. You can even make google-o-meters

and QR codes

in addition to maps:

If you haven’t tried out the Chart API, give it a whirl sometime; it’s pretty easy.

For October, I’m not going to use any Microsoft software. No Microsoft operating systems (WinXP, Vista, or Windows 7) and no Microsoft Office allowed. I will continue to use their keyboards, because they make very nice keyboards, and I will allow myself to use their websites–sometimes I need to do a query on Bing to test how well they do, for example.

I don’t plan to switch to Apple, although I might try a Mac for a week. Apple products are polished and usable, so why not switch to Apple? That would be a much longer blog post. Apple makes great design decisions for the majority of people, but if you don’t like a particular decision, it can be very difficult to change it. Have you ever wanted to see the exact time (including seconds) on an iPhone? It’s hard to do, and I’m that kind of guy. Another big reason is just that I’m huge believe in free and open-source software, and I want to support that sort of software.

So on Friday I installed Ubuntu on my Windows XP laptop. On Saturday, I downloaded all the data from my pedometer (the software only runs in Windows) and shut down my home Windows XP machine. I already had a machine running Ubuntu at home, but I managed to get it driving two out of my three monitors:

What have I learned so far? The current version of Ubuntu (called “Jaunty Jackalope”) is really quite nice. There’s a lot of polish to the UI and the day-to-day tasks work very smoothly. At the same time, it’s possible to tinker around with something so much (I’m thinking about fonts right now) that you mess things up. But the dev version of Chrome for Linux has been really fast and stable, even though Chrome for Linux isn’t officially supported yet. I spend a large chunk of each day in a web browser, so having Chrome as an option was critical.

I’ll let you know how the 30 days turns out, but right now I’m optimistic.

Step 1. Buy a productivity book.

Any productivity book will do. I use a book called “The Now Habit.” It doesn’t matter what book you order though, because you probably won’t read it. You can use any random “increase your productivity” book.

Step 2. Look at the productivity book and tell yourself, “If I don’t get X done, I’m going to have to read that productivity book.”

That’s it. As far as I can discern, staring at the cover of a productivity book gives you almost as much of a motivational boost as actually reading the book. And if staring at the cover doesn’t work, then tell yourself the punishment for not getting your work done is that you’ll have to read that dang productivity book. Pretty soon you’ll be off and working. Enjoy.

One of my favorite hidden Google gems is a program for Android phones called My Tracks. I like it enough that we made a short video about it. Enjoy!

As always, you can watch more videos on the official webmaster video channel on YouTube.

For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax.

For the month of July, I biked into work. I learned:
- I don’t much like to bike to work. Part of it is probably that I have pretty old/crappy bike that doesn’t change gears quite right. The fastest path to work is on car-dense road, which also isn’t much fun.
- For the iPhone, I found a program for $3 called MotionX-GPS that does a very solid job of recording times and GPS tracks.
- But the best program I found was for Android. It’s called My Tracks and it’s free. It’s better than MotionX-GPS for a couple reasons. First, in addition to “total time,” the My Tracks application also tracks “moving time.” In other words, if you’re stuck at a traffic light, your “total time” keeps counting but your “moving time” doesn’t. Second, the My Tracks application can easily upload your GPS track to a Google Map.
- I can tell a notable improvement in my fitness level. It’s deeply satisfying to shave a few seconds off my biking time every day.
- The easiest way to improve your speed is to ensure that your bike tires are fully inflated.
- I get hungrier when I bike to work. I can also eat more without gaining much weight.
- Google has a program that lets bike-to-workers earn donations for their favorite charity.

After biking to work for July, I ended up doing a short sprint triathlon (swim 400 yards, bike 11 miles, run 3 miles) this past weekend. I did it in about an hour and 20 minutes, which I’m pretty happy with–especially with my crappy bike.

For the month of August, I’m shooting to read 15 books in 30 days. I’ve only read 6-7 books so far, so I’m behind, but I figure I’ll read 15 books and if that takes a little while longer, no biggie. I love to read.

Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?

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I think it’s spam about embiggening a specific body part. But the spammer clearly didn’t set up their spam template correctly. Anyone have guesses about which email spamming software package this is?

I’m just now wrapping up an effort to not watch any television for 30 days. I started on May 22nd (right after all the season finales finished). I learned that other than a few times at night, I don’t really miss the television–and I ended up reading a lot more books. I’ll still watch some TV after this experiment, but I think I’ll watch less. I also noticed when I watched TV after a month off that when a pizza commercial came on, I started to hanker for pizza. Search ads have wonderful, trackable ROI–but branding ads can be effective too.

So now the question is: what project should I attempt next? I wrote down a few ideas ranging from hard (read 15 books in 30 days) to near-impossible (no email for 30 days). I’m curious to hear what you think I should try:

If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!