How did it happen?

In July, I stayed with my friend for a week in Arlington, VA after a wedding in Maryland. When I was there I wanted to eat a banana that was a bit too ripe I couldn’t just crank the handle back without mashing the banana to pieces. His sister-in-law Brittny was staying with him at the time and was carrying a grilling spatula. I asked her if I could borrow it to make a cut in the rid.

Brittny: “Oh you don’t know how monkeys peel bananas?”

Me: “No..”

Brittny pinches the tip of the banana and opens it from the bottom

MY HEAD EXPLODES

I couldn’t believe it, how did I go through 28 years of life not knowing this? PEOPLE MUST KNOW!!

I immediately tweeted my discovery:

“holy crap, I just learned the way monkeys peel a banana (just pinch the end and peel) http://twitpic.com/9n7r3“ 9:08 PM Jul 7th from Tweetie

My friend Alistair re-tweeted and replied.

“DUDE! Youtube it”

It wasn’t until the next morning when I was making breakfast and wanted to put banana in my cereal that I thought about Alistair’s tweet. I should put my discovery on Youtube, why not?

I tweeted

“Dropping some knowledge, my 1st YT how-to video: “Open a Banana Like A Monkey” http://bit.ly/dmIId @F1LT3R thanks for the push ” 10:37 AM Jul 8th from Tweetie in reply to F1LT3R

I setup the camera on the counter and recorded the first take, fumbling over my words and massacring English in the process. I uploaded it to Youtube later that afternoon and when my friend Mike came back from work I showed it to him. He got a kick out of it and submitted it to Reddit, he’s pretty active in the community there.

Part of the reason it shot up in Reddit I believe was because the athiest community saw my video as reply to Ray Comforts religious slant on peeling a banana, the monkey method basically blew his line of thought out of the water.

The clip ended up making its rounds in mid July. It was a crazy ride. Eventually around 600k views on YT I was invited to their partner program. I didn’t know I could make $ off of the Youtube clip. Eventually I did up earning a couple hundred bucks for sharing my discovery.

Some Milestones

55th most popular link in 2009 on Reddit!

Popular on YT: World-Wide

Lifehacker
Featured as a Food Hack

Yahoo Homepage! Twice!
Reuploaded on Yahoo! Video, Voted to Best Videos of ’09

Busch Gardens made a video response
with Kashina, a REAL Gorilla!

I’m on TV in Japan!
NHK Video Clip, transcript

Lots of interesting video responses, some concerning.

Lots of supporting comments. Lots of not-so-nice comments.

Could I do it again? Doubtful

• No Script, genuine. Just me (in my pj’s)
• Polarizing subject – you loved it or you hated it. You knew about it or you didn’t.
  MIND = BLOWN or You’re a MORON
• Monkey Pants (I swear I did not plan that)
• Killer headline on Reddit “Holy crap, I never realized I was peeling a banana wrong my entire life [Vid]“
• Timing, released early in the week, went more viral as the week went on
• Wasn’t the first to do a YT banana peeling video. (I like to think that it was my likeliness that made it catch on like it did)
• It seemed like a perfect storm of factors brought it together at the end.

Lots of copy-cats. First, my clip was picked up was poached from YT and submitted to Yahoo! It made the front page and got 2mil+ views before I submitted my own original then I contacted them and got it pulled. I got to the homepage again with this resubmission in the best viral videos batch.

I tried to capture screenshots of the craziness as it happened in my Banana Trail Flickr Photoset.

If I were to estimate, between YouTube, Yahoo, all of the articles, and times I saw it refactored & reused I’d say the video received over 10mil+ views worldwide. Maybe more.

That’s Pretty Awesome To Think About

picture courtesy of bripblap.com

So I have a confession to make, I love delicious, but I’m lousy at tagging bookmarks. I have a horrible memory so in my travels (and I delicious links a lot) I find myself wanting to tag a bookmark with as many keywords as possible on some off chance I don’t know what to search on to dig up the particular bookmark I’m trying to retrieve. I end up manually toggling every popular tag that is shown on a given post. It’s too time consuming for me.

I’ve been working with jQuery and bookmarklets a lot lately so I had the idea of leveraging the two to create my own LazyTagger bookmarklet for Del.icio.us.

The LazyTagger process is simple

1. You must have the Del.icio.us ‘post’ bookmarklet installed. Try my customized version (does away w/ the popup window which I find annoying) post to delicious « drag this to your toolbar
2. Drag the LazyTagger bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar
   
3. Copy and paste this code into the ‘location’ of your newly created bookmark – you’re going to have to go and edit the bookmark manually from the browser. This has to be done to the avoid character limit on drag-and-drop bookmarklets.
   

   javascript:var%20s=document.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src','http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js');document.body.appendChild(s);s.onload=function(){var%20tags=[];$('#save-reco-tags%20ul.tag-list%20li,#save-pop-tags%20ul.tag-list%20li').addClass("on").each(function(){tags.push($(this).text().match(/\D*/g)[0]);});tagit=tags.join('%20');$('input#tags').val('').val(tagit+'%20').focus();};void(s);

4. ‘post to delicious’ just like you normally would
5. When you’re at delicious, click the LazyTagger bookmarklet
6. All of the popular and recommended tags will be selected automatically. Laziness rocks.
7. After all of the tags are toggled the focus will be placed on the tags input so you can begin typing any other tags you deem necessary.

That’s LazyTagger. I’ve been using it for a long time and I can honestly say I don’t think I could go back. Feedback appreciated.

Luckily I have an awesome sister who works in design and is good with Illustrator – which I am definitely not. Thanks to my sister Ryanne, I was able to go from a concept:

To the final design:

She finally helped me get it right. All that’s left is to finally get my blog design in order. It’s due for a refresh. Let me know what you think.

Check out the Upcoming Event. Sign up sooner than later, as of this writing there were only about 20 slots left!

I’ll be talking about how I’ve used jQuery in some of my development projects and some tricks and best practices I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll also be talking about degradation, progressive enhancement and (time permitting) discuss how jQuery’s Plugin architecture lets small teams do a lot with little.

Update

The talk was a great success and I had a great time. I’ve posted my slides: jQuery Best Practices. Much thanks goes to the Betahouse for hosting the Refresh Boston event.

As well as the accompanying demos on Progressive Enhancement:

• jQuery Rating
• Toggle-able Forms

In reality I don’t have a single point of failure at all because I’m leveraging web services by not putting all of my eggs in one basket. However, if my laptop did have a serious problem I’d have to deal with an annoying situation. If for instance my cat spilt a glass of water on the computer (happened to my sister just last week), I’d be out of commission for a few days, but I would still be able to get back on my feet relatively easily. For these reasons I do have a single point of failure, but one I’m comfortable with.

Since June of 2006 I’ve used my MacBook Pro at all of my recent 9-5′s as well as personal use and I have yet to have a hardware failure. In fact truth be told I rarely even turn it off.<br/> knock on wood again

I’d say most savvy netizens have similar setups. Although it can’t hurt to share mine.

Online Applications I Use

• Gmail in favor of Mail
• Google Calendar in favor of iCal
• Google Docs in addition to Numbers and Pages
• Subversion Repositories for Code Projects
• Serial #’s Labeled:Serial in Gmail (or any other important info worth labeling)
• Del.ici.ous for Bookmarks
• Flickr for Pictures

and many more

• MP3 Library on a LaCie external drive + DVD Backups
• iPhoto Library on external drive + DVD Backups

I also use SuperDuper! for nightly bootable backups. Time Machine was putting a strain on my system and if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
One thing I would like to move completely online are my finances. I do the usual online banking, but I use Quicken on my Mac for personal finances. Quicken sucks, especially on the mac. Hopefully one of these days there will be a decent web app to replace it. I’ve played around with Mint and Wesabe but they’re just not there and I don’t feel entirely safe with that type of personal information in-the-cloud yet.

Right now we’re at a half-way point between pre-internet-personal-hardware-entrapment and post-personal-hardware-cloud-processing-greatness. How long do you think it will be? I say 10 years before I’m on an Apple Thin client as a primary computer. That will be sweet.

I wish I blogged more often but it’s hard to find the time to do it. The bottleneck for me was creating and editing posts via WordPress’ backend. Loading, refreshing, uploading pictures, and double-checking the blog post to make sure everything was lined up correctly, etc. The time I would spend writing a post was compounded by the back and forth between the front and backend until I found MarsEdit.

MarsEdit to the Rescue

Simply put MarsEdit is an OSX application that interfaces with the WordPress backend of the blog via XML-RPC. MarsEdit allows me to edit/post/upload images with ease. If I wrote for multiple blogs (I don’t yet), then I could do it all from within MarsEdit and life would be that much easier. Now I can post/edit/upload much faster. The next step to making things REALLY fly is my use of Markdown.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). daringfireball

Essentially Markdown is shorthand HTML that makes it faster bang out blog posts.

If you’re blogging or thinking about blogging I highly recommend adding these tools to your repertoire.

You’ll notice since I implemented these tools back in the beginning of March there has been a serious uptick in the frequency of posting here at somedirection. A large part of that is leveraging MarsEdit+Markdown in this blog. There’s also another factor and I’ll be writing about it shortly.

Resources

• MarsEdit
• I use the WordPress Markdown Plugin to format the pseudo markup.
• Markdown CheatSheet PDF

This post was written in Markdown, you can view the syntax here.

Recently I’ve been using Twitter more and more. What was initially an annoyance of a service (first time I saw a tweet about having to take a deuce I checked out) has become my office water cooler from my virtual home office where I spend my days toiling away working on the pipes of the interwebs.

Initially when I signed up for Twitter back in March of 2007 I chose a different moniker “ky“ because the big thing about Twitter was that you could use it on your cell with SMS. I figured if people were going to txt me via twitter that “ky” would be a hell of a lot easier to type than “somedirection” so I went with it.

I think Twitter as a service is starting to catch on – even Obama has 2 channels: BarackObama and ObamaNews. Seeing that use of twitter was probably the first time I thought – hey Twitter is mainstream. Obama is using technology in his campaign exceptionally well I might add. But I digress..

I realized recently that I don’t want to be boxed into the “ky” username. It’s nice to have and people recognize me (once they see my avatar) but it’s not me, it’s not my brand. So I went about changing this and stumbled upon the realization that Twitter actually handles for multiple Twitter personas quite nicely.

The Primary User Method on Twitter

1. You need a unique email address for each name
2. Choose 1 handle as your master account from which you’ll send all updates. For me I’m going to stick with ky because it’s what I started with and I have a handful of followers.
3. Create your other usernames. For my purposes I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t lose somedirection, nor did I want one of my clones to snatch KyleBradsaw from my grasp.
4. Now here’s how you can funnel people into your primary username. For myself I have just 1 tweet for both users somedirection and KyleBradshaw “DBA @ky”. This will give the surfer a link directly to my primary account while also letting them know that the account they’re looking at isn’t where I update.
5. Now ONLY follow your primary account from your alternate(s). Every time you twitter under your primary account and some one visits one of your alternate handles, when they look under the “With Others” tab they will see all of your primary holders’ tweets!

Each user can have it’s own style. I like having a couple of different looks across all of my users.

Initially I was thinking I’d have to kill off ky goodnesss for somedirection to keep my brand in tact, but this is a suitable workaround and I can have the best of both worlds. While I was at it I also grabbed KyleBradshaw for good measure. If Twitter becomes popular like myspace or gmail I’ll be glad I did.

Misinformed Crazies Will Find You

Most recently a high schooler found “Kyle Bradshaw” on Facebook – she must’ve had an online romance or something because she was heated mad at “Kyle Bradshaw” when she discovered he was a 26 year old computer GEEK living in Boston with a girlfriend and a cat named Cleo. She had basically gone from mild mannered high school girl to private investigator extraordinaire picking apart my online identity in her own estrogen-enhanced personal drama. Although it’s not very hard, she was no Matlock – a simple google query will land you here without struggle. The transcript of the entire ordeal is available here for those interested.

As unnerving as the whole experience was at the time I don’t regret having my life out there in the ether. I did get paranoid that my address was published on my resume so I quickly pulled that for fear of psychotic-high-school-girl-obsessions. Maybe I’d get a severed parakeet head in my mailbox or something – I dunno. Either way that drama broke the camels back.

The Importance of Having a Persona

It is very important to the type of work I do to be “out there”. However, on the grand scale of things I am a fairly private person for someone that has their life so publicly available. I want to control as much as my personal brand as possible because the Internet has an exceptional memory. I always consider the potential implications of anything I publish, pictures I upload, messages I post, etc. Some people don’t seem to give a rats ass about such things but it’s important to me. Good Karma, Good Reputation, Respectability and Honesty are things that I strive for.

To boot if you want to be recognizable out there you need an appealing, memorable moniker. Whether you’re notasausage, or you go by made up words like adactio it’s important that you have your own voice to differentiate yourself from the millions of Internet citizens.

Online, my handle is somedirection. Why? Not because Kyle060481 sounded too cool for school, but because I identified with it. I started as nodirection back in my college days because by my 3rd year I realized that I didn’t want the degree that I originally set out to get, then I graduated! Thus SOMEdirection was born. I’m not entirely sure what the next step in my username evolution will be honestly (haha). I just know that I love what I do and I’m going to keep doing it as long as it’s paying the bills.

With the creation of handle/alias/moniker sometimes people don’t identify you as your name but as your handle. I found this was the case for me before I went to South By Southwest in Austin where I finally met my colleagues face to face. Stop Design became Douglas Bowman, Clagnut became Richard Rutter, Slayer Office became Steve Chipman, Mezzoblue became Dave Shea, sometimes you discover new acquaintances are NOT sausages – you get the point.

Beyond the “name” there’s also a huge opportunity to brand a logo as yourself. These can be instantly recognizable if done right. Inman, Haney, and Moll come to mind. I was quite surprised the other day when I went to view ObamaNews [pic] on Twitter and stood out to me like a sore thumb instantly. I was very surprised I even noticed it but I shouldn’t be – it’s light blue color is loud but not overbearing and it stands out from its neighbors in its simplicity.

I need to get a logo that stands by itself and can be instantly recognizable. I’ve put it off for so long because I can never make anything cool enough that I would want to represent me (I would love to hire a talented designer to help me with this).

Persona Evolution

The creation of a handle itself comes with responsibility. There are numerous “Kyle Bradshaw”s out there, but only one somedirection. It’s important that this username represents me everywhere I sign up for a new service, comment on a blog, or join a forum.

Do you have any thoughts good or bad about online personas? Do you have one already or are you planning on creating one? Do you even care how you are perceived on the net? Feedback greatly appreciated.

UPDATE

I’ve created a new logo for my personal brand and I really like how it has come out.

Read about it’s creation »

Its obvious to me, but what I find is that people have a very hard time staying Cash Flow Positive. I was inspired by an article I read on Get Rich Slowly about “The Power Of Positive Cash Flow” to share my experiences with money, where I was and where I am today.

I’ll be the first to admit I took things for granted when my cash flow was sky high, I was living w/ 3 other guys and my rent was only $330/mo. After I graduated from college I purchased an Audi TT to replace an old beat up Mercury Cougar I had had because I got in a collision with the old car (a Chevy Lumina) I had since 16. It had been my goal since early in college to get that car, so I got one. It was my reward to myself for graduating with a degree from WPI so I got it and paid ~ 23k for an ’02 Audi TT Roadster with 33k miles on it. I was that prototypical kid that simonized his car constantlly, was irritated when it was dirty, avoided potholes like it was the plague and generally acted like it was a fragile fabergé egg. It was a great car, but after a while I found that I didn’t own the car it owned me. It was impractical as a primary vehicle, the trunk space could barely fit a suitcase, so as time went on I wanted to part with my beloved TT. I ended up selling it 1 year later on eBay for $18k. 1 year, $5k depreciation.

Around this time I really wanted a motorcycle. I think because in my neighborhood there were always people riding dirt bikes and my parents never let me get one. So I decided I wanted to get a motorcycle, but before that I figured a truck would be the most practical way to go. It’s bed could hold a hell of a lot of suitcases and a motorcycle . I also wanted to be able to drive around more than 1 passenger. I researched quad cab pickups and ended up paying $16k for a used ’02 Dodge Dakota.

Next I got my motorcycle license, then I got my bike – a 2000 Buell Cyclone M2 for $4200. This thing had some power and I promptly dropped it on the road because I dropped the clutch too quickly (did a wheelie I couldn’t hold on to). I sold the beat up motorcycle to a neighbor who was some what of an motorcycle aficionado/gearhead for $2000 cash. 2 months, $2200k depreciation.

As time went on I had no use for the truck aside from the occasional mountain bike adventure. My fantasies of being a rebel subsided quickly and the 14-16 mpg my truck would get was driving me nuts. So I looked into replacing THAT with a super fuel-efficient vehicle that got the job done. This led me to my next purchase, a 2006 Honda Civic EX that I paid $21K for, and they took my truck as a trade in which they only paid off what I owed the bank @ the time – I think it was around $12k, another year or so – $4k depreciation.

Now I have my Civic, I love it, and I’m driving it into the ground and I don’t care about “looks” or “flashiness”, just cost. Although the major reason for getting a new civic and not a used one were the looks of the ’06 model compared to an ’05.

So in total since graduating college in ’03 I’ve spent about $11k on what were essentially big boy toys with nothing to show for it. I’m over it now and I’ve completely changed my perspective on “stuff”. It didn’t do much for me and I’m glad that I learned that lesson early in life as opposed to later.

I’m much more conscious now of how I make and also spend my money. Reading sites like Get Rich Slowly are a great resource and I highly recommend checking it out.

There’s a saying I absolutely love – It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.