Use the rule of thirds for better photos.

The folks at Instagram have some great tips for taking better photos on your iPhone with iOS 5:

Instagram Blog: iPhone Photo Tips: iOS 5 and the Rule of Thirds

Type each letter of the alphabet into Google, and you can get your Google Alphabet. Here is my Google Alphabet:

amazon, best buy, craigslist, dictionary, ebay, facebook, gmail, hotmail, ikea, jet blue, kohls, lowes, mapquest, netflix, orbitz, pandora, quotes, rei, sears, target, usps, verizon, weather, xbox, yahoo, zillow

What is your Google Alphabet? Add it in the comments.

Many soap dispensers I see have a small pool of soapy water on the counter underneath.

Here’s a solution from airplane bathrooms: make sure the soap dispenser hangs over the basin and not the counter. Soap drippings will wash away in the basin, and the counter will stay clear on it’s own.

Checkout at Costco is like sitting in a traffic jam, especially on Saturday morning. Costco employees try to check people out quickly, but most people have large carts filled with a lot of items.

Recently, I realized our local grocery stores and libraries have electronic self-checkout, but Costco does not. In fact, the local library is only self-checkout now.

The library, in fact, uses RFID instead of barcode scanners. With RFID, each book has a small, embedded sensor. Instead of scanning each book, you simply stack all your books on top of the checkout stand, and the computer immediately recognizes all the books you have.

Imagine a Costco with RFID. Instead of having to lift each of your items onto the conveyor belt (and then have the cashier put them back into your cart), you simply push your full cart past a sensor, and the computer tallies the items and recognizes the new RFID member card (included in your $50 annual membership) in your pocket. You pay the cashier and take your cart out to the car.

RFID technology is a little too expensive to put a sensor on every individual can of soda and pack of gum, but RFID has been used for years to track large palettes of product as they’re shipped on ships, trains, and trucks.

Since Costco deals mostly in bulk items (large cases of soda instead of six-packs), perhaps the economics of RFID can work for them.

First, they sued and killed Scrabulous, which let you play Scrabble with your Facebook friends. Now, Words with Friends lets you (and John Mayer) play a Scrabble-like game with friends and relatives across the world on your iPhone.

Board games help bring people together. With the Internet, you no longer have to be in the same room as your friends and relatives to play. What are the folks at Hasbro doing? How many other classic games can be brought onto new platforms like Facebook and iPhone?

Old and New: Google tested the shade of its logo and whether to use a drop-shadow.

Earlier this month, Google made a dramatic change to the design of their search results pages.

Design is always an iterative process with multiple prototypes and revisions. Usually, selecting which prototypes to use is done by an expert designer. But at Google, the users decided.

In a blog post detailing the re-design, Google explained that Google designers came up with different options, and then they tried each out to see which was the best. In the past, Google has tested small things like what shade of blue to use for link color. (If you’d like to run similar experiments on your site, you can use Google’s free Website Optimizer tool.)

In this case, the “best” meant which design produced the fastest click-throughs. Faster click-throughs mean (1) people are finding what they’re looking for faster and (2) Google can display more search results and AdWords to a person in a day.

This is the design model for the future. Human creativity creates prototypes, which are then rigorously tested in an iterative process using randomized experiments to arrive at the optimal solution.

Two things that make Google’s process successful: randomized experiments over statistically-significant numbers of users and a clear definition of “success” that is the same for the business and the users.

Excerpts from Business Week’s "Your Office Chair is Killing You":

Hamilton, like many sitting researchers, doesn’t own an office chair… The data back him up. Older people who move around have half the mortality rate of their peers… The best sitting alternative is perching—a half-standing position at barstool height that keeps weight on the legs and leaves the S-curve intact. Chair alternatives include the Swopper, a hybrid stool seat and the funky, high HAG Capisco chair. Standing desks and chaise lounges are good options. Ball chairs, which bounce your spine into a C-shape, are not.

With my own domain name and WordPress, I have a professionally-designed site that is search-engine optimized, can handle as much traffic as I can get, comes with comment spam filters, and many more powerful features without any of the hassle of server or code maintenance. Plus, with Google Apps, I have a professional naterosenberg.com email address that has great spam filtering and works on any device.

You can spend a lot of money on a website designer, servers, and email systems, but for most people, the following steps are sufficient.

Create a professional website and email address for under $25 per year.

1. $10.69/yr. Buy your company domain (mybusiness.com) at GoDaddy.com.
2. $0 Create a free website on WordPress and choose from one of their many professionally-designed themes. Create some pages (About, Contact) and write a few blog posts.
3. $10/yr Move your WordPress site to your domain.
4. $0 Sign-up for Google Apps Standard Edition to have professional @mybusiness.com email addresses. An advanced email system with great spam filters, Google works with any web browser, Outlook, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Dear iTunes: Please let me mail cards like these as presents.

Last week, I bought a physical CD for the first time since high school. Now, high school wasn’t as long ago for me as it is for others, but it’s still been a long time.

I was an early convert to iTunes, ripping all my CDs and selling them at a garage sale when Hansen was still on the radio. I was ecstatic when the iTunes Music Store made it easier to buy music and amazed when the iTunes Store on iPhone debuted.

But last week, I wanted to buy the new Jack Johnson En Concert album for my step-mom’s birthday, and I’ve always had a problem with iTunes when it came to gift-giving.

Some of the best presents I ever received were a Winton Marsalis, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Connick Jr., and Benny Goodman CDs from my parents, aunts, and uncles when I started listening to Jazz or the mix CD my sister made specifically for me. Though not that expensive, those presents had a lot of thought put into them and were very personal.

iTunes offers the convenience of emailing gift certificates, but I’ve never been a big fan for holidays. I e-mailed my cousins iTunes cards for Christmas, but the fun of opening presents disappears when there’s no box or envelope to open. So, I buy physical iTunes cards at the grocery store or Target instead, but they are very impersonal, only a step away from cash. Sometimes I’ve included a note to say the card is for a specific album, but that’s awkward.

Last year, iTunes added a Gift This feature to send specific albums, videos, or audiobooks, but you have to e-mail them or print them out. I want iTunes to mail them in a nice envelope for me like they do with gift cards.

What I’d like to see is something like the iTunes Album cards that Starbucks sells. I use Gift This to select an album. iTunes sends a nice envelope for me as a gift and inside is a heavy stock or plastic card with the album’s cover art and the code to redeem the gift. Even better would be if I could create a custom mix with cover art of my choosing.

Half-yoke eggs with spike scrambled in unsalted butter. Turkey sausage patty. Toasted English muffin. Try it.

Freakonomics author Steve Levitt confirms: Capt. Chesley Sullenberger yesterday completed the first water landing in the history of commercial aviation.

 
Mindless increases in school spending will be an expensive fiasco that will generate more disillusionment than human capital….

The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality… Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size….

The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some other way.
 

Turk, the Harvard Business School turkey

Shannon and I visited Harvard Business school this fall. As we walked through the campus, we suddenly came upon a wild turkey standing outside one of the lecture halls.

Turns out she had been there for a year and the students named her Turk.

A week after we left, she attacked a local reporter and was removed from campus before she could complete her MBA.

1998: Buys New Frontier for $165 million
June 2008: Sells New Frontier for $1200 million (511% compounded annual return)
December 2008: Buys Treasure Island for $750 million

Nate crossing the finish line with his dad in back

Two weeks ago, I finished my first marathon ever! I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, but I have been helping Shannon with her business school applications until this weekend.

The good news: unlike Pheidippides, I finished and did not die.

St. George: Most Drive-thrus per Capita

The race was on a Saturday, and we drove up after work Friday. We picked up my number at the expo after dark and went looking for a dinner place. St. George has every kind of fast food known to man, but the nicest sit-down restaurant we saw was Claim Jumper. We couldn’t even find a Cheesecake Factory. We settled for Olive Garden.

A Room at the Inn

Now, we were supposed to stay in a friend’s cabin, but instead of following my friend’s directions, we followed Google Maps, which sent us an hour in the wrong direction up a dirt road with no lights through a forest. The race was going to start the next day at 6:45 a.m., and I was planning on waking at 4:30 a.m. Once we turned around and made it back to downtown St. George, it was already 11:30 p.m., and the house was still at least half an hour away. So, at Shannon’s suggestion, we turned into the Best Western in town instead. Luckily, they had had a cancellation and had a room available.

I love Best Westerns. There’s nothing particularly great about them, but I have never stayed in a bad one. They always have comfortable bed and since they’re independently owned, they each have unique things that make them seem like a bed and breakfast instead of an impersonal national chain. This Best Western was no different.

I had brought oatmeal and raisins, my normal pre-run breakfast, which I had planned to make at the cabin. Now that we were staying at the Best Western, I was worried that I didn’t have a bowl. It turned out the Best Western had a runner’s breakfast with waffles, eggs, bacon, yogurt, fruit, cereal, and yes, oatmeal with raisins. Woohoo! My day was off to a great start. And they had a van taking people to the shuttles so Shannon didn’t have to wake up to drive me.

“It Never Rains for this Marathon”

The weather forecast said that it would be cool and partly sunny in the morning and drizzling in the afternoon. I ate breakfast with a woman who was running her seventh St. George Marathon. As we walked out to catch the van, we realized in the blackness of the early morning that it was raining. She said, “I can’t believe it. It never rains for this marathon.”

In fact, it rained all morning. As my dad and I started the race, it was pitch black outside (I couldn’t see more than 10-20 ft. in front of me), raining, and gusty. The rain came down harder and harder, and the wind picked up. I saw one girl being taken away in an ambulance shaking, clearly suffering from hypothermia. With only short and a drenched shirt, by mile 11 I thought I might also get hypothermia. But around the half-way point, the wind died down and the rain let up.

Mile 21

The longest run I had done in my training was twenty miles. Right on schedule, around mile 21, my legs started killing me. I wasn’t tired all over and definitely wasn’t out of breath, but I really started to wonder if my legs might stop moving. I had told myself all race long that if I made it to mile 24, I was going to make it. Running mile 21 was the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever done. I had been tired before mile 21, but this was the first time in my life, I actually thought I might be physically incapable of moving my legs. It was a feeling I had not experience during training. I looked 50 ft. in front of me over and over again and said, “Just make it that far.”

“How much farther?”

I had been telling myself since the night before that if I just made it to mile 24, I had made it. But as I came into town and reached mile 24, the reality that I still had two miles to go was almost too much to bear, but as I had been doing for over five hours, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. I wish that at the end of these races, they had signs that said “1/2 mile to go, 1/4 mile to go, 400 yards, etc.” Everyone is doing busy cheering to hear me ask, “How much farther?” I had the same problem when I ran the half marathon. I didn’t know how close I was until I turned the corner and only had a few hundred feet left.

Father and son marathoners

This time, as I came around the corner, my dad (who had finished the marathon an hour before me) and step-mom saw me and ran with me. I can’t describe the flood of emotion that came over to me as I finally saw Shannon on the other side of the finish line cheering me. I had a last-minute burst of energy and gave Shannon a huge hug and kiss as I finished. What a sense of accomplishment! Since my sister first announced almost a year before that she was doing the Orange County half marathon, and I decided I couldn’t letter her show me up, I had been training for almost a year.

Finished

I’ve never been much of a runner and I don’t know that I’ll ever do another marathon, but it was truly great life experience to train for and finish a marathon.

Big thanks to my mom for planting the seed, Arestia for the initial challenge, Andrew for running the 10-miler with me, Thayer for being my training guide, Nike for incredibly good socks, Apple for Nike+iPod, my dad for inviting me to do the full marathon with him, Karen for the amazing massage after the race, and Shannon for always supporting me and pushing me out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to go do my training run. I love you all.

Article: The Best Advice I Ever Got

Some of my favorites:

• Michael Bloomberg: Always ask for the order and when the customer says yes, stop talking.
• Tina Fey: Sign your own checks.
• Peter Peterson: Focus on things you do better than others.
• Nelson Peltz: Get sales up and keep expenses down.
• Charlene Begley: Spend a ton of time with your customers.
• Andrea Guerra: In your first years, don’t chase fancy titles; find people who can teach you something.

Video: Johnny Lee at TED

I checked, and Safari 3 does not require the dot-com. What a great feature! Unlike Firefox, which uses Google’s “I feel lucky” feature when you enter in a word without the dot-com, Safari just adds the dot-com for you. Give it a try.

For example, typing “safari” into the Safari address bar takes you to the african sightseeing site safari.com, not the web browser’s site apple.com/safari, even though the web broswer’s site is #1 on a Google Search for “safari”.

Seth suggests the dot-com will stick around as shorthand for “our website is.” I agree. Still, thank you to Apple for not requiring me to type “.com” every time I visit my usual sites (wikipedia, amazon, techmeme).

One of the best ways to quickly scan the headlines of any publication is with an RSS feed reader (short video about RSS). I currently use Google Reader, but there are many other great RSS feed readers available.

BONUS: Create a Google Alert to stay current with the latest news about your company and your customers. Type in the company name, and Google will alert you anytime there is a new article about that company on the web. You can make alerts for people, too. Unfortunately, you cannot get Google Alerts via RSS feeds yet.