TJ Crawford’s Abstract Ideas

Our 2 youngest (11 months) had been a bit slow to crawl. We were hoping they would get moving however now that they are can we tie them down. Trent LOVES the stereo equipment and rushes over so he can push every button and turn every knob. It took me 30 minutes the other night to get the settings back to the correct place. Speakers were turned off, surround turned off, muting, etc. Amy had to grab something from the back room a few days ago, a 20 second task, and Trent was sitting playing with some toys. As she was walking back down the hall the stereo got cranked up to a level that was WAY TOO LOUD. Trent was sitting in front of the stereo again looking at her like "WHAT?". 

Velcro could work too!

Here is the first crawl just a few days before.

My wife has always liked medical things and has made comment on several occasions that she would have loved to have been a nurse. When she saw in the paper that the Bodies Revealed Exhibition was in Sacramento we knew we needed to go (even though we did the standard "do you really want to go?" at least 7-10 times).

This last weekend we packed up the twins with all of the standard diaper bag gear and headed down to Sac. We had called Amy’s sister and Bob (The Brother-in-law) and planned to meet them. We were a bit surprised to see such a small building as I was thinking museum type spaces. However the small accommodations didn’t detract from the displays at all. It was absolutely fascinating, the manner in which they preserve the bodies lets them do all kinds of creative displaying.

The process uses acetone to remove all the water from tissue on a traditionally preserved body. They then use a polymer in conjunction withe a vacuum chamber that somehow replaces all the water with the polymer. Your left with a plasticized mummy. With everything being plasticized you can remove bone, skin and other tissues leaving organs, blood vessels, muscle etc. My favorite one was the blood vessels (see image). You can’t believe how fine of a network runs throughout the human body and I was amazed that one of the largest concentrations was in your heel. On displays of the heart and lungs they even colored the arteries vs the veins so you could see how blood circulated out then back in. 

When we bought the tickets they let us in with our strollers, but a few minutes in the head attendant nabbed me and made me check mine, thus having to walk around the entire time holding Trent. He is the lighter of our twin boys but at 22-23 pounds and as squirmy as a worm out of the ground, it was tough holding him for 45 minutes. He also wanted to touch every display we walked within 3 feet of. We got to talking with a sympathetic attendant that told us it wasn’t fair as there are people that come in all the time with wild 2-4 year olds and, in her opinion, that was worse. Interesting fact, you tip one of the displays over and it cost the exhibitor $1,000,000 to replace. Wow!

There is a great deal of controversy over this exhibit though. All the bodes are of Asian origin and word has it they are all obtained through the black market. You can imagine how they came to be on the black market too. Within the Asian cultures it is definitely a no, no to have your body treated in such a way as these have been preserved. I can’t really condone taking peoples remains and doing something against their wishes, but I would have to tell you that it is unbelievable informative and educational, beyond anything I learned in the class room.

If you get the opportunity to go I highly recommend it as you will learn and see more about the human body in 45 minutes than the average person sees in their educational career.

One of the things we tell our clients is that if you don’t have someone to produce content for a blog you shouldn’t go down the blog, and for the most part, social path. You have to create, or repurpose content to keep it going. Well here I am writing a post after 36 days without one.

It’s interesting as I was playing with some new Google Analytics features an noticed that my stats had gone through the floor. No one reading for a long time because I didn’t have anything new. So I updated my blog software, added some GA features and lets see how many people come and look. It will be an interesting experience. I’ll have to make sure and be diligent in my posts over the next few weeks.

Extreme Makeover Home Edition visited Stagecoach a little town about an hour from Reno last week. They were there building a house for a Harley riding minster (Pastor Steve) and his family who donate to various charities through their Harley affiliations.  and his family. They started doing fund raisers through their motorcycle rides and ultimately turned their small 2 car garage into a youth center. Read more about them here NevadaExtremeHome.com

The company I work for (Twelve Horses) and more importantly one of our Biz Dev guys Dean McBeth decided to donate some time of his own and help spread the word by spending long cold hours at the site taking pictures and pushing the social medias, much like this blog post. Thanks Dean, a great cause and benefit for the local community.

You can see the rest of my photos from the last night of the build here.

I am working on a project for the Las Vegas Monorail that has been one of the most fun, and rewarding, in my career.

We started working with the LVMC in late 2006, with a website redesign and a very basic purchase of tickets online. The delivery was all off line via snail mail however. Our contacts were new to the Monorail as they had just undergone a corporate purge from the top down. They had inherited a project that a 3rd party had been working on to bring mobile barcodes to the Monorail for their tickets. To make a really long story short the 3rd party was not equipped to implement such a project and ended up burning up a year and a half of time trying. We had been helping them with the integration to the LVMC’s current online purchase process and had formed a great relationship with the company that licensed the barcode technology to the 3rd party in the first place (Swiftpass UK). Swiftpass revoked their license due to non-performance and myself/Twelve Horses picked up where they left off.

In the meantime while all of this was going on we had been listening to the LVMC and their website needs as well as some of their pain regarding sales, specifically corporate sales. They had formed a corporate sales team and were going to be approaching all of the large trade shows and conventions as well as the hotel properties asking them to offer LVMC tickets. After talking to them a little while about how they planned on accomplishing, and more importantly supporting and scaling this it was evident the TH team could help. Since we had developed the purchasing front end, integrated with the credit card processor and with Swiftpass for the barcodes we were uniquely positioned to develop a ticketing platform that could transact tickets based on the varied targets the LVMC was pursuing.

Our platform uses a re-branded interface for the companies that did not have the time, effort or expertise to do a full scale implementation. This was the same process the LVMC used to transact tickets however we allowed for text and graphics to be completely changed and branded for whomever the partner was. Additionally for the large and sophisticated partners we developed an API interface allowing them to integrate LVMC ticket sales right into their established shopping cart, folio or purchasing engine.

Currently this system is powering the ticket sales for the likes of CES, ASTA and all the major trade shows that come to Vegas. In April we will be launching the next major phase to this and delivering a 2D Barcode directly to the purchasers mobile phone. they can then use that phone at a special eTicket kiosk to print their LVMC Ticket.

In the time we lost other industries have introduced mobile based tickets such as the Pirates baseball stadium, Continental Airlines and a Ski Resort in Bend, Oregon. unfortunately it will not be the first to market implementation we had hoped for however it will be the first to integrate with a Magnetic Stripe ticket so often used by Transit Authorities.

 We continue to build upon the features and extend the systems capabilities. We are in the planning phases to provide the hardware & desktop applications for extend the system to their customer service booths. Additionally an integrate with their other systems so we can aggregate their revenues from their other system (Scheidt & Bachmann) and give the LVMC real-time tracking & reporting of their revenues.

Cool & fun stuff.

So thank you to Twelve Horses for the Chrome bag and iPod Touch. I had been wanting one because my iPod Video’s battery was about shot and I couldn’t use the iPhone we got earlier in the year because I’m on Sprint and the Windows Mobile platform for work. Below I have written some pro’s and cons based on more of the nuances rather than the glaringly obvious.

Pros

Connectedness is fast through 802.11 b/g network. I have a home network running on N and it makes the download seem really fast. A couple of reasons for this is that from a mobile devise everyone is used to slower speeds because manufacturers put slower more efficient chips in to save on battery life. Second I am used to my Sprint phones connection that is 115k. I can’t go anywhere and use my iPod but with the proliferation of free WiFi I think I can cope.

Multiple clocks can be configured and displayed on the same screen. This may seem trivial but it’s nice for my business needs. I have a clock for London where we are collaborating on a large project with SwiftPass UK, Indianapolis where I have extended family, Houston where my sister and parents live and San Fransisco only because Reno is not in the list.

An iTunes Store functionality is on here as well. With faster connection speeds they have been able to provide the purchase and download of songs directly from the iPod (something that should be on the AppleTV). There is now video support of any kind but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Music Videos become available. When you connect your iPod back up to your computer it adds a palylist under the STORE named "Purchased on TJ’s iPod". It then copies over to your normal iTunes library but also stays available within this playlist. 

The browsing experience is probably the best feature. On the iPhone the slow connection makes it agonizing at times and my Windows Smartphone is so watered down. With the Touch it’s fast and very full featured. Support for viewing Flash content is not there but javascript and light weight features are.