I love data.  And I adore playing with it graphically, as I learn a lot from graphing longitudinal data about things I’m involved in.  However, I find that almost all of the web services I use suck at providing visualization / graphing tools for their data.  For example, I’ve never really found any of the graphing options in any of the running software I use satisfying or useful.

I’ve known about Tableau Software for a long time.  The CEO and founder is Christian Chabot – we worked together at Softbank Venture Capital.  Tableau has built a significant software company and when Christian called me up to ask if they could play around with some of my running data as part of their launch of their new web-based services, I agreed.

The hardest part of this exercise was getting granular running data out of the various systems that I keep it in.  I use a Garmin watch and have very detailed GPS and heart rate data on every run I do.  However, the two primary systems I store this data in (MotionBased and TrainingPeaks) have abysmal data export systems.  After fighting with them for a while, I eventually did the equivalent of “scraping” the data by exporting the data underlying a bunch of individual runs.

Once I got the data out, Tableau was pretty amazing.  It was extremely easy to use (in comparison – say – to Microsoft Excel where you can spend hours and still not get the format you want.)  And – it was extremely fast.

After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took over and created the widget that you see above.  There are a few things to note about it:

• It is a live exploratory visualization, not a static chart.  You can select workout days, highlight across views to see heart rate, or filter to different kinds of activities.
• This was done with no custom development. Typically interactive visualizations like this take a lot of custom flash work; with Tableau anyone can create and publish an interactive visualization with drag & drop ease.
• Tableau’s vision with this product is to set data free on the web. They want to make real data, no charts, accessible to people so they can question conclusions and offer their own analysis.

Tableau has been around for years and has thousands of customers, but visualizations like these are still in private beta as they make sure they hammer out all the bugs on their latest release.  I’m not an investor, but based on what I see I wish I was.  Nicely done Tableau (and Christian).

Well – that serves me right.  If you requested a Gist beta invite, be patient.  I’m grinding through my inbox and you’ll have your invite by tomorrow at the latest.  Thanks everyone who requested one, especially for all the kind feedback on the blog.

But that’s not what I’m thinking about this morning.  Last week I read an intro O’Reilly book to HCI called Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices.  It was ok, but one of the insights – that the public restroom has become a test bed for gestural interface technology – really stuck with me.

I found myself in a restrooms at DIA last night before I got in my car for the hour long drive home.  I generally hate public restrooms as my OCD kicks into high gear around everyone’s germs.  I no longer think that bad things are going to happen to me if I don’t touch every street sign on a walk, nor do I get stuck in my house in the morning because I have to do everything in multiple of three’s (and – if I blow it, then nines, and, if I blow it then 27’s, ugh – yuck.)  However, I still dislike the idea of the public restroom.  But sometimes you’ve just gotta go.

It was pretty late at night and I found myself in a recently cleaned and completely empty restroom at one end of Level 6 at DIA.  I decided to perform an experiment – could I go about my business without touching a single thing other than myself or my clothes.  I like to wash my hands before I go to the bathroom (You don’t?  Think about it for five seconds.  You’ve been shaking hands and touching things all day?  C’mon.)  The soap dispenser spit out soap after I put my hands under it.  The sink automatically turned on when I put my hands under it (I had to move them around a little.)  I walked up to the toilet, did my thing, and walked away to the sound of a toilet flushing.  Back to the sink for a redo of the previous drill.  I wandered over to the towel dispenser which automatically dispensed some towels when I waved my hands under it. 

The only think I had to touch was the door.  Even that seems easy to solve – automatic opening and closing doors have been around forever.  None of the gestures I did were particular complex and – as I think about it – all were pretty obvious. 

Life is a laboratory.  Don’t forget to always be exploring and experimenting.

F3EL7-T3YL2-MBN5P-ZQI6R-YE8PI

Ever type that into a pop up box on your computer when installing software?  If not, you’ve never installed anything from Microsoft (or many other companies) – at least not legally. 

This morning I was copied on an email from my partner Ryan McIntyre to a company we are talking to about funding that said:

“I use Pro Tools and other pro audio software regularly and since the SW is quite expensive, the SW vendors go to great lengths to use copy-protection, and most audio plugins and applications (and there are dozens) have some sort of authorization code scheme, ranging from friendly to downright byzantine.  It drives me nuts, but my constant exposure to it means I’ve formed some opinions about what is “easy” when it comes to entering authorization codes.  The easiest plug-ins (authorization-wise) in the audio world use alphabetical codes broken up into strings of words, so instead of the longs strings of numbers, you get long strings of words, which are much easier for a human to enter without a mistake.  A couple code examples might be:

HOUSE-BIRD-TRUCK-DRUM
FLINT-TRUE-SWORD-CALL

You get the idea.  I’m assuming third-part auth-gen packages must exist to generate codes like these that give you a big enough address space yet also make guessing authorizations relatively difficult.  And that you could relatively easily change your process at the manufacturer for associating MAC addresses with device IDs.”

I prefer auth-codes that are haikus.  I wonder if there’s a patent on this?

Wow – Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 is awesome (thanks Dave).  It is a screenshot from every major graphical OS since the Xerox Alto.  Some old favorites of mine include the Apple Lisa (1983), the Amiga Workbench (1985), Geos (1986), NeXTSTEP (1989), and OS/2 2.0 (1992).  At some point in time I had a computer that ran these and/or installed them on a computer of mine.

I weigh 209.4 this morning.  That’s down from 220 when I Declared A Jihad on My Weight on 10/27/08 although it doesn’t look like I’ll make my Anti-Charity goal of 200 by 1/31/09 (more on that in a post on 2/1/09).

I was thinking about my weight this morning as I entered it into the online system at GoWear.  I thought about it again when I entered it into Gyminee.  And then into Daytum. I’m going for a run in a little while so I’ll enter it again into TrainingPeaks. 

Here’s what I’m doing:

1. Go to the appropriate web site.
2. Choose the appropriate place to enter the data.
3. Type 209.4 and press return.

Four times.  Every day.  Pretty ridiculous.  If you reduce the data to its core elements, they are:

1. Web site id [GoWear, Gyminee, Daytum, TrainingPeaks]
2. User Id (almost always bfeld)
3. Timestamp (or two fields – date, time) – automatically generated by my computer
4. Weight

The only actual piece of data that I need to measure is weight.  I measure this by standing on a scale each morning.  The scale is a fancy one – it cost about $100, looks pretty, and has a bunch of extra things I don’t look at such as BMI.  I have an identical scale in my house in Keystone (although the battery is dead and needs to be replaced.)

Some day, in the future, I’ll be able to step on the scale.  And that will be it.  My weight will automatically go into whatever online systems I want it to.  I won’t have to do anything else. 

Of course, one of the assumptions is that my scale(s) are “network compatible”.  While you may joke that this is the age old “connect my refrigerator to the Internet problem” (and it is), I think it’s finally time for this to happen.  As broadband and wifi become increasing ubiquitous and inexpensive, there is no reason that any electronic devices shouldn’t be IP connected, in the same way that microprocessors are now everywhere and pretty much everything has a clock in it (even if some of them still blink 12:00.)

So, accept this assumption.  Then, I’m really only taking about a “Brad-centric” data payload.  While I’ll have a lot more data than simply weight that I might want in my payload, let’s start with the simple case (weight).  Right now, we are living in a system-centric world where data is linked first to a system and then a user.  Specifically, you have to operate in the context of the system to create data for a user.

Why not flip this?  Make things user-centric.  I enter my data (or a machine / device collects my data.)  I can configure my data inputs to feed data into “my data store” (which should live on the web / in the cloud).  Then, systems can grab data from my data store automatically.  All I have to do is “wire them up” which is a UI problem that – if someone is forward thinking enough – could also be solved with a single horizontal system that everyone adopts.

Right now there is a huge amount of activity around the inverse of this problem – taking widely diffuse data and re-aggregating it around a single user id.  This deals with today’s current reality of how data is generated (system-centric) but doesn’t feel sustainable to me as user-generated data continues to proliferate geometrically.

Enough.  As I said in my tweet earlier today, “thinking about data.  thinking about running.  thinking about thinking.”  Time to go run and generate some more data.

Every male tech nerd (and some female tech nerds) that I’ve known has at one time or another has fantasized about a robot bringing him (or her) a beer from the refrigerator.  Thanks to my friends at iRobot that’s now possible.

Ok – that’s a Pepsi.  But it could have been a beer.  The future is closer than you think.

I’m knee deep in reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, listening to Pink Floyd, and enjoying a perfect Homer, Alaska evening with Amy.  I was an undergraduate at MIT during the Lucasfilm days of what became Pixar and vaguely remember early Media Lab / Project Athena animation stuff and watching super cool computer graphics wizardry post-SIGGRAPHs at the Computer Museum in Boston.  Fortunately, YouTube has all the old classic computer animations online, including The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.

Awesome! (the animations and the book).  While sneak peaks of this one and other old Pixar shorts are available on the Pixar website, due to the magic of the Internet they are all available on YouTube.

I’ve been bouncing around the world of video conferencing for a while.  The guys at Raindance – a company I was on the board of from 1997 – 2002 – knew this stuff cold (and what worked / didn’t work) as they were previously the founders of LinkVTC (one of the first video conferencing bridge service companies.)  One of the applications of the stuff Oblong (one of our new investments) is doing applies to video conferencing, and the little cameras on top of my computers occasionally get used.

While video conferencing is "ok" (and definitely 10x better today and at least 100x cheaper than it was a decade ago) it still sucks.  My reaction to the demo of Cisco’s On-State TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing system was "bitching."  It’s pretty amazing to see it, even via online video. There are definitely some hacky aspects to it (as my partner Ryan points out, there is some sort of transparent screen being used), but it’s still incredible.

Another reason for airlines to be scared.

My partner Ryan wrote a long post on the Foundry Group blog about our interest in HCI titled Theme: Human Computer Interaction (HCI). 

I believe that 25 years from now we will look back on the way we used computers in 2008 and think it was quaint.  For a reference point, try to remember how you used a computer in 1983 (character-based screen, excitement over "graphics", and the year before the introduction of the first Mac.)  Or go back to 1978 and the dawning of the Apple II computer.

I just don’t believe that in 2033 we will be fighting with the double click speed adjustment on our mice while moving our Windows Live Writer window to the left and right so we can see our browser or pressing alt-tab so we can bring our email window to the front to quickly respond to an email.  The universal TV remote control – yeah, whatever.  Worrying about which server our data is on?  Air traffic controllers typing on keyboards?  Uh huh.  3D walkthroughs and large scale data visualization being done using a mouse and keyboard?  Right. 

The way we interact with these things is going to continue to change radically.  While I’m hoping the future view of Skynet is wrong, I’m going to keep reading and watching as much science fiction (which I think of as "potential science fact in the future") as I can.  History helps also since it lets you draw a nice, spiffy curve through the data points.  With your brain, rather than with your mouse.

If you are working in this area or simply fascinated by it, holler anytime.

How about a portable turntable scratch pad for playing Guitar Hero.

Or even better – using a real guitar to play something that looks like Guitar Hero.

Nah – I think I’ll just stick with my Internet Connected Refrigerator that has an iPod port and a tablet PC connector.  My veggies stay fresher when they are listening to Nirvana.