Archive for July, 2009
Me and my wife went to the beach last weekend and took some pictures of our kids with a good friend of my wife’s. She’s a professional freelance photographer. Priscilla Santos does some really amazing work. Her sight is here.
I’m trying out a new product Microsoft is releasing on the web called Hohm. It’s a web site dedicated to tracking your energy expenditure and cost, so that you can reduce your energy consumption and also save you some cash along the way.
How does it accomplish this? It profiles you and your house. It asks you some basic (and some not so basic) information about your house and your energy habits. The cool thing is you can choose to fill in as much, or as little, as you want. No pressure. However, the more information you can give it the more accurate the reports will be.
Other cool things include the ability to track your energy bills through an automated feed. This has to be set up with your utility company(ies), but if they offer it, then it’s a quick way for Hohm to get a lot of information about your energy consumption. I live in Homestead, FL, and as of today they haven’t set up any of the providers here. I’m hoping they will in the future so I can submit them my data feed and get some real data to project.
I’m really using it as a way to try and save money primarily. If it works out I’ll be writing a success story on it at a later date.
I’ve discovered a product that I really enjoy using and thought I would share it. It’s called Balsamiq Mockups and it’s a tool that you can use online or on your computer for drawing up quick ideas on software systems. They use a sketchy kind of font to give you that “drawing out a spec” feel. What really makes the product so appealing is how fast you can build up a simple mock to show to your team. I’m literally able to sit down at my computer and within 5 minutes have a meaningful mockup of some kind of feature I want to convey. Really powerful stuff.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing you can build with it.
Balsamiq Demo
