Month: November 2005

On Monday my motorcycle turned 30 months old. (It was a big day for both of us.) About the time I got it, I put together a little WML app that would let me record my mileage. Each time I buy gas I open up my phone and record how much gas I bought, how much it cost, and my current odometer reading. I don’t quite know why I started doing it, probably just for fun, but now I have 30 months of historical data which is sort of interesting to look at.

Here is a graph of gas prices over the last 30 months. It’s not scientific:

• Most of these prices come from Provo, UT, but there were trips to Las Vegas and Logan and everywhere in between.
• Prices are for premium gasoline — usually 91 octane.
• The dates on the x-axis are not constant; there are more data points when I ride more during the warm months, and fewer points during the cold months.
• The green area marks $1.00/gallon and is just to make the graph more colorful.

Premium gas was cheapest on July 21, 2003 at $1.64/gallon. It was most expensive during September of this year when it reached $3.06/gallon. The average is $2.19/gallon.

Ingredients: One web app (WML, PHP, and MySQL), Actual Technologies ODBC Driver for getting the data into Excel X, then a copy-and-paste into Pages for graphing.

A few notes from Paul Allen’s keynote lecture at the BYU Marriott School’s e-business day:

Brent Barlow’s talk on marriage [mp3] includes a quote by poet Robert Browning that says the “best is yet to be.” That should be our attitude in life; it’s an attitude that helps us be happy. We can’t be happy by thinking the best has already passed. (Paul Allen said Brent Barlow’s talk is also the best talk he’s heard on strengthening one’s marriage.)

Several inventions have come from or been made popular in Utah. Paul Ahlstrom, who started vSpring Capital, talks about technology in Utah in a recent podcast.

Advances in technology mean we can “approach omniscience” — we can learn almost anything we want (e.g. Wikipedia), and we can connect to and communicate with almost anyone in the world (e.g. Skype, Linkedin).

Ten things you can do to learn more and connect more:

1. Take notes always
2. Store everything you learn in a personal knowledge base (e.g. Folio, Gobinder)
3. Start a blog
4. Google Alerts
5. Linkedin
6. Read Love is the Killer App — “the book that changed my life the most in business”
7. Use time wisely: audible.com, ldsaudio.com
8. Volunteer with the More Good Foundation
9. Become an “e-mail missionary” — email people you love more often
10. Be a spokesman for BYU and the Church (Carrie Jenkins) — how many people have heard you speak about or read something you wrote about BYU or the Church?

The longer I go without blogging, the more pressure I feel to say something profound when I come back. And it’s been almost a month. While I won’t pretend to have anything grandiose to say, I just wanted to pass along a quote from Tim O’Reilly that I heard today. Tim O’Reilly is the publisher of O’Reilly books, which produces fine computer books. I listened to the podcast version of his interview on NerdTV while jogging. (I jog as often as I blog.)

Tim said companies should seek to “create more value than they capture.” That’s something I’d like to live by, personally and professionally. There are plenty of opportunities and riches out there to give away a lot.