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Two months ago, I bought the Withings WIFI scale, which has a bunch of unique features, including the ability to report weigh-ins to twitter. I decided to conduct a two month personal experiment where my scale would report to twitter every time I stepped on it. Because my twitter account is hooked up to Facebook, the scale also updates my Facebook status.

I had two goals for the Twitter diet:
1. Don’t gain any weight in the month of December
2. Lose 10lbs by the end of January

Amazingly, I managed to acheive goal #1, but I fell short of goal #2. I only managed to lose 5lbs during the twitter diet. The Twitter diet was unique because everybody around me was reminded that I was on a diet, which created a built-in weight loss support group. If somebody saw me eating junk food, I would be ridiculed.

The daily reporting of my weight caused me to really think twice about what I was eating. For the first time in my life, I experimented with various diets. I went veggie for a few weeks, I tried the the low-carb thing too. There is no way I would have been motivated to diet if it wasn’t for the Withings scale.

Overall, I think the twitter diet has a lot of potential. I’m actually going to keep the scale sending tweets, but on a weekly basis instead of daily. The weekly reporting should be enough to get me embarrassed if I start to creep back up, and thats the real benefit. The public reporting of weight, gets people who would otherwise not care to really think about how much they weight, what they are eating, and what they are doing.

Its been 24 hours since the iPad was announced, and I have to say that with every tick of the clock, my opinion of Apple’s new device gets more negative. During the announcement, I wasn’t blown away, but I was positive. However; the more I started think about the iPad, the more I disliked it. Its really just an oversize ipod touch.

I thought Apple’s device would be a really strong e-reader, but sadly the Kindle is far superior. A backlight display is not preferable for reading, so Apple’s choice of an OLED screen makes the device a substandard e-reader. With the Kindle, there are no data fees, and there is infinitely more content, and to top it off, the books are cheaper too. So I have to have a monthly network access fee, to buy more expensive books, in a store with less selection, and I must read those books on screen that will strain my eyes? No thanks!

Photos, videos, and music all look very nice on the ipad, but why would I buy an iPad when the iphone/ipod already has all that functionality? The video display is better, but what is the actual use case for the iPad video? An airplane trip? If I’m in an airplane, I already have my laptop, so why bother with an iPad? Again, the more I think about it, the more the iPad doesn’t make much sense.

Finally, the one solid use case I had for an iPad is a living room computer. Something I could share with others in the house to check e-mail, browse the Internet, and carry on the road when I’m on the go. The lack of multiple user profiles makes the iPad a horrible option as a living room computer. Multitasking has existed on personal computers for 16 years, but the iPad wants to party like its 1989? There is no camera, there is no standard video out, and there is no usb port. No sane person would buy a computer that requires you to purchase a bunch of proprietary junk to have basic connectivity.

I’m the type of personal who can rationalize just about any technology purchase. I’m the guy in line to buy the new gadget the day it goes on sale. There is no way to rationalize purchasing an iPad in its current form. The device makes zero sense. It reminds me of the Macbook Air, a device for people who have more money than brains.

I recently purchased the new Withings Wifi enabled scale. The scale is unique because it uploads your weight and body fat measurements to the Internet via wifi, and the measurements are accessible via a web page and iphone app. A new feature allows you to publicize your weight to twitter. It sounds completely stupid, but I thought it would be interesting to see if reporting weight via twitter would actually lead to weight loss.

For the next two months, I’m going to report my daily weight measurements via twitter. December is probably the absolute worst time to start a diet, but I need to get an early start. I have a very challenging cycling “vacation” at the end of March, and my current weight is the cycling equivalent of morbid obesity.

The ability to moderate comments and user created content on a website is not a new technology. Slashdot has had comment moderation for over a decade. As the ability to vote on user generated content has grown more popular, so too has the inability to vote down or “dislike.”

The most common example is Facebook, which introduced a “like” button, which was really just a ripoff from Friendfeed. While Facebook is the most widely known case, I find the lack of moderating down comments on Yelp even more annoying.

On Yelp people will write reviews that are completely idiotic. A negative review because the restaurant was busy, or because the weather was bad, or because it was a chain. Yelp only gives people the ability to “compliment” a review, so moronic reviews never get put in their place.

Has our society become so insecure, that we cannot take honest feedback when it comes to our online contributions? Does every child get a medal? Life is a two-way street; online moderation should be the same way.

The marketplace for startup funding is something that has always fascinated me. Venture capitalists seem to behave like trendsetting hipsters trying to go to the next “it” club. Once the new “it” business plan is identified, VC’s will gladly fund mediocre startups that resemble or piggyback to “it” regardless of their potential for long term viability.

In the mid to late 90’s “it” was any business plan that involved e-commerce. You could write a business plan to sell dogshit online, and “it” would probably get funded. The Napster phenomenon caused a funding frenzy towards P2P startups, even though their potential for revenue was mediocre at best. The success of Myspace caused a funding boom for anything to do with social networking, even though that business model is extremely questionable. Today, the “it” trend is probably cloud computing.

Venture capitalists are like hipsters looking for the next “it” nightclub, but most of the time they end up with a bunch of “me too” companies that go nowhere, but get funded with buzzword laden business plans. Some of the most successful startups in the history of technology are boring companies in established markets.

Was there really anything exciting about Google? Search was already being done by 20 different players in the late 90’s. Search was boring. I’m surprised they didn’t get passed over in order for a VC to fund the next Pointcast screensaver.

The point is that some of the best startups are boring companies, that do boring things, in already proven boring marketplaces.

The Wall Street Journal had a sobering article about the changing face of employment in the United States. Many of the jobs lost during this recession will never return.

The U.S. hasn’t seen a contraction as deep as this one since before World War II, and employers have cut workers faster than history suggested they would even in a recession as deep as this one. Private-sector payrolls today are lower than they were at the end of 1999.

In addition to replacing 7.2 million lost jobs, the economy needs an additional 100,000 a month to keep up with population growth. If the job market returns to the rapid pace of the 1990s — adding 2.15 million private-sector jobs a year, double the 2001-2007 pace — the U.S. wouldn’t get back to a 5% unemployment rate until late 2017, Rutgers University economist Joseph Seneca estimated. And that assumes no recession between now and then. “Even with some very optimistic assumptions, it’s a long road back,” Mr. Seneca said.

Perhaps one bright spot of note is the constant change of employment. Many of the jobs that exist now, did not even exist a decade ago.

In 2003, Treasury Department chief economist Alan Krueger, then at Princeton, calculated that a quarter of U.S. workers at the time were in jobs the Census Bureau didn’t even list as occupations in 1967.

25% of all jobs in this country did not exist a few decades ago. On a personal note, what I do for living did not exist a decade ago. There were very few IT people focusing on datacenter automation, and the commercial use of Linux was in it’s infancy. Time will tell if positions like mine exist twenty years now. However; if there is one positive note about the volatility of the job market, its the fact that five years from now there will be plenty of new positions that do not exist today.