Software for Overworked People

Summary
The Metaist is expanding its operations to write open source software for people who have too much to do.

We're also selling t-shirts.

Clean up top, party on the sides. Or not.
(Image: Metaist)

Announcement
After a year of sporadic blogging, The Metaist is taking up the plight of the overworked professional. The point of metaist.com is to build software for people who are being distracted from doing their jobs because they are overworked.

Our first project, HebPhonics, is targeted at teachers of Hebrew fluency. Teachers, in general, tend to work a lot when they get home either grading tests or preparing lesson plans. HebPhonics was proposed by Shoshana Zazula as a way to create individually-tailored worksheets for students with special needs in an semi-automated fashion. By automating the drudgery of making worksheets, teachers can pay more attention to the actual work of improving fluency.

Oh, and by the way, we'll be funding these activities by selling t-shirts (or whatever you else you might want). We're somewhat limited in what we can offer, but we're open to suggestions.

Meta
Do you have ideas for Metaist projects? Let us know.

See Also

• Happy Hour is 9 to 5 by Alexander Kjerulf for an excellent discussion of happiness and work.
• HebPhonics for the Hebrew fluency tools.

Take The Metaist 2010 Survey! [Closed]

Note: This post contains an embedded survey which may not appear in your RSS reader. Click here to view the full post.

Request(Updated 2010-06-11)
In the past The Metaist had Feedback Friday as a routine way to get feedback from you (dear reader). Over time (7 months), this became less of way to solicit for ideas and more of a way to fill space without providing content, so it was abandoned.

Nonetheless, getting feedback from the readership is important and following a suggestion by reader Jeff Klein, I'm providing a small (4 question) survey to assess our status. It should take less than 3 minutes to complete and will be open until June 4th, 2010.

Please take this anonymous survey at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,
The Metaist

Update 2010-06-11:
The survey is now closed. Thank you for your participation.

Feedback Friday: March 2010

Summary
The Metaist is having a hard time getting out of this slump. If you guys have any suggestions, now would be a good time to let me know so I can cook up some more posts. Otherwise, I think I'll just end up writing about a whole bunch of cognitive biases (which might be okay).

Looks like parts of California could use some moisturizer.
(Photo: arbyreed at Flickr)

Feedback
As always, your submissions & feedback are appreciated.

Feedback Friday: February 2010

Summary
Feedback Friday is a week late, and there hasn't been a post in two weeks; The Metaist is in ad-hoc mode (but not for long).

Things got kinda slow, didn't they. No worries, we'll bounce back.
(Photo: streamishmc on Flickr)

Feedback
As always, this is your place to voice your opinion on things you'd like discussed in future posts.

Feedback Friday: January 2010

Summary
The Metaist continues to show consistent readership. The blog is drifting towards discussions about human behavior, psychology (especially cognitive biases), and economics, plus a dash of technology.

Word clouds. Expect to see more of them in the future.
(Image: Woordle)

Feedback
Much of the source material for this blog comes from discussions with readers. I occasionally recall an interesting study or video I saw the illustrates an aspect of human behavior, an interesting business maxim, or explains how something works.

So my question this month is: What is some human behavior you always wanted explained?

[Resolved] Blogger Issue: Comments Form

This post describes an issue with Blogger software that has been resolved.

Several readers have identified issues with the comment form. In one case, arrow keys (or CTRL combinations), and in the other, the form was missing altogether. I have replicated the first error (in Firefox) and the second (in Chrome), but after restarting the browsers, both errors appear to have been fixed.

If you are having issues with commenting, please email metaist.blog@gmail.com with a brief description of the problem and how it can be reproduced.

Feedback Friday: December 2009

Summary
The Metaist has been around for almost a month now and, contrary to my welcome notice, posting has been somewhat regular (except this past week; sorry about that).

This past month I was pleasantly surprised to find that about twelve of you read this blog somewhat regularly. I've gotten a bunch of feedback that this blog is "very intense" and doesn't cover subjects such as what I "ate for breakfast this morning". Such reactions are understandable since I typically don't discuss what I had for breakfast on this blog.

I typically don't discuss what I had for breakfast.
(Photo: Wikimedia)

Feedback
Yet, I would like to make The Metaist interesting to a (somewhat) wide audience. Technical subjects don't usually lend themselves to wider audiences, but I'd like to try and present interesting explanations of those subjects. To that end, I'd like to know what sorts of things you folks find interesting.

By participating now, you have a chance to help shape the direction of this quirky little blog. While I don't expect it to ever become extremely popular (but I don't rule it out either), the ideas you share here will get exposure to a small, but dedicated, audience-- something that we should leverage. Would anyone like to guest post? About what would you write? What do you get from reading this blog?

Please submit your ideas in the comments below.
Thanks.