It is one of those things that are very dificult to explain. And if you try to explain it, you will almost inevitably end up in the realm of NSFW.

I am — of course — talking about The Marquardt Scale.

If you followed any of the recent Everest Trek coverage over on The Rest of Everest or if you have listened to the Everest Trek 2010 announcement on Tips from the Top Floor, you will already know what that scale is about. If not, it's about time you found out.

I came up with the scale on the Trek in May. Even though it was a silly idea at first, it almost immediately stuck with everyone on the trek and it was used daily by virtually every trek member.

During our dinner in Lukla on the last day of the trek, the usage of the Marquardt Scale finally found its culmination in Jon Miller's immortal words: "I just had five one-point-eights within thirty minutes!"

Well, but what is The Marquardt Scale?

In describing what that scale is lies my biggest difficulty. I would love to be able to explain it in one or two short sentences in a way that is completely family safe.

Can you help?

Here are the rules:

# Leave a comment to this blog post with a short explanation about what the Marquardt Scale is.

# It should be no longer than 25 words.

# Make it funny, make it wacky, make it family safe.

# Only one entry per participant.

# Update: the scale officially starts at 1.0 and ends at 2.0 because it should be analog to "number one" or "number two", which is used by parents in some English speaking countries to avoid having to say the more obvious words in front of their children. Massive bonus points if you manage to work that into your explanation. If you already submitted an answer before this update, your personal number of acceptable entries is automatically extended to two. (e.g. feel free to go again)

# The jury (Jon Miller, Monika Andrae and myself) will choose the winner based on a top secret selection process.

# The jury reserves the right to not use any of the handed in entries for any reason.

# All entries have to be in by Nov/27. Later entries will not be accepted unless the jury really loves them.

# The prize is an awesome TFTTF Everest Trek t-shirt that was hand-embroidered in Kathmandu.

# Anyone apart from jury members can participate. This includes the 2009 Everest Trek participants.

Now DIG IN!

Video is wonderful. It lets you develop this quick feeling for something, usually much quicker than reading through paragraphs of copy or listening to lengthy audio. And social video is even cooler, as it lets the producer get his video out to so many more people, and collect inputs and get social linkage, and sometimes... very rarely, one might even go viral.

The flood of video sharing sites also has its drawbacks of course, as you might eventually end up with quite some fragmentation as to where your videos are. I sure experience that. Some videos are on Youtube, some are on Vimeo or Blip.tv, just to name a few. And pulling those together into a coherent user experience has been pretty difficult in the past.

Has been.

Because now there is yubby, a free online service that lets you quickly and easily create a channel with videos from all types of sources, that you can then embed in a web page as a widget.

I have just done that. Thanks to its great search capabilities and somewhat consistent tagging of my videos, it took me about five minutes to pull together a channel of the videos that I (and others) produced at various workshops, and place it on my main workshop page.

Yubby lets you then choose one of several ways to present your videos, from a grid down to a small player, which is the one I opted for. I should actually even be able to embed it here. Let's try.

See? It's that easy.

» The widget in action on the workshop page

» yubby.com

Workshops, workshops, workshops... 2009 was such an exciting year in so many respects and I am very grateful for being able to do the things I do.

With Brooklyn Cookin', the workshop that I held together with Chef Mark, this year's season is now over, and what a great final workshop that was. Both Mark and I found that we'll have to do a workshop along the same lines again next year. The concept is perfect: the target audience is couples where one half is into cooking and the other half is into photography, and here they have a way to learn and spend time together.

Even though this year is over from a workshop perspective, it actually isn't. At least not for me. I am going to spend most of November preparing everything for a smooth 2010 launch. My goal is to have everything ready by December. And there are a lot of things to be worked on. Luckily most of my workshop locations are already nailed down, some helpers need to be briefed, and then there's the whole registration process. I have looked into offers in the cloud, but there is no workshop/seminar management system that even remotely seems to fit the bill.

All I need is to manage the registration process and payments for about ten workshops. Internationally. With deposits. And limited number of seats. For a decent price. And no, in an economy where everyone needs to think twice before spending anything, I consider taking 10% of the workshop fees *not* decent, because that would eventually increase the workshop price by that same amount.

So in short, I haven't found a good and easy way to automate this yet. Which is why I've taken things to the cloud in a different way for 2009 and why I'm going to go even further in 2010. In short: I'm using online services and forms to handle the sign-ups, I have simplified the confirmation and registration process using Services on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I use PayPal to handle the bulk of the payments, and I use my own time to keep it all together. Not ideal, but workable. The KISS principle applies. Keep it simple, stupid. I don't need a full-fledged database to handle a couple of hundred participants. Every participant ends up in a spreadsheet with a status field depending on where in the registration process they currently are, and if I need to send out a bulk mail to all participants of an individual workshop, a simple copy/paste of the email address column for that workshop will do just fine.

The biggest item are the workshop pages on the web site. This is where everything is supposed to come together in a nice and easy to navigate way. I have spent hours and hours to design something that ties together everything from basic information about the workshop ("why would I want to come to this workshop?"), the agenda ("what are the workshop details?"), timing ("when does the workshop start and end?"), accommodation ("what hotel is near by?"), navigation ("how do I find my way to the workshop?") and pricing.

Obviously I design this once and duplicate it for all the workshops, but the content will be different for each workshop. The overview, the detail description, the example images, the example video, the FAQ. And the language.

So I guess I better get busy and finally start tying all those lose ends together to bring you not only an excellent 2010 workshop season, but also a great experience when it comes to finding the right one for your needs and going through the registration process.

If you want to be notified as soon as the 2010 workshops are ready, please make sure you are on the newsletter (get the newsletter here).

Got a way to help me simplify the registration process? Leave a comment!

I've just found the solution! You can help me save a lot of time, which in turn will allow me to concentrate more on the production side of my shows instead of the planning side. And it's simple: all I need is the help of 94 of you clicking a vote button.

update: just one day later and 34 of you awesome individuals have already clicked. thanks!!

Okay, hear me out, my logic on this is impeccable, I'll just need a few sentences to explain.

If you've read this post about my new iPhone calendar app you know I've become a big fan of Pocket Informant on the iPhone. And you also know that I am still searching for an app to help me with year planning. Each year around this time I'm knee deep into planning next year's workshops. And each year I spend hours trying to find out if anyone has written an app that will help me doing that.

I have very simple needs:
- a view that shows me the entire year with my workshops as time blocks
- a fast and simple way to move around these workshops
- calendar data linked/synced with my existing calendar (currently Google cal)

There is no such application for the Mac. Or the iPhone.

So every year I fall back to a stone-age year spreadsheet and changing cell background colors to indicate events. This takes time. Lots of it. And this is valuable time that I can't use to bring you exciting episodes of TFTTF, HS, Daily Photo Tips and so forth.

Here is where you come in.

If you're a fan of any of these shows, or the workshops, you want to help me finally get such a year planner, right? (See? I told you my logic was impeccable!)

But this is not just for me, it's useful for everyone. Plan out vacations, keep track of your kids school projects. Name it.

So you can imagine how happy I was to find the Pocket Informant feature request list. If anyone can pull off that year planner feature, it's these guys with their mad coding skillz! The feature request list is powered by Uservoice and you can vote for features. Three votes per person and feature. 280 votes to get to the top of the request list and a chance to be looked into. 280 / 3 = 94 people.

Please help vote this feature request up to the top of the list!

Instructions

1. Go to the log in page of the voting site


2. Click the login provider of your choice (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID,...)


3. Once logged in, enter "year planner" in the search box


4. Click the vote button next to the "Year Planner" title and leave three votes.

Let's move it up to the top of the list!!

Here's another post that's not about photography. I promise, I'll stop talking about geeky infastructure as soon as finished testing my latest acquisition: a sensor loupe and a Sensor Klean .. errr.. sensor cleaner.

This post is about some more recent infrastructure changes though that I put the finishing touches on over the weekend. Did I mention last weekend I was super productive with both, fixing my iPhone and switching my calendar infrastructure? Oh, I have? Never mind.

I recently installed my own URL shortener. It helps me paste short links into Twitter or other short form communication, it lets me get some basic stats on these links, and in general I get a lot of fun out of dabbling with these sorts of things. If I can find the time for it. Luckily I didn't have to write my own solution, as there is YOURLS. And as I happened to own the tfttf.com domain, which is reasonably short, I thought "why not?" and went ahead. It works flawlessly.

The other tool that I wouldn't want to miss is Textexpander. It runs on the Mac and what it does is simple: it replaces short strings with longer ones as you type. So if I send out an email to someone in Germany, instead of copying/pasting the signature for that, I type siggg and Textexpander automatically replaces that with my full German email signature block. For the English signature I use sigge. To insert the current date I defined the shortcut ddate and so forth. A big time saver and totally transparent. Works system wide.

Textexpander can execute scripts too. And this is where the magic starts. It comes with a script to shorten URLs using bit.ly. All you do is copy a long URL into the clipboard (CMD-C) and then type /bitly at the place where you want the short URL to be pasted.

/bitly is the trigger for Textexpander to execute an Apple Script that takes whatever is in the clipboard, hand it to the bit.ly API for shortening and returns this to wherever the cursor was.

If you are as keyboard-focused as I am, this is bliss. (And believe me, I am keyboard-focused. I even use the jkhl keys in vi so I won't have to move over to the cursor keys and leave the 10-finger base position on the keyboard)

Long story short, I have adapted said AppleScript to run in conjunction with YOURLS and it works like a charm.

» download the script here (instructions inside)

And that's it. If you have YOURLS installed and use Textexpander, this ought to make your life quite a bit easier. It sure does that for me.

And please note: I'm not an Apple Script developer, this script is part of the Textexpander distribution (I hope I'm not gonna get into any trouble by posting it here in its modified form) and I merely adapted it ever so slightly for use with YOURLS. I will not be able to provide you with any scripting support whatsoever. Believe me, you really don't want me to give you scripting advice...