April 2012
2 posts
The Times They Are A-Changin
Lots of changes going on in 2012. One of the big ones for this here blog is it’s moving. I’m going to be doing my personal blogging over at:
Ninjas and Robots
It’s part of Dustin Curtis’ new blog network, SVBTLE. It’s got a great focus, and has re-upped my commitment to writing. Hope you have some time to check it out.
March 2012
2 posts
WatchGreat video my wife sent over to me. When I think about the companies that I’m loyal to, there’s only a few, and it seems like it’s because they’ve done a great job communicating why they make things.
Apple pisses me off often with things that have gone wrong with my iPhone, wireless equipment and power chords. But damn, do I firmly get behind the “why” of...
February 2012
9 posts
When does design matter?
This isn’t meant as a troll or a rant. Or meant to spark any outrage.
And it feels like I need to preface this with:
I do believe design (informational and stylistic) is insanely important in many situations to early businesses. It’s just that I get confused when.
Look at the Clear app that sold 350,000 downloads in the iPhone app store practically overnight. The only reason that...
I'm giving up. Oh wait. Facepalm.
So I’m working on this new thing. I’m not going to reveal it yet, because it’s still getting figured out before I want to promote it too much.
The gist is, I’m doing some very unscalable things to test out some conceptual product ideas. If you want to read a great article about achieving scale by doing things that don’t scale, you should read this:
...
“THEN WHY HAVEN’T YOU DONE IT YET?? Do you realize how easy it is to do...”
– A great quote from Tucker Max as he reviews some job applications.
Recap of round two responses — TuckerMax.me
Am I confused about the GPL or are they?
It’s crazy to me that I’ve been “dealing with” open source licenses for what seems to be my entire professional career. 13 years. And I still can’t definitively tell someone what is or is not allowed under something as popular as the GNU General Public License, or GPL.
The latest example is about some stuff I was researching about Wordpress themes. A few theme...
Short documentary on IDEO's process
Great documentary on IDEO’s process. It’s funny though. Doesn’t seem too surprising. Just give some smart diverse people a few constraints and let them run their brains all over the place. A few other take aways:
Go immerse yourself into the life of the user.
Ask all the questions.
Nothing is sacred and should be assumed.
“Ninjas are a species of ghost bred for the purpose of assassination and other...”
– Dr Theophilus Pudding’s World of Knowledge of the World: Ninjas (via colepierce)
Haunted
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair I’ll fix it.” - Mitt Romney
This isn’t a political post. There’s a post I wanted to write recently, and Romney’s recent soundbite spurred it to get completed.
Mitt isn’t saying something that’s just the viewpoint of Republicans. I’ve heard this same...
I FOUND ICE CUBES 'GOOD DAY'
murkavenue:
CLUE 1: “went to short dogs house, they was watching Yo MTV RAPS” Yo MTV RAPS first aired: Aug 6th 1988 CLUE 2: Ice Cubes single “today was a good day” released on: Feb 23 1993 CLUE 3: ”The Lakers beat the Super Sonics” Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY...
January 2012
12 posts
United States Postal Service tries to compete with...
Dear United States Postal Service,
Saw this last week. It looks like it’s been out maybe since October
Are you kidding me?
Use the mail, because computers get hacked? Whoever came up with this campaign at the USPS has seen way to many political attack ads.
Remember Hillary Clinton’s commercial: “Don’t vote for Obama or your kid is gonna get kidnapped at...
Jobs that make people money aren't the jobs that...
The New York Times graph of the jobs the wealthiest 1 percent of US citizens have was making the rounds a week ago.
Coincidentally I stumbled on this article last night.
The 10 jobs the happiest US citizens have.
Clergy
Firefighters
Physical therapists
Authors
Special education teachers
Teachers
Artists
Psychologists
Financial services sales agents
Operating engineers
There’s...
Baggage
I’m inspired watching my dog constantly.
One thing that’s never stopped being amazing is how little baggage she carries with her.
It’s very noticeable on walks. When it’s time to take her for a walk, we’ll just say the word walk, and in a blink she’s at the door ready to go. She could have been sleeping, but as soon as something is going on, she’s...
WatchReinventing Yourself in Tough Times
A great interview with James Altucher. A very interesting idea in here about sending lists of ideas to people you are cold emailing for the purpose of adding to your network.
James is full of thought provoking advice and crazy honest views of what it’s like to run your own business, success, failure, and picking yourself up again.
His book is only $1...
Live as if someone you love, but don't know who,...
There’s a bunch of “Live as if”s around.
Live as if you were born yesterday, and will die tomorrow.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
-Ghandi?
They’re all thought provoking. But I can’t help feel that they are tough to really follow through with.
Really, you’re going to work today if YOU were dying...
yongfook: Do Something Mundane! →
yongfook:
Problem discovery is a challenge that every founder will face. How do I find a problem worth solving?
You’re not going to discover a problem worth solving by fantasizing with a cofounder along the lines of “wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app that…” and you’re not going to discover a problem…
Would Einstein have read The 4 Hour Body? Are we...
Do you think Einstein cared about six pack abs? Or for the folks coming from Hacker News. Would Einstein have even glanced at his Karma?
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I...
It's not about how hard you try, but how hard you...
We’re often told things like “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”. Or Steve Jobs said:
“If I try my best and fail, well, I’ve tried my best.”
But I think those sentiments might miss a bit that could really amp up how fulfilled we feel when we are trying our best.
A lot of us on this rock are trying really really hard. At...
December 2011
5 posts
“If I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.”
– Steve Jobs, 1998 (via david)
37signals doesn't like you sorting stuff. Or. Why...
I’m working on project where I’ve got numerical data for each record, so you wouldn’t be surprised probably that I was formatting that data into an HTML table and was going to let users click column headers to sort that data.
But it got me looking for inspiration on how others are designing tabular data and sorting data these days, so I went looking at the 37signals portfolio. What I saw...
Google out-Appling Apple
You probably use Chrome :) It’s already surpassed Firefox and Safari.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201111-201111-bar
What do you think the reason for that is?
It’s not about preinstalls. Safari like IE is preinstalled on tons of computers. And these stats from StatCounter are about desktop browser market share, not mobile.
Is it about speed? I don’t think...
November 2011
5 posts
A few things I'm grateful for
I’m grateful for so much it’s impossible to even articulate it the way I want too.
Since I know I won’t get around to writing this tomorrow I just wanted to throw out a few things I’m grateful for.
This list isn’t inclusive of everything or anything in particular. Just a few on my mind currently.
This year has been crazy. :) I’ve stared a new business with...
WatchA tale of persistence and realizing it’s never too late. Here’s a 61 year old grandfather who is now kicking extra points for Faulkner University.
October 2011
5 posts
Using the crowd to predict TV show failure →
The NYTimes has a nice implementation of a crowdsourced app to try and predict which television shows will get cancelled this season. It reminds me of something Brent Stinski of MediaPredict told me…
Hacker News Google Chrome Extension
Update
And just like that it’s unpublished. :( I’m not going to encourage the use of this extension right now until there’s a resource friendly API to get at this type of data.
Original
I just published a Google Chrome extension I made that starts to add a couple things I’ve wanted to get from Hacker News.
Yes, I am guilty of checking my karma too much :) I...
How to autoscale Heroku
Heroku’s awesome, but some stuff is still a pain in the ass.
It’s great I can scale my app with the push of a button. But I don’t want to push a button. I just want it to happen.
We’ve been running Cityposh on Heroku. Some days have big spikes in traffic, and some days have real lows. I don’t want to have to keep looking at our web traffic to see if I need to be...
Inkling Now Fully Internationalized →
A few months ago we announced that Inkling had gone international and we could support any language. One of our clients immediately took us up on the post and asked for Inkling in two additional…
September 2011
1 post
Politics and projects gone bad →
Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite software engineering books, Peopleware, by DeMarco and Lister. They set the stage for the rest of the book with an alarming statistic – 15% of…
August 2011
1 post
Have a discussion! →
In watching companies run a lot of marketplaces, we’ve noticed that a key success factor is to have a healthy bit of back and forth in the discussion threads associated with each question. While many…
February 2011
3 posts
A nice collection of failed predictions →
In an office building I used to work in they had quotes like this all over the place as inspiration. Here is a nice collection of outrageously wrong predictions made by the seminal experts of the…
I'm in a play!
It’s a Monty Python version of The Canterbury Tales.
We are performing this weekend Feb 18, 19, and 20. Friday and Saturday shows are at 7:30PM and Sunday at 2:30PM.
It’s at St. Mary of the Woods Church in Chicago. 7033 N. Moselle.
Tickets are $8 for adults, $4 for students.
:)
Cityposh, our second company →
Nate and I “soft” launched a second company a couple weeks ago called Cityposh. On Cityposh we’ll be offering up products, services, and experiences to be auctioned off in a “penny auction”…
January 2011
3 posts
Good Luck, Javan →
Some sad news to report today. Javan Makhmali, the first developer we ever hired, is leaving us to go work for 37signals. Javan has been an amazing help to us over the past 2 years. There isn’t a…
Inkling now supporting multiple languages (German... →
Some good news for those who want to run an Inkling marketplace in a language other than English. In preparation for working with one of our German consulting partners on delivering Inkling to one…
Improved Trading Interface Coming Soon →
Based on lots of feedback and our own use of Inkling, we’ve been working on some long needed improvements to our trading interface. Amazingly, the trading interface has not changed significantly…
July 2010
1 post
New and improved: stats page for each question →
With the release of our new stats page a few weeks ago, we introduced the concept of an “Inkling expert” - someone that had traded in the right direction on several questions in any given topic….
June 2010
13 posts
Choo Choo: Railinc launches their internal Inkling... →
Railinc is an IT Consultancy for the Rail industry. They support business processes and provide business intelligence that help railroads and rail equipment owners increase productivity, achieve…