This morning I received an email from my cousin that I was added to his family tree on a service called Geni. It said it was private and I was intrigued so I clicked on the link. It showed a segment of my family in Flash and immediately satisfied me in multiple ways. It was…
I don’t know if this is something that affects other people. However, I find that if I spend too much time on a single thing, my creativity levels go down. I start to run out of inspiration and general energy. When I can rotate my crops, and work on different things each day, then my…
Microsoft named their new search engine “bing”. I don’t think they realize how lame that sounds. Every time I hear it, I think of this scene from Groundhog’s Day. (Great movie) I imagine Steve Balmer saying, “Yeah, i love it. They search for something and BING! they found it!” This is the same man who…
I just finished reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. It should be mandatory reading for anyone who presents anything, ever. There is so much goodness in this book about communication and it’s so short. I would classify it similar to Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. A quick read that gives immediate value. Highly…
I just love, love, love the ingenuity and creativity of the human mind. Well, I also hate, hate, hate the ingenuity and creativity of the human mind when it’s applied to torture and cruelness, but that is another issue. In this case, it is applied to something dear to my heart, the environment. Check out…
I work with some great engineers. One in particular is fantastic, named Crash. He is a backend guy, doesn’t touch the UI much. A demo to him is all accomplished at the command prompt. He said something yesterday that was abaolutely brilliant and summed up my admiration for him. When I add a new feature,…
I love the feeling one gets when they realize they are not alone. July 26, 2007, I was at Ajax Experience and asked the presenter Chris Wilson from Microsoft a question: Outlook 2007 doesn’t use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, “Why did Microsoft do this to me?!?” While Chris…
I am reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. So far, its fabulous and I would suggest it to everyone. Early on in the book, there is a small section on The Beginner’s Mind. Some summarize the concept this way: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. I…
I was helping two co-workers the other day. One wanted to present information in an email and the other in PowerPoint to be used with customers. (Pretty common tasks, you think?) The tricky part for me was to avoid just “fixing it”. I wanted to teach them to fish, not just give them a meal.…
Somewhere in my childhood, I forgot exactly how to cry. I can remember exactly two times crying and it was such a tremendously powerful feeling. I was watching a movie this evening and there was a really sad, sad scene. I wanted desperately to cry. I could feel the lump in my throat; I felt…
I have been reading (and really enjoying) Seth Godin’s book, Small is the new Big. His blog is chock-full of these little insightful nuggets of wisdom. He produces them at a crazy fast rate. In his book, he talked about Squidoo, which I have heard of but never checked out. I made my first Squidoo…
My least productive time of the day is 20-30 minutes before a meeting. I know that the meeting is coming, so I don’t want to be deep in the middle of something when that moment to leave my desk comes. So I end up doing a bunch of small things that are somewhat productive, but…
Recently, Mozilla Firefox has been challenged on my desktop as the default browser. I keep flip-flopping between Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5. I was really excited to see Aza Raskin taking the UX reigns at Firefox to see what someone with creative mojo could do with such a powerful program. At first, the ideas were…
Recently, I was in some conversations about development practices. I believe the methodology used in a technology company has a huge impact on the quality of the product. I drew up a little diagram to show the differences under ideal conditions. To be as fair as possible, I had the product launch on the exact…