I heard a phrase: People don’t buy shovels, they buy holes. It’s taken me a very long while to respond to this because it sounds so good. It rolls off the tongue and has an unexpected, logical quality. It seems right, doesn’t it. The only problem is that it is…
An interesting thought experiment came up today. A company I know acquired another company for 8 figures. The purpose was Acqui-Hire. This is the practice of acquiring a company for the talent, not for the product. There were not alot of people in the company and the acquiring company immediately…
I don’t need skype at work. So when my computer boots up, I right click on Skype and click “Quit” I was pretty clear of what I wanted, right? So why the heck does skype give me this window? Honestly, screw you skype! Stop bothering me. No other program…
For the old folks…remember Windows 95. It used a FAT file system, not the more modern NTFS (for Windows). It needed to be defragged to run at optimal speeds. I loved the entire idea of a defrag. It was like cleaning up a room, putting each thing in it’s place.…
When I’m down or frustrated… When things aren’t going my way… When I just want to give up… A good joke makes it all better. Here are a quick set of 10 good ones: (My Favorite of the day) What did Jay-Z call his girlfriend before they got married? Feyoncé. (2nd…
I was walking in the parking lot at work and a car alarm went off. The car was about 50 feet away. I could see someone with the door open, leaning into the driver’s side. I looked around me and saw about 6 other people. Each one walking nonchalantly towards…
I broke the Tortoise table this morning because I was impatient. I tried to move it without someone helping me. I leaned a little hard on the plexiglass and it cracked. I should have waited until tonight and had help carrying it. I hope it’s not totally ruined. One part…
Recently, we bought a red foot tortoise. We bought it without realizing how much space the thing really needs. Subsequently, we bought a habitat that is too small for him. I was determined to figure out a solution to the problem. There was a spot in our house that would make…
I was looking at design work I did over 15 years ago. Although I can see that the browser technology has improved and therefore my canvas of design has improved, I noticed that the quality of the work was not discernible from my current work. The thinking that went into the…
I had been testing for a couple of weeks and the winner seems to be ASmallOrange.com. Performance I used some ping services as well as anecdotal evidence from colleagues around the world. Orange performed consistently better. Price Orange is half the price of MediaTemple. It’s not THAT much money, but…
For the past few years, I have been hosted on MediaTemple. However, I kept noticing that the site would get slow or even fail to load sometimes. I kept trying customer support, but they blamed some issue that they claimed was outside their control. I don’t know if it was…
The other day someone told me that typography was subjective. It set me off on a rant about how it wasn’t. I tried to explain about how typography affects reading and changes your mood. Different fonts will create different feelings in the reader. I tried to explain kerning, serifs and…
The art of making great APIs has become a key skill in a technology organization. Whether it’s the protocol or the naming scheme or the functions or even the error logging, the API has a UX of it’s own. Make a bad developer UX and you will have fewer technology…
Nissan has a standard key fob system. You don’t need to take it out of your pocket. I love this system and find myself confused when I am in a car that requires the key to manually be inserted into the steering column. It is good, but has some…