Flashes of inspiration are a critical ingredient for great design. However, they really are brief moments in the life of a project. The real work of making something great is time consuming. It is iterating and polishing and re-ordering and re-conceptualizing and backtracking and focusing relentlessly for long periods of…
Last week a 20-year old took hundreds of rounds of ammunition in high density clips and a semi-automatic machine gun into an elementary school in Connecticut. He shot 26 people, mostly 6 year old kids. It’s senseless. It’s insane. It’s an act of mental illness, evil or both. The thing that…
Verizon just upgraded my phone to Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1. It has some minor improvements, but generally speaking it isn’t much of a change. The icons look different and the email clients look newer. There is more color in the built-in apps like Calendar and Email. They have a new…
Making a decision in a bad headspace is a bad idea. Frustrated Anxious Guilty Sad Angry Frantic / Hurried Fearful Distracted Passionate Hungry Ecstatic These emotions make your brain run hot. They take away valuable CPU power in decision-making. You want to be calm and collected when you make decisions.…
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/biweekly Happening every two weeks. Happening twice a week; semiweekly. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biweekly occurring twice a week occurring every two weeks fortnightly http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biweekly Occurring once every two weeks. Occurring twice a week Here is the bottom line: The prefix bi- applies to the week rather than to the events that occur, therefore giving…
I am a pretty avid reader. I used to read on the train when I used public transportation every day. These days, I drive 10 minutes to work, so my reading has been fewer minutes per day. For this reason, it REALLY sucks when a book is bad. Specifically, I…
Microsoft has had a pretty rough time the last few years. Steve Jobs innovated like a mad genius and came up with the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. That’s alot of ground to cover and Microsoft has not been able to keep up. At best, they tread water. However, Steve…
A huge portion of User Interface design is finding the right levels of abstractions. What I mean by this is that you have to decide what the information hierarchy is and how they map to mental models. Example System : WordPress Blog (Good)You have posts and pages. Those are objects within…
Iconography is a specialized talent. Working in such small confines making images that convey specific meanings. Previously, I have heavily endorsed using IconExperience. Over 2,500 icons in lots of sizes, with and without shadows. It’s a cornucopia of excellent images. They are very easy to mashup to create a nearly…
One day, if I have a hundred million dollars, I am going to fund the following initiative: The Do Your Job Proposition From now on, all California propositions, initiatives and ballot measures will have an additional choice besides Yes and No called “I Don’t Know”. If the measure does not…
I have been trying lately to speed up the performance of my blog. Steps so far: Remove about 25 plugins I really didn’t need. Remove plugins from my wife’s and brother’s blogs Switch to the TwentyTwelve theme Still, I was getting CPU throttling from my host. It still wasn’t fast…
It’s such a pain to move to a new host. DNS changes. Import/Export of WordPress. Debugging. New security. Redirects. Let’s face it, it’s a huge hassle, so I need to have exhausted all my options. Despite the fact that I am pissed off at BlueHost for not having a faster…
I have been feeling for quite some that the performance of my blog was dragging. I just implemented a new plugin to do caching and it seems to help a little. However, the internal tool, where I type and do publishing is slow as well. Obviously, I want things to…
Take a look at this fascinating 1 minute video. How can a little monkey like that have such an immediate and intense reaction to something that is unfair? We clearly have a fairness gene. Something in our brains that reacts strongly to this sort of situation. The little monkey is…