Nothing I have done has ever gone viral. I am talking about Charlie Bit My Finger viral. (840 million views, 500k comments) Ok, maybe even something with a few thousand likes. This is the kind of viral that usually happens in numbers similar to winning the lottery. Very few have done it and usually it…
I hear the phrase “Fail Fast” all the time. At heart, the sentiment of this is “Get on with it.” (Which is a good thing) The problem with the word Fail is that it assumes that the effort is going to be negative. Why can’t the message be “Learn Fast“? Fail fast makes me depressed. Failure is…
These are currently my favorite comedy acts: Flight of the Conchords I love these guys. They have live acts plus an HBO series. They are brilliant. So many different styles, each funnier than the last. Here is my favorite live show from them: Garkfunkel and Oates They are like the female version of Flight of…
My world has just been rocked. At the end of the movie, The Wizard of Oz, the scarecrow receives his diploma. He then immediately rattles off what I thought was the Pythagorean theorem. Until this morning, I thought was he was saying was correct. Today, on NPR, they disabused me of that notion. Here is…
Someone once told me that you should be happy doing nice things for people, for its own sake. You should never do something nice with the expectation of getting something good in return. In other words, if you save someone’s life by pushing them out of the way of a truck, don’t expect them to…
My son and I watched the movie Whiplash last night. He is a drummer and guitarist, so he was interested in this movie. (He loves Rush, but appreciates Jazz and Buddy Rich). My definition of great art is when the piece evokes thought and/or emotion in the audience. Whether it is writing, music, paintings, sculpture,…
Im starting to get annoyed that this is taking so long. The therapist says this is normal and I’m doing well, but I just want to play tennis unencumbered. It’s not just the flexibility, it’s also the strength. My wrist, fingers and forearm are still a bit weak. Here is the updated flexibility. The backward…
I’ve seen two advertisements leveraging this Donald Trump meme. One was a billboard on 101 that stated “Make your data great again!” and today, I got this email that proclaimed, “Make your events great again!” Both times I saw the ad, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan came to mind along with a bunch…
It’s slow and steady progress, but you can almost see the diminishing returns. Getting to that green line is going to be difficult. Whenever I see data, I want to visualize it. I hate looking at tables of data. The line shows a trend, the numbers are harder to understand. There is a UX lesson…
No matter how long I live, no matter how big they get, my kids will always look like this to me: It was taken in 2009 during our infamous Tahoo trip. It’s funny how kids get frozen in that moment. This one picture of pure boyish joy was the moment they stopped growing in my…
I’ve been helping my sister with her resume. Here are a few good rules of thumb: Make it look nice visuallyBefore anyone reads it, they look at it. The first impression happens in less than 2 seconds. Make it look nice. I downloaded a free template and then modified it. If you aren’t sure, ask someone…
My wrist adventure has just been a nightmare. I want to chronicle it so far. Date Doctor Prognosis Sep 2014 Me I hit a tennis shot funny and my wrist hurt. I said, “Ow!” – Unbeknownst to me, I tore ligaments in my wrist. 1 week later Doc #1: Kaiser She said it was a…
Sometimes I’ll write a whole post and throw it away. The post made more sense when I started than when I finished. It happens in startups as well. The company starts off in one direction and then changes. It is called a Pivot. A pivot is actually great in a way. It lets you build rapport…
I don’t think I have ever seen this. I heard a story about Amazon building something called a Gremlin which would randomly take down a particular service in the Amazon stack. This would force the engineers to build redundancy into every layer of the system. Seems smart, doesn’t it? So what happened? They are down.…