Year: 2004
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Links4U
OK, the links are for me, too, not just you. Someone else who wonders why ‘social’ software sites are businesses. I’m using LinkedIn, sort of. It works, I guess, but it’s a feature set, not a business. Are Friendster and Tribe.net and Ryze really any different than the defunct SixDegrees.com? I’m not covering new ground…
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Science and the small things
Aren’t you glad someone studied the science of skipping stones? I am. The world record is 38 skips, by a human. But these scientists hope to use their newfound knowledge (20 degrees is the magic angle) and a stone-skipping machine to set a new world record. If someone has time to do this kind of…
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Movie: Big Fish
Eleven days, we got out to see Big Fish, the new movie directed by Tim Burton. Had enough fantasy to suit Burton (Beetlejuice, anyone?), but always in the service of the story. I really enjoyed this movie, and I had the refreshing experience of knowing very little about it before I went to see it.…
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David Ogilvy quotes
I’m not an advertising maven, but Ogilvy is cited as the genius of the field, at least for the last half of the 20th century. Here’s a list of quotes from Ogilvy. I liked this one: Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people…
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It’s your problem. And their…
Tim Bray posits the “Two Laws of Explanation. I’ll let you go there to read the short essay, but the two laws complement each other, underlining the reality that it’s incumbent on the person describing something new to do a good job with the explanation, while it’s the responsibility of the person learning about something…
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Explaining the passer rating
Richard Sandomir at the New York Times often covers sports broadcasting. He must have been as perplexed as the rest of us — or just unusually perceptive — as the passer rating (aka QB rating) of Peyton Manning was announced as ‘perfect’ at 158.3. That incredibly arbitrary number comes from a formula devised by a…
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Useful tip: Mail.app on Panther,…
Environment: MacOS X 10.3.2 and Mail.app 1.3.2. Experience: Junk mail filtering stops working, and when manually classifying mail as Junk, Mail.app crashes. Workaround: Quit Mail.app, delete the ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 file, then relaunch Mail.app. Source: Post to Macintouch. This has happened to me several times on the laptop, and now on the desktop. I just now tried…
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Three links
Out of 175+ headlines in NNW this evening, here are the last three… I want to review these in detail, but I can’t face the computer any more this evening. So, for future reference… Users can’t know their requirements early – Project management wisdom. Just the headline alone has me nodding my head in agreement.…
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I’m learning
Tonight I relinquished a role, and the attached responsibility. It feels great. I have not always been good about saying no, or letting go, but I’m learning. Admittedly, it’s not a job lots of people would sign up for (nexus of inter-family communication, among other details). Still, you have to start somewhere. Good luck Drew!
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TiVo for the…
Being compared to TiVo is just about the best praise you can ask for in the technology space right now. While I don’t think TiVo the company will thrive in the long-term, they’ve elevated the expectations of consumers everywhere, and not just within TV. Whether they succeed commercially or not, they’ve changed the world. That’s…