You probably haven’t heard about freckle, unless you follow me on twitter. This is because this year is the year that Amy learned that the more she talks about something, the less likely she is to do it. My theory used to be that if I publicly committed myself, the external pressure would help. Turns […]
Hey kids, it’s poetry explication time! Give me five double-spaced pages on Robert Frost’s “Nature’s First Green is Gold” by Friday or your grade is toast and your parents will disown you, you’ll never hold a good job, and you’ll die destitute and alone. Just kidding. I hated dissecting poetry in school, but loved the […]
Pissing me off is one of the best ways to convince me to write something. Take, for example, the following. The setup We humans have a tendency to want to see in black and white. That concept is nothing new, referred to any time there’s some kind of moral dilemma, or religious war, yadda yadda […]
Two perspectives. Clay Shirky, writing on A Brief Message: Design is arrogance. The designer says, “I know what you want better than you. Here it is.” A designer offers judgment as superior; as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Design is humility.Users […]
I hate feed readers. The idea for creativescrape was midwifed by that hate (a fiery, passionate hate it is). Like email, feed readers are almost exclusively uniform—and uniformly bad. They try to make everything in the world fit into the same mold, however cramped and unpleasant it may be. As developers we naturally find this […]
Hello, friends. We’re your usability consultants. Is your web app tired? Run down? Listless? Does it poop out at diggings? Is it unpopular on del.icio.us? The answer to all of your problems is in this little bottle consulting package. Hyphenated People Prix Fixe. Yes, Hyphenated People Prix Fixe contains vitamins, meat, vegetables, and minerals and […]
Having just torn through two “brain vacation” novels (Maxx Barry, if you must know), I’m back at it. I just can’t stay away from non-fiction long enough. I need a vacation. Anyway, I’ve begun reading The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, which so far is […]
I came on to keep a system alive and rewrote it from the ground up, learning OO along the way. The system solved an office politics problem; this was intentional. If you’re in your early 20s and you tell CEOs they fucked up their org chart, you’ll never get anywhere, but if you just build […]
Big surprise? Here’s an internal Microsoft email written by Bill Gates, which allegedly came to public view due to a lawsuit. From this Seattle PI blog post. It’s long, but definitely worth at least a skim: —- Original Message —- From: Bill Gates Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM To: Jim Allchin Cc: Chris […]
A couple weeks ago, at RailsConf, I tweeted that I was skipping Joel Spolsky’s keynote and why. Judging by the few responses I got, most people took this to be a joke. It’s not. I try very hard to watch what I put into my head. To a greater or lesser degree of success. All […]
