Thursday, May 17, 2012
I finally got the option to buy a Red Sox ticket package, and I don’t need all the games as I got. I’d rather hook up friends, family and acquaintances than deal with Stubhub, Craigslist, etc., so get in your requests if you’d like any games!
Monday, March 19, 2012
Cost of dividend: $2.47B/quarter
Cost of a majority stake in Netflix: $3.18B
Friday, March 16, 2012
I picked up “the new iPad” this morning. Here are my first impressions.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
People are complex creatures. I honor the good he did and I loathe what he allowed to happen, all at the same time.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
No matter how harsh or personal or crushing someone’s feedback feels, take it constructively and with the best of intentions. Show them gratitude for having the courage to help you in a way that was probably uncomfortable for them. If you don’t respond positively, they’ll never be honest with you again and you’ll miss out on a lot of invaluable learning opportunities.
Monday, April 18, 2011
It’s problematic when copywriters write for companies instead of people. It’s important to remember that it’s always a human — not a company — who will be reading your words. This post contains my slides from my speech on copywriting, which was given in my Executive Speaking class.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
GarageBand for iPad is the most complete and capable all-in-one music creation package available anywhere. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s effective. At $4.99, it has replaced my $220 Micro BR.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Leaders show themselves in various forms. There are rhetorical magicians (Barack Obama) and iconic revolutionaries (Steve Jobs). There are also workplace leaders – the silver-tongued employee who can articulate issues several steps beyond what others are thinking, or the clever, diligent coworker whose performance alone encourages others.
Whatever the kind, leaders have three priceless skills: they’re doers, they persuade, and they inspire.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Heroku provides a highly scalable background worker framework, but leaves the burden of scaling it to the user. Middle Management automatically scales Heroku workers so that your jobs gets worked off as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Blogging platforms have evolved toward media publishing platforms rather than toward their “web log” roots. Themes use crowded designs to make blogs look important and popular. They deceive us into believing that those traits will come from design rather than from content.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Yesterday, Michael Pope posted an article titled Technical Cofounders Are a Myth. In it he tried to make the case that software engineers don’t finish what they start, and that you’re better off paying a technical person than partnering with one. His frustrations are valid and not uncommon, but his conclusions are way off base for a lot of reasons.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
The GPL effectively rendered ArtPal a pro bono project. I was unable to make it a businessworthy endeavor while abiding by the full terms of the license. However while selling ArtPal was not a sustainable business in and of itself, it generated sufficient leads to be well worth my time.
Friday, June 25, 2010
If you’re going to talk about the virtues of failure or any other counterintuitive concept, please follow the Brad Feld strategy of reason, and avoid the Umair Haque strategy of shocking contrarianism.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Writing for people is about cleanliness and brevity. Writing for Google requires clutter and redundancy. Startups should write for their users because companies need to prove their value before they market it. Any startup that’s writing for Google is getting ahead of itself.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
I recently replaced my work and home keyboards with the Kinesis Advantage. These are my collected thoughts on it after two full months of daily use.
Monday, April 26, 2010
The trust that Google accrued when it was a smaller company opened doors for many unforeseen consumer products. Every time Facebook uses data in a way that makes its users uncomfortable, it closes those doors a little further.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
What I want to see is a mutual recognition of self-interest and codependence between Twitter and its third party developers, and a better understanding of what both sides need to do to make the most of that relationship.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
It’s not that Apple doesn’t want “some other company” to establish a higher level language standard; it’s that Apple doesn’t want any company to do that — including Apple. The reasoning is the same: if Apple were to allow developers to write iPhone apps using MacRuby (i.e. Ruby 1.9), there would be nothing to stop those apps from being moved to other mobile platforms that also support Ruby.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Whether you believe Twitter brought 30.5%, 32% or 45% of didtheypasshealthcarereform.com’s traffic, the conclusion remains the same: not only did Twitter win the battle of relative numbers; Twitter drove more total traffic to the site than Facebook did.
Monday, February 1, 2010
There is a widely held belief that you can tell how interesting a Twitter user is by the number of followers that he or she has. This is a flawed line of thinking.