RE: Blogger Sees Red Over StarTribune’s Lack of Citation

As if I didn’t have enough reasons to grumble at the STrib – a reporter doesn’t credit their sources. Coincidentally, on a story covering questionable ethics. “Come on, Jackie. You called me about this on Thursday afternoon. We discussed the story, I pointed you to sources where you could find more info, including the email …

“It’s Been 10 Years, You Still Amaze Me”

Today marks a decade of marriage for Jen and me. Back then, I had no idea how dramatically our relationship would improve over the years. I didn’t know that we’d catch our stride 5 years in, nor how much easier that makes things. Especially with the big stuff. All of which I owe to her. …

Cullect.com – “takes the web2 out of feed readers and I love it.”

Arik Jones, one of the people I’ve asked to try Cullect.com for a week, wrote up his thoughts two-days in: “Unlike Google Reader it doesn’t inundate you with useless UI elements….What I like the most about Cullect is the ability to recommend feeds and then being able to give friends a dead simple url. It …

Book Still Readable – Decades Later!

“If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly.” – Dave Slusher If you fell into a coma when Business 2.0 had a roller coaster on the cover and woke up today, you’d have one more reason to …

Strib: Off-Topic, Uncredited, Fear-fanning, Ads

Reading the Strib’s Business section yesterday, I was reminded of Sesame Street’s “One of these things is not like the other” sketch. Here’s the story, can you guess which one doesn’t belong? “Grounds for worry: Trouble’s brewing in the economy, if the news from the nation’s biggest coffee chains is any indication. No. 2 player …

Say When

When was the last time you – yes, you, specifically – thought, “I sure would enjoy [insert favorite publication] more if they inserted more advertisements.” Thought so. A friendly reminder that readers, viewers, fans, etc aren’t the people pushing and demanding advertisements. “‘Deal with it’ doesn’t mean ‘Make better advertising’ or ‘Target your advertising more …

Rails Cheap, MySQL Expensive

This is an update to earlier post on Performance and MySQL Indexes. While 10-12 seconds per feed is an improvement, it’s completely unacceptable when we’re talking 2,000+ feeds (full parse would take 5.5 hours) and slow down the system to unusable. In an attempt to find the bottlenecks, I loaded up the query_analyzer plugin on …