“I WANT to be enthused about things like Myspace, and Facebook, and Second Life, and iLike…In every case, I feel like people are blindly giving away value, and not getting enough in return. What do you get from these websites that you can’t get on your own? What do they do for you that you …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Twin Cities Cool. Not Just Cause It’s Autumn
When we moved from Chicago almost 5 years ago, I got a lot of snickers and jeers from my co-workers. Completely understandable given that Chicago sees itself as the second city and all the reports of Mayor Daley trying to make it into NY without the bad parts. It’s the quality of life that separates …
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Twitter Bars?
I saw these two tweets side-by-side over the weekend. I read them fast and thought that spin and Calacanis were talking about the same product. It’s a floor cleaner, it’s a desert topping, it’s a publishing channel, it’s a weight loss supplement.
Floored
One of the longer term (i.e. not this year) projects around the house is the basement. Currently, it’s comfortable place to hide from a storm, but not more time than that. Yesterday we were at IKEA and noticed 2nds of their floating floor are 1/2 off. After brunch this morning we picked up 25 boxes …
We Met at a Dunn Bros – But Not the Same Dunn Bros
“We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other.” – Meg Swan, Best in Show Meeting for coffee at a Dunn Bros. on University this afternoon and just got the call that there’s more than one. We each chose a different …
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Remodelling
Despite not having written in a while, I’ve gotten some excellent comments on the look of this site. “…I don’t know if that’s artsy or what, but I wasn’t all that impressed.” and the more concise: “conspicously vacant” Perhaps suck.com had the same problem 😉 Either way, this site’s role has changed, and it needs …
The Power of Vendor/Gems
Right now, I’m heavily reliant on an unsupported (if not completely abandoned) ruby gem library. Historically, I’ve just gem install bizarro-gem and moved on. A couple of issues have changed my perspective: My host, textdrive, doesn’t allow installing bizarro gems on their shared servers and I’ve had difficulty freezing them, so I worked around the …
Hugh MacLeod Explains My Entire ‘Comic’ Category
“PPS. Being a Marketing 2.0 geek/blogger/entrepreneur is pretty cool, but being a cartoonist is WAY cooler.” – Hugh MacLeod
To Do Before I Die: Get 99 Other People to Speak My Made Up Language
While Toki Pona‘s minimalism feels too much like Newspeak for my taste, the notion of creating a new common-use language is an intriguing thought. Especially if the language’s biases were deliberate – and I agreed w/ them 😉 – from the beginning. Initial thought: a highly technolibertarian version of Dutch. Thanks to: Hobbies in everything- …
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Assuming a Silo?
My only issue with A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web is that it seems to assume a silo. Cause, why else would it be needed? If I always have full control (i.e. installing and maintaining a wordpress install on my own servers – not at wordpress.com) why would I need beg …