How to Consistently Un-motivate Yourself

“Less blogging, more jogging,” my friends.” – Alex Tabarrok The above quote is from an excellent post on how incentives – both their creation and manipulation – negatively influence motivation towards a goal. Feels like part of this phenomenon is covered by Goodhart’s Law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a …

JustType.de’s Kernest.com Interview With Garrick

Sebastian Brink from JustType.de interviewed me about Kernest.com. I took the opportunity to spell out some of the principles guiding Kernest’s ongoing development. I’m taking the liberty of re-posting this here for archival purposes. What is Ker­nest? What do you do? Ker­nest is an font direc­tory and web font ser­ving engine. The web font ser­ving …

Three Things Wrong with Heath Care

Earlier this week, at a local medical facility for a basic checkup – I was presented with a ‘Consent for Treatment’ document. Here are 3 brief excerpts from that document I feel highlight the incentives healthcare provider have to perform increasing costly services thus inflating healthcare costs. “I agree to any care (tests, treatment, medicines, …

Thesis’s Next Opportunity: Un-WordPress Itself

A long running controversy in the WordPress community was resolved this week when the popular, commercial theme Thesis was re-licensed making it compatible with WordPress’s own GPL license. This re-licensing confirms WordPress themes and plugins must be released under the GPL. This is great news for the WordPress community for it reinforces the type of …

Adding Custom Fields to an Existing Post via XMLRPC in WordPress

If you’re having difficulty adding custom fields to an existing WordPress posts via XMLRPC’s metaWeblog.EditPost command, try including a dummy entry in your code. It worked for me. I’m working on a project where we’re programmatically adding WordPress custom field data to thousands of posts, seemed like a great job for XMLRPC. I had assumed …

Real Time Red Herring

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on a number of projects exploring the the value of capturing & sharing a fleeting moment in ‘real time’. These projects included; Cullect; which proved to me how infrequently ‘real time’ ever passed into ‘relevant’. RE07.US; which was a URL shortener that self-destructed after 5 minutes iTunes-to-Twitter; where …

What Does a Successful MN Tech Firm Look Like?

“The region has just a few large tech operations left (Lawson, Digital River, Seagate), and venture capitalists say most local software startups are tiny and will never grow into market leaders or large companies.” – Dan Haugen. Most businesses, local or otherwise, are tiny and will never grow to market leaders or large companies. Minneapolis’ …