Maybe you’re reading a book, or watching a movie, or working on something with your full concentration – and you realize you’ve been holding your breath. You have no idea how long you’ve been holding your breath. How long you’ve been focused solely on this one thing. But, it’s been a while. And you snap …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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’ …
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RESTful Blogging via Email w/ Sinatra?
Somewhere in my travels I thought I saw a project that uses Sinatra and some very RESTful URLs to do blogging via email. Now I can’t find it. If you’ve seen this as well – leave a message in the comments. If I can’t find it in a couple of days, I think I know …
Twitter’s a Memory Hole
“…it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four This weekend, I opened up my …