About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
On Thursday afternoon, I had an idea for just about the smallest web app I could think of (since then, I’ve even cut out a couple features). It didn’t make sense to use all of Ruby on Rails for this considering how tiny it was. Seemed like a great opportunity to try out Sinatra1 Write …
Continue reading “Deploying Sinatra on Joyent’s Shared Accelerators with Thin”
It’s March in Minneapolis. The thermometer just broke 40°F and there’s still inches of snow cover. Winter sustenance in the upper Midwest traditionally comes in two forms: canned or hotdish. Not the most uplifting and exciting dishes to get families through long, grueling winters, but economical. Citrus fruits were a rarity, rare enough for oranges …
Continue reading “Introducing the Minnesota Pineapple Economic Indicator”
I’m proposing today as new American holiday. A day of deliberate action. A day of buckled-down confidence. A day of bootstrap-up-pulling. A day of To-Done-ed-ness. A day of recovery. The opposite of Labor Day – more along the lines of Independence Day. Let’s go, there’s work to do. March Forth. “This country will be rescued …
This morning I talked with John Vorwald‘s Multimedia Web Design class over at UW-Stout. One of the great questions asked by the students was: “Where do you see the internet in 2 years?” 2 years? Easy. Everything has a web server in it. The internet is accessible everwhere. On my desk, as I write this, …
Dave’s “Decade of Ebook Arguments” post took me back a decade, to my first portable MP3 player – the Diamond Rio‘s 800 1 If memory serves, the 800 had 64Mb of storage2 – just enough audio for the walk from the apartment for the L ride into Loop. Not even enough for something new on …
Earlier this week, I watched The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters1 What I expected to be a light-hearted documentary about competitive video gamers took an unexpected turn into the dark, bizarre, lengths small people go to keep their name in the #1 spot, their clique tight, and outsiders out. Since you’ve lived through …
A couple weeks back, I picked up a 2nd Generation Apple iPod Touch – partially so I could start playing with web apps for it and partially cause my much beloved 3rd Gen 40gig iPod is starting to flake out. I’ve been primarily for programming-related movies (PeepCode, SDRuby, and Pragmatic Programers), a calendar & address …
Continue reading “iPod Touch 2nd Generation 16GB: First Impressions”
Amazon’s Kindle 2 arrived today. It’s the 3rd mobile internet device I’ve picked up this year, and a few hours in, I’m more pleased with it than the other two. My initial impressions: The monochrome screen is gorgeous, and looks almost textured – as if there were a digital compliment to letterpress. The slim, flat, …
As I mentioned earlier, one of my goals for this year is to launch 2 revenue-generating projects. I took a couple hours this morning and started the ball rolling on 2 of the potential candidates to fulfill that goal. Here’s the checklist I use to lay the foundation for a project: Declare a descriptive code …
The funny thing about metrics – the wrong one distracts more than it helps. And in this modern age, a technological hack can be built (if it doesn’t already exist) to give you the desired numbers. Bernard Madoff Click Fraud This is why I’m not a big fan of measuring the success of a website …
Continue reading “Rule 1. Success Metrics are Things Robots Can’t Do.”