Remember, a few months ago when crude oil was at it’s highest (Unleaded hit >$4 in my neighborhood) and natural gas was spiking as well? Considering both are falling (Unleaded is currently $1.85 in my neighborhood), both are sold in US Dollars on the world market, and the US Dollar is trading at it’s highest …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
13 Levels of Engagement: Football Edition
There are a small number of NFL games I watch each season. Sunday’s Vikings vs. Packers game always makes the list. Sitting in the comfort of my own home – just a couple miles from where this down-to-the-wire game was played – my mind wondered how engaged I was in the game. I sketched out …
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Financial Shock: The Bad Decisions that Got Us Here
Financial Shock A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis is an amazing read. Amazing for 2 reasons: It was published in early 2008 and is covering – in-depth – the issues the news media is just now picking up on – e.g. the Fed nearly bailed …
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9 Things Cullect Taught Me About Software
Forcing people to create an account to use your software is a bug. if you’re not scared to deploy, you’ve stopped caring. Murphy is alive and well. Google and a bookself of technical books can be equally useless. Good software is like an iceberg. if you ask for money, people will give it to you. …
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In Bigger News: FCC Opens White Space & Frees iPhone
I was always baffled by Apple exclusively giving the iPhone to AT&T. It’s not in Apple’s DNA to tie the customer experience of their products to someone else. Exclusively or otherwise. Multi-year or otherwise. Apple’s built their reputation on owning and controlling the entire stack; OS, applications, hardware. Hell, Apple’s never been crazy about having …
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America 3.0
1776. America is born. 1945. America claims the leadership of the developed world. 2008. America reclaims its position. (more tomorrow.)
I Needed That.
“So build something that you use all the time, and, unless you’re really weird and different from everyone else, you’ve got a potential winner.” – Tim Bray.
Decision 2008, and My Vote Goes to…
Attention, St. Anthony Villagers, your sample ballots are here (Hennepin | Ramsey) My votes; Presidential & Vice Presidential: Barak Obama & Joe Biden U.S. Senator: Dean Barkley U.S. Representative District 5: Keith Ellison U.S. State Representative District 54a: Mindy Greiling Constitutional Amendment: Clean Water, Wildlife, Cultural Heritage and Natural Area: Yes. Overall, the decisions were …
TiVo Has Until Feb ’09
“But TiVo has repeatedly failed to gain traction in the marketplace even though it has been hard at work creating innovative ad solutions and coming up with ways to help advertisers and networks recoup ad dollars.” – Meghan Keane I’d flip it around – Tivo has failed to gain traction specifically because it’s been hard …
How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 1
There are a number of ways increase Ruby on Rails performance through caching. Caching works because things don’t change….or don’t change frequently. In Cullect, almost everything is dynamic, even Cullect’s HTML presentation format has 3 different states depending on access privileges and there are 8 other presentation formats available. The standard page, action, and fragment …
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