General – Garrick van Buren

A Great Story of Free Speech @ UW-Stout

It’s unfortunate that a ‘climate of sensitivity’ was enforced so heavy-handedly. It’s unfortunate so many other players had to get involved to re-establish common sense. Especially at a campus that – at least when I was there – had gun lockers in the dorms for students. I trust the administration and police will be more sensitive in the future.

Unblaze

“But a dangerous thing happens when we follow a trail: We stop paying attention to the environment. Since the trail is so easy to follow, we allow our minds to wander and neglect to observe where we are.”- Peter Bregman, 18 Minutes

Bottoms up product management

“Much of what made Twitter useful in the first place – Hashtags, @user and many other little Twitter specific conventions are hacks that were first adopted by users because Twitter didn’t support several key functions like groups or addressing a note to a specific user. Twitter has made the colossal mistake of trying to integrate these workarounds into the base DNA of their service.” – Ross Rader

My Favorite Sentences of the Day

“The beggars huddle for warmth within things called ‘industries'” – Richard Fink

“If every additional user is putting money in the developers’ pockets, then you’re less likely to see the site disappear overnight.” – maciej

A Sure Sign of Goodness

I just notice two things:

I haven’t written here in a while
My browsers’ URL autocomplete for ‘garr’ defaults to the sub-domain of a mostly unannounced project I’m very excited about.

Less Anger and Garlic

“You can try them out on their website or if you have NotePad just make an HTML page and put like a big textarea in it and that will give you a taste of what [they] do.” – Joel Spolsky

On a related note – my next project is targeting left-handed squirrels.

Even better:

“You are not in charge of what your users do.” – Joel Spolsky

What Matters

“What’s ‘small stuff?’ Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.” – Paul Graham

“Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.”

how to install fontforge on os x lion

After losing the fight with a native build-from-source multiple times, my currently recommended method of installing fontforge on the Mac OS X Lion is:

brew install fontforge
sudo brew link fontforge

Update: 23 January 2012
Austin Sabel emailed, “I was having trouble getting an old cairo font document working in Lion. This saved me. However I ran into a few problems that it looks like some other users had too. The default compiler causes an error while installing fontforge on os x Lion 10.7.2. If you change the install command to the following command it will installed without throwing an error.”
brew install fontforge --use-gcc

What Color is Your Couch?

There are 2 couches in my house.

One is a dark chocolate brown and the other is a light beige-y/tan.

So, I found it interesting that I bumped into these 2 logos today.

Not that there’s any confusion between these two services. More an observation on the popularity of red couches.

Double Plus UnGood

“Too many companies lack the creativity to see ways to expand the users’ universe. Instead they are trying to shrink it.” – Dave Winer