Labor Day: Celebrating Opportunity

“Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two 2 weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty week a year?” – Seth Godin, Tribes

Almost 15 years ago now, a fellow student at the German design school I was attending, purchased a run-down flat. When he wasn’t focused his design degree – he was renovating the flat. With school Monday through Friday – his core renovation days were the weekend.

Well, Saturday.

The neighbors would complain if he used power tools on Sunday.

At the time, I was also surprised by the number of unfamiliar public holidays
German shopkeepers observed. Their frequency caught me unprepared more than a couple of times. While closed can be a cultural benefit – having the option to be open for business is a competitive advantage.

Here in the States, 12.4% of the workforce – 16.1 million people – belong to a union.

Over the past 24 years as union membership has dropped by a 1/3, real compensation has risen by 1/3.

union membership vs real compensation

“The problem with unions is not all that dissimilar to that posed by entrenched management: Once they win comfortable contracts, they often become impediments to the kind of innovation and flexibility essential to success in today’s economy.” – Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Sept 29, 2007

This Labor Day – as an entire family – we headed to the mall to purchase some new school shoes for the kids. On the way home we grabbed a soup and some sandwiches. The stores were open and the shopkeepers were as eager to help as any other Monday. If I understand U.S. labor laws correctly – everyone working today did so – by choice. Their employer provided them the opportunity and they took advantage of it.

Maybe their politics don’t mesh with organized labor. Maybe they were still protesting the outcome of the Pullman Strike. Maybe they find it ironic. I suspect for the vast majority of them – the additional dollars were more valuable than non-work-related plans.

Yes, I did some client work while the kids were napping, and will continue after I finish this post and clean up the dinner dishes.

The ability for a single individual to make the decision to work on Labor Day is why the U.S. is still the land of opportunity.

auth via params API Access with Authlogic

Authlogic, my current favorite Ruby-based authentication library and I were in a fight the last couple of days.

I was trying to add token-based, auth_via_params, authentication (vs. login and password) to a project – but Authlogic and I weren’t agreeing on how it should be done.

I had assumed:

@person_session = PersonSession.new(single_access_token => params[:token] )
@person_session.save

Instead Authlogic wanted me to give it a Person first.

@person_session = PersonSession.new(Person.find_by_single_access_token(params[:token]))
@person_session.save

Culld.Us – URL Shortening Reimagined

We don’t shorten URLs just to shorten them.

We shorten them for the same reason big box retailers sell flat-pack furniture – greater confidence during transport.

With that in mind, I’ve completely rebuilt Cullect’s URL Shortener1 – http://culld.us

It’s still custom brand-able. In a way I’m much happier with than in the previous version – just point your domain at your Culld.us subdomain.

The part I’m very excited about – it flips shortening on it’s ear.

Sure – you can shorten a URL in Culld.us and share it with a comment in Twitter or email or wherever…or you can just leave it in Culld.us.

Think microblogging + url shortening.

1. This is the first step in a complete rebuild of Cullect as a whole.

A CraigsList Re-Design Challenge

Many in the web design community re-designing CraigsList.org since it launched [1, 2].

Each one of these efforts feels like missing the part that makes CraigsList special to me – it’s the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Anything more – while perhaps adding value – absolutely adds overhead.

If only in the number of decisions that need to be made, communicated, and maintained.

“If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.” – Craig Newmark

Seems to me if a designer wanted to get their CraigsList re-design recommendation implemented – they’d find a couple superfluous things in the existing site and kill them.

Who’s up for the challenge?

Rails Cookie Settings for Cross-Subdomain Sessions

For the past day, I’ve been tracking down a hair-pulling-ly frustrating bug in Rails ( with Authlogic on Passenger).

My sessions weren’t sticking in production

Cross-domain or otherwise (doubly frustrating because a) Authlogic has been so rock solid for me otherwise, b) worked as expected in development).

Turns out, I wasn’t setting the session domain correctly in environments/production.rb.

config.action_controller.session[:domain] = '.YOURDOMAIN.COM'

Note the dot (it’s there for subdomains). Oh, and be sure to correctly spell your domain name…or sessions won’t work at all. 😉

Countdown to Dow 10k

Yesterday, I was asked if I’m still holding my Dow 10k by Labor Day prediction – considering it now means at least a 60 point gain for the next 11 trading days.

Yes, for 2 reasons.

First, my original prediction factored in a 75-point daily shift.

Second, Conference Board’s Aug 20 Leading Economic Indicator report came out today [pdf] citing a 0.6% increase (oh sure, I called 0.7% a couple weeks back).

“the six-month growth rate in the index has accelerated to its highest rate since the middle of 2004”

“the 3.78% four-month increase in the Leading Index from March (97.9) to July (101.6) 2009 is the largest percentage increase in the LEI for a four-month period since the 4.15% increase from October 2001 to February 2002 at the tail end of the 2001 recession. ” – Mark J Perry

Kernest as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

“We Make Shitty Software… With Bugs!…We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. ” – Dave Winer

Kernest, my web fonts service, has been publicly available for just under a month. In that time – it’s earned 400+ users, 200+ websites, and the became the first font service to sell a commercial web font license. An early success in my book.

This afternoon I had a fantastic hour-long phone conversation with a new user of Kernest. They had lots of questions about how it worked and we bumped into a number of bugs. Some I knew how to resolve easily, others require some more thought.

Yep.

There’s lots there.

Ben pointed me to Kent Beck’s recent ‘Approaching a Minimum Viable Product’ post.

“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.” – Kent Beck

The current state of Kernest validates 3 of my potentially-fatal assumptions:

  1. a font service can resolve browser-compatibilities and provide basic asset protections with a simple, standards-compliant URL. (YES!, better than I hoped)
  2. There are enough liberally licensed fonts of reasonable-quality that a reasonably-sized directory could be boot-strapped. (YES, 300 and counting!)
  3. Some commercial type designers will be happy to test out a web use license. (YES!)

Now that I’ve got those answers, it’s easier to iterate atop them.

Elsewhere:

“Cut it down to the bare minimum for you to do something with it, and ship it. Dog food doesn’t have to be pretty. It’s going to be 75% wrong. That’s the point. Who cares if it’s shit. Eat that dog shit and make it better. The sooner you actually put it up live, eat it, and invite some friends to eat it, the faster you will improve it.” – Jason Goldberg

Dow 10K By Labor Day

Over on the Twitter I’ve been predicting the Dow will hit 10K by Labor Day, with the deadline approaching, I thought I’d show you where my prediction comes from.

10kbylaborday

The light blue is the DJIA from August 2008 – March 2009 (left to right).
The dark blue is March 2009 – Today (right to left).
The green is where I think we’re going over the next 4 weeks.

As you can see – the Dow has been steadily re-tracing its steps all summer. We are now as far away from the March low as when the Dow fell off a cliff in Oct 2008.

We’re not going to see a huge jump (reversing the fall), it’s going to be hard, steady work – notice how much less volatile the market is from last year.

The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators also hit bottom in March, then turned 90 degrees and have been steadily climbing [pdf]. 1% up in April, 1% up in May, .7% up in June. Next week, I expect the Conference Board to announce another .7% rise for July.

Plus, unlike last October – there’s much less uncertainty lurking in the zeitgeist.

No, I don’t think we’ll be approaching the overheated 14k for at least another year, but I think it’s undervalued at anything below 12k.

Good work everyone.