February 2009
21 posts
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will...”
– @redstarvip
Proletariat Style
“Denim pants have been around since at least the 1600s when they were worn by workers in England. The name denim came from the French serge de Nîmes: the twilled fabric, serge, came from the French town of Nîmes. In the mid-19th century, Levi Strauss used the fabric to design a sturdy pair of pants for the workers who had come to mine for gold in northern California. Later, a tailor...
“Three nights per week pushups, plus three nights per week dumbbells, and I...”
– Me
Damn Doorknobs
You’d think that doorknobs would be simple. They’re all the same size, most doors are pre-drilled with the holes, there are standard tools for cutting the holes correctly for those doors that aren’t pre-drilled, etc. etc….
And yet, they make these fancy doorknobs. They are supposed to be “better”, in some cases they are prettier, but they can be a real pain...
“For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there...”
– W.W. Bartley
“The most academically correct solution is rarely the most pragmatic.”
– Me
“The problem with mistakes is that they’re usually not obvious while you...”
– Me
“No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better.”
– Alan Cooper
A Parable, 2/15/2009 →
The kung fu disciple, to his master: “What is the meaning of it all?”
Philia: Philia in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics... →
“young lovers, lifelong friends, cities with one another, political or business contacts, parents and children, fellow-voyagers and fellow-soldiers, members of the same religious society, or of the same tribe, a cobbler and the person who buys from him.”
“All of these different relationships involve getting on well with someone, though Aristotle at times implies that something...
PowerPoint singalong →
“A presentation read verbatim from the slides without observations, notes, comments or asides of any kind. Monotone optional, but not required.”
Don’t Be Afraid To Have Opinions Or Take Sides →
I’m willing to take a risk and be wrong. Mistakes are a good way to learn what not to do.
What I’m not willing to do is sit on the sidelines, ride the fence, and do nothing.
5 Secrets To Ninja Writing →
“Should you lead off the following paragraph with a question? Probably not – but if you’re worried about this you can always answer yourself with a bolded sentence, thus creating and disposing a nice recursive black-hole paragraph in one pass.”
The Last Newspaper →
“He reminded his rapt audience that what they now refer to as “content” used to be called “stories,” delivered by trained individuals known as “storytellers” and “journalists.” These people didn’t work for companies like Google or Amazon as they do now, culling “content” from armies of information aggregators and feeding it into computers which analyze and pull out the relevant information...
“Memory management and real pointers keep C programmers pragmatic and focused. ...”
How Twitter was Born →
“The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.”
The most successful ideas are often the “Plans B”.
“Longer Term” Planning: Thinking at the Beginning... →
A complete product plan includes not only birth, but life, and the eventual death. The time when the last server is turned off, and any clients still in the wild begin failing with “cannot connect”…
