Topics on businesses, good and bad.
Before I sold it, Project Badger was ugly. Almost painfully ugly. It wasn’t a deliberate decision — I’d have made it pretty if I’d had the time — but our customers wanted what it did, not how it looked. When BigCo bought it, the first thing they did was slap a new name on it …
Continue reading ‘“In Defense of Hard: When Easier Isn’t Better”’ »
You’d think that a company like Microsoft would come up with something better written, better acted, and altogether better thought-out than this. Disappointing. (I’m not a big fan of Google, but I’m far less a fan of Microsoft, given that they’ve done their damnedest to sabotage any progress for at least the last ten years …
Continue reading ‘“Microsoft ribs Google’s ad tech with ‘Gmail Man’”’ »
Scott Adams points out a possible link between creativity and boredom. I can see where he’s coming from, in that when you’re bored you’re more likely to think of something creative than when you’re too busy to think, but I’m pretty sure people can be creative even without boredom, at least in the area that …
The countries of the world are in dire financial straits. They have been for years, but it’s finally coming to a head because they’re reaching the end of their credit. Everyone who watches the least bit of news knows about Greece, but that’s just the first; Portugal and Spain have also had their credit ratings …
Fun bit of trivia: Phineas Taylor Barnum (better known as P. T. Barnum) was born exactly two hundred one years ago today. Just about any American kid who watches any TV probably still knows his name, by way of the touring circus he founded, now known as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. “The …
I try to keep this blog away from politics, but for issues of sufficient magnitude and importance, I have to bend that rule on occasion. If you’re American (and maybe even if you’re not), you’ve probably heard by now about the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that money was …
Continue reading ‘“Move to Amend: coalition to abolish corporate personhood”’ »
Besides the humorous and enlightening marketing lesson, this article points out a mental quirk of our species: the reward you get from something isn’t as important to your happiness as the amount of effort you had to put into getting it. I have perfectly sound and logical business reasons for always tackling the hardest programming …
Wow, newspapers are really getting desperate. I just got another call from a newspaper telemarketer (yes, yet again). When I said that I still wasn’t interested in a newspaper, he asked where I got my news, so I told him from the Internet. So far, no different than every other time these guys have called. …
I’ve mentioned a couple times before that I used KeePassX, the unofficial Linux port of the highly-thought-of KeePass Password Safe. A few months ago I decided that I’d gotten tired of using it… KeePassX had only basic password management features, it lacked most of the nice features that I heard KeePass had, like automatically and …
Knowledge really is power — power that the Internet is moving from governments and large corporations to the people. Nothing I haven’t talked about before, though I’m frankly shocked at how fast it’s happening. Let’s hope that the people use it well.