Posts Filed Under ‘People’
Should You or Shouldn’t You Host Your Own Webapps
September 21st, 2009, 13 comments
One of the smartest people I've ever met, Maciej Cegłowski, says you shouldn't self-host web-based software like WordPress or Fever or eventually, Google Wave, because it requires you to "devote half your life to learning and understanding [server] administration." Go with a hosted service or generate flat HTML files of your blog posts that you upload to your server automatically instead, he says. While Maciej's argument may apply to some (ok, most?) folks, I disagree: When it comes to a project you care passionately about, doing it yourself is much more educational and satisfying (and won't take half your life). Sure, most people should just buy instead of build, but they'll never get something that's exactly what they want and unlike any other.
September 3rd, 2009, 5 comments
Voting for SXSW Interactive panel proposals closes end-of-day tomorrow, and your little green thumbs-up counts for 30% of a panel's chance of actually happening. Here's the panel I proposed, the one I'll be on (if it's voted through), and others I've voted for.
Post your picks for panels you've given the thumbs up in the comments, so we can help make the good stuff come to fruition in Austin this spring.
August 26th, 2009
You like looking at beautiful things? You're in the right place. The full collection of pieces from my guest curator stint at online art gallery 20x200 is now available. Check out what they all look like hanging on a wall together. If I had to name this collection, I'd call it nerdy-nostalgic.
As I said earlier, my favorite piece is Rebecca Loyche's The Office, but Mark Richards' Apple I comes in a close second. (Aren't computer innards awesome?) I love all of the pieces, but the other image I can't get out of my head is Hosang Park's Howon aerial photograph.
Check out 20x200's full newsletter about the collection, which includes an IM conversation transcript between myself and gallery owner extraordinaire Jen Bekman. If you need to spice up your cubicle or home, pick up a piece or two (or eight) to support some amazing artists and the gallery who features them.
August 18th, 2009, 1 comment
Being a purveyor of technology links and a coder feels like the furthest thing from a museum curator, but my friend and gallery owner Jen Bekman asked me to choose eight of my favorite images from her online art gallery 20x200 this week.
20x200 is a treasure trove of eye candy. Be prepared to spend some time there, and maybe even a little money--you want to buy and hang this stuff in your home and office. I had a ball making my picks, which will appear in tomorrow's next week's edition of the 20x200 email newsletter. In the meantime, I get to share my favorite of all the pieces: the one pictured here, a photo called "The Office" by Rebecca Loyche. Here's an excerpt of a chat transcript between Jen and I about the photo.
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Debunking the Lone Genius Myth
August 5th, 2009
During their session at OSCON, Google programmers Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick say that it's coders who can collaborate with others, not lone ranger geniuses, who are best at what they do.
July 27th, 2009, 5 comments
Writer Dominic Ali came up with an unusual way to make office meetings more bearable--one that would make Ellen proud. In the comments of my recent post about meetings, Ali says:
At my previous job, I once took on a temporary acting communications director role. All of a sudden, I had eight people reporting to me. To keep impromptu meetings short, I instituted Dance Meetings. By playing some funk at low levels through my computer speakers, I'd encourage my colleagues to dance. We'd dance for the duration of the song as we discussed their projects, challenges, personal troubles, etc. The benefits were immediately clear.
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July 13th, 2009, 6 comments
I've always been an avid daydreamer--so much so that my mind can wander off at the most inopportune moments, like in the middle of a conversation. But I've always come up with my best ideas and even made difficult decisions in the midst of totally idle thought. So it doesn't surprise me that a new brain-scanning study shows that a wandering mind isn't idle at all: in fact, it's hard at work moving you toward a flash of insight. The Wall Street Journal reports:
By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.
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June 22nd, 2009, 8 comments
New York Times technology writer David Pogue offers a few of his biggest productivity tips, from working at home (thus avoiding a time-intensive commute) to using voice-to-text transcription software, text expansion, and keyboard macros. What caught my eye is how he uses a personal database to store and find information he needs. Pogue writes:
Years ago, I started using an address-book program that's now called iData 3. It's a freeform database, meaning that the "cards" in this database don't have separate fields for Name, Street, City and so on; instead, you can type or paste whatever you want into each freeform card.
This program doesn't play well with field-based contact managers like Google's or the iPhone's, but the beauty is that it holds whatever you want: recipes, brainstorms, article fragments, driving directions, lists, Web addresses and so on. And you can find anything in a fraction of a second. (Actually, iData now lets you create field-based databases as well, but my freeform database has been growing since about 1988 and I'm not about to convert it.)
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June 22nd, 2009, 4 comments
Inc. magazine's "The Way I Work" feature profiles Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, the software that runs this site. Even though the article byline was "by Matt Mullenweg," Matt says the reporter actually wrote the piece--so he rewrote it, in his own words, on his blog. (I love this.) Matt's workday sounds perfect to me. He says it includes:
- No computer or email for an hour after he wakes up (not to an alarm clock)
- No meetings before 11AM
- Working from home six days a week, even though his office is a five-minute walk from his home
- Going out for long lunches (and having meetings over food)
- Batching his tasks to avoid context switching: all his meetings in one day, all coding TODO's in another, all his errands in another.
Interestingly, he uses RescueTime to monitor what applications he spends his day in, and also uses both a Mac and PC connected with Synergy (like I do). This whole article is worth a read, but get it in Matt's words on his own blog: The Way I Work, annotated. Photo by Andrea Beggi.
June 19th, 2009, 1 comment
What I love most about my friend Penelope Trunk's Twitter feed (and all her writing) is that it's raw, personal, and hilarious. But I imagine getting served with legal documents that involve a printout of it wasn't so hilarious.
iPhone and Mac Talk on Copper Robot
June 15th, 2009
Had a blast last night on Mitch Wagner's Second Life interview series, Copper Robot, where TUAW's Mike Rose, ArminasX Saiman, Mitch and I got to chat about Apple's new iPhone and Snow Leopard announcements last week. Thanks to Mitch and my co-panelists for having me; if you missed the event in-world, you can watch and listen to the video here. I also posted a couple of screenshots from the event on Flickr.
June 5th, 2009, 4 comments
Comedian Chris Hardwick theorizes that the essence of having confidence is having options. That is, confidence is knowing that if this one thing you really really want doesn't work out, you've got a safety net. That net makes you less desperate for that one thing to happen, more chill and composed. Makes sense. But how does one create these options? Hardwick says you've got to get good at something you love--then everything else will be better.
When you’re learning how to do something you enjoy and ultimately doing it well, that becomes mental currency that you can use as armor for a variety of seemingly unrelated situations, and therein lies the cool mind sorcery of it all: the options you create DO NOT have to relate to the situations in which you want to be confident. You don’t have to be an ace with the ladies to pick up more ladies—you can excel at something entirely different and still get the action you so richly deserve. The key is for you to feel safe and comfortable.
This rings true to me. My line about this whole writing thing is "whatever, if it doesn't work out I'll go back to being a programmer."
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Google Wave, Bing, and the Future of Newspapers on TWiT
May 31st, 2009, 2 comments
Had a blast yakking with Leo Laporte, Don Tapscott, Jeff Jarvis and his son Jake Jarvis on today's episode of This Week in Tech. We covered much ground, from gushing over/being cautious about Google Wave (first take the time to watch this, then read this), to the flailings of the newspaper industry (read this), to redesigning the goals and methods of the modern university (listen to what 17-year-old Jake has to say about that). This was my third TWiT, but it was the first one nerves didn't get the best of me--felt comfortable, chilled out, and quite chatty . Thanks to Leo and the rest of the fabulous panel for putting up with me. Here's the episode page; MP3 available for download.
May 25th, 2009, 3 comments
Artist Jorge Colombo drew the image that graces the June 1st cover of The New Yorker magazine with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone app. Virtually "finger-painting" an image like this onto a tiny iPhone touchscreen seems insane and inconvenient, but Colombo has good reasons. The New Yorker reports:
He discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.)
Drawing on the iPhone also offers the artist anonymity. Colombo stood in Times Square for an hour drawing this image on his iPhone and no one gave him a second look. Unlike if he had been painting with an easel, passersby just assumed he was checking his email.
Surely sales of the Brushes app will go through the roof this week as aspiring artists scramble to replicate Colombo's work. Of course, Ken Rockwell was right when he asserted that it's an artist's eye, patience, and skill that makes a good image, not the tools he or she uses. See a video of this drawing come to life below.
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May 24th, 2009, 5 comments
I've got my own pie chart of how I want to spend my time, so it was fun to hear that Jim Collins, author of bestselling book Good to Great, also has a similar breakdown, pictured right. The New York Times reports:
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Collins is a whole lot more diligent about tracking his progress than I've ever been, though.
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