The other day, I pondered deleting my blog entirely. But I realized a couple of things that made me reconsider: Even though my day job is writing, I really do enjoy writing on my own, for fun. I’m not terribly artistic – so writing of any kind is more or less my creative outlet. As my 45th birthday approaches, I find myself reflecting, and sort of missing the challenge that the Honolulu Marathon presented to me – it was a…
A bit ago, this blog post crossed my Twitter feed. I read it, and while the schadenfreude made me smirk for a minute, it eventually made me feel bad. The blog post purports to describe how a shitty shutdown dialog became a shitty shutdown dialog. But instead, it documents something I like to call “too many puppies” syndrome. If you are working on high visibility areas of a product – like the Windows Shell – like Explorer in particular, everybody…
I’m tired of filtering out spam from the comments. As a result, if you want to comment on a post, find me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.
“The reason why businesses love measures is because they mistakenly believe that measures are real, hard data.” Karen Phelan, author of “I’m Sorry I Broke Your Company.”
“As a lad he became expert as an amateur watchmaker. Disliking farm work because, “considering the results, there was too much work on the place,” he became an apprentice mechanic in Detroit, and repaired watches in a jewelry shop at night. He flirted with the idea of entering the watch manufacturing business on a large scale, “but I did not because I figured out that watches were not universal necessities.” His apprenticeship over, he served with the local representative of…
“The first thing I do when I start to look into the affairs of a failing company is to study the personnel of the organization and the individuality of the men. I am concerned first of all with executives, because if their principles are not right it is useless to look for results from the men. When I have measured up in my own mind the capacity of the executives, I get out into the operation of the plant and…
Given recent events, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about metadata. The “Patriot”* act, signed in the hazy, fear-driven months after 9/11 was a piece of legislation that was so broad that even one of the authors now says the hoovering of telephone metadata was never the intent of the law. Law, like any type of contract, is a funny thing. It’s not so much what you say, it’s what you don’t say that matters. I was concerned about the potential…
During 2012, I used my iPad as the primary device for writing most of the time on the road. I also used a new stand with it, which proved quite useful when both writing with it on my lap and while on planes to and from conferences. For the longest time, I regularly had to answer the question, “Where can I get one?” – only to wind up disappointing them since I had a prototype and you couldn’t buy it yet. I…
“It’s increasingly likely that a small group of well-financed people are going to be able to really bring this country to its knees.” I couldn’t agree more, which is why we shouldn’t let them be re-elected. Anyone willing to grab a pitchfork and stab the rule of law in the name of fear doesn’t deserve to hold office in this country. Fox News: Republican lawmaker defends call to torture (Linked from USA Today)
Stop buying more stuff, believing that buying more stuff will make you happy. Happy Earth Day.