“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” — Dr. Seuss, The Lorax. Next month marks 12 long years since I joined Twitter. I distinctly recall an early conversation while walking to lunch with the dev team I was managing then, joking about how Twitter was used primarily to let people know you were on your way to the bathroom, or you were back from the bathroom. It all seems so simple and…
During the past 12+ years I’ve used a Mac, I’ve had dozens of little utilities that I swore by for a time, many of which came and went. Some were binkies of a sort, easing the discomfort of using a Mac for a long-time Windows user. Some were power toys – often to find things, run things, or sort things in ways that a Mac’s operating system couldn’t at a certain moment in time. Over the years, what would eventually…
Until 8 months ago, I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “bot” or “bots” used in any context other than search engine crawlers or FrontPage technology <shudder/>. But beginning three boot camps ago, someone asked me, “how do we license bots?” – and I’ve been asked this question at both boot camps since, and 3 more times in addition during that timeframe. Outside of licensing Office for use in a server application (step 1: don’t do that!), this is…
As I head into the weekend, I’m prepping for my second work trip of the year. First up was Orlando, back in January. While we often don’t have a ton of free time in some of the cities we hit for our licensing boot camps, my colleague and I usually have a bit free, and in particular, have time for specific dining options. San Diego is a funny one, because while I usually have a set of places I like…
Yesterday on Twitter I said: Find the little joys. Treasure them. I mean this sincerely. Our lives can be overwhelming. But I believe that the key to living a life worth living is to find these little joys. If you follow me on Twitter, you may see these from me sometimes. A video of a bird singing. A photo of a flower. A sunset, or often a photo from a 737 as I fly to or from one of our…
“Death of the United States?”, you ask, shaking your head at the lunacy of a blog post that dares to suggest such a thing. As we sit here in 2017, days into a new administration, we are faced with a dangerously narcissistic man in the White House who has suggested voter fraud based on no provable facts, but instead based on his own opinion; a press secretary who parrots whatever he is told, whether it is provably false or not;…
Over the last several weeks, a Skylake full of ink has been spilled over this fall’s Apple crop. Actually, the press seems fascinated with three distinct topics: Insufficient magic in the 2016 MacBook Pros Apple “sticking it to pros” by offering limited RAM in the MBP Apple “sticking it to pros” by not updating the Mac Pro desktop since 2013. Issue number 1: Beginning the next day after the announcement, I had non-technical friends asking me, “what’s the deal with poor, old,…
Almost exactly three years ago, I decided to kill my Facebook account. Not log off. Delete it. It’s been gone since then, and honestly, I never miss it. When I signed on to Twitter for the first time in May of 2008, I had no idea what I would do with it. The running joke at the time was that Twitter was primarily used to let others know you were going to/were in/were back from, the bathroom. Colleagues at a startup…
Following my recent trip to Germany, I’ve spent the last month thinking about the idea of brand spaces. By brand space, I mean the use of a space – be it a single store, a building, or a multi-building space, that a business uses to establish or grow a marketing relationship with their consumers. Although I hate to fly, I love to travel. (As I like to tell people, “I like to be places”.) I took a few days this year…
Last week, as I entered the elevator of the building, another tenant turned to me and gleefully exclaimed, pointing across the garage at a new Jeep, “See that Jeep? I think I’m going to buy it.” I could tell immediately that this guy (a younger man, in his 20’s) was in trouble. He was smitten. He was a stranger, but sharing all of this, unprovoked. I had just come home from work, after a long editorial review meeting, followed by a trip to…