YakShaving

Yak•Shaving (noun) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem

Month: January, 2008

links for 2008-01-31

Thinking About Tomorrow – WSJ.com (tags: technology futurism)

links for 2008-01-30

Effective Writing – George Orwell (tags: writing tips language howto creativity)

links for 2008-01-27

Masters of Collaboration (tags: design collaboration teamwork)

How To Make Things “moddable”

image source: Tyler Hicks, NYTimes Game developers have known for a long time now that a clever way to win consumers is by making their games “modifiable” — That is, adding custom levels in Quake, or creating scenarios in strategy games like Civilization. As designers/innovators, we all know it’s particularly insightful to observe extreme/lead users [...]

links for 2008-01-23

jaxer (tags: ajax server web aptana development javascript)

Hamel appeals for innovation “hackers”

According to Gary Hamel (whose book I have yet to finish reading), you can teach an old dog new tricks. His assertion that corporate leaders invest very little on training of innovation methods may well be true: even truer might be that corporate expenditure on innovation might be wasted in bizarre ways. Rather than allocating [...]

links for 2008-01-22

Curious (tags: curiosity creativity inspiration)

How I learned to stop worrying and love “I’m feeling lucky”

I was looking for a Firefox search engine plugin today for Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”. Why? Because I am militant about saving time, I search for stuff constantly, and I think it’s easier to type in “Illinois DMV” into a search bar and I’m pretty sure I know what the first hit is going to [...]

Dual Sim Cards for international travelers

When I went to China last summer, I met a lot of [mostly businessmen] who had dual sim card phones. In the late 90′s I remember clearly a device released that fit over your phone jack or connected to your phone and automatically dialed internationally using the cheapest provider for the call. (Nowadays, this would [...]

links for 2008-01-21

Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog ยป 8 Important Consumer Trends to Look Out for in 2008 (tags: design trends)

links for 2008-01-19

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard (tags: environment sustainability stuff)

Restaurants and new ventures: Looking past the conventional wisdom

It would appear that growing enterprises and [buffalo wing] restaurants really do have a lot in common. From Business Week: Restaurant owners weren’t failing because they had ill-defined competitive strategies. They weren’t failing because they lacked access to capital, or because they chose poor locations, either. (These are factors, Parsa says, just not typically make-or-break [...]