YakShaving

I’m surprised I waited so long to read this book by Randy Komisar, now almost a decade old, titled The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. The book is a light read, I finished it between two short airplane flights to/fro Philly. Lots of this stuff is intuitive if you [...]

Yesterday, I was helping a friend and colleague at ID work on an exciting new platform for eBooks delivered on a backlit display and was shocked and pleased with how easily I was able to provide feedback, give and receive ideas and inspiration. Not only was this (hopefully) helpful to Dan, but also to myself [...]

I loved the zefrank show (zefrank is where i got that black shirt i have with the small fuzzy black duck that people always think is a stain) I’ve now referenced this video in conversation at least 3 times so I thought I might as well post it. I saw this while I was in [...]

Tim Brown’s article in Stanford’s SSIR this month covers Design Thinking for Social Innovation. In the article, the importance of direct observation, and ethnographic inquiry, standard design staples are covered. Design thinking is defined as being “inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential”. Most of the stuff in the article is old hat to those with a [...]

I read this post a few weeks ago by Joel Spolsky about growth and the need for speed (The post is entitled “Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?”. I thought to myself for a while and nodded… and all of the examples were spot on: Word vs WordPerfect / Oracle vs Ingres. But there was [...]

You start to lose track of days when you are trying polyphasic sleeping. Remember when I was talking about all of the social norms you’re up against when trying non circadian sleeping habits? Well, they’re a lot more pervasive than I thought. I think I finally got into a groove, but I’m not sure how [...]

Today begins the 3rd attempt in my life to switch to a polyphasic sleeping schedule. I’ve tried twice in the past, unsuccessfully. Both of those were in college. For a while I just thought that it would be amazingly awesome to sleep just… less. Be insanely more productive and contribute to seventy five different projects, [...]

Last week, Chris Dixon posted this comment from Caterina Fake (of Flickr fame) that really got me thinking: “Flickr is a wonderful place to be a photograph“. Makes a lot of sense. If you were a photograph, where else would you want to be? On Flickr, lots of people would look at you, you’d be [...]

From TechCrunch yesterday: Get Ready For The Firehose. Search Is About To Get Realtime, Real Fast Oh great. Here we go. My post yesterday about realtime couldn’t have been more timely. Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results. For the search engines, the firehose [...]

Clive Thompson wrote this piece on “How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind“. There’s a post in Business Insider and from MSNBC with a special guest experience by Steve Berlin Johnson, called “Twitter And The Real-Time Web Are Ambushing Google”. I’m going to take a stand and call utter BS on the article and [...]

Great TED talk by John Gerzema. I won’t make another comment about skating to where the puck is headed, but you get the point. “Did you know that 68% of Americans now carry a library card: The highest percentage ever in our nation’s history. What you see in this consumer trend is also the accumulation [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote about rating systems for product reviews from an article I read in ACM. Then I saw this article in VentureBeat about what Yelp is doing. The author mentions: “when you’re looking for a fast solution on where to eat, a list full of four-star restaurants makes for an overwhelming [...]