Pure Vanity.
My favorite productivity trick has got to be moving everything on my desktop into a folder to be looked at later and everything in my inbox into the ” refile” mailbox.
An empty desktop and a clean mail folder and all of a sudden you’re more productive.
I think the technical term for this is “pushing the reset button”, except in my version of it, there is no shutdown notification. (If I weren’t such a poser, I’d twitter it.)
I tried that today.
[The fallout after the jump.]Continue reading
Last week I skipped out of work for a few hours to hang at Web 2.0 Expo which was promoted by Dave McClure.
I had to scum a coupon code from Scott which was making the rounds, when I asked Dave a few months back, he was not very forthcoming. Maybe he misunderstood that all I wanted was a free pass to the convention floor; maybe he was afraid that I’d “hurl up my Lunch 2.0.”
[My day at the Expo after the jump]Continue reading
Holly wrote recently that your most passionate users don’t necessarily build the best products. It’s really worth a read.
I think the problem comes from the fact that there is often a large difference between what people say they want, and what people really want.
Forgetting that this difference exists and being insensitive to a customer’s true desires is the source of many mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned.
What follows is an example of each of those things two things: a mistake and a lesson.
[Michael and me after the jump.]Continue reading
For almost a month now, I’ve been living in the best place to dine according to Bon Appétit readers.
Other than fast food, I’ve eaten out here a total of three times.
Things to get
“Sara would read anything you handed her…She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car…If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupon. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with the volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through on of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”
—Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys”
I can relate.
This leads to the famous line in the movie: “She was a junkie for the
printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”
I got my kitchen closet shelving today. (It’s actually a coat closet, but I’m turning it into a kitchen one which says something about my priorities.)
In about 3rd grade or so, we had to write down a self-description. The teacher gathered the cards, read them, and the class would try to guess who it was about.
My description started out: “I am 3′ 11″ tall…”
That’s about all I remember and it’s just about as far as the teacher got before the entire class guessed it was me. While I thought it was a pretty impressive number, I was still the shortest kid in my grade.
I’m standing in the elevator reading the side of a box I’m hauling up to the apartment. The shelves are 48″ long, an inch longer than I was at the time, and how this event comes back to my mind unbidden.
I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.
This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)
But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.
Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.
Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.
(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)
[Updates after the jump]Continue reading
I woke up today and had four zits on my forehead.
That’s like two more than I had my entire high school years. What’s up with that?Continue reading
As I was nitpicking a historical inaccuracy in a recent Wired article, Holly wondered if I ever took a Myer-Briggs.
I always felt I’d score an introvert, but nearly everyone who ever took Myer-Briggs said I’d score a heavy extrovert. I had never took one so I didn’t know.
Mildly amusing play on this.
I don’t play Second Life, but I definitely need to get a first life.