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
I am the very definition of lazy.
Case in point: I pulled three all-nighters in two weeks in order to allow our widget partners to do the work of pimping my Tagged profile with
which is a round-about way of saying:
Before this I was working on infrastructure. The problem with infrastructure is nobody can see it. Widgets on the other hand…
(Both of the above widgets were created through our widget partner RockYou! which is co-founded by my sometimes Ultimate teammate, Jia Shen.)
[More widgets 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
Out of nowhere, the tired old dog of PHP compilation rears its ugly head.
Here is an recent e-mail exchange that puts it in its place (along with some information about code browsers and documentors and a lot of confusion on my part). I don’t think anyone is going to mind me posting these since the only one who comes off as an idiot is me.
[Dialog after the jump]Continue reading
I removed this rant from my last entry.
<rant>
I like to say Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 on the cheap. But that doesn’t mean we’re any less losers.
The only difference is instead of being about the New Economy, it’s about how the Old Media “just doesn’t get it.” And instead of talking about when our options are going to vest, we’re talking about what so-and-so had for lunch because of some Twitter SMS we got.
Fuck, we make fun of those people who pick up People while in line for the checkout stand, but at least it cost them nothing, unlike the $236.70 SMS charges we’ve racked up.
</rant>
Sometimes I think we deserve all the beatings we got in high school.
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
“It hurts me to confess it, but I’d have given ten conversations with Einstein for an initial rendezvous with a pretty chorus girl… And how often, standing on the sidewalk involved in a passionate discussion with friends, I lost the thread of the argument being developed because a devastating woman was crossing the street at that very moment.”
—Albert Camus, “The Fall”
Someone else asked me a question whose answer turned out to be Gaia Online.
According to the data in the hints of the question, Gaia needs a serious revision upward in Alexa traffic rankings. I’m still wondering how revenue is going to keep up with costs though.
This company had a booth at ZendCon which was practically the only booth I missed even though they had a totally smokin’ boothbabe there—ZendCon isn’t CES. I guess missing out doesn’t matter much, becauser the lead engineers at the company visited Plaxo before they closed their insane round. All I recall from then was that Gaia Online was like Cyworld meets Second Life for 12 year olds. It’s a pretty cool website for those of you who aren’t Korean and worth a looksie if only to get a hint of what your kids will be doing online when they reach 10.
Speaking of Second Life, Dave was talking to me the other day about someone plunking down $50k for Amsterdam and for some reason it made me think of this. I don’t know why.
My favorite vim setting
// vim:set expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 foldmethod=marker syntax=php:
has the unfortunate side-effect of causing others to complain about the fact that my source code is “folded.” The problem is that some people who are only vim-users-only-when-working-on-a-remote-machine have a small learning curve when they see a page that looks like
<?php // vim:set expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 foldmethod=marker syntax=php: +-- 12 lines: docs ------------------------------------------------------------- +-- 6 lines: imports ---------------------------------------------------------- +--154 lines: WidgetProviders -------------------------------------------------- ?>
But with about a minute, training yourself how to navigate vim folding will pay itself off handsomely for those of us who don’t use IDEs or do fancy stuff like exuberant ctags.
[quick fold tutorial after the jump]
Continue reading
It’s (almost) finally safe to make a single song purchase in iTunes Music Store. A new feature called Complete My Album will count your single song purchases to the purchase of the entire album.
Nice.
It’s currently a limited time offer. My guess is they’re going to see the conversion rate before deciding to make it permanent. That’s clever but annoying.Continue reading