Here's a positive step to avoid the faceless bureaucracy that wants to take over your organization:
Every new rule needs to be associated with one and only one person who is willing to stand up for it and explain it (to your people and to the public).
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Blog: Put a name on it. Seth Godin reviving a Ancient Greek tradition to avoid stupid rules & bureaucracy
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Blog: What do I delegate, and why? » sacha chua
Setting appointments: Great. They follow up with people and manage my calendar. People’s reactions are fun, too. 
Following step-by-step routines: Good. Because the task is done by any available assistant, I sometimes benefit from different perspectives, and sometimes get people who overlook a step. I’ve given my routines one-word shortcuts so that I can e-mail complex requests easily. Comparison shopping: Okay. It’s a good idea to specify which stores you want, and even better if you can specify the item you’re looking for. I’m in Canada, so I need to remind them to check if retailers will ship to Canada and to factor in shipping costs when comparing price. Web research: Hit or miss, unless the search is very specific. Maybe it’s the 15- to 30-minute “task window” they work with, or differences in approach, or even English skills. Still, it’s a decent way to get started on a task, and even wrong results teach me more about what I’m really looking for. Calling for information: Good. I don’t have Web access on my phone, so if I’m out and I need to confirm information that’s not on my iPod, I can call them. It’s a US call, though, so I ask them to call me back with the results. The turn-around time is decent.
via sachachua.com
I have been pondering about Virtual Assistants as well.
I consider this a MUST READ
Superpowers at work.
I can sit at one of those meetings where the customer is annoyingly vague about his requirements and keeps waving his hands around as if it explains anything. I ask few questions, drilling down into specific requests he’s made and after the meeting, I tell my team: “The customer wants X. He forgot to ask for Y, but he’ll need this too. He’ll be very happy if we’ll throw in Z as well. He doesn’t need W, even though he asked for it, so we can skip it.”. I always get this right.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Mission Accomplished! Boxing Day Sale Win at Future Shop!
Just bought a new netbook at Future Shop.
As you can see, they only had ten at the cheaper price. I bought the ninth.
Here is to waking up at 6AM.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Beautiful Losers: @mikecane is right, The Author's Guild are dumbasses.
It would therefore have been deeply satisfying, on many levels, to litigate our case to the end and win, enjoining Google from scanning books and forcing it to destroy the scans it had made. It also would have been irresponsible, once a path to a satisfactory settlement became available.Litigation, particularly litigation over the bounds of fair use, involves risk. Some critics of the settlement wrongly dismiss that risk, but the fact is that we certainly could have lost the case. Losing would have meant that anyone, not just Google, could have digitized copyright protected books and made them available through search engines. Since creating a search engine is rather simple, anyone with a website -- Civil War buffs, science fiction fans, medical information providers -- would then have been empowered to start the uncontrolled scanning of books and the display of "snippets." Authors would have no say in those uses and no control over the security of those scans. The damage to copyright protection would have been incalculable.
via authorsguild.org
The Authors Guild - Ursula K. Le Guin, Google, and the Economics of Authorship
This letter is wrong on so many levels.
1) Why would it be good if Google destroyed all the scans they have already done?
2) As per Mike Cane, these people are dumb. It is not easy to create search engines. If it was easy, Google won't have a monopoly on search engines.
3) Display of snippets is still not display of the book. I don't know if these guys know about a place where they are giving out the entire content of the book for FREE. It's called the library.
Personally, I don't think these guys knew what they were doing. One of the interesting that came out of the original settlement was that it gave Google a de facto, legal monopoly over all digital books. I guess this new settlement only gives Google an effective monopoly, as no other entity would spend the billions to scan all the out-of-print books.
So, new stream of income, Yes. But it would be only from Google, set by Google (with the occasional prodding from the Author's Guild to try to increase it.) It's not like any entity will emerge any time soon to challenge Google at this.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
There is nothing sexy about Dostoevsky
Underground Man is sexier than Pierre Buzukhov
This is stupid, try-hard crap.
Quote: Book publishers are idiots
One key advantage of corporate publishing was supposed to be its marketing muscle: You may not publish exactly the books you’d like to, but the ones you publish will get the attention they deserve. Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional marketing is useless.
“Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,” says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade. Others vehemently disagree. But who really knows? Focused consumer research is almost nonexistent in publishing. What readers want—and whether it’s better to cater to their desires or try harder to shape them—remains a hotly contested issue.
via nymag.com
What kind of large corporate entity doesn't do simple market surveys?
So these guys routinely buy print ads at artsy magazines without looking at its effectiveness?
What about simple reader surveys?
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Calling @Doctorow "the last, best hope" for SciFi is a bit much. But he is awesome.
It's enough to make you think he really is the Chosen One.
Lego goes the extra penny for users — UX Hero
See those extra Lego pieces? Those are the ones most likely to be lost either by the manufacturing process or by accident when a kid (or I) build the thing.
Meanwhile, I’ve purchased plenty of build it yourself furniture from places like IKEA or CB2, and they almost always leave out a 2¢ screw. And it’s almost always some special screw that the local hardware store doesn’t have. Fun right?
Note that leaving out a 2¢ part is worse than a big all-at-once failure. With a big failure both you and the store know how to fix it. With a missing screw failure you think, “can I live without this screw or do I drive all the way back there with a half-built book shelf because they screwed me to save two cents per unit?”
Penny wise, pound foolish.
The user experience design version of this is “not going the extra mile to make the experience frictionless.” Yes, it costs more to do, but the downstream effects are huge.
Related Post: Augmented Reality at the Lego Store.
via uxhero.com
Monday, December 21, 2009
Ebooks vs Hardcovers: which is more profitable?
For instance, 40% of hardcovers are either resold online two or three times or lent to friend and family two to three times. Or swapped two or three or more times.
None of those transactions pay a penny to the publisher or the author.
But e-books can’t be resold. Or borrowed. (Barnes & Noble’s Nook offers publishers the option to lend once, but few allow it.)
I have been thinking about this ever since I learned that the Kindle is DRM-ed. Even if it wasn't, transferring files from one device to another is always difficult and annoying.
I never realized the Hardcover secondary market is so big.
Texas -- no bookstores here.
Laredo (pop. 250,000) the largest US city with no bookstore. (The nearest substitute will be in San Antonio, 150 miles away.)
via csmonitor.com
Just found out that the two largest cities without bookstores in America are both in Texas.
Laredo and San Antonio.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Die #Framemaker Die!
In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed in the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we’re used to that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And Frame was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of thing that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourages editors to drink at their desks.
After the horror of learning the basics of Framemaker, I spent the last two years looking for an alternative -- any alternative -- to this Adobe abomination.
After trying wiki and CMS, editors, Eclipse, etc., nothing still just works.
This solution seems close. Tho, no cigar. It's a lot clumsier than I think is warranted. Why not do a custom CSS for paper? Or push it thru LaTex?
New level of awesome. PastryKit (sort of) works on #Android
Enter PastryKit. As Daring Fireball explains, this combination of JavaScript, CSS, and some supporting graphics resources was created and used by Apple to make the latest version of the iPhone User Guide. When accessed from mobile Safari, a special iPhone-formated version loads up, which perfectly mimics native application look and feel. It does so by explicitly limiting the view to an iPhone screen-sized rectangle, hiding the mobile Safari toolbar, and allowing for the creation of fixed-position toolbars. All input is then intercepted by JavaScript functions, which then handle scrolling in a manner that is as close to native as anyone has yet to manage.
via arstechnica.com
I am loading the Apple User Guides now on my ADP1 with the Dolphin Browser. As long as you set the user agent to "Iphone", it will work.
Well -- sorta.
Everything displays and all the links work. But it never seems to finish loading. I guess some of the javascript bits are throwing the Android javascript interpreter into a loop. Also, I set the default to "Large Fonts" for my browser. This seems to skew the layout on all the pages.
But the cool part is that: It works!!
Man, I think Skagen Watches are slick. CrunchDeals: 25% off Skagen watches
via skagen.com
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/12/17/crunchdeals-25-off-skagen-watches/
I know. ~$200 for a quartz watch.
But they are so thin!
They are like ipod touches on your wrists. Except they only tell time.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Lou Reed's new Iphone App.
Friday, December 11
Lou Reed Launches iPhone App That Has Nothing to Do With Lou Reed
Cut down on chronic iPhone squint with the Lou Zoom.
Photo by Kirstie Shanley
You know when you go to your grandparents' house and they have one of those phones with really big number buttons and it's sorta sad? Well, Lou Reed's new iPhone app is the iPhone equivalent of a telephone with big numbers on it.
It's called Lou Zoom and it enlarges the names and numbers on your contact list "allowing you to read your contact info without squinting," according to a press release. It also makes searching your contacts a bit easier.
And, just in case you think this utilitarian app may have been created by another Lou Reed (since it has nothing to do with music or art or anything), no dice-- the Lou Zoom is currently featured prominently on The Lou Reed's official website.
The application costs $1.99 and you won't need your reading glasses to appreciate the screen shots below the fold:
via pitchfork.com
Everyone is in the Iphone app game now.
Monday, December 14, 2009
FSJ: Why the mainstream media is dying
via fakesteve.net
Wow. I didn't know NYT did an article then.
This is just awful. Maybe newspapers do deserve to die.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Fake Steve Jobs on AT&T. This is why carrier companies will never be consumer companies
So we set up a call with Randall this morning to discuss some of the profoundly stupid things his guy Ralph de la Vega said recently about creating incentives that would encourage people to stop using AT&T’s data network so much. Point of the talk was, when you’re lucky enough to create a smash hit product — when the stars align, and the hardware is great and the ecosystem is great and the apps are great and the whole experience is great, and everything you do just makes everything else better, and you’re totally on a roll and can do no wrong — when that happens, you do not go out and try to fuck it all up by discouraging people who love your product. What you do, instead, is you fix your fucking shitty ass network you fucking shit-eating-grin-wearing hillbilly ass clown!
via fakesteve.net
Friday, December 11, 2009
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: How the Apocalypse Would Happen if Heaven Were a Small Non-Profit.
HOW THE APOCALYPSE WOULD HAPPEN IF HEAVEN WERE A SMALL NON-PROFIT.
via mcsweeneys.net
This is my life.
sigh.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Car insurance, home ownership, and efficient markets
Car insurance, home ownership, and efficient markets
I don't insure my car. Well, I have liability insurance, but I don't insure the car itself. So if I drive it into a ditch, or it gets stolen, I have to pay to repair or replace it, out of my own pocket.
This article pretty much sums up all my thoughts on buying vs, renting and car ownership, and how so much of it is a scam.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The distance between the F and OSS amazes me.
This is why I have always maintained that drawing a political line between so-called “open source advocates” and so-called “free software advocates” is specious. You can’t have “open source software” (in the sense that open source advocates mean the words) without also having “free software” (in the sense that free software advocates mean the words). Both are merely contractions of “free-licensed open source software”. The definitions promoted by both groups (the “Open Source Definition” and the “Free Software Definition”) include both legal freedom to modify and share the code and the pragmatic access to it.
Man, I had this giant debate last night on this exact same topic over the phone.
Free Software!
Open Source!
I guess there is a difference, but as an end-user, I don't really care.
I just want to know when they will let me watch pure TV and play cool RPG's on my eeePC.
RRW: Facebook Game Addicts "Paid" to Oppose Health Care Reform
Got that? An aggregation-heavy blog quotes a Flash game CEO blaming a casual game ad network (who denies it) for serving up in-game currency offers from a health-insurance front lobbying group to millions of people who spend their time doing things like watering crops that don't really exist on Facebook to instead send letters to politicians opposing government reform of the health care system. That long sentence went from vacuous to real serious, there at the very end.
via readwriteweb.com
This is a superb sentence!
Remember when being compared to Dubai was a good thing? "Why Greece Could Be the Next Dubai - TIME"
Why Greece Could Be the Next Dubai
via time.com
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Why do they always call them ex-pats?
It’s a cocoon, perhaps, or an escape. It used to be worse. There used to be one bar where all the ex-pats went. It was just like in Prague where there where, for years, there were only one or two spots they flocked to, where they isolated themselves from the tumult of a post-Communist society.
via crunchgear.com
People of color never get called ex-pats when they move to "the West." And if POC all gather at one place like that, cops probably gets called.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
"Immigrants are better at business because they don't know the rules"
I personally believe many immigrants or children of immigrants fare well in business. It never occurs to them to play by the same rules as everybody else; in fact, I’m not sure if they even know what the “rules” are.
via venturehacks.com
Gee. Thanks?
It's always so weird to see technical analysis in a mainstream medium
What we can see is that there is resistance at $28 that has to be overcome. But if your investment horizon is forever then I would say it's not a stretch to think that eventually man's propensity to create solid waste will drive greater profits to the bottom line of Republic Services.
Friday, December 04, 2009
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Link: User Interface is marketing
It should be obvious by now. This article sums it up nicely. Mad Man reference is extra bonus.
http://thelostjacket.com/marketing/invert-funnel-functionality-trumps-design
Goldman bankers are buying handguns as a hedge against revolution
senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
via bloomberg.com
Oh man.
This thing is funny on sooooo many levels.
The funniest part is that it's from Bloomberg.
I guess if you're the real rulers of the world, a little protection goes a long way.
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