Friday link clearing

• Sarah Silverman, Obama, and the Jewish vote - not safe for work, but worth watching
• Small Banks are doing fine it seems
• Israel asked Bush for permission to bomb Iran, and it seems Bush refused! Good. No point in throwing away all the gains in Iraq
• Making money twice - worth reading
• Who serves in the military? Well worth reading.
• Jetpacks!
• The difference between Sunni and Shia in short form
  
• And this little nugget - via Ezra Klein

  Dear American:
  
  I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
  
  I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
  
  I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
  
  This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
  
  Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
  
  Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

  
  

Random business insight

Coming up with value-adds are usually a sign that you're on the wrong track.

Lost sleep and mixed blessings

So, my week continues to suffer, as I've been going on less than two hours a day of sleep for since Sunday. Work however goes very well. On the political front, both Guiliani and Edwards have dropped out of the race, and I got my first robocall from the Ron Paul campaign.

Bleg

Have any of my readers used Microsoft Office Accounting? As the company ramps up I'd like to get off my current system, but I've heard nothing about any accounting packages lately.

Also, does anyone have any recommendations about the SubVersion file management system?

Of particular annoyance

So I call T-Mobile to see how to use my Blackberry as an internet connection since I'll be without the cable for a couple days. The first tech I talk to was nice. She calls me on my land line so we can continue setting everything up.

All is good so far. She then transfers me to their special Vista tech support department. While I'm waiting for Vista support to pick up, I hear a horribly loud screeching sound on the other end and I'm disconnected. T-Mobile is a phone company mind you.

I call back, speak to a tech, who tells me I have to add a $19.99 package to my plan. The first tech made no mention of such a thing.

I'm calling back and hopefully I can bypass this nonsense.

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

Very well put

From Zeldman on designing on spec

Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving. Unless the RFP spells out site goals and user needs in phenomenal detail, you can’t create an appropriate design because you don’t yet know what problems need to be solved.

I try something new

In accordance with 37 Signals design methodology, I'm designing a new application by designing the interface first. I'll keep everyone posted.

The project is currently called Socializer, it's based (somehow) on Bill Clinton's early networking style.

Google power

On Friday I created my post on the new NineRodessa.com site. Monday morning I hear from the client that the post is showing up third on Google. Things have changed considerably since the Yahoo and Alta Vista Days.

NineRodessa.com website!

Ever since I went in business for myself (5 years ago now) my largest client has been Nine Rodessa. And we've talked about doing a new website since then; happily other projects have taken priority and there has never been enough time to actually build the site. At long last the site has been created and built. It's a fine mix of high-end design, Flash video and Ajax, all administered via a lovely content administration system. For this type of work I think it's the finest I've ever done.

Check it out.

The report of silence

It didn't work for very long. Working without music focused my attention for several hours, but after that my attention span dropped. A good experiment nonetheless.

The sounds of silence

In the spirit of the books Getting Things Done and the Four Hour Workweek, I'm attempting to go an entire day of working in silence. I'll let you know how it goes.

Sorry for the light blogging

Work has been insane lately. I should have the Chicago photos posted soon.

Another interview worth reading

In this case, with industrialist Charles Koch. It's seems that most interviews on the internet are with either celebrities or analysts, and seldom anyone who has taken his own risks and created his own empire.

Thursday morning link rapid fire

• Fast Failure's and Google
• HDR in Photoshop CS III - I still haven't gotten that to work right, more at this site.
• Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
  

Days of rage

Not only have I worked for free for 30 hours in the past two days on a Classic ASP (obsolete in 2003 if any one is curious) project mind you (a long story I won't share here) but now I find that my car won't start.

Predictably, I've noticed that I'm fighting the urge to grind my teeth and have a sudden urge to clean the house. It's odd those are always my responses to anger and stress.

Frustration

Though I've said this before, never again will I try to fix someone else's work, or deal with client's at the end of a project if I haven't dealt with them in the beginning.

An enraging day was had by me.

Update at 6:15 - it's sad when a different server error is the high point of a (so far) 12 hour day.

A thousand curses upon Comcast Broadband

I've been getting 90% packet loss on all upstream traffic all day, which pretty much kills any and all productivity on my part. The tech support couldn;t do anything and had to schedule a service appointment for Thursday.

Does anyone know if you can get DSL without a phone number?

Sony VAIO customer service - an exploration

Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it's lame.

In the post she states

So instead, I'll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I'd like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.

Let's remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.

So if you're reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn't mind linking to this post, preferably with the words "Sony VAIO customer service" in the link, I'd appreciate it awfully.

Sure, it's revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they'll stop doing it. To all of us.

We'll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.

That would be a good company to start - a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.

Yet another FireFox tip

Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.

An interview with Charles Koch

A blogger was kind enough to post his transcription of this interview with Charles Koch of Koch Industries (the biggest company you've never heard of). Of particular liking to me

Studying business in school is way overrated. There seems to be absolutely no evidence suggesting that people with a business degree excel more than those without one. As you go to college, you don't want specifics on how to run a business; you will learn this as you go along in real life. You need to have fundamental tools, such as reading, writing, doing math and science, understanding reality, and having good values that enable you to work with people and create real value.

That has always been my gripe with the MBA's I've met. They're certainly more confident (which is important) but of the three main tasks of a business (moving it, making it, and selling it) they're not any more capable than they they would be without the MBA.

Much thanks to C.S. Hayden for posting the interview.

Stigmergy and signalling

Stigmergy is defined as a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. My Digital Tool Factory project has been evolving in that direction lately and it occurred to me that the internet is evolving that way too.

In the political blogsphere one can draw conclusions about an author from the use of the phrases "The fall of the Soviet Union" vs. "The fall of Communism". In the corporate realm the use of feathered graphics is a good indicator of the age of the designer and the focus of the company.


Food for thought.

Affirmation

Yesterday I went to the lovely and prestigious offices of Green Media Works and got a lovely jolt of purpose and enthusiasm.

Working at home there's no good way to tell if you're a heroic entrepreneur writing your name upon history or some loser typing frantically in a messy office. To go out and mingle like minded people in a tremendous psychic push for the former.

Application wanted

Some time ago I read that Bill Clinton (starting in his younger days) would try to meet as many people as possible in a day, and then at night write down the particulars of everyone he met. It would be nice to have some sort of visual web app to do that. It would allow the user to note all of the relevant details about a person, and also visually show his connections to existing contacts, companies and concepts/entities. It can be done manually in Visio, but that's hardly a workable solution. Does anyone know of any products that do this?

If not, then it goes on the list of stuff to build.

Thursday link roundup

• Hitchens has a sharp pen - Jimmy Carter is his particular target today.
  
• The economics of The Wire - I suppose I need to write one about the economics of the Shield to fully flesh out the crime show econ world.
• Top 100 website run by one guy - hopefully someone will be writing that about me.
• How to photography silhouettes
  

A needed innovation

Last night I spent about seven hours trying to get a particular Microsoft web product to work, only to discover at the end of a long search that you simply couldn't make it work that way. I was trying to update the error message dynamically and have it appear in the VCE

It would be quite handy to have a list of things that a product CAN'T do, it would save so much time trying to prove negatives. Perhaps that should be a new site idea.

Local cooling

I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it's 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.

I wonder if there's a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project...

Monday link roundup

• It's Wiretap the Internet Day - what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
• Entrepreneurial Adages - All quite true. in particular

  Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus

• Battlefield spy-bot - really cool
• Tribal Minds
• The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
  

My fabulous new logo

The company will be unveiled soon.

The old round up

• Digital Camera crop factors
• 20 things not to do when starting a business - I stayed away from most of them
• More solar power
• via Marginal Revolution -

  The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled.
  

• The worst school murders actually happened in 1927, though it did not involve shootings. It's a horrifying story.
  

Tuesday rapid fire

• Art of Innovation
• A very good analysis of the ISG report, specifically

  The risk of surging any troops is summed up in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. I refer to the story of the Sicilian Expedition, in which the Athenians invade Sicily in support of allies there. But as problems mount with the operation, more and more reinforcements are sent, so that the consequences of failure rise from the merely serious to the monumental.

  Which is something to bear in mind.
  
• Ouch
• RentGlass.com - Lenses in this case
  

Quick Monday rapid fire - fun addition

• On the matter of remittances by immigrants to foreign countries

  Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

  And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

  Very well put.
  

• Gun toting robots!
• From the mouths of ad executives
• An original knife holder
• Easily the best use of Flash I've seen in months
• Quotes from Jim Webb, the Marine veteran and aspiring Democratic Senator from Virginia. Though nothing beats him saying "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch Jane Fonda slash her wrists."
• A FoxNews empolyee gets waterboarded, sadly it's not their web designers (their site gets worse by the day, though, still no Lou Dobbs, happily)
• Iron Man is about to be real!
• This looks quite interesting
  

Eating the elephant

The more I think about it, I think the GTD "Open Loops" theory of anxiety is true. Which is why one eats the elephant one bite at a time I suppose.

Blogging will be light

For the next ten days or so. I've got a crushing workload until then.

Also, I apologize if I've been rude or distant or anything like that lately. Everything is getting to me more than it usually does.

Happiness and the devil....

Are both in the details. I was tidying up around the office and came across my original Logitech trackball mouse. I'd always meant to mess with it a bit to see if I can get it working, no other mouse has even come close. I did get it working, and I'm happier now that I've been in several days. I'm not even a bit peeved that I'm working at 1:20 in the morning, with several hours left to go. That's odd when you think about it.

There's much to be said

for working until exhaustion sets in, and none of it good. Humbug.

I have listened to the first five Freakwater albums while I've been working on this particular project, it's good stuff for the late night/early morning.

I'm sweating blood!

Or it feels like that anyway. I think I'm about to enter my busiest work period ever.

Anyway, for your amusement, check out this time-lapse map of the Middle East imperialism.

Live She Is!

After a ton of work, the Earth and Vine web site is finally live. Foodies rejoice!

Getting a dark monitor tan

I've been working for a week solid, and here I am still sitting in front of a screen. On a gorgeous day when I should be riding. Humbug.

Catch up

While I'm uploading massive files, I think I'll post some photos I took last week.

This lovely little praying mantis was outside my door reflecting on life when I came back from the fun filled Armchair Media 5th birthday party. He was kind enough to stay still long enough for me to test the macro feature on the new Canon.


Speaking of Armchair, their party was a blast, here is an interestingly dressed bartender. She called it her "Space Look".

Blah

These all night work sessions get harder and harder to do.

A horrible dream

Last night I had a dream where I went back to work in corporate America. It was truly horrible, oceans of cubicles, schedules and faceless (literally in the dream) drones. How does anyone stand it? It was much like my time at CMD.

Saturday rapid fire

• Make a timeline of your life - it could be cool, but too revealing
• Time Maps
• Top 10 Signs You're Made to be an Entrepreneur 6.

  You spend more time and energy looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing something than if you just did the task outright.

• Prosopagnosia - The inability to recognize faces. Or the way of the Steve.
• A good wrap up of the Goldstein - Frisch battle by Wendy McElroy. I still find it odd that Fox News employs a Canadian anarchist as a columnist, but she does seem popular there.
• The Agitator's Fox column about Swat Teams and no-knock warrants. It would seem that the best way to fix the problem is to assign liability to Judges who sign errant warrants, though I don't think anyone has suggested that yet.
• A very good post on why the current world situation is NOT World War III.
  

Biz Links

• How to start a business
• StartUpNation.com
  

Quote of the moment

There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin

Blinded by the white

After four long years, the Creative Plumbing website gets a long overdue makeover. I decided to concentrate on a simple black and white look. I'll be adding portfolio items over the next few days.

More world domination planning

Green Media Works and I continue our schemes to dominate the globe. After the meeting we took some pictures from the roof of his lovely downtown office.

Gallery Here.

Finally done for the night

Such an evil project. A cool link is WikiMapia.

On another note, a client of mine, Food 101 made the AJC.

Joy, Joy

Now I find that the monster project is to be live at midnight, and not tomorrow morning, and there are 23 more changes, mostly in the copy.

Yet more

I'm nearing the "Vomit With Rage" stage of my workday. More changes!?!

My head explodes

I've been up for two days, it's due in two hours, and they're still making changes to the project!?!?!?!?!?!

UPDATE: Made it with 20 minutes to spare. Yay me.

Mind altering visuals

Going into a meeting with a large cut on your knuckles is a great way to get people to treat you nicely.

Granted, I told the truth about how I got it (bike wreck) which in and of itself doesn't impress people, but it is an impressive visual aid.

Day two of my low caffeine life

The goal is to cut the caffeine intake by two thirds, which I'm doing. So far, the results have been interesting.

I'm not quite as moody as I have been, rather I still have the same moods, just not as extreme. I went to sleep a bit earlier than usual last night and woke up a little earlier as well. There seems to be marginal improvement on my attention span too.

Yawn....

My first all-nighter in quite a while. This is going to be an unpleasant week.

Rapid Fire Saturday

• How to tell a good story
• Google unleashes free 3-D software
• A very interesting post on how a war with Iran is likely to function.
• LifeHacker on problem solving.
• LifeHacker on starting your own business.
• A guy in Colorado got caught with an infrared traffic light changer, and was only ticket $50! Totally worth it.
• A very good article on this ridiculous "Peak Oil" meme.
  

Pecked to death by ducks

This would seem to be the month of work-related stress, aggravation and rage.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Why are people allergic to details?

Grinding

The combination of spring break and tax time has made the past few days excruciatingly dull. Most of the people I work with are out out of town, the rest are doing taxes (like me) and that's thrown all organization out of whack, which is bad. I'm in the odd position of not having anything pressing going on, and no work related stuff to talk about, which happens very rarely. The combination has made me moody the past three days.

In other news, I did get the Garmin Street Pilot in today, I'm about to take it on it's first test ride. We'll see how it goes.

An unusually quiet day

Definitely one of the most quiet on record, I guess everyone really is on spring break.

On another note, I just visited this blog's Technorati profile and I find that I'm linked under "a loner's temperament" and experpted on a Malaysian blog.

Most surprising of all though is being linked from the Columbia Journalism review. They picked up on my Cheney - Abu Ghraib theory. It's quite flattering.

Now, back to taxes.

Quick Saturday afternoon round up

1. Baltic Crusades - on WikiPedia. Interesting.
2. Tips for startup companies
3. The torn up credit card application - this is scary - get a shredder now.
4. An interesting article about the self-described "The Hell with them Hawks."
5. Interesting post from Marginal Revolution about inherent tensions in libertarianism.
6. Borders is refusing to stock a magazine that is showing the Mohammed cartoons. More here and here.
   

Quick round up

• The Simpson's intro - as done by real people.
  
• Spaceplanes
• It's not fascism because we don't call it fascism - the food police are now after soft drinks.
• Some clear thinking on the morning after pill.
• Evidently AT&T has a 1.9 trillion call database.
• Your tax dollars are paying auto workers not to work.
• An article on tracking public opinion on the internet. I will one day get my blogprophet project up and going.