Best response ever to someone bragging about their corporate paradigm shift.
“Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolves around the sun brought about a paradigm shift,” he said. “Your revelation to outsource the payroll department probably shouldn’t carry equal cachet.”
I just updated the look and feel of Life Times Voice. Go check it out!
Jason Calacanis, proprietor of a technical business, publicly throws his technical team under the bus.
We are not down today, but we are very—very—slow. The problems are getting solved, and our team at LogicWorks is trying there best to help us, but the results are still lame.
The tech team here at Weblogs, Inc. and LogicWorks are still not being proactive enough in my mind. We’re still stuck in this “I think we solved it” mode, which makes me crazy. Why not go above and beyond what we think might, if we’re lucky, result in us being up the next day.
I may be going out on a limb here, but, in my experience, publicly humiliating your technical team does not often lead to favorable results.
The Boston Globe has an article about Verizon’s new FiOS system, a system which is 30 times faster than my old DSL and 600 times faster than dialup. Because I happened to be moving at the right time, I was actually one of the first people in town to be hooked up to the new service.
It is pretty fast, but you won’t notice it as much while browsing the web as when downloading. If you’re copying a 30MB file, it’s much faster; if you’re just loading a 200k webpage, then the limiting factor is going to be your machine, not the line.
Still, it’s about the same price as Comcast, and a lot faster. Woo hoo.
Read these posts on The Job Blog and The HR Blog.
How you treat your employees affects your bottom line. Don’t forget that.
A Verizon lobbyist trying to prevent municipal broadband in West Virginia stormed out of a meeting because he didn’t get to write the legislation himself. Apparently, the legislators went behind his back and wrote their own legislation. The horror.
“You know all of our broadband providers are interested in it, and you secretly put out a bill to do this,” [Verizon lobbyist John Ruddick] said. “That is wrong.”
Committee Chairman John Unger, D-Berkeley, said he and others did consult with Verizon, Adelphia and other companies, but he made no apologies for not releasing the bill to them before it came out of his committee.
“The special interest groups think they ought to see the legislation before the legislators see it,” he said. “That’s where everybody’s got it backwards around here. They’ve got it backwards, because they think that the special interest group ought to draft the legislation and then show it to the Legislature, and that’s not the way it should be.”
Sometimes I wish I’d stayed at Amazon. I love my life here, but I envy the interesting things my ex-colleagues in Seattle get to work on.
They recently introduced SIPs, “statistically improbable phrases.” They analyze all the text in the millions of books they’ve scanned, and then pull out the unique phrases which most characterize each book. It works simultaneously as a summary of the book, an insight into its feel, and an automated folksonomy.
This is just hours of fun going through some of my books to discover their SIPs. Here are a couple of examples from a few books I highly recommend:
Kitchen Confidential: chiffonaded parsley, broiler man, manger man, feed the bitch
The Eyes of the Dragon: royal napkins, instinct for mischief, watery ale, ash bucket, two guilders
The Tipping Point: social epidemics, transactive memory, mouth epidemics, teenage smoking
Good to Great: sustained great results, unsustained comparisons, red flag mechanisms, profit per customer visit, confronting the brutal facts
John Sumser, whose trade newsletter for online recruiting I read even though I’m not full time with (the award-winning) BostonWorks anymore, brainstorms ideas for using this technology to slice and dice resume information. All sorts of interesting possibilities.
I’ve been off the grid for a few days, so here’s some stuff that’s caught my attention recently.
12 principles for fair commerce in software and other digital products
A manifesto against unfair end user license agreements and other corporate abuses.
How to start a startup
Strikes pretty close to home. A really interesting read if you’re an entrepreneur, or know one.
The missing caption for the little red book
Mao says: RTFM
It’s always nice to get a little external recognition. BostonWorks.com has been named best employment site (circulation greater than 250,000).
The move is mostly over. The kitchen is functioning, as are the baths. The cats have calmed down (a little).
Perhaps normalcy is just around the corner.
Just about to move to suburbia. Launching a partner with LTV. A number of consulting projects in progress and in queue.
Lots going on. My writing schedule is suffering. Hope to be back on top of the game in April. We’ll see.
Dynamic data without refreshing the page
Neat PHP implementation of an Ajax framework.
What’s special about this number?
All sorts of mathy goodness, like 732 = 1^7 + 2^6 + 3^5 + 4^4 + 5^3 + 6^2 + 7^1.
Telephoto is for cowards
Long lens != good candid photos
10 ways to avoid getting hit up for expert advice
Stephen King on everything you need to know about writing successfully in 10 minutes
2nd draft = (1st Draft - 20%)
New Google Toy
Weather in Holliston = weather:01746
Blogosphere 2.0
This mirrors a lot of thinking I’m using in building Life Times Voice.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
[Ruby on Rails] may eventually replace PHP, which itself seems destined to the life of an over-implemented, omni-present scripting language embraced by new, overzealous programmers who create low-quality code they barely understand.
True, but low-quality code that does something useful is better than elegant code implementing an idea no one will buy.
LinkedIn moves to Craigslist model
Trying to turn a profit on social networking products.
On Bull[pucky]
It’s a process, not a product
Software developers working shorter hours
Not this software developer.
Why your broadband sucks
Larry Lessig on how the broadband cartel sues to prevent cities from providing wireless access to citizens.
The thin line between safety and tyranny
Papers, please.
Why WKRP in Cincinnati isn’t on DVD
Another reason I’m trying to keep Life Times Voice as simple as possible
“Some form of experience tailoring on the user’s part is fine, but only to a limited degree. When I see an endless array of options, it’s clear the marketer hasn’t defined a target customer and taken a point of view about her needs.”
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Blogging
Funny funny funny funny segment on the Daily Show about the recent blogging hoo-haws. Warning: Salty Language.
New Jersey’s attorney general has brought suit against Blockbuster for consumer fraud, complaining about Blockbuster’s intelligence-insulting “No more late fees” bull.
We’ve been complaining about this lie since Blockbuster started trumpeting this crap a couple of months ago. Dear Blockbuster: we’re not as stupid as you think we are.
Endlessly entertaining legal threats
I’m not sure I would have the courage to send these types of responses, but I admire his pluck (and Sweden’s laws).
Blogs and libel
He talks to Counsel for The New York Times Co., getting his perspective on how bloggers can get sued. Truth is still always the best defense.
IE7 is coming
For now, still using Firefox when required to use a PC.
Think twice before sending that Valentine at work
Interesting BostonWorks article about the perils of declaring your love to a co-worker.
How to read a business book
Interesting tips. I read the same “Love is the Killer App” book, and I highly recommend it. It may be the first of the book reviews I should write for the site.
The fabulous A. is quoted in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly about pro bono work she’s doing to help the troops.
The Basics of Search Engine Optimization
A nice writeup of concepts I often explain to clients.
How to make a “life poster”
Fabulous use of iPhoto. Now I just need to convince A. to let me put posters up in the new house…
Russell Neufeld
Friend and former Abuzz CTO starts blogging.
C|Net puts out a branded RSS Aggregator
It won’t be long before all the media companies have branded RSS readers featuring their own content plus articles from competitors and weblogs. And yes, LTV will soon have RSS for all the sections (it’s done, but it’s bundled with a couple of other things that aren’t done yet.)
Google Maps
I wrote about this before, but it’s really really neat.
Here are some more of the new bloggers over on Life Times Voice:
Josh Baker
Mary Kay Barnett
Doug Eisenhart
Amy Gow
Gillian Tetreau
This is a really neat graphical interface that tells you the popularity of names over the past 100 years. A few minutes of fun playing with it.
And boy, Jason was a popular name in the ’70s.
Yay, I’m finally back online.
A couple of months ago, I transferred all my domains to a new server setup to scale Life Times Voice, and in the process I broke my installation of Movable Type. I finally got a chance to look at it this morning, and I’ve spent the past few hours wrestling with it. Grr.
It’s funny, you really start to miss blogging when you aren’t able to do it for a while. Now, I can use my Life Times Voice blog just for business things, while using this one for my regular thoughts and musings.
For the fourth time, I’ll be heading abroad on a Habitat for Humanity Global Village project. Only this time, I get to go with my wife!
Next May, we’re off to build homes in Madagascar, a very large island off the coast of Africa, home to many a lemur. I can’t wait.
Here’s more on Madagascar. Here’s more on Habitat for Humanity Global Village.
Adam, over at Boston Common, has started organizing his list of bloggers by T stop. Here are the other Central Square bloggers.
I’m doing something similar on Life Times Voice, but I’m only going down to the level of town. Here are the Cambridge members.
For the geeky among you: Google Suggest javascript dissected and explained.
The best way to learn how to code is to look at someone else’s code and figure out how it works, then generalize that to what you need. This javascript is way out of my league, but it’s still kinda neat to read about it.
What do you think? Should I fill out the application and see if I am selected to be on Survivor?
I spent two weeks violently ill in the-middle-of-nowhere, China; I drove 20 miles on route 128 without the benefit of brakes; I quit my job and started my own business. Survivor can’t scare me.
And, I could use a million dollars. Hmm…
Bruce Schneier, renowned computer security expert, gives advice on what average Internet users can do to ensure their security.
This is worthwhile reading, especially if you find your machine infested with spyware and viruses.
It’s hard to feel sorry for the aggrieved party when their evil spyware was automatically disabled by another company’s evil spyware.
According to the Nov. 24 complaint, DirectResponse’s software detects Internet Optimizer and then sends a command to “kill” the program, a process that deletes its files from the PC registry and from the computer altogether. Avenue Media said DirectRevenue’s tactics have caused it to lose about 1 million customers–about half its installed base–and as much as $10,000 a day in revenue.
I woke up yesterday morning to over 100 new comment spams (fake comments advertising vile items in the hope of leeching some of my Google-juice). Even using MT-Blacklist, cleaning up that much crap takes a while.
So, I took down the comments on my site, and blew away the file that creates the comments. Today, I checked my stats and found more than 500 “404″ requests to that file. That means that the evil spammers tried to add more than 500 spam comments to my site.
So, this experiment in online community failed. Another reason why you must be a validated customer to post comments on Life Times Voice.
Here is an extremely interesting article from this morning’s New York Times detailing how today’s corporate denizens have trouble writing coherent emails.
Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: “I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information … However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to ‘C’.”
The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst’s employers that she needed remedial training.
The article also touched on one of my biggest pet peeves: emails conveying bad news. Back when I had a staff, one of the only “rules” I enforced was “all bad news must be delivered in person.” Emails are so easy to misinterpret; the fallout from a poorly written email is often worse than the actual bad news.
(Cross-posted to The Job Blog)
I’ll be at Harvard’s Internet + Society 2004 conference next week. It looks like it will be an interesting program.
If you’re in town, give me a yell….
“We buy our ink by the TeraByte!”
I saw this here, in the midst of an off-color rant about the idiocy of Sony.
One of the joys of creating tools to help people keep in touch is that your friends can now start writing their own blogs. Here are some of my friends who’ve gotten started:
Marc Quinones
Emma Lathan
Stephanie Hagyard
Susel Gonzalez
Plug: Life Times Voice, blogs, groups and photos for normal people. Sign up as a betatester!
This is pretty funny. One of the massive advertising screens in Times Square blue screened.
Entrepreneur.com gives us the 17 most common mistakes startups make.
Interesting conjecture: will Apple launch a mobile phone?
First it just makes sense. Apple is making a ton of money off of the iPod. They’ve already made that first step into the consumer products category and have seen how successful it has been for them. The iPod mini is really close in form factor to a modern mobile phone, so the experience in designing and building a new device like that could be used as Apple wades into the mobile phone market. Those are the logical thoughts. They’re already making the iPod, a phone isn’t that much of a leap (sorta), so it just makes sense, right?
My old Holliston friend Ed Moloney and his wife Christine are participating the Breast Cancer 3-day next July, Christine walking and Ed helping with walk support.
Go read their story, and, if you can, help them reach their fundraising goals.
Interesting article from the Globe about how higher education debt prevents grads from entering public service.
Wondir seems to be doing many of the things we did a few years ago.
Wondir is, at its core, a question answering service. Wondir itself is more than two years old, but Koll only recently took the “beta” off the service and turned it into a for-profit enterprise. While there are loads of question answering services on the web, this one is different in some important ways. First off, it feels like a search engine. That’s intentional, Koll told me, as he feels the process of finding answers through chat rooms and usenet like forums is cumbersome and unintuitive. Secondly, Wondir aggregates questions and answers through the architecture of participation, essentially getting its questioners to become answerers, and vice versa. This is non trivial - getting people to answer questions is not as easy as it might seem. But Koll has thought through all of this, and I like where this service is going..
There’s nothing new under the sun.
Amazon’s broken this morning. I just received error messages adding something to the cart, and then later trying to sign in.
This is not a good weekend for a shopping site to go down.
I’ve taken Life Times Voice out of stealth mode. You should go over there and check it out!
Kevin Sites tells of his experiences in setting up a one-person software shop, or as he calls it: a micro-ISV.
Last month I offered six of these so-called “hypotheses” about how to make micro-ISV successful:
* Don’t start too big.
* Don’t quit your day job yet.
* Don’t fake the plural.
* Don’t forget the Law of Focus.
* Don’t spend much on advertising.
* Don’t hassle your users.
I’m following many of these in setting up Life Times Voice. Except for the “Don’t quit your day job” part, of course…
This just in: credit card companies are evil.
But increasingly, they say, what should be a warm embrace has turned into a painful squeeze as lenders employ new tactics to extract more and bigger penalties for even the slightest financial transgressions. In the last few years, lenders have more frequently raised customers’ rates because of slip-ups elsewhere, like late payment of a phone or utility bill, or simply because they felt a customer had taken on too much debt.
The practice, called universal default, started after a rash of bankruptcy filings in the mid-to-late 1990’s and has increasingly become standard in the industry. While MBNA declined to comment on any specific customer’s account, its general counsel, Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, said in a statement that it was being prudent by raising rates when it had reason to think the risk of not being repaid had increased.
This is joint investigation between the Times and Frontline, so if you happen to catch Frontline this week, make sure to watch it.
And, this may be the squishiest defense of price-gouging ever:
But MBNA, in the statement from Mr. Freeh, said: “If we see indications that a customer is taking on too much debt, has missed or is late on payments to other creditors, or is otherwise mishandling their personal finances, it is not unreasonable to determine that this behavior is an increased risk. In the interest of all of our customers, we must protect the portfolio by adjusting a customer’s rate to compensate for that increased risk.”
Seth Godin analyzes the relative sales of the paper, e-book and pdf versions of his Bootstrapper’s Bible.
The key point is this: “Can you make any money giving away an ebook? I think you can. I think you do when the idea spreads and people want to interact with you in other ways. And those interactions are the currency of the future.”
This is why I tell everyone to blog on their areas of expertise. Not only will you meet interesting people, but you’re showing your ideas and your thinking.
People will pay you money to generate ideas for them.
I have to go to my dentist to have a cavity filled.
I haven’t had a cavity in twenty years. I’m not looking forward to the needle. Or the drilling. Ugh.
Dan Gillmor talks about Drupal, an open-source content management and blog system.
It’s not easy enough to use for average people yet, however. Some of the arcane terminology shouts that programmers have written this. Let’s hope the Drupal community can make it more user-friendly.
In creating the Life Times Voice system, I investigated all the major content management systems, including Drupal and its derivative, CivicSpace. They’re all very powerful; from an engineering perspective, they’re worthy of respect. However, none of them were as simple as I needed to make the product for my customers.
As these tools move from the early adopters to the early and late majorities, they will not succeed unless they adapt their metaphors and interfaces to normal folks’ sensibilities.
It’s finally happened. My formerly 20/15 vision has deteriorated over the past 15 years to 20/30, which is a borderline need for glasses.
So, I’ll suck it up and get a pair of glasses, for those times when I’m driving at night, or just really want to look distinguished.
Sorry for the relative lack of posting recently.
Sales and development for the new company are keeping me pretty busy. I’m climbing about 500 different learning curves at the moment, but it’s fun. I’m learning a lot and working on something I really care about.
Bootstrapping is fun! Check out Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible over at ChangeThis. It’ll be available for only a couple of weeks.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Uncategorized category.
Welcome to Jason Butler's Home on the Web.
