Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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The Argument That Apple Cannot Keep Growing

The Argument That Apple Cannot Keep Growing:

I agree with one thing: sustaining high profit margins is difficult. But where Denninger goes wrong is in assuming that competitors can easily or quickly copy what Apple is doing. His argument is no different than the dire predictions for the iPod a decade ago. Yes, Apple’s hardware margins are extraordinary. But Apple is an extraordinary company. They have an unparalleled retail presence, a top-shelf brand, and a loyal, large, and growing customer base. They write and design their own entire software stack, have incredible third-party developer support, and, by selling very large quantities of a relatively small number of hardware products, attain astounding economies of scale.

I’m not saying Apple’s continued success is assured. But there’s no sense in an argument based on the supposition that Apple is in any way a typical hardware maker.

[It is always easier to throw rocks.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Time and taste

Time and taste:

Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.

People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.

Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

[I’m not sure I quite agree with the “People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population” line. I think the subset is those who *think* about the design, rather than the more common, “yeah, that works, yeah, I like it” intuitive understanding majority. Since taste is the ability to discern and consider the differences rather than intuit them… The argument here is simple, most people would gravitate toward a better a better design, but they let a whole slew of other factors (what they’ve been told and by whom, and their own biases of many years etc) get in the way. Remove some of this, and the design that works, one that provides a good experience, every time.]

Source: Marco.org

Shield House by Studio H:T

Shield House by Studio H:T:

Studio H:T have designed the Shield House in Denver, Colorado.

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Description from Studio H:T

This urban infill project juxtaposes a tall, slender curved circulation space against a rectangular living space. The tall curved metal wall was a result of bulk plane restrictions and the need to provide privacy from the public decks of the adjacent three story triplex. This element becomes the focus of the residence both visually and experientially. It acts as sun catcher that brings light down through the house from morning until early afternoon. At night it becomes a glowing, welcoming sail for visitors.

[Sweet!]

Source: CONTEMPORIST

Leave It Alone One of the most important skills you can learn as…

Leave It Alone:

Thoreau once said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

Figuring out how clothes should fit is one thing; figuring out whether they suit your personality and character is something else entirely. That part requires a lot of self-discovery, honesty, and time.

[As it is with all—discovery, honesty, and time.]

Source: Put This On

$10,000 Lemonade Stand

$10,000 Lemonade Stand:

Drew said he felt sad and wanted to help his father with medical bills.

“He is so important to me. We like to play with each other. Lots of times we like to play games,” Drew told a local television station.

Randy Cox says he has medical insurance but still will have to pay thousands of dollars in medical costs out of pocket.

Drew opened his stand for business outside his home on Saturday morning, charging 25 cents a cup. Word of his benevolent venture spread quickly, with some customers coming from dozens of miles away. 
 
One person wrote a $5,000 check and by the end of the day, Drew raised more than $10,000.

[People can be so wonderful…]

Vagrant 1.0

Vagrant:

Web developers use virtual environments every day with their web applications. From EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku, virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant aims to take those very same principles and put them to work in the heart of the application lifecycle. By providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.

Vagrant is a development tool which stands on the shoulders of giants, using tried and proven technologies to achieve its magic. Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to create its virtual machines and then uses Chef or Puppet to provision them.

[Congrats on getting to 1.0 to all involved. Check out the Railscast to see it in action.]

Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter

Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter:

Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods.
So Migicovsky posted his watch on Kickstarter, a “crowd-funding” website where anyone can pledge money for creative projects that have yet to be completed. In the last few days, roughly 26,000 people plunked down their cash, with many pledging hundreds of dollars and about a half dozen folks promising $10,000 or more.

[It seems cool. I’m in. Crazy story.]