advocacy

The Wirecutter: Best Standing Desks

→ The Wirecutter: Best Standing Desks:

Today, there are more electric-lift options with programmable heights: the GeekDesk Max, the NewHeights, and the attractive NextDesk Terra. I’m glad Mark found these: now I don’t need to worry that I won’t be able to replace my desk when the AdjusTables’ unreliable lift mechanism inevitably breaks.

[Or you could spend way less money and not sweat the measurements by buying one of these, and dropping a piece of plywood on it as a top. (I had just the piece I needed in the garage. If you don’t have such stuff in your a garage, IKEA sells tops at reasonable prices) I don’t mind the minor effort.]

Source: Marco.org

Writing with Bitly

Writing with Bitly:

As an art and a practice, writing is no less a product of its instruments than are music and painting. We not only need pianos, drums and brushes, but Steinways, Ludwigs and Langnickels. Microsoft doesn’t cut it. (Word produces horrible html.) Adobe had a good early Web writing tool with GoLive, but killed it in favor of Dreamweaver, which is awful. There are plenty of fine text editors, including old standbys (e.g. vi and emacs) that work in command shells. Geeky wizards can do wonders with them, but there should be many other instruments for many other kinds of artists.

[Great insight.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Old Farts Know How to Code

Old Farts Know How to Code:

Nick Bradbury:

“Old farts” are often excluded from that culture, not because we’re lousy coders but because we won’t put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us.

In addition to the sexism that has been discussed a lot recently, software engineering suffers from extreme ageism and workaholism.

I’m about to turn 30, I’m married, and we just had a baby. This will implicitly (and illegally, of course) disqualify me from working at almost any startup.

∞ Permalink

[Well it doesn’t preclude them all, but you do have to know how to pick ’em. And the classic startup does fall into the above criteria. More’s the pity, as I know lots of “older” folks with lots to share…]

Source: Marco.org

The Loop on Blogging

The Loop on Blogging:

Blogging is not a thing, it’s an attitude:

Blogging is not about being stiff and rigid in your writing, but being flexible and flowing with ideas. It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees with your thoughts. In fact, that would be really boring — but you write it anyway.

If large media companies want their writers to be bloggers, they need to let them go. Bloggers need to feel free to express themselves and their opinions. There are plenty of great bloggers on the Internet — many of them came from these large organizations, but weren’t allowed to post their thoughts.

Blogging is also about trust. If you’re readers know that you are writing from your heart, they will listen. They will engage you, and in the process you will learn something new. That, in turn, will help shape your opinions.

Blogging doesn’t have an agenda, other than expressing your true thoughts on a subject.

[The last point is, at the very least, poorly written. Of course blogging is about an agenda. It’s just a personal one, not a corporate one.]

Source: inessential.com

Uncle Glenn and The Choice of Buying Organic

Uncle Glenn and The Choice of Buying Organic:

To Glenn, a farmer’s job is to produce as much food as he possibly can, because people tend to need more food than they have. Developing and improving chemicals that increase yields is one way the farm industry keeps up with ever-increasing demand. We tend to look at the environmental damages caused by industrial farm runoff—not to be understated—and we associate the pollution with corporate greed. It’s easy to forget that without these chemicals, we’d perhaps have less food. The cost/benefit analysis here is tied inextricably to the ones that motivate our individual consumption, and it’s even harder to balance.

[Puff piece? You decide. But I think the answer is in distributed growing rather than in counting on “specialists” (farmers) for everything. There was a time when everyone was a “farmer” for themselves. What if stopped growing lawns (I don’t) and started vegetable gardens? Don’t you think that improve things for everyone? I do.]

Source: Simple Blog

Better than an “email vacation”

Better than an “email vacation”:

Much like inbox bankruptcy, simply running away from email overload doesn’t solve the problem. What does work is to engage email as described in Bit Literacy (free Kindle ebook, free iBookstore ebook). To summarize: move your action items to a todo list, and archive or delete everything else. The inbox should be empty at least once a day.

[Mark’s been talking about this for as long as I’ve known him. Just do it already. You can thank me later. BTW, the email client I’ve been using for work has an setting that shows only unread mail. Very useful.]

Source: Creative Good

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

$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…]

Photo check deposits

Photo check deposits:

It’s much faster and simpler than a photo deposit. (I can also get cash while I’m there. Can’t do that with the iPhone app.)

And then it’s done. The check is out of sight and out of mind. I know that if anything goes wrong, the bank will mail me something about it, although I’ve never had an ATM-deposited check get rejected by the bank later.

Sometimes, new technology is not progress.

[I hope the folks at Simple are listening. (Hey, where’s my invite anyway? :) The thing is, simply using cool technology is never enough. It has to provide a better experience. If it doesn’t it’s a failure. Certainly you don’t want a process that’s worse than old way, or less flexible.]

Source: Marco.org