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PermalinkSnowmobiling: Tamed By the Beast, by Derek Powazek

I’ve love to go snowmobiling. I’ve been ATV’ing in the mountains of Alaska, I think I can handle some snow. Sounds like fun.

PermalinkThe No TV Experiment™

I didn’t watch television today. That’s kind of a big deal for me lately. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last 6 months or so, watching a lot of TV. After reading the suggestion to ignore TV for a day in Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit” — I decided to give it a shot.

The results?

Well, I felt a little more productive today. Though, nothing earth-shattering. I really didn’t miss TV that much—except at dinner time. That one hour was strange. I replaced my normal nightly television watching with reading. That was a really nice change of pace.

While today marks the end of the “No TV Experiment™,” its only day one in the “Week* Without Xbox.” And, tomorrow is the first Upstate Interactive field trip: I’m going to the local public library.

* Week is define as 5 consecutive days.

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PermalinkNew: Apple's Revolutionary MacBook Wheel

“It remains to be seen if the wheel will catch on in the business world, where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

I’m constantly amazed at the lengths that The Onion goes to create their fake news.

PermalinkPicasa is out for the Mac

Finally.

I used to love this program when I was on a PC. Though, its gonna be a tough sell already using iPhoto. Leaving behind that integration with the rest of the OS is hard. Picasa does seem to blow iPhoto out of the water when it comes to overall speed.

PermalinkVixML from the guys at Viximo

This looks very promising and very cool. I have a Twitter DM in to Jeff for immediate access.

PermalinkDoctor Who Figures

I’ll take the Doctor, an Ood, and a Dalek. Thanks.

PermalinkYea, I'm back.

Expect lots of crap here soon. Deal with it.

PermalinkLeave me alone, I'm on vacation.

Yea, merry Christmas. I’m on vacation till the 5th. So don’t expect much from me until then.

PermalinkCarsonified fires sole developer, offers exploitative deal to same developer two weeks later.

What an awful deal for the developer — he’s going to lose a ton of time/money betting on a app which will most likely fail. Lets be honest here, Carsonified is not a creator of web applications, they’re a host for conferences. The say that they’ve had 3 successful web applications. Two of those applications don’t make any money.

To be fair, Carsonified didn’t force the developer to agree to the deal, but they sure did make him feel like he didn’t have any other options.

Related Note: Don’t post details of your contracts online. If you must, and I do think transparency is a good quality, don’t discuss specifics of percentages and payouts. You’re just asking for trouble.

PermalinkI don't really like Mike Arrington, but this bitch deserved the slap.

To be honest, I’ve never met or spoken with Arrington — he just comes off as arrogant. But then again, so do I.

PermalinkFluency WordPress Admin 2

This is my new favorite thing.

PermalinkMacWorld 2009 to be Apple's Final. No sign of Jobs.

At first, this seemed really stupid to me. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that MacWorld, over the last few years, has been populated by pre-announcements — not actual product launches. Killing the Keynotes in January puts the launch timeline of new products back into the hands of Apple. No more arbitrary dates that only cause rushed products and stock drops.

PermalinkProject Management Lingo

A few of my favorites:

• Nine women can’t have a baby in one month
• Hit with the scope bat
• Scope creep

Permalink37signals Redesign Highrise Marketing Site

Its pretty awful. Very cluttered and “un-37signals-like”. They’ve also removed the free account from the signup page.

They made everything big, to the point that nothing is big.

PermalinkWorking from home, it sucks sometimes

Just like everything, there’s a good and a bad to working from home.

The Good: I get to work in my PJs.

Its fun to be lazy and not get dressed until 4:30 in the afternoon.

The Bad: I get to work in my PJs.

Its draining and soul sucking to realize that its 4:30 in the afternoon and you’re still in your PJs. And you smell like onions. To add insult to injury, there have been plenty of days when a friend or family member has shown up to the house, and I’m wearing a ripped shirt and smell like bagels.

The Good: I get to wake up late.

Its great to know that I can stay up late and sleep in — being able to create your own schedules is one of the biggest perks of being self-employed, at least for me.

The Bad: I tend to stay up too late.

Not having to be at the office at 9am feels great most mornings. Realizing that I don’t actually get moving much before 10:30am isn’t so great. Staying up late, means starting work late. Which then means working later into the day. If I start my work day at 10:30am, then I most likely won’t finish up until 6ish. That means less time for family and friends at night — not everyone can stay up until 2am on a Tuesday. I find myself spending lots of time late at night not doing much. It can lead to some unproductive weeks. Every now and then I have to snap myself back into a normal schedule by setting the alarm for 6am. Its great to be up early and finish work at 3pm.

The Good: I get to work when I want to work.

Its a great feeling to jump out to a long lunch with my wife in the middle of the day and know that I’ll be able to finish things whenever I get back to my desk.

The Bad: I forget to STOP working.

There are plenty of nights that I sit down after diner to quickly check my email and catch up on some feeds, only to look up from the computer and realize that 4 or 5 hours have passed…