geekluv

“The customer really isn’t always right. We believe we have the expertise to bring the best product. We don’t randomly put these ingredients together. We spend the time to test these and try them”

via NYTimes.com

“Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested”

via Made To Stick

via 1000 Small Businesses

“scan your site and look for any reference to “I” or “we.” Any information that focuses on you or your company has to go. Then, replace it with information that helps the customer identify the problem that you can solve”

good advice. stop thinking about who you are and start thinking about the problems you solve

Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste » Nieman Journalism Lab.

The Case Against Vertical Navigation – Smashing Magazine

A lot to read and it’s worth it, but the general nutshell:

• “allowing content areas to have strong visual focus”
• left navigation is virtually ignored anyway

I don’t know how this translates when dealing with large corporate clients that feel the need to put everything on their website. What is most likely required would be a strong conversation explaining why that website doesn’t need the 20 page history of the company in it’s own section five levels deep in the Information Architecture. However, this argument definitely lends itself well to the concept of Building Small Things.

an article on packet sniffing. this should be a reminder, unless you’re using SSL (HTTPS), or you’re tunneling traffic through an SSH connection, your data is not secure

Packet Sniffing on Mac OS X with Wireshark – dylanedwards.com.

[update] – turns out, the software linked to (wireshark) is prone to its own security holes: http://wiki.wireshark.org/Security

Got it in my head that I want my own wax seal. It’s not so much that I’m involved in hand-written correspondence so vital that its recipient must know they are the first and only to read said correspondence. I simply desire a wax seal, perhaps a signet ring. I can envision the reams of paper I will go through, applying wax seals to the tri-folded decree and handing them to my family with notes like, “should I cook dinner tonight?” or “how about chicken?” and “do you mind if I go out for a drink with a friend?”. “Don’t forget, I have a neighborhood association meeting tomorrow”.

Anyhoo, there are places to buy these things, as there are places to buy anything your head can imagine, I would think. However, as this is the internet, people tend to do things themselves

Ways to make a wax seal:

cut a potato in half

dowel rod and a wood burner

clay and a pirate ring (arrrr!)

limestone and a dremel

you might prefer a signet ring

you might get distracted and make a green lantern ring instead

or, hell, you might just make an platinum engagement ring because you’re a badass.

Can’t start a business only eating a Tombstone pizza every day

Great article on inkling that can probably be summed up best with the ubiquitious, “baby steps, baby steps”

This completely hit home for me, because I’m guilty of taking an idea and blowing it so far out of scope that I’ll never be able to handle it myself (I also have issues with letting go and delegating, so that doesn’t help either)

“Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.”

via As Population Shifts in Harlem, Blacks Lose Their Majority – NYTimes.com.

Interesting wiki statement regarding Gentrification: “Consequent to gentrification, the average income increases and average family size decreases…” (emphasis mine). At first I thought that Wikipedia is suggesting that wealthier families have smaller families — but, reading further, it seems the smaller family size might be due to the traditional “Gentrifier Types” — artists, gay men, singles.

2009 saw major cities across the U.S. make their transit, demographic and crime data available to the public so that hackers and tech geeks could do something meaningful with it

via NYC open data contest draws to a close Jan. 7.