Archive for January, 2006
Four things
I got tagged (thanks, Matt). Drum roll, please. . . . .
Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
1. Pizza delivery driver for Pizza Hut
2. Grader of state-wide standardized writing tests for public school students in North Carolina
3. Manager of campus coffeeshop / music venue
4. Frozen yogurt shop attendant (fired)
Four movies I can watch over [...]
Thunderbird on the Mac: delete key doesn’t work!
I recently started using Thunderbird on the Mac (after using Mail.app for a couple of years) and it’s great and all, but why doesn’t one of the delete keys work? On the Apple keyboard I have, there are two delete keys: one under F13 and one below the “help” button. I [...]
Whatever happened to wireless electricity?
Marc Abramowitz recently pointed to Splashpower, a wireless electricity company that supposedly has a working product. The term “wireless electricity” means just what it sounds like — electricity delivered without wires. Wikipedia has a little background on Splashpower with some details on how it all works.
The funny thing is that in November [...]
Working with the “beginner’s mind”
From the excellent Presentation Zen blog (which is always filled with immediately useful advice on delivering compelling presentations), here’s a post that references the concept of “the beginner’s mind,” a term that was unfamiliar to me until now, but one that describes an approach that seems to be common among people I most enjoy working [...]
Email inbox management in a new job (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 5100+ messages)
My blog has been fairly silent over the past several days because in addition to my usual job, I’m spending a lot of time getting things organized. In the past two years, I’ve had a lot going on in both my personal and professional lives, and it was time to take a breath and [...]
Irony and digital music
So I’m sitting at home trying to organize various things (mostly computer-related) and I’ve been sitting at the computer for hours using Yahoo! Music Engine and dutifully rating various artists/songs and seeing what it spits back at me as recommended music. It’s doing a pretty good job, I have to say. When you’re [...]
Unix as literature
Every now and then, I wonder to myself, “How in the world did I go from being an English major with PhD aspirations to a total computer geek who enjoys writing code, toying with Apache configs, etc?” In those moments of self-reflection, I’m always reminded of Thomas Scoville’s excellent essay, “The Elements of Style: [...]
Yahoo! in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies To Work For”
“Best of” lists aren’t the be-all and end-all measurement of transcendent goodness, but I think it’s a positive thing to be included in such lists. Yahoo! made its debut in this year’s Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, which is cool since I just started here five months ago. IDG, [...]
Unix cal command: a key part of my calendaring solution
I noticed both Tim Bray and John Roberts‘ recent ruminations on the perfect calendar solution, and while I don’t have the answer, in thinking about it I realized that I have a quirky calendar-related habit that has stuck with me for over a decade, throughout all my own various experiments with Palm Desktop, Outlook, iCal, [...]
Salesforce.com and API metrics
Although I’m not as engaged with the topics of software and services for the enterprise as I used to be, I’m still keeping up with what’s going on at Salesforce.com. I was a customer in my InfoWorld days and also wrote some nice things about their web services platform early on in its development. [...]