2012
December 3rd
The return of an old friend. →
Background Radiation
If there’s a complementary version of this Sunsuper billboard somewhere in Sydney where the girl dreams of being an astronaut, it’s not in any train station I’ve been through. →
On the Internet, nobody knows you are a cat.
A year or two ago, I created a Facebook account for my mother’s cat. →
Don’t Feed the Trolls
As the early 90s drifted on, the definition of trolling broadened to encompass anyone who acts like an asshole on the Internet just to get attention. By the end of the decade, few people even remembered the original definition. →
“You can’t control what you can’t measure” revisited.
This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. →
…or are we just simply spiralling coils?
Everything about a company's strategy—what new ventures are given attention, what old ones are scrapped, the degree to which it tolerates risk—all get entwined in the question “How does this help us execute our core reason for existing?” →
Johnny and Jenny Can Code
One of the more stubbornly persistent recurring themes from tech curmudgeons goes something like this. “When I was young, computers shipped with BASIC, and you had to laboriously type in programs from magazines to make the do _anything_. Computers these days are shiny, hermetically sealed boxes with no built-in language that do anything you want at the press of a button. In this way, we are betraying future generations of nerds to grow up without the advantages we had.” →
The Eyes Have It
I was standing in the Apple Store. The perky sales clerk had confirmed they had my preferred iPad model in stock, and was offering to fetch it for me. My girlfriend was actively encouraging me to buy it. And I said no. →
Nerds (For Science, Part 2)
Well, more like 1.0-beta1 →
The Importance of the Hat Tip
The hat tip isn't a service to the “cool hunter” who brought you the link. It’s a service to the reader who wants to expand their sources of information. →
The Showstopper
What Facebook did to the social networking market should be entirely familiar to Google. It's exactly what Google did to the search market. →
For Science
The test was negative. Looking back, though, that was the day our conversation changed from “Should we have a kid?” to “We should have a kid.” Because now it had a name. →