Trapped on Palm?
My
Twitter
question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the
Palm III
launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance […]
A new grocery store opened in my neighborhood last week.
Fresh & Easy
claims to provide high-quality food at “unbelievable” prices in a friendly, small-store format. They further claim caring for the environment and an emphasis on local sourcing of produce.
Our little slice of Los Angeles is grocery-starved, so Thursday’s hotly anticipated opening was well-attended. […]
I received an eVite today, the first in a long while. It was not a great experience.
Strike one: lack of context.
The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no […]
Jason Fried over at 37signals
mentioned
today that he gets a lot of questions about “growing the business”: why aren’t they, when will they, etc.
They don’t plan to. Not in the traditional sense, by hiring. What’s important here is that they have oriented their business, and especially their products, to succeed without requiring additional head […]
Getting to know your customers is both fashionable and a good idea. But if you work for a large corporation, you may find several obstacles to forming a direct relationship with customers. All is not lost; you can kick-start your customer research by looking within your company for evidence of user experience problems.
Technical Support
: Customer […]
I once had a manager who would leap into action whenever I told him anything. Much of the time I wanted his advice or just wanted him to know what was going on, but it seemed that our every conversation resulted in marching off to another part of the company and shaking someone down for […]
In his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address today, Steve Jobs announced the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. This left some people at work scratching their heads and focusing on two questions: 1) Does Jobs think he’ll bite off a meaningful chunk of Windows browser market share with this move? 2) Does he […]
I recently returned from our division’s National Sales Meeting, a week-long conference wherein the sales staff are pumped full of excitement about current and coming products, told the final results for the fiscal year, trained and role-played until they are worn down to little sales nubs, and then feted heavily to both thank them for […]
Take care when browsing the site for
Birdwell Beach Britches
; indiscriminate viewing may cause eyestrain. But if you escape this fate, you may well find yourself tempted to purchase many pair of custom boardshorts. The text displays significant personality and tells the story of a family-run business that is focused on making a single product […]
Uncle Barry pointed me to this
BusinessWeek article about Microsoft Silverlight
and asked:
I wonder if you have any insights into this Adobe/ Microsoft rivalry that’s brewing here…
My take:
It is fitting that Microsoft is going after online video; the animation capabilities of Flash are nearly forgotten. But online video sites like
YouTube
successful are successful […]
We’ve sometimes had significant debates about the merit of a feature or service that never manage to include user needs. I want to make sure there is a user case for what we choose to do, and ensure that high value to the user outweighs risk at an appropriate level, so these debates have been dissatisfying at best. And about a year ago I weighed in on the topic in a pretty significant way. (Initials have been changed to protect the people involved…)
Steve Pavlina
(thanks, Douglas Wagoner) has an interesting post about
living your values
. His central assertion is that rather than dig up your values to then generate goals that are alighed with them, you should actually
adjust
your values to pull yourself into alignment with those goals so you can readily achieve them. Intetsting thought.
Trouble […]
Since I’ve been trying to become a more effective and organized employee/husband/guy (order depends on time of day), I’ve been reading a lot about systems of organization, business practice and philosophy, and the like. And nearly to a man, the authors of same claim that one must know one’s values.
Lucky me, Douglas Wagoner has thrown […]
Seth Godin’s
post about CEO blogs
(all the rage, it seems) got me thinking about a related problem I see in my new workplace. And it isn’t a CEO (necessarily) or a blog. But the five or six characteristics of a good CEO blog can easily be cross-applied.
A few times a week a message hits […]
I’ve always liked being sneaky. It used to get me into tons of trouble, being sneaky, for what sneaky things can a kid in high school (or middle school, or elementary school) do that aren’t also frowned upon by the parental establishment? And there aren’t a heap of sneakiness opportunities in a relationship that won’t […]
I was thinking about all of the things I need to do and want to
do and all of the people/projects who want a piece of me and somehow before I became whelmed an idea! burst forth. I’m kicking it around now; we’ll see if it amounts to anything.
I’ve been toying with
GTD
methods for a […]
As much as I am not a fan of the punditry of others, there are some good things happening over at
Change This
, an interesting “idea publishing” project. They’ve got an intriguing model: you propose to write a manifesto, site visitors give the nod (or not.), (or submit a written one) and then they read […]
(By the way, I’m using “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ for the first time in this post. We’ll see how I like the resultant HTML.)
I’ve taken a new job, as mentioned before. This time I am to become the (first ever? for this organization) business owner of the interface of a variety of online and offline software. Which got […]
A lovely thread
over at
SpeakUp
regarding public perception of the big brands (Microsoft, Coke, Nike, etc). It started with a question about
Believing the Good in Brands
, but after the initial post, quickly zeroed in on what I see as the core problem: Companies that make a lot of money constantly have to defend […]
When I first came to work at my current long-term contract (scratch that, make that the second time), I immediately set up a wiki to capture and display thinking, planning, and progress on the very large project that I had been given. This worked, sort of.
At work recently we’ve been tasked with finding out if/why our group is at all special. A consultant has appeared before us to point out his view of the dimensions along which a team might excel (tools, techniques, process, skills, attitude, or discipline). And we’ve been told that as a “shadow” IT group that wants […]
While poking around this weekend I stubled across an interesting concept in the work of
Alphachimp Studio
. Among their many offerings (including fiber art!?) they list ”
Graphic Facilitation
,” in which an illustrator(s) takes visually rich notes during a meeting that they are also involved in facilitating, in an effort to capture the salient points of […]
Boxes and Arrows
continues to publish insightful and relevant articles. And the fact that two of my recent favorites just happen to include the words “Design Success” in their titles isn’t a factor, no siree.
Most recently,
Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
details a method for performing
stakeholder analysis
, an exceedingly useful technique that […]
We’ve recently heard tell of ways that users “get around” what they find inconvenient about our therapy management application. I find this sort of revelation surpassingly interesting because it reveals not only deficiencies in the application, but new ways that people
want
to use it.
It is almost as if they are writing the requirements for […]