Today at 3:00 PM I put my dog of six years to sleep. I got Drex in 2004 when his previous owner was out of the house for too long during the day and Drex needed constant companionship. Luckily I never left the house and we fit together well. He was a great dog, preventing at least one break-in at my condo, and always being loving, protective and affectionate.
Read more on Rest In Peace Drex…
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People use some phrases to make themselves feel better, not to add anything to the conversation. Using these phrases annoys everyone in earshot and decreases motivation to fix the underlying problem. My preliminary list:
Read more on Better to remain silent than to say any of these things…
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Several months ago I finished reading Brain Rules by John Medina and I’ve been raving about it ever since. Medina is a noted brain researcher and the book contains the 12 things he wishes the lay public knew.
The 12 things (with my notes in bold and italic)
From this book I have made the following changes in life Read more on Everyone should read Brain Rules by John Medina…
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My new commandment: Never complain about anything. Ever. If you feel the need to complain to pressure someone else to make something happen, then be honest and call it manipulation.
I realized this while at a client meeting; we were talking about problems with a botched sales program and the staff had a litany of complaints about the program (ed. note: it was created by a separate vendor years ago, and the fault lies with the now-departed project manager who designed something inappropriate. It does a masterful job of integrating legacy systems from different vendors, languages, platforms, a mainframe and Europeans are involved somehow, but the user interface is wanting. But I digress…). Then I remembered hearing the same litany of complaints a year ago. Unlike last year, I offered suggestions on how to make small improvements to the program. Everyone proceeded to ignore me and continued complaining. At the end of the meeting everyone felt a lot better once they had talked about their problems. No one made any plans to actually fix the problems. Read more on Why you should never complain about anything – with anecdotal proof!…
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After writing yesterday’s post on lessons learned from eight years in business, I thought I would come up with my listing of great books that have helped me starting out.
I follow Tyler Cowen’s notion that if you you finish every book you start you’re wasting time on crap. On average I finish less than half of the books I start. Since I’ve gotten a Kindle I’ve upped my selectivity considerably. Before anyone asks, I have yet to finish Getting Things Done by David Allen.
With no further ado – here are the books I recommend to start out. Read more on Ten great books for American business…
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While pondering installing Visual Studio 2010, as well as thinking how all software is moving to a subscription basis, I had the thought – why not do two predictable releases a year? The first release, say in January, would be whatever new features were in place by that date. The second release, say in July, would be a pure performance and usability release, as the development team would spend half the year optimizing and tweaking the code, as well as fixing all bugs. Any new “Features” would have at least six months to cook in the minds of the developers and would be implemented on a much stronger code base. Read more on Thoughts on predictable software scheduling…
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photo credit: Rego – twitter.com/w3bdesign
First things first, I have not seen the Apple iPad. I am an enthusiastic owner of an Amazon Kindle. I honestly don’t see what the hype is about. Granted, I never do with Apple products, but I can’t even see it from Apple’s point of view this time. The Kindle is perfect at what it does, largely because it doesn’t do that much. You read order, download, and read books on it. Period. The Kindle does that effortlessly and the e-ink is easier to read than paper. The pages are consistently sized (an under-reported feature of the Kindle that helps quite a bit) and the battery lasts forever. The Kindle also weighs almost nothing and you do not have to choose between it and a laptop in terms of weight or space. In sum, the Kindle solves the problem of “I want to read something” quite well.
Read more on Thoughts on the Apple iPad and the Kindle…
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“Before I tell you about it you have to sign this!” is what they all say. The idea will be written out over five pages, usually in the passive voice, with as many adjectives and adverbs as possible. By the time you finish reading the document the concept will be fuzzier than when you started reading the document.
As a solo web/software I’ve signed 15 or so non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) over my past eight years in business for new products and companies. I don’t recall any of the products being successful in the long term. In fact, I can’t recall any of the products being around after six months. Most of the products never reached any sort of development at all. To a man the people pitching the NDAs had great enthusiasm, and they all insisted on a great many meetings. Why is this? Read more on Non-Disclosure Agreements are the Kiss of Death…
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