2904 S Washington St

Photo

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:12:12 -0700

Photo

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:00:39 -0700

A Clarification for Steve

Thu, 28 May 2009 23:15:16 -0700

Steve (is he back from Africa?) B. wrote to point out, as an offended southerner, that the Mason-Dixon line refers very specifically to the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Of course Steve is correct in the exact sense (ref. Wikipedia), but not in the colloquial sense:

From 1820 onward the name Mason-Dixon Line came in general colloquial usage to mean the boundary between the free states and the slave states. It therefore included not only the original Mason-Dixon Line as surveyed by Mason and Dixon but also that part of the Pennsylvania/Ohio border from the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania to where the Ohio river crosses this border, the route of the Ohio River from that point to where it flows into the Mississippi, the eastern, northern and western borders of Missouri, and the 36 degrees 30 minutes parallel westward from the southwestern corner of Missouri

… so I stand by my colloquial usage :)

from http://www.johncletheroe.org/usa_can/usa/mas_dix.htm

See if you can spot the Mason-Dixon line. Via the American Human...

Sat, 23 May 2009 07:03:48 -0700

See if you can spot the Mason-Dixon line. Via the American Human Development Project

sujay: “The Designer You Treat Like Shit Has Quit...

Fri, 15 May 2009 19:54:16 -0700

sujay:

“The Designer You Treat Like Shit Has Quit Unexpectedly”

(via dan)

"You can take that road - and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest..."

Wed, 13 May 2009 21:44:41 -0700

“You can take that road - and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.
[…]
That’s a good motto for all of us - find someone to be successful for.”

- President Obama’s commencement address at ASU

If you’re at all interested in the state of online video,...

Mon, 11 May 2009 09:07:47 -0700

If you’re at all interested in the state of online video, this is 18 mins of your time well spent. Money quote: “I think a lot of these guys don’t really understand what it takes to program a Broadcom chip.” (at 16:00)

Slides and original post here.

Requiem for a dying newspaper industry

Mon, 04 May 2009 11:09:15 -0700

This weekend, Bonnie and I went to see State of Play (plot summary: cute cub reporter, grizzled old vet, black helicopters) at the Big Picture (once again, what an awesome place to see a movie).

In so many ways, the film is a requiem for a dying newspaper industry. The cub reporter is from the online division, the grumpy veteran’s office is filled with paper. The movie is capped off with sentimental footage of big newspaper printing presses as the final credits roll.

This morning, Om writes on Why the Kindle HD Can’t Save Newspapers and references an article from Clay Shirky that hadn’t crossed my desk yet:

There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. […] It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

I could have picked 15 other spots to quote as well. The article is fantastic, and if you are at all interested in the death of the newspaper industry, you should read the whole thing.

p.s. also this morning: Boston Globe almost shut down

jakemintz: Blind Pilot - The Story I Heard Thanks to this dude...

Mon, 04 May 2009 10:03:53 -0700

jakemintz:

Blind Pilot - The Story I Heard

Thanks to this dude I’ve never even met, I have this song stuck in my head now. Time to pass it on :)

glenn mcdonald on Douglas Bowman's departure from Google

Sat, 02 May 2009 15:57:20 -0700

glenn mcdonald on Douglas Bowman's departure from Google: “Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better.”

The Flypaper Job Description

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:06:39 -0700

I was surprised to note this morning that Google registers no hits for the phrase “flypaper job description” (nor for several variants), which is a phrase I’ve used off and on for a while. So, here’s my minor contribution to the vocabulary of the tech startups world.

A flypaper job description, or flypaper job posting, is a listing designed to attract potential candidates to a company even though there’s no open req for that position - i.e. no formal plan exists to hire for the position advertised. Frequently used as a group, one might list a collection of flypaper job descriptions from entry-level developer to senior architect, so that a range of potential candidates trolling a company website might consider inquiring or sending in a resume.

One purpose behind the flypaper job description is to snare that one in a million candidate who the company would hire no matter what - the person who happens to be the domain expert in the field, or the guy who studied under the guru at Caltech who invented the original widget, or .. you get the idea.

These “fake” job postings may also be used for the secondary purpose of making a company look more successful than it is (“we’re hiring!”), and in rare cases, to sow a little misinformation in a competitive feint. (Job postings frequently betray new projects starting up, or underlying technologies used at a company.) Sometimes you even snare a resume from an employee at a competitor.

A more passive flavor of this practice involves simply being slow about removing job descriptions for positions already filled or no longer needed - under the theory that there’s no harm in collecting more resumes that you might want to use later.

Flypaper job descriptions are quite common among tech startups. I’d venture to guess that if you click through to the ‘Jobs’ or ‘Careers’ pages of the 200-odd tech startups in Seattle, as many as half of the jobs posted have no true open hiring requisition behind them. I suspect this practice is frowned on by HR professionals, and it’s certainly questionable from my reading of employment law - but it’s all over the place.

So, is there another term for this practice that is more common than mine? Let me know in the comments if you know of another.

Facebook Announces Users Will Soon Be Able to Login to Facebook through OpenID

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:26:17 -0700

Facebook Announces Users Will Soon Be Able to Login to Facebook through OpenID

Photo

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:22:42 -0700

Adrian and I went skiing this morning. It was a lot of fun :)

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:28:58 -0700

Adrian and I went skiing this morning. It was a lot of fun :)

Photosynth for video

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:20:49 -0800

Photosynth for video: Anyone who has spent more than few minutes with me lately has probably been subjected to some ranting about the need for something like Photosynth for video. I think the potential for improving video navigation is enormous. Fortunately since this is Microsoft they probably won’t get it right immediately. So if you have some interest and/or expertise in this space, give me a shout because I want to talk about it.

Dammit I should follow my own advice. Dec. 1 - I give a BUY...

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:20:09 -0800

Dammit I should follow my own advice.

Dec. 1 - I give a BUY rating on Akamai.

Feb. 10 - It has doubled while the rest of the market is in the toilet.

Unfortunately I didn’t actually buy any last December.

DevHub - Free Web Hosted Publishing Platform

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:21:00 -0800

DevHub - Free Web Hosted Publishing Platform:

This is about to go live. Contact me for a preview. - asteele

DevHub is a free web hosted publishing platform and content editor. We bring publishing tools, API integrations, and…

Here I am, sitting on Amazon Unbox/Video on Demand, virtual...

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:36:53 -0800

Here I am, sitting on Amazon Unbox/Video on Demand, virtual credit card in hand, looking to pay real money to watch a particular movie that Bonnie told me I should download/rent.

Oh, sorry, we can’t take your money, because of some stupid studio licensing agreement.

So BitTorrent, P2P, whatever, here I come. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Photo

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:01:19 -0800

Photo

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:01:07 -0800