It's interesting working for a music distribution company - our upper management tends to the audiophile / retro-geek crew.
Witness our CEO's office:
And the CTO's office:
I do wonder at the massive old-skool speaker stacks and tube amps... in a 15x15 standard drywall office, but it does look sorta neat.
Well that was no fun.
For a while, I was in a funk because the Planet-Geek.com site was not posting ANY of my articles. And when I logged into the maintenance pages, I couldn't see any of my articles for the last year.
Now, the site has something like 1600 articles on it. I was pretty cranky at the possibility of losing all my content. But the database itself seemed okay, and I could see entries in it. Just new content was not showing up.
Tonight I decided to sit down and figure out WTF was wrong with it.. It took about half an hour to determine the root of the problem...
I was logging into the wrong site.
We migrated the blogs off msb to msb2 a year or so ago, but I never a) removed the old bookmark in my shortcuts, and b) never updated the maintenance page to point to the correct toolset.
So I was editing the old site.
Boy do I feel like a dork.
Thou shalt not release software to production on the eve of a weekend or a holiday.
Thou shalt not use corporate email servers to distribute full page pictures of your kitten, or your child, or your horse, or your hamster.
Thou shalt not browse porn from your work computer or laptop. Ever.
Thou shalt use corporate / IT mandated applications for corporate related work, regardless of whether you think RandomFinancialTool is better.
Thou shalt choose Microsoft products ONLY when all alternatives have been thoroughly reviewed and considered objectively, and using the criteria of "But it's not compatible with Microsoft products" is usually a red herring.
Thou shalt not rely exclusively on the 'genius' or 'vast experience' of a single person within the company or organization. They might be wrong. How would you know?
Thou shalt consider a laptop expendable and subject to imminent destruction.
Thou shalt understand that IT and sysadmin staff are employed to HELP the users do their job. We may know what we're talking about.
Thou shalt not page a sysadmin at 2am because you've forgotten your password. Next time be more careful.
And last but not least.....
Thou shalt respect us. We're people too.
This is a brilliant video about 4 folks who decided to cut loose, renovate an old boat, and just plain Leave.
Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.
Be sure to check out discussion on Boingboing (including some answers from the folks on the boat).
From a TED talk by Caroline Phillips - ever wanted to know about the hurdy gurdy? What a beautiful instrument.
As little as 5 years ago, Six Apart was the undisputed gold leader of blogging platforms. Movable Type was the largest and best known blogging platform, and corporate entities were making moves to acquire competing services.
During this time, SixApart launched Vox. The idea was to blend blogging with social networking. Shared questions and trends, bring the whole blogger community together into one big happy family.
It never worked.
Bloggers are individuals. They want their own sandbox, their own domains, their own content. Not only from an individualistic stance, but also when it comes to money. It's hard to make a buck when your blog is buried in with a thousands other bloggers.
Vox lurched along for a few years, but never got any traction. Perhaps due to its muddled target audience. Were they targeting bloggers? Facebook folks? The then-dominant MySpace crew? It wasn't clear.
I had a Vox account, and I posted perhaps 3-4 things on it, and lost interest. There was no draw or anchor. I never went back.
Well THIS will come as a shock to absolutely no one:
Dear Valued Customer,
For the past several months, we’ve been working hard to combine the best features of Quicken Online and Mint.com into a single online personal finance solution—Mint.com. With the improved Mint.com, you can enjoy the features you love in Quicken Online, plus new benefits such as connecting to over 16,000 financial institutions, including Canadian banks—as well as tracking your investment and retirement accounts. There is also a new Goals feature that takes the tool you enjoyed in Quicken Online to the next level.
As a result of these changes, Quicken Online will no longer be available as of August 29, 2010. Creating a new Mint.com account is easy, but for reasons of security and accuracy, we cannot create one for you. Once you’re signed in, you can add your accounts and see your financial picture in just a few minutes.
Color me shocked. NOT.
It was obvious from the beginning that Intuit was never going to make anything serious out of Quicken.com - they’re far more interested in Quickbooks. When they announced the aquisition of Mint.com, the writing was on the wall.
I recently switched my online accounting over to Mint.com, and I have to admit it’s a helluva good system. Fast, very well designed interface, and good integration with my other finances.
So, there ya have it folks. If you can’t code it, acquire it.
