I’m posting partly because I loved Van Halen in high school and partly because I was surprised to see them on the Interwebs this way.
Business Advice From Van Halen
My challenge to you is this, where are your brown M&Ms?
Avoiding the Important
February 23rd, 2010 by Ben No comments »I’m reading the 4-hour Workweek right now, and one of the principles author Timothy Ferriss repeats over and over is to remind yourself to not invent things to do just to avoid doing the important things. Taking that into mind, yesterday I filled out a sticky note of things that I wanted to do today, and stuck it squarely in the center of my monitor, vowing to focus on the most important things. It’s still there, and I’m actually moving my windows around the note, trying to read my email first anyway. Even now, I’m typing this quick post around the sticky note. Clearly, I have a problem with avoiding the important. More to come.
Arcade-style A|B Testing
February 16th, 2010 by Ben No comments »If only all A|B testing was this easy!
Omniture’s Pick the Winner Game
I’ll have to download the white paper and see what they are willing to share. My guess is that this is a funny way to garner brand loyalty from those of us that get a kick out of this kind of stuff.
Food, Inc
February 2nd, 2010 by Ben 1 comment »
Every six months or so, a movie comes out that has the capacity to actually change me. I have to admit that I have scoffed the recent push for organic foods a few times, but I won’t anymore. In fact I may even buy some, because I appreciate what they are trying to do and I want to cast my vote at the checkout scanner for the foods that are produced responsibly and sustainably.
Anyway, enough of the rhetoric. No matter what foods you like, you should see this movie, gather some information and then make a decision about your life and your food, because it does matter.
The Dip, by Seth Godin
February 2nd, 2010 by Ben No comments »
In an appreciably small book, Seth Godin focus in on the period in life when increased effort yields the same or worse results. Convention wisdom teaches that this is the time to “stick it out” and that quitters never win. But Godin counters with this insight, “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”
The Dip is a quick exploration of how we get into this dip and when we should stick it out and when we never should have been there. The key is knowing beforehand if it will be worth all the effort, adds Godin, “you should outline your quitting strategy before the discomfort sets in.”
Do you have the guts to quit so that you can succeed at the right thing? Do you really believe that you can be really successful at the right thing, not just average at something?
Interesting stuff. Read it for a quick insight into the things that you may be failing at because you won’t quit.
My Setup
January 30th, 2010 by Ben 1 comment »Technical difficulties have forced me to reinstall Windows, which I thought wasn’t a big deal, but it was and no one is surprised. Perhaps more for my sake than yours, I wanted to list all of the things that I wanted to install.
- Firefox
- MeasureIt! add-on
- FireBug add-on
- Color Picker? add-on
- AdBlock Plus – advertising blocker
- Screen Grab add-on
- Developer tools
- Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
- 7-zip archiving tool
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Premiere
- Thunderbird email client
- Adobe Reader
- Google’s Chrome web browser
- Apple’s Safari web brower
- Skype
- Microsoft Office 2003, including the file format converter for the latest version
- Google Picasa
- CodeLobster – a pretty nice (and free) PHP IDE
Here are some things that I normally install but won’t this time if I can avoid it:
- Eclipse with Aptana
- WAMP Server
- BullZip PDF Printer
More coming as I get setup.
