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:

More coming as I get setup.

New Development Process

January 21st, 2010 by Ben No comments »

After working out a development process based on Scrum for a presentation, I thought that I had really struck gold with what I had. It was agile, it was quick, it had good transparency and accountability… and then a late suggestion came that has turned my plans up-side down. It’s called WACD (pronounced ‘whacked’). This could be the future of all development… and if it is, I will look into farming or something as my next career.

Prototyping

January 13th, 2010 by Ben No comments »

The creation of all great products begins with the prototype, unless you’re a genius. Certain that I am not a genius, I’ve used various methods of prototyping, including pencil sketches, storyboards, wireframes, the paper browser, mockups and the infamous napkin. A good friend of mine who is starting his own venture pointed me at this list of 10 free prototyping tools. I’ve tried HotGloo and have been satisfied, but I think I’ll take some time to try out some of the others. Enjoy.

10 Completely Free Wireframe and Mockup Applications from Speckboy.com.