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Movie Review: Hanna I watched Hanna last night an was left with the pressing need to immediately watch something else, as if to remove a bitter taste from my mouth after eating bad food! The story was engaging but the characters...

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Dear Facebook, No. Dear Facebook. Yes, I'm not logging in from the same computer. No, I don't have that computer anymore. No, I am not sending you or anyone else a scan of one of my IDs. No, I am not a hacker....

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The Outdoor Office My outdoor office, now in 5D! Look at how it all just pops out of the screen! I love those little alphanumeric crackers. I once wishfully discussed working outdoors with some cubical mates and today...

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Using Game Theory for Positive OutcomesUsing Game Theory for Positive Outcomes Game theory investigates the motives and dilemmas of social interactions relative to selfishness and cooperation. As we understand game theory we can increase our chances of finding satisfying resolutions...

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Redesigning the WeatherRedesigning the Weather Weather.com has, at least in my mind, always been the go-to place for weather forecasts. I don't know why I made the association... oh wait! It's because its probably one of the best domain names on...

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The Dip, by Seth Godin

Category : Business, Reviews

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

Category : Technology

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

Category : Business

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

Category : Business

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.

Joel Spolsky on Strategy

Category : Business

What isn’t surprising is that someone has written some advice on how to run a smart software business, what is surprising is that he wrote this eight years ago and it’s still holding true.  Check out Joel Spolsky.

  1. Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
  2. Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
  3. Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
  4. Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
  5. Strategy Letter V
  6. Strategy Letter VI

My Chili Un-recipe

Category : Food

I was asked for my chili recipe today, which is a shame because I don’t have one. This is both because I never wrote it down and because every time it is different. But I do feel that I have something going, so if I were to make chili today, here’s how I’d start out.

Every-color chili- Cans of beans, red, black, white, navy, kidney (drain and keep the juice)
- chopped green and red peppers
- chopped onion
- pineapple chunks (optional)
- meat, like bacon, steak, spicy sausage or ground beef (or any combination of those)
- hot peppers (Anaheim, jalapeño, habenero)
- brown sugar (more than you’d think)
- chili powder
- garlic
- cumin or a packet of chili seasoning mix (optional)
- a very tangy BBQ sauce (hot and sassy, rich and sassy), up to a full bottle

Toss all of that in a Crockpot and let it cook. As for the relative quantities, I usually go for color and texture first, which might be backwards. If you’d like, use the BBQ sauce and bean juice to make it more soupy. If you’re going with spicy peppers, remember that the spiciness will take a while to show up, so don’t over do it.

In my mind, what makes a good chili is that the flavor is consistent with every bite. Of course the flavor changes with what you put in, but cooking it long allows you to make changes to the flavor.