* “Boil the ocean”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22boil+the+ocean%22&btnG=Search, an egregious consulting term used to limit the scope of a project: “we’re not looking to boil the ocean with this.” Fast Company took “a shrewd look”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/debunk.html at the phrase, and Bob Congdon digs up its “earliest use”:http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html.
* “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (“via Tim”:http://www.challies.com/sideblog/archives/001828.php). Very forward-thinking book design on the part of the Standard Bible Society. Bibles used to be beautifully constructed books that were admired, but rarely touched. That’s beginning to change as people want to — literally — interweave the story of their lives with the Scripture.
* YouTube: “Two Chinese Boys”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdpTCJgnwc (“via Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2140697/). Be sucked into the vortex of incomparable splendor that is YouTube.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The Great Escape”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371767/. Forty million American employees toil in soulless cubicles. How did they get there — and can business ever break out of the box?
Probably not.
* ??Crain’s Chicago Business??: “The new face of technology”:http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=25714&bt=37Signals&arc=n&searchType=all (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/crains_chicago_business_cover_story.php). Start-up! Start-up! Start-up! 
* ??Kathy Sierra??: “The myth of keeping up”:http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html. You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be.
Good to know I’m in good company.
* ??Michael Idov?? for ??Slate??: “Bitter Brew”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/. You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business — where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.
Pragmatic advice for anyone who handles money. Worth listening to…twice.
* ??Sam Andreades??: “The Redefinition of Simon Peter”:www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/. Are you really free from how others look at you? I don’t just mean saying ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’–there are plenty of people in New York saying that. … Are you really free of carrying the responsibility of your reputation with others?
* Apple: “Get a Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?ilife_medium (“via Dan”:http://hivelogic.com/links/133). Quietly brilliant new “switcher” ads by Apple. Is it me, or does PC look a little like Mr. Gates? 
* ??John Gruber??: “Good Journalism”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/good_journalism. One can only hope that Apple will one day handle security issues as well as Microsoft does now.
Wow, you can _taste_ the bitterness in this article.
* ??Evan Ratliff??: “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/04/modern-love.html). Feeling suddenly like a shy 10-year-old in the playground, I pretended not to understand. But he walked off, and there was nothing to do but follow. I was already uneasy in Dhaka, unable to blend in or communicate, and now self-consciousness was joined by a simultaneous thrill and fear that I was walking into some vortex of cultural misunderstanding.
* ??Angela Wu??: “Religious map of America”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/religious-map-of-america.html. Like, if you grew up going to church all your life and everybody else you knew did, too, you might fervently believe lots of things…
(bonus: “cows”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/beating-dead-cow.html)
* The Village Church just might be getting “a new calendar”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ based on the open-source “WebCalendar”:http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php?topic=About. WebCalendar has been okay to work with, but not trivial to integrate with the site — due in part because it’s “ugly as a dog”:http://www.k5n.us/webcal-screenshots/wcss-month.png out of the box. Still, it will export an iCal feed, so if you’ve got 30 Boxes or Google Calendar, you can “subscribe”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/publish.php?user=public.
* ??Fast Company??: ” Varnished History”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/pr.html. The documentary itself won’t be featured in any film classes — but in the tawdry realm of corporate propaganda, there has been worse.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Ministry Exchange Overview”:http://www.intervarsity.org/mx/item/3674/. IV constructs a massive content management system to share ministry materials, providng features as web-2.0 savvy as tagging and RSS feeds. Well done–this is worth watching for a while.
* ??Ken Walker??: “The Debate Over Newark, Part II”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/05/04/the-debate-over-newark-part-ii/. Have you heard? We’re getting a new mayor in Newark after 20 years of the same administration. The candidates recently debated — here’s how it went.
Category Archives: Culture
Weekend Update: Jen’s Recital, Lunch with TVC’s Übercüte Couple
Drove 1 hour and 20 minutes to the Mazda dealer to pick up a sideview mirror, which was broken and later glued back on to the car. Vehicle abuse is one of the charms of our town. I need to find a new parts dealer.
Went to an excellent Master’s Degree recital by “Jenny Jobb”:http://www.myspace.com/jennyjobb at Juliard. It rocked–and I was even more impressed because flute is not my favorite instrument. Jen’s music was ecclectic and fascinating. Thanks for the invite.
Church on Sunday began with Darin & Sam’s Marriage and Dating class. Sam taught on the “asymmetry” of roles in marriage relationships. Judy Fujimura helpfully pointed out that both men and women both have to make the decision to lay their lives down for each other, even if the actual implementation looks different.
Speaking of the d-word, we were highly honored to spend lunch with the most “übercüte couple”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=287 at the Village Church. We talked shop about Newark (which is _so_ “up-and-coming”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/10/15/newark-unveiled-as-a-force-in-the-art-world/), the m-word, visiting Europe, “new apartments”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=300, and “widgets”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/28/on-the-radar/. Then we consumed the best “cream puffs we’ve ever had”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://www.muginohousa.com/creampuffs.html&e=9797.
Finished the weekend watching “Sullivan’s Travels”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ourstory-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=B00005JH9C%2526tag=ourstory-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/B00005JH9C%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82. Very good, though we’re not sure why we put it on the Netflix queue in the first place.
On the Radar: All Those Pretty Widgets Edition
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “How to medicate with legal substances”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/04_21_2006.html. Two, we spread a layer of peanut butter on top because we ran out of spreadable cocaine.
* YouTube: “Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs. Steve Jobs introduces his little digital wonder to the world.
* ??Steve Pavlina??: “How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/ (“via”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/sleep/how-to-get-up-when-you-really-want-to-169533.php). I’d love to try this out, but I have a feeling that simply _going to sleep at a decent hour_ might be just as effective.
* “Widgets”:http://automattic.com/code/widgets/, “widgets”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.org/development/2006/03/widgets-plugin/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/02/25/wordpress-widgets/, “widgets”:http://photomatt.net/2006/03/29/wordpress-widgets/ — the WordPress world is in love with them, and for good reason. Widgets make customizing WordPress even more accessible for mere mortals. A nice side benefit: they also make upgrading your theme much more painless. With the “ExecPHP”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/execphp/ and default text widgets, you can make sidebar mods (such as advertising, etc.) without worrying about them getting overwritten after a theme upgrade. Great work.
* ??Seth Godin??: “Ode: How to tell a great story”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html. Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.
* ??Ken Walker??: “He Smells Like the Future”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/04/26/he-smellslike-the-future/. On watching the Newark debut of Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight” (two years after the movie’s release) and Q&A with the director at Rutgers-Newark.
* ??LifeHacker??: “Download of the Day 2: Google SketchUp”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day-2-google-sketchup-170027.php. What the…?! Where did this program come from? I played with this a bit–it’s definitely complex, but interesting. Why would Google want us to play around with 3D modelling?
* ??Ben Goodger??: “Firefox 2: Safer, Faster, Better”:http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/2.0/firefox2-vision.html. It won’t have the much-coveted (and advertised) “Places”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places functionality, but Ben tells you why Firefox will _still_ be cool in 2.0. Can’t wait ’til “August”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Schedule!
* ??Steve Smith??: “Staying Small in a Big Place: Part 1″:http://orderedlist.com/articles/staying-small-in-a-big-place-part-1/. Kind of like “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104 for teams. Good read.
* “Uno”:http://gui.interacto.net/ is an attempt to cut down on the GUI dissonance you might experience while using a Mac — all of the windows are made to look the same (rather than the ongoing conflict between “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized and the “other guy”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal). There’s even a matching “Firefox theme”:http://takebacktheweb.org/, which makes FF look a lot less ugly in OS X.
One nice example of using widgets to hack your WP templates: I just set up a widget to carry some CSS code embedded in a “style” tag in my sidebar. I know, it’s right smack in the middle of my HTML which is “totally illegitimate”:http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#edef-STYLE. But, hey, if the pros can occassionally “thumb their noses at the validator”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/02/05/bebad.html, why can’t I? (Okay, okay: Doug was thumbing his nose at a _bug_ in the validator…but, still).
On the Radar: Up Late Waiting for iDVD to Encode
* ??Alissa Clark??: “Weekends and Things”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=261. And this, my dears, is why God made coffee for his beloved. It’s a common grace thing, like the rain.
* “Ask a Ninja”:http://askaninja.com/. Don’t ask me why, but I think this is hilarious (“iTunes podcast”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=115933673&s=143441).
* “ScrewTape on the Da Vinci Code”:http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2006/04/screwtape-on-dvc.html. If anyone’s going to revive ScrewTape, I’m glad it’s Eric Metexas. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details — as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields.
* ??Russell Posegate??: “Graduate Recital”:http://russell.posegate.org/podcasts/recital-060327/. My brother-in-law is a rockstar. See him listed in “iTunes”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=148258780&s=143441 among the other rockstars.
* ??Rands in Repose??: “1.0″:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/04/20/10.html. Who wants to do a startup?
* ??Jamie Zawinski??: “The Netscape Dorm”:http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html. It is two days later and I am still at the office. I did not go and chase coots. There is too much work to do. I want to die.
Who _still_ wants to do a startup? (“via Rands comments”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=408)
* ??The Onion??: “Beaver Overthinking Dam”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47469. Work-work-work. Gnaw-gnaw-gnaw. Build-build-build. Must hurry.
(“via 37signals”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_onion_beaver_overthinking_dam.php)
* ??Michael H. Goldhaber??: “Attention Shoppers!”:http://www.wired.com/wired/5.12/es_attention_pr.html Really, really compelling article about the future of the web, and of how we value things in the attention economy.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The boom is back”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375405/index.htm. Wow, I could have told you about these companies a year ago.
* ??Steve Jobs??: “Commencement Address at Stanford (iTunes)”:https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse/StanfordPublic-1770144-1770146–1770159–1770745_84019178?i=1741752008. I think I’ve linked to the transcript before, but John Gruber found the “audio version more inspiring”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative. I agree, and the video version is even better.
* ??Mike Davidson??: “Hacking a More Tasteful Myspace”:http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/04/hacking-myspace-layouts. Wow–Mike’s MySpace page actually isn’t horrifyingly ugly. Not sure I want to spend the time tweaking my own, though.
* ??Steven Garrity??: “Acts of Volition Radio: Session 24″:http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2006/april/actsofvolition. I’ve really been digging Steven’s “podcasts” (now that they’re called that). This latest one ends with one of the most amazing songs I’ve ever heard.
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “Even I can’t believe I’m allowed to have a dog”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/nubbin/04_05_2006.html. This is exactly why having a dog is so much fun.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??: “All the dogs I have known and loved”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/04/14/dogs. Mark Pilgrim is writing a blog again. Also regarding dogs.
In other news, I’ve set up a “NewsGator”:http://newsgator.com account for Sarah and made it her home page so she can keep up on our friends’ blogs. It’s become a family ritual now, where she and I sit side-by-side, scrolling through the morass of bloggy goodness before going to sleep. Well, except for those nights when I’m burning DVDs until 2 AM, anyway.
Outside
In NYC today, making sure the project managers for our division are getting up to speed on the new “project management system from hell”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/05/pebfad/, (which shall remain nameless). It goes like this: I check my mail and find that I’ve received 30 new messages in the last hour since I was last at my desk. I pick the three most important — either because I can pass them off to someone else and let them work in parallel, or because it’s a critical thing that can’t wait for another hour — and forward the email, make a phone call, or do a desk visit. If I’m at my desk for more than 30 minutes, someone stops by to ask for help, and away I go. This goes on for the whole day.
Except for my 2 o’clock lunch. I ignore the one-line email (“Are you there?”) and slink out the office to the elevators. Thirty-one floors later, I’m through the lobby and standing at the lunch truck. A couple in their fifties are there, slinging hotdogs and hamburgers for a few bucks. They’re cheap, fast, and they’ve been there forever. He doesn’t say a word, and she’ll chat with you only as long as it takes to get you your burger– everyone calls her Mama.
A young man orders in front of me; he’s got his head on a swivel. Mama asks him whether he wants mustard and, looking the other direction, he replies, “My God, look at my _wife_.” I turn to look, expecting to see a woman waiting nearby, perhaps with a child. Instead, I only catch the glimpse of a woman in a skirt as she glides by — apparently he was speaking in the future tense. Mama summons him back to reality: “HEY, FOCUS. You want mustard?”
I order, take my lunch from Mama, and drink in the warm, blue sky. I decide with gravity that the day is too beautiful to waste inside of an office, and, with equal gravity, that I shouldn’t be gone for more than ten minutes. I grab a bench in the little park outside the austere office building we call “388″. Men in expensive suits stream in and out of the revolving doors, passing by Tribeca mommies (nannies?) pushing their strollers. Little kids are playing hopscotch across the stonework in the park. Working men in uniforms tell colorful stories in even-more-colorful language nearby.
Another day of “eating nuclear waste” to keep the business running. Nice thing about being busy is that, at the end of the day, you feel like you’re taking names and kicking arse — plus, it fights off the layoff jitters. I’m glad my manager gave me the opportunity to be the “key guy” on this project. I’m even more glad, though, that tomorrow is a holiday. I miss sleep.
Ten minutes come and go quickly, but are well spent. I grab what’s left of my lunch and head back into the fray.
On the Radar: Busy Signal
Here’s why I haven’t been returning your phone calls or answering your emails.
* “The Village Church”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com site went down last week as we were changing web hosts. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication on my part, we lost our site and backups _before_ I had the chance to download them. LOVE it. Needless to say, we did some “damage control”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/2006/03/our-new-web-home/ and I lost a bit of sleep over the whole thing. Thanks to my fabulous team, we had it all fixed by the weekend.
* “Pandora”:http://pandora.com is Internet Radio that doesn’t suck. Put in your favorite artist and it will create a radio station of similar artists. Already discovered a “number of bands I like”:http://www.pandora.com/people/ken786, and I’ve only just been using it for a few days.
* Jeffrey is “tired of keeping up”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/03/22/unmixed with the Web 2.0 Joneses. I feel that.
* Everybody and his mother is starting up a blog about the Newark 2006 Mayoral election–and for good reason: the face off between Mayor James and Cory Booker has already brought about some political drama, such as the “delivery of Mayor James’ petitions _on a bicycle_”:http://newark06.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=34 and the “eviction of Cory Booker from Brick Towers”:http://newark06.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=47. Awesome. Should Booker pick up the win, I think we’ll really see some revitalization to the city, and this blog phenomenon should really kick off an interest in Newark as an online presence.
* On a related note, the Everything Newark blog is now on the ??New York Times?? “Newark 2006″:http://newark06.blogs.nytimes.com/ blogroll.
* I’ve also been doing a bit of research on reporting through WordPress in order to get a handle on our traffic at The Village Church and Everything Newark. I found out that if you take “Google Analytics”:http://google.com/analytics + “Feedburner”:http://feedburner.com + “WordPress Reports”:http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/, you can have a pretty sophisticated reporting solution for your web presence. Already got users subscribed to your news feed? Steve Smith’s “Feedburner Redirect”:http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/ will point them at the Feedburner feed instead with no impact on your users.
* Oh, and ??Angela Wu??’s “boring blogs”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/03/just-being-boring.html are much cleverer than my boring blogs.
Return of the Portal: How Dashboards Need to Evolve in the Attention Economy
It seems every other day I find out about a new tool to get me to the information that matters most. Back in the day, it was “My Yahoo”:http://my.yahoo.com, then it was “NetNewsWire”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire, then for a while it was “Newsgator”:http://www.newsgator.com, then “Google Home”:http://www.google.com/ig, now “Rojo”:http://rojo.com. Just today I took “Windows Live”:http://www.live.com for a spin before deciding that I liked the much lighter “Microsoft Start”:http://www.start.com. Of the competition, Rojo still wins out (for now), but not because it’s a great product. I love the lightness and ease of use of Microsoft Start, but the portals haven’t quite caught up with the information model suitable for the attention economy.
Everybody loves the idea of a portal: one place, all your information. Get stock quotes, email, weather, global news, local news, website comments, blog entries, Flickr photos, product announcements, local movie times, whatever. Add to that my bank account balance (secure, of course, but we’ll leave those worms in the can for now), upcoming events from my calendar, and task lists and I might be a real happy camper — in charge of all the bits of information that I need to meet my goals for the day. But the problem is that this is all still a lot easier said than done. While the technology is here to tie most of this information together through RSS, portal designers *still* seem to repeat a cardinal sin of web applications, which is to engineer the technology first, and paint on the user interface after.
“These guys”:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ will tell you that this is the exact *wrong* way to build an app, and I think poignantly so with one that’s intended to emulate a newspaper. With the advent of the information age, we’ve replaced hundreds of years of typography and graphic design insight, with this:
A tiny, constrictive, awkward little idiot box of information nobody wants to read. Spread out another 8 of these little boxes all over your screen in tic-tac-toe formation and, voilà, welcome back to 1999. To really make things horrifying, throw in some Microsoft-issue, 9-point Verdana typeface (will somebody _please_ tell these guys that Verdana is to the web what Times New Roman was to print five years ago?). Now you’ve got something that would send Edward Tufte to the grave just so he could spin in it.
Okay, okay, both Google’s and Microsoft’s custom homepages have been hailed as web 2.0 because of their Ajaxy drag-and-drop, redesign-on-the-fly features. But, really, how often are you supposed to be modifying your screen layout? 10% of the time? That leaves the other 90% of the time that you’re using the screen for it’s main function: _reading it_. The exact functionality that Google and Microsoft both seem to have spent the least amount of time perfecting. Bravo.
Think I’m overreacting? Go build yourself a Google or Microsoft or Yahoo dashboard and come back. Think you’ve got something you can live with? Now go look at “Veerle Pieters’ site redesign”:http://veerle.duoh.com/. You might have built a page that you might not mind looking at day in and day out, but you’re not going to find any tool today that will construct a site for you as compelling and interesting as Veerle’s site. And, remember, the portal is supposedly showing you information _that you care about_.
Well crafted dashboards need to be “designed to be read”:http://www.porsche.com/filestore.aspx/normal.jpg?pool=germany&type=galleryimage&id=d9af94b7-9c30-4ff2-a8c4-9401abf25d76&lang=none&filetype=normal, not to be “consumed”, and certainly not as an afterthought. In the transition from the information economy (“wow, look at all the cool stuff I can read”) to the attention economy (“*good Lord*, how do I get rid of all the noise?!”) design will mean the difference between making a successful web 2.0 app and being an also-ran.
Blogging the Renaissance
Announcing “Newarker.info”:http://newarker.info, devoted to covering the life and times of Newark, NJ from the perspective of the people who live here.
Newarker.info is just a blog and wiki for now, but I’m curious to see if we can ride the wave of the “renaissance” underway in the city of Newark. There seems to be a huge opportunity right now to build an online community for the city as more people take an interest in living and working here. The closest attempts I’ve seen are simply forums (“Newark Speaks”:http://www.newarkspeaks.com/, “The Newarkian”:http://www.newarkian.com/), which lack some of the more interesting features of the web, like RSS feeds.
My time commitments to the project are slim, so if any fellow Newarkers are interested in participating in a group blog, I’d welcome the help.
The Village Church is SO Web 2.0
Check out the new “map widget”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/about/service/ on the Village Church site. This was really, really easy to do, but looks so much better than that static image we had up there from MapQuest for the past three or four years.
The “Google Maps API page”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ has more information, but, essentially, you just need to “sign up for an API key”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html (this is drop-dead simple — they don’t even ask for an email address), and then “walk through the documentation”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/. It wasn’t quite as easy as I was hoping at first; for example, you have to use Lat/Long coordinates rather than just a street address. But once you get the hand of hacking the JavaScript, it’s admirable how simple it is — our little interactive map is all of 14 lines of code and an extra div tag.
One gotcha I ran into when testing, though: IE will throw a nasty error when loading the page unless you “implement this fix”:http://www.ryangrant.net/archives/internet-explorer-cannot-open-the-internet-site-operation-aborted-google-map-api/. You just need to make sure the page loads your map using the onload event for the page body.
Do Business Right, Keep Your Soul
??Fast Company??: “The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html?partner=rss. Snapper chooses to continue doing business with excellence, but not by selling out their brand and everything they stand for to Wal-Mart.
Indeed, the productivity of every factory worker is measured “every hour, every day, every month, every year,” says Snapper president Shane Sumners, who walks the 10.5-acre factory floor with comfort and familiarity. “And everybody’s performance is posted, publicly, every day for everyone to see.” It’s a lot like Wal-Mart–which measures the number of items every checkout clerk scans every hour. Some of Snapper’s dramatic productivity improvements, in fact, seem to come almost directly from the Wal-Mart playbook. These days, the Snapper factory operates in Wal-Mart time. It must, because it operates in Wal-Mart’s ecosystem.
??Rands??: “Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/01/23/subtlety_subterfuge_and_silence.html
Herein lies the hard part of subterfuge. Depending on where you are standing, my plan could be viewed in any number of ways. The other engineering director would have called it, “Disobeying a direct order” whereas my boss, who got wind of the effort two days in, called it “a skunk works project” and told us to proceed. Phew.
??37signals??: “You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful.”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/you_still_want_meetings_heres_how_to_make_them_useful.php
Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time.
And, in case you hadn’t seen it yet: “Apple’s Intel ad”:http://www.apple.com/intel/ads/. Love it.
New content from Ken Walker coming soon, promise.