Category Archives: Thoughts

As part of Adobe’s ongoing efforts to make the web a more terrible place, they’ve released a tool that will help a new generation of 14 year olds[1] try to compete with talented designers and developers in the small business market. In meeting the standards set by Microsoft in Front Page and later the HTML conversion feature in Word, the code generated is an incomprehensible mess which will break in multiple browsers as soon as new versions are released. I … Continue reading →

And there’s a cap on how much music you can play in a given month. But you can’t deny that “15,000,000 tracks” is a very large number and “zero dollars per month” is a very low price. Andy Ihnatko reviews, and totally gets, Spotify. I managed to get in last week, and I’ve been pretty impressed so far. I don’t fall into the target market for services like Spotify, Rhapsody or the Rdio because I already have a pretty extensive … Continue reading →

I’m a person who can tend to overnerd1 things from time to time. Having skills in particularly nerdy areas creates the tendency to run yourself down small rabbit holes of pointless automation, or insisting that something be re-written from scratch even though it’s past 50% completion. Whether it be trying to figure out how to improve the syntax highlighting of markdown documents using the solarized theme in Textmate before writing something, or tweaking an OmniFocus perspective instead of actually getting … Continue reading →

It’s not the lack of retail space that’s causing Microsoft problems with consumers, it’s the lack of vision. Much like RIM, they know how to make businesses happy and do a great job at it. Microsoft Exchange 2010 is one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve ever used. From the web client (which fully supports Safari) to offering ways to listen and respond to email over the telephone I continue to be amazed at how cool the system is.

Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. Not better or worse, just different. You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like “nerd”. Maybe you will find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them. To this I have one just … Continue reading →

Even though it didn’t affect places like Atlanta, DC or New York it was pretty hard to avoid noticing that a lot of the country got slammed with a big snow storm this week. Even the Chicago School District decided that it was best for everyone to stay home for a while. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but there seem to be more posts than normal this week about the benefits of not being at work or shutting out other … Continue reading →