June 21, 2012 by sean 2 comments
If you’ve ever been in any sort of budget planning or project cost estimation meeting at a large corporation, you know how completely silly they can be (especially so for software and IT infrastructure projects). Wildly optimistic or bloated numbers get thrown around that usually have less to do with hard facts than they do [...]
April 11, 2012 by sean 3 comments
Dear AT&T, I’d like to cancel my U-verse internet service. I went to my account at att.com to do just that, but after 15 minutes of fucking around on your labyrinthine support site discovered that the only way to cancel my service is to call you on the goddamn phone. So I gave you a [...]
December 17, 2011 by sean 78 comments
I have a terrible addiction to new ideas. Although I can occasionally achieve a state of flow in my corporate job, I can almost never achieve it in my free time. I’m constantly chasing the new idea dragon. When I look at the past year of output, it’s simply abysmal. All I have to show [...]
December 15, 2011 by sean 2 comments
The Gutenberg Diagram is a concept popularized by newspaper designer Edmund C. Arnold in which a display divided into four equal areas can help designers ensure that they are taking full advantage of a user’s reading gravity, the natural path that most peoples’ eyes will follow when being presented with information. In Western cultures we [...]
December 14, 2011 by sean 1 comment
Friends and family chide me for holding onto my t-shirts far longer than I should. When I find one that fits right and feels comfortable, I tend to wear it past the point that it literally starts unravelling. One of my favorites is a Zildjian shirt my dad gave me about 15 years ago for [...]
September 25, 2011 by sean Leave a comment
Rule #1: There is no such thing as a bad idea. We never know how one idea (however far-fetched) might lead into another one that is exactly right. Rule #2: We don’t talk yet about why not. There will be plenty of time for realities later, so we don’t want them to get in the [...]
August 30, 2011 by sean 18 comments
A Pre-Launch Page is a way for you to build some interest with your target audience while you slave away in the shadows building your awesome new project. It also allows you to build an email list of interested potential users, which could absolutely be your most precious asset in the beginning. There are several [...]
July 21, 2011 by sean Leave a comment
Trying to purchase tickets for the Natural History Museum of LA presents me with an awkward salutation dilemma. This reminds me of that scene in The Goonies, where they have to play the exact right piano keys or be dropped into a cavernous abyss. I hope I pick the right one! This kind of obvious [...]
July 15, 2011 by sean Leave a comment
I love the writings of Venkatesh Rao at Ribbon Farm (especially his Gervais Principle series). That’s why I was bummed I couldn’t make it to his talk at the Kanban L.A. meetup this week. Lucky for us a video of Venkatesh presenting was posted today. Enjoy!
July 15, 2011 by sean Leave a comment
I gave up on Microsoft improving their product interfaces a long time ago, but they still occasionally shock me with an especially terrible design decision. Their new Outlook Web Access interface is an abomination. I’ll eventually write up a post dissecting exactly why the whole UI is criminally awful, but for now I’m going to focus on [...]
