I’ve been busy in the after-hours helping TheWife(tm) and TheSisterInLaw(tm) get their show on the e-road. Crawling through catacombs, experiencing ruins on a regular basis. Very cool stuff for a simple Canadian boy. I love what they do and it was an honor and a thrill to hash out a simple WordPress installation for them. The site still has a long way to go but looking at it gives me the sense that I should have chosen a different career path.
I’ve been ordering flowers online from the same home-town shop for about 10 years now. They’re fantastic and the results always bring a smile to my “ladies back home.” Yesterday, I was a bit surprised to find that they had introduced Youtube-style regional content blocking when I hopped on to buy some Mother’s Day flowers. Like I said, they always managed to provide excellent bang-for-the-buck so I had no problem leaving the final choice to their discretion. “I’ll pay max $XX; you just take care of the arrangement and delivery.”
I’ve been thinking a little bit about this. It’s actually the first time where I was restricted from shopping online based on where I live. I’ve seen specific products blocked; RedBull was banned in France for example causing stress on a previous-life product and the Android market is full of stupidity in this regard; I’ve however never seen entire sites blocked. I’m hurt.
Regardless of whether or not this was intentional (and I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t), I’m just worried about how this sort of thing will evolve. Is the internet really contracting into a group of protected cells? I certainly hope not.
As I look around the landscape, I see so many start-ups from here that just seem to have their shit together. It’s not just that they’re making stuff that actually works, they’re also doing it sexy. I stole that term. Allow me to explain.
Posted: February 1st, 2011 | Author:Deke | Filed under:Why not? | Tags:Biz, IT
For the past year, Matej and I have been working hard on a new startup. We have revolutionized printing as you know it. Just kidding. We did this in two weeks. Just kidding. Matej did it in one week; I’m just stealing a breath of bragging right.
Envelopa.com is a super-simple utility for printing addresses on an envelope. It’s old school — we know — but it was one of those problems that we couldn’t find a simple and free solution for. It was also something that fit into our “if it can’t be done in a week, we won’t do it” mantra.
(Note: our next one’s a real whopper so that mantra dies now.)
Envelopa is pretty basic in its current form. You sign up, paste contacts from a spreadsheet or create new ones manually, and generate formatted PDFs for each of those contacts. You can then take those PDF files and (using only an Inkjet printer as odd as that might sound) print them directly onto your envelope. We’re, rather Matej’s, busy with adding support for importing contacts via Google and a CSV file-upload utility.
It might just save you a few minutes of time; we find that pretty darned useful. Check it out.
Was just going through some PR texts and stumbled on:
We will continue to attract users, maintain a fresh and “edgy” design and react to technical and business stresses as the user base improves.
Was thinking about editing it into:
We will continue to attract users, maintain a fresh and “edgy” design and react to technical and business stresses as the user base improves. We read that in a book.
Here’s a screenshot (format matters) of an email I received this week from Telligent. There’s no pretext, just a boot and a bunch of self-promotion.
I wasn’t a user so I’m not so offended, I just find this message a tad brutal. If I need a social network for my enterprise-of-one, I’d probably use theflowr.
This was a place where I wrote a complete (thesis) response about a certain set of requirements in old English. It has been redacted based on completely nonsensical grounds. I digress, and digress for the last time.
I’ll keep this short yet still cathartic: please, people, don’t waste other people’s time with nonsense. If you don’t know what you’re doing, start the conversation with “I don’t know but …” and not some unjustified list of demands. On that note, I hence forth ignore demands. Questions and concern are accepted at par.
Janssen Pharmaceutica is based in Beerse, Belgium. Each year, throughout an entire summer month, the production and research division is shut down; it’s crickets from conveyors to labs. The original reason was probably due to regular maintenance; the story as of my last stay in 2000 was due solely to it being vacation time.
I’ve been a jack of all trades since 1996. The choice at the start of my career was simple: generalize or specialize. I generalized out of curiosity and boredom prevention. Now I wonder, is that approach a mistake? Is the question of generalizing or specializing still relevant? A friend of mine (Rod) said it perfectly: “People with broad interests are rarely successful.“
