Archive for May, 2006

I never thought I’d see the day: Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Fabricland Sewing Club. The shame, the shame! Here’s the deal: I’m building some prototypes for a new product. For inspiration, and for product design, I needed fabric. Lots of it. Apparently, you get a 40%-off discount when you’re a...
Read more »

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Do you dream? Do you believe? I think that dreaming is an essential survival skill in business, in work, in life. I’ve just come through a month without dreams. A month of projects, tasks, requests, work. Basically,...
Read more »

Up at 6:20 this morning (late), skipped breakfast. Left house at 7:20. At work at 8:10 – working in Bellingham today. Juggled projects and priorities until noon, then had lunch with my boss, Kevin. Worked until 4:45. Home at 5:45 (border lineup was huge). Eating until 6:00. 15 minutes of hockey – Buffalo Sabres...
Read more »

Is your business beautiful? That sounds like a strange question – mostly because it is. But it’s a good question. It’s a question more people should ask of their business, processes, strategies, marketing, and products. Why? Well, think about it: what is beauty? Beauty is the marriage of structure and function. It’s elements in...
Read more »

I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog lately. He’s the extremely clueful author of Ideavirus, among other books. So in a recent post on cargo-cult marketing I found it pleasantly surprising that he states “we have no idea why some ideas spread and others don’t.” The post is about copying things you see successful companies...
Read more »

A company with a conference table this cool: And one that is still bold enough to put a Flash movie as the first thing you see on their site (remember skipintro?): … must be a pretty cool company. And indeed, if you check out their guiding principles (aka ‘frogism’), they are: 1. StrawberryFrog means...
Read more »

I sometimes shop at Chapters Indigo. But only when I have too … like when I get a gift certificate from IDC Canada for participating in one of their research studies. I hate shopping there, because the site is always, without exception, slow. I have never had it respond quickly. Double plus annoying. Plus,...
Read more »

… you’ve left the boilerplate text in your website after launching. fortuitous, beta, launch, web 2.0, funny, john koetsier
Read more »

OK, the title is accurate. But that’s not really why I’m making this post. Actually, what’s going on here is that I’m testing Apple’s iWeb. Teresa mentioned that she’d like to have something from time to time that would help her create a digital scrapbook, and so I said I’d look for something for...
Read more »

The rumors had been around for some time: PowerSchool was on the auction block. Now it’s official. But why? Why did Apple sell PowerSchool? It appears that the division was not profitable enough for Apple, and there were always rumors of issues around the development of new versions of PowerSchool. But I think there...
Read more »

I take a ton of screenshots. See something cool on the web: screenshot. See something I want to blog about: screenshot. Funky error condition: screenshot. But it leaves a mess on my desktop: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4 … you get the picture. (Ha. Ha.) So it was very cool to...
Read more »

Better is boring. Better sucks. Better is evolutionary, incremental. Better is moving the sticks a few more yards down the football field. Big deal. Different is in. Different is sexy. Different is new. Different is exciting. Different is brandable. Different is attention-grabbing. Different is a pattern interrupter that breaks through the attention clutter and...
Read more »

Wired has an important article in their June issue on what they’ve dubbed crowdsourcing. What is crowdsourcing? Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. Jeff Howe, the...
Read more »

Friends of our who recently moved to Alberta just had twins: Kathryn and Larissa. They were born a month early – preemies – and have been in hospital for 20 days … all their young lives. Congrats Wayne and Adriana! They emailed this photo:
Read more »

That’s the number of kilometres Teresa and I drove on our recent road trip to California. (I thought I’d finally post it just to remove it from my list of to-blog articles!) Note: 1500 of those kilometres were done on the first killer day: Abbotsford BC to San Francisco, CA.
Read more »