Design

Design / Mozilla / Personal stuff / nerdTech — 10 Comments
7
Feb 09

TED Overload

All the awesomeness fuses in my brain are blown from sheer overload of the awesome, so not sure I’ll be super-coherent tonight — will post more through the week about a bunch of different & great insights from TED.

For now, I want to capture this one thing: on both a personal and professional level, TED is amazing and transformative. It’s chic to be sort of cynical about the conference circuit, glib about how you’ve seen things like this before. But it’s not appropriate in this case. I feel that virtually every interaction & talk over the past 3 days has made me want to become better at what I do, and to do more to change the world we live in as well. It’s made me want to do more at Mozilla, but beyond that to be a more present and thoughtful human, husband and father.

Because my first experience at TED has been one where being smart is cool, where using data is obviously the right way to do things, where science rules, where art transforms. It makes me think harder about what to do at work to have a greater impact, and what to do at home to be a better family member.

It’s as good an event as I’ve ever been to, and especially with all the cynicism in our world today, I think it’s important to note TED as a force that promotes education, science, and art as a way to improve the world.

More soon, as my brain recovers.

ps – everyone here uses Firefox. :-)

Books / Design / Personal stuff — Comments Off
5
Jan 09

1 year of Kindle

A few quick thoughts on my Kindle now that I’ve lived with it for a year. I’ve purchased 46 books on it, reading at least some of each of them, and finishing about half.

1. The integrated wireless store is absolutely the best part of it. I can literally think of a book and have it available to read within a minute.

2. Selection of titles is getting better, but still only about 50% of what I read.

3. Reading on it seems no different on my eyes than reading on paper — paperback pulp is probably the closest contrast-wise.

4. I find that books do seem longer on the Kindle, mostly because I get a little lost in terms of where I am. The indicators are all good, but it’s hard to figure out how close we are to chapter endings, etc. As a result, it’s screwing with all my 38 year old physical book navigating abilities.

5. It’s making book reading much less social for me, because nobody can tell what I’m reading. On airplanes, that’s a great thing. So great. At home with my wife, it’s not as good, because it means we don’t have as many serendipitous conversations initiated by her about what I’m reading. [A weird side effect was that I was trying to get through the last 50 pages of a mystery over break -- usually people can tell where you are in a book and that you're near the end, and will forgive anti-social behavior if you're sprinting to the end -- with a Kindle, they think I'm even less social than I generally am.]

Overall, though, my sentiment is the same that everyone else who has one has: it’s a very flawed device, and I would never give it up at this point.

Design / The Internets — 2 Comments
15
Oct 08

The Big Picture — Days of Autumn

The Big Picture does it again, with amazing, amazing photos of the Fall Season. I should just set up a permanent pointer to these, because they hit it out of the park every single time. As Paul mentions, it’s a testament to the power of a good, simple photo. No animation, no Web 2.0, just phenomenal photography, and a great editor pulling things together.

Design / startups — 2 Comments
28
Aug 08

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

Great article on helping & supporting creative organizations by Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s founders: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Here’s something from the introduction:

I don’t think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.

It’s pretty long, but full of great, great stuff.


Design / OSX / nerdTech — 2 Comments
13
May 08

beta Google Reader for iPhone is **great**

New beta of Reader for iPhone is fantastic — super-AJAXy, and makes my life a ton better already. Love it. Note that you need to use a special URL: http://www.google.com/reader/i/.

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