Monthly Archives: February 2011

February 22, 2011 · 11:17 am

Think About It?

A photo of The Thinker by Rodin located at the...

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If you’ve been following along in this space you’ll know that we spent a little time in Hardware Hell the last week or so. Motherboards frying, backup drives breathing their last, laptop displays going dark like a theater marquee after a string of bad reviews.
As I was doing my best to repair this stuff and not electrocute myself by weeping into a live circuit, The Mrs. asked “how do you know all this stuff?” In my mind, it wasn’t so much how I knew it but how I was able to dive in and get to work without spending a lot of time thinking about it. The business thought? Continue reading →

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February 18, 2011 · 2:29 pm

One Size Fits All

Large and small skillets

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It’s Friday and our food-related theme for the day involves tools.  Kitchen tools, specifically.  Let me ask you to think about how many assorted gadgets, pots, mini-appliances and other tools you have stashed in your kitchen?  If you’re like me, you have dozens.  There are many knives of different sizes – chefs knives, boning knives, paring knives, and others.  There are pans with different profiles which I use depending on whether I’m sautéing, braising, making a sauce, or frying.  Even the materials for similar pans can be different – I have cast-iron and stainless pans of the same size and profile yet use them very differently.

I was at a tech event the other night and that exact thought came to mind as we talked about technology.  How did that happen? Continue reading →

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February 17, 2011 · 1:44 pm

Idiot Proof

I was on a call this morning with the tech and ad teams from a client of mine.  We’re spending a bunch of time trying to reconfigure the ad system to be more target-able (is that a word?) and flexible for sponsors.  As we discussed a number of options for changing the existing content management system the discussion kept coming back to the change in work flow that the changes would mean for the editors and producers.  The tech guys, who are very good at what they do, were trying to figure out logic which would prevent a CMS user from categorizing a piece of content incorrectly which could mess up the ad targeting.  Given that these changes are kind of pressing and also given that the logic they were building would take a lot of time to implement, I felt a need to comment on that incongruity with some excellent advice I was given and which I’d like to pass along. Continue reading →

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