Blog Posts

Goodbye to BlogBridge…

After a glorious run of almost 10 years, regretfully, I’ve decided to decomission BlogBridge. My longtime freinds and blog...

Aruba vs. Curaçao

I admit I am always a little bit offended when I hear that a friend of mine (François?) chooses Aruba as a vacation destination. And it happens pretty regularly. Oh I always say that the two islands are very similar, but the truth is that I’ve spent very little time in Aruba, so… Anyway, for those o...

Box.com – 50 gig for free!

Forget Dropbox, I just heard that Box.com gives you 50gig for free upon signup. I just signed up and it seems like I got it. Pretty cool: Box | Secure content-sharing that users and IT love and adopt: > Box lets you store all of your content online, so you can ...

Never go on deck alone

This is just a great read. A Speck in the Sea – NYTimes.com: > Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances.

Wikipedia’s tenets

Flying back home yesterday I read this article about Wikipedia in the New York Times: Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page? – NYTimes.com: > The three tenets of Wikipedia articles are “No Original Resea...

Design Thinking vs. Lean Startup

Point Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design – NYTimes.com: > While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease peopl...

If you appreciate this you’ve attended one too many corporate trainings

[Pro-Tip] When writing a delicate email, enter the To: last

So, if you are writing one of those emails that you have to get right, and you plan to check and proof and think about, then don’t start by typing the To:. As long as you don’t type the To: you can’t accidentally send it out before you finish writing it. Once you write the To:, and accidental or careless send will possibly cause collateral damage if you’re not done word smithing your message.

Getting an “A” at Harvard is e-z!

Unfortunately students can be quite focused on their grades, and as a result I end up paying more attention to grading than I would like. By the way let me point out that ‘grading’ is more than assigning a grade to a bit of homework. Without going into detail, you have to decide and communicate: - ...

How well does higher ed prepare you as a ‘software engineer’?

This article is a bit harsh/one-sided, but I still thought it was interesting to see an attempt at comparing programming as practiced in two very different contexts.  [What’s the difference between college-level and corporate programming? | Ars Technica](http://arstechnica.com/information-technolog...

Dear Consumer Reports

From an email I sent, just because:  > “Dear CU: I bet you won’t print this one! But maybe you can respond to me personally. Check this out CU itself is a bad actor when it comes to magazine subscription renewals. ...

This post might have changed my mind

Scott Adams is the guy behind the famous Dilbert comics. I’ve not worked in a big corporation for a while and I’ve not been reading Dilbert for quite a while too. But Scott Adams remains a brilliant humourist. This post however, is not meant as humour: [Scott Adams Blog: I Hope My Father Dies Soon ...

Intellectual Property on Wall Street?

A fascinating although quite long article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis is an amazing non-fiction writer, best known to me for Moneyball (about baseball) and Liars Poker (about Wall Street.) [Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? | Vani...

Customer Service Ceremonies

Nowadays, when I am done talking to telephone suport of any company, they seem to be trained to go through a long ceremony before letting me go: me: “Thanks, I am all set” They: “Did I solve all your problems”? me: “Yes, thanks” They: “Ok then thanks for calling XXXX” me: “You’re welcome” They: “Thanks and have a good day” me: “Thanks” Question: is it impolite for me to hang up before this whole ceremony is complete? Say “Yes, Thanks” and then hang up? Or am I being a rude, impatient, always in a hurry northeasterner?

Healthcare.gov not working yet (duh)

I feel really bad for President Obama and I am still a big fan. But. As we all know now, this is a total disaster, on a lot of levels. For first hand experience, I tried to create an account on Healthcare.gov about the middle of October. After several tries I managed to do it. Yesterday I tried to l...

Boo for me! Yay! for Massachusetts

Today my first Amazon order with sales tax. Too bad for me, but good for our state!

(De) bunking some myths about those $1b startups

I want to direct your attention ton interesting article about $1 Billion Startups – “Unicorns” – on TechCrunch today. Some myths debunked and others confirmed: > So, we wondered, as we’re a year into our new fund (which doesn’t need to back billion-dollar companies to succeed, but hey, we like to learn): how likely is it for a startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? Is there anything we can learn from the mega hits of the past decade, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Workday? (from: Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups | TechCrunch🙂

Do it for free!

Tim Kreider’s essay could apply as easily to all those people who complain that an iPhone app is not free, or is so so expensive at $5.99. Not too long ago a piece of software would get $99 or $495. Makes you wonder how long Adobe can keep on charging through the nose for Photoshop and Illustrator. ...

[FUNNY] Congress investigates problems with healthcare.gove

Really, this is NO JOKING MATTER > Rep. Upton said that “looking serious and nodding our heads a lot” contributed to the illusion that committee members had even scant comprehension of what was being discussed. “At the end of the day, a lot of it came down to not asking the questions you really wanted to ask,” he said. “Like, ‘What exactly is a Web site?’” (from Congress Spends Several Hours Pretending to Understand Internet : The New Yorker)

The Apple Store: Fascinating look behind the scenes

This was a fun read with lots of cool insights. If your blood pressure surges and adrenalin courses through your veins as you approach the big white electronic temple then read on. Here’s an excerpt from: [Retail Therapy: Inside the Apple Store](http://gizmodo.com/retail-therapy-inside-the-apple-sto...