There is a widely held belief that you can tell how interesting a Twitter user is by the number of followers that he or she has. This is a flawed line of thinking.
There are two ways to look at follower counts as a tell of value:
Look for a high followers:following ratio (f/F). The rationale here [...]
What I love most about working at a startup is how close I am to the people I’m serving. Almost every task I work on directly benefits our customers. And working at a web startup means I can deliver that benefit as soon as it’s built.
A lack of customer interaction yielded many frustrations at my [...]
A week ago I purchased an Amazon Kindle. These are my initial impressions. I am using the 6″ Kindle with the free 2.3 firmware update.
It’s easy to use.
Your father and your grandmother can use the Kindle. They may need your help creating an account and entering a credit card number the first time, or linking it [...]
I’m a big fan of Amazon.com. It is far and away my online retailer of choice. I’ve been a Prime member since they launched the program in 2005. Books, computers, videogames, RAM, speakers, … you name it, I’ve probably bought it at Amazon.
But it’s time for some tough love. Amazon, your web site is in [...]
Update Sept 6, 2009: I’ve created a project at github to simplify this process. More details here.
Task: You want to use Time Machine wirelessly to backup your Mac to a drive on another Mac on your network.
Problem: If the target machine is in “sleep” mode, your backup will fail.
Solution: Send a “magic packet” to the [...]
There are a number of tutorials floating around that explain how to install MySQL 5 on Snow Leopard. They all recommend the x86_64 universal binary supplied by MySQL. If you’d like to install MySQL via MacPorts (MySQL5 is certified compatible!), here are the steps:
Install MySQL with developer libraries:
sudo port install mysql5-devel
Create the required databases:
sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_install_db [...]
Every now and then I stumble across a Twitter post, Facebook note or blog entry in which somebody is upset about an unfollowing or defriending on their social network of choice. Yikes. Two quick points that I’m pretty sure all reasonable people can agree on:
If you get into an e-fight with somebody and you de-friend [...]
Today’s Boston Globe reports that a new law will go into effect on July 31, making life more difficult for scooterists. Here are the important quotes:
On July 31, a new state law will kick in that could require license plates for hundreds, if not thousands, of scooter owners whose bikes are smaller and sleeker than [...]
Having your heart in the right place is not enough. Those who lobby for equal rights would be wise to learn Rustin’s lesson quickly now so that they don’t have to learn it slowly and painfully later.
Of Montreal
Live at The Orpheum, Boston, MA
October 30, 2008
Kevin Barnes & Co. put on the most spectacular live performance I’ve ever seen (spectacular, quite literally, referring to the notion of “spectacle”). If costumes and makeup weren’t enough, they’d employed four professional dancers to help drive their musical theater piece of death and rebirth. The pictures [...]
If you’re an iTunes user who doesn’t let iTunes manage your music collection, you’ll find that iTunes isn’t very cooperative when it comes to moving your music around. For example, if you decide you want to move your music from your internal drive to an external drive, you’ll find that you have to re-import your [...]
It was my junior year of high school. I was in the library when the first plane hit, about to run to Ms. Najman’s classroom for Chemistry or Advanced Physics (she taught both; I don’t know which class it was, my gut recalls the former). We spent the next fifty minutes on her computer trying [...]
Every day I ride my bike to work (downtown Boston) from home (Somerville), and I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern: glass bottles smashed and left in bicycle lanes. It’s a bizarre phenomenon, but a consistent one. It’s now the third consecutive day that I’ve found new instances on my daily commute, and there was no shortage [...]
Yesterday at OSCON, Andrew Hyde and Gaving Doughtie gave a presention on launching a startup in three hours. The presentation was based in large part on Startup Weekend, a company that helps startups get off the ground in 54 hours.
They gave a great macro-level description of the processes involved in starting a startup, as well [...]
It came as no surprise that I found myself in need of a new laptop. My Compaq Presario M2000, purchased in 2005, was becoming less sufficient by the day. What was adequate for web development three years ago is no longer usable for such light tasks as web browsing or document writing. I stalled and [...]
