A couple of months ago, I finished my course at Product School. This course allowed me to get a better understanding of how product development happens, the ways decisions are made and technology products are iterated, and how to validate ideas with customer feedback. In the course, we were advised …
There's something about the beginning of the year that opens up the possibility of change (and reevaluating old projects and behaviors). In the spirit of aspiration, I am posting my goals for 2016.
I have a couple of productivity tabs open with two different, competing tools — Asana and Trello. Since I graduated from Product School last month, I've been thinking about what I like in productivity management tools.
In the past, I've also used Jira, but I didn't administer my own personal projects …
After over 15 years in the technology industry as a front end developer / web application engineer, I wanted to make a change — to tack to starboard and sail on a different course. I wanted to have a much more significant impact on the things I work on. I love …
I'm a huge fan of the language courses prepared by the Foreign Service Institute, part of the U.S. State Department. For a long, long time, there's been a community-sourced collection of these public domain materials at FSI-Language-Courses.org, which made the PDF and MP3 files available for free to …
The first time I met Dave Goldberg, who passed away suddenly last night, was when I was a contractor at SurveyMonkey. I had been working there for about a month when I encountered him accidentally near his desk at the office building across from Palo Alto City Hall. The thing …
The Oscars for this year happened a couple of days ago. Time to update the Nominee Project database.
The list before today:
Adding 2015:
For the first time …
I’ve been spending a bit of time reviewing my Nominee Project database and realized that I haven’t added the new nominees to the tally since awards season in 2009. Since the 2015 awards season is just around the corner, I thought it wise to take the time to …
Happy 2015! At long last, the new year is upon us. I’m in the process of rethinking all of my projects and devising a plan to make headway on as many of them as possible.
I’m still in the planning phase for my Q1 2015 projects. Mostly, they …
I’m working on a few themes for this blogging engine, both for this blog and 50 Words. I haven’t migrated that one yet, because I’m trying to get a handle on how to solve the issue of preserving (or upgrading) the formatted reviews over there.
Since I …
In the process of migrating this blog, I’ve been thinking about 50 Words. Every post on 50 Words since January 2006 has been in hReview microformats. Since I never had a tool to make it work with Wordpress, I always just modified an HTML template to post a review …
I spend a lot of my time at the command line — working, writing code, exploring Python, and taking notes while I get my learn on (watching lectures, attending lectures, going to meetups, you name it). A few years ago, I began exploring the idea blogging using static site generators, starting …
Hi. It's been a while. Seven years on this blog have seen 26 posts, 12 comments, and promises to myself to get going again. For the past few weeks, I've been noodling around with designing a new theme for this place. Maybe, I'll finish it soon. Or, maybe I'll rough …
My grandmother, Jessie Louella Payne Nau, passed away peacefully this morning in Payette, Idaho, surrounded by her family. She was born on September 8, 1917, in Middleton, Idaho, and lived for over 95 years. She was an extraordinary woman who lived through the Great Depression, built bombers during World War …
I am a big fan of Delicious and have been using it for about 7 years. Delicious was acquired by Yahoo a number of years ago and, in December, Yahoo decided to sunset the site. An outcry went out on the internet while the users scrambled to find a new …
Between January 1 and August 1, I wrote 128 reviews on 50 Words. Most of them are things I've seen, listened to, or read for the first time. Here are the highlights:
A little over 18 months ago, I posted here about The Nominee Project. Recently, I finally got around to adding the nominated movies of the 2009 Awards shows to the database.
Since that post a while back, I've added two years worth of nominees to the database. As is obvious …
This weekend is my 20 year high school reunion (Class of 1989 - Payette High School, Payette, Idaho). I only have regular contact with one of my former classmates, who has been my best friend for the better part of three decades. Apparently, I've been missed, although I haven't spoken a …
Thanks, Larry Pruett. I think I'm starting to understand Design Patterns from the perspective of PHP. A lot of this is still kind of cryptic to me, but if I enter in the source code manually and examine it over and over again, perhaps it will prepare me for my …
I wrote 122 reviews on 50 Words. Most of them were things I listened to or saw for the first time. I'll round up the year with three top 10 lists: the best movies, the worst movies, and the best music. I'll skip the worst music list, since none of …
Nearly two years ago, I decided to undertake a monumental task to diversify my cinematic literacy (to coin a phrase). I haven't written about it here before. As awards season for the 2007 films approaches, it is a good time to review my Nominee Project, which I originally mentioned on …
Yesterday, Brent Simmons announced that NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS Reader, is being released for free download. Along with NetNewsWire, which won my RSS reader roundup a couple of months ago, NewsGator has released all their RSS readers for free.
It seems like an excellent time to update to NetNewsWire 3 …
I listened to a lot of really great music in 2007 and reviewed 97 albums, almost all of them jazz, on 50 Words. Ignoring albums I'd heard before, but never reviewed, that still leaves a whole lot of really phenomenal music that came through my headphones in 2007. Many of …
I saw a lot of movies in 2007. I am a huge movie fan, with 480 movies in my Netflix Queue. Since early 2006, I've been writing reviews of everything I listen to, watch, or read over on 50 Words. To recap 2007, here are the ten best and ten …
Sometimes, when we're engaged in a new undertaking, we try to build a habit by doing this new hobby or routine every day. And sometimes, we fall off the wagon, get distracted, or let it slip our minds. Sometimes, we know we should do this thing today, but we procrastinate …
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, a day most people spend gathering around a table with friends and family. I've never really been one for Thanksgiving festivities. When friends find out that I had planned to stay home and watch movies today, they invariably express concern and imagine …
The other day, Chanpori Rith started on 43 Folders with a really insightful post about The Seven Deadly Sins of Instant Messaging. One of the things that grabbed me was the following section from the fifth of the seven sins:
According to the Pareto principle, you spend 80 percent of …
Around the United States, people gathered at polling stations (or at their absentee ballots) to vote for various ballot measures and municipal officers. I understand other states had state-wide referenda. Here in California, it was just a municipal election.
I live in Sunnyvale, California — the home of large technology companies …
Since I was very young, I have been studying foreign languages. I will not name all of the languages I've studied, but there are nearly ten on my college transcript. Once in a while, I get bitten by the bug to jump into another language. So, it's off to the …
I've spent a long time going along with whatever was in front of my face, either idling time when I had it to idle and putting out the fire closest to me when I didn't have idle time. I haven't really nailed down any long-term goals, except in a very …
Today, I got a spam on my gmail account from Beth Myers, campaign manager for Mitt Romney, that talked about how great this last weekend was — that the former governor got an endorsement from the Family Research Council. Whoopty doo.
It's bad enough that my snail mail box is stuffed …
After a long time of realizing how much it sucks to back date entries in Wordpress (especially if you're using the Firefox Expandable Form Fields extension) and trying to remember the passwords of a whole bunch of different blogs that are powered by various systems, I downloaded MarsEdit 2.0 …
I'm getting really tired of Google Reader, primarily due to its slowness and the way that it reacts to my keystrokes. The v key in Firefox-based browsers opens the item in a new tab. If I fill my browser (usually Flock — which I'll likely replace) with tabs, Google Reader will …
I'm planning on travelling very soon. It's been a long time since I have left the United States. So, in order to prepare myself for my future travels, I am making a list of the languages I either need to brush up or learn, so that my travel experience can …
I wrote 37 Reviews in July on 50 Words, six more than my goal. In August, I’m going to try to keep up with my average of one review per day. Here’s what I reviewed in July, in order of letter grade:
Since adding to the list a couple of months ago, I’ve been sorting through the unavailables in the outside chance that some of them are being released eventually on DVD. I was surprised by my results.
Tally from January 27:
On recent announcements of award nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards, I’m awarded the opportunity to add more movies to my database. As mentioned earlier, I’ve culled the list to the 88 eligible movies and eliminated one of them for not …
Today is my last day at BMC Software. It’s been two years as a contractor. I’ve had a lot of fun, lots of laughs, and did some really good things. It’s time, however, to move on. So, right now, I’m taking the posters off the wall …
About five months ago, I announced the Nominee Project here. Since I posted that, I’ve seen a few movies, started a reviews site with a couple of friends, and kept my database of nominees up to date.
Let’s take a look at my progress. It isn’t awards …
Some time ago, I decided to embark on a new project. I have decided to attempt to view every movie nominated for either an Oscar, a Golden Globe, or an Independent Spirit Award during the course of my life. This includes any movie nominated from 1971 until now (no matter …
The Independent Film Channel aired the Independent Spirit Awards tonight, a flippantly irreverent awards show dedicated to showcasing excellent independent film, popular and obscure. Many of the films nominated for awards tonight are extremely obscure are will likely never see a DVD release (Sir! No Sir!, Conventioneers, and Jellysmoke, for …
Nothing wakes you up like a meeting at 6:30 in the morning (Pacific Time). It’s not the earliest meeting I ever had, but it’s pretty early. After not sleeping much last night and dreading the dentist’s appointment in three hours, I’m ready for more coffee …
I am a fan of Inside the Actors Studio, the long-running interview series on Bravo and hosted by James Lipton. I haven’t been able to watch it recently, because I’ve really been too lazy to add a Season Pass to my Tivo. At the end of each episode …
I was noodling around Wikipedia earlier and found a list of science fiction novels. I decided to go through the list and delineate which of these I’ve actually read.
Here they are: