Fake Steve Jobs has been outed. It’s Daniel Lyons, a Senior Editor at Forbes. He was outed by Brad Stone of the NY Times .
I had always suspected it was a journalist or writer of some sort - the writing quality was too good to be a random schmo.
An assortment of tasty distractions.
A fun collection of classy insults. Here are a couple of choice ones:
“A modest little person, with much to be modest about.” - Winston Churchill
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” -Clarence Darrow
What 120 calories looks like. Nice reminder. Via Jeremy Zawodny
A productivity tip from Jerry Seinfeld I really didn’t believe this until I read it. Good advice.
YUI 2.3.0: Six New Components and a Prettier Face
“We’re pleased to announce today the release of YUI version 2.3.0. This release features six new additions to the library as well as a new skinning architecture and a new visual treatment for most of our UI controls. All of this, plus 250 enhancements and bug fixes, is available for download immediately.”
One of the notable additions is a rich-text editor that is stated to work well across all of the YUI “A” browsers.
I have a few articles I want to publish, but I’m holding off until I have this site moved over to Slicehost. In the meantime, here’s a kottke - style list of random things that have caught my eye lately.
I am(thankfully) long past dating, but just because you’ve convinced her to marry you doesn’t mean you don’t still need to charm her.
Summary of a Google Tech Talk on how YouTube scaled, both pre and post acquisition. With the massive storage requirements (they have servers dedicated just to serving thumbnails), this is certainly not a typical scaling story.
Catch The Best is a new “applicant tracking and ranking system” from Ben Curtis, who is fairly well known in the Rails community. This looks promising. Ben is also looking for sample resumes to test his system out.
10 year old article by Tom Peters on the importance of developing a personal brand. Still very relevant.
Just seen on TechCrunch:
Why are you people searching for Britney Spears!? She is hardly the eye candy she once was so I just don’t understand how she has topped Yahoo’s most popular search terms for the fifth time in six years but is appears that the flashing, divorcing baby mama has.
Tonight at 9 p.m. PST, Yahoo will release their most popular search terms of 2006. In the top five are Britney, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, and Paris Hilton.
This makes me want to cry.
So, how’s Microsoft’s iPod killer being received? The Sun Times’ Andy Ihnatko sums it up:
Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.
Yeah, what he said. I’ve not seen a positive review of this thing yet.
And the junior marketing flunky who came up with “squirting” as the metaphor for transferring content wirelessly needs to find another line of work. It just sounds dirty. Like you could get slapped for saying it out loud in mixed company.
It’s possible that version 2.0 of the Zune may redeem itself (this is a Microsoft product after all), but it seems unlikely. What seems a lot more likely is that this will go down in history as a “what were they thinking” event.
My suspicion is that the people at Apple laughed hard when they first saw this thing. For something that was touted as an iPod killer, it amounts to little more than a paper cut.
I’ll try to prevent this from becoming another Seth Godin lovefest, but Seth’s article on the best time to start a business was too good not to write about.
From the article:
…the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.
Full article here. Go read it now.
Photo by Tom Stone
I often find that it’s difficult to be content with what I have in life. It’s too easy to focus on what you don’t have - a new car, a bigger house, that shiny new MacBook Pro - and forget about how much you do have. Modern society doesn’t make this any easier, particularly in the geek culture where something you must have comes along every few seconds it seems.
The reality is, I’m fabulously wealthy. I mean, I’m no Warren Buffet, but compared to the rest of the planet, I have more than enough.
I drive a 10 year old car, but there are millions of people who have no car at all. Millions who would be happy to have a car, any car.
I have a laptop computer that’s 4 years old, and has seen better days. But there are millions who don’t have any computer at all, and would be excited at the thought of having mine.
I’d love to have a bigger house - who wouldn’t? With two young boys, you can never really have too much room. But there are millions who live in houses a fraction of our size, many that aren’t what most of use would even consider houses. There are millions more who are homeless, and would consider any kind of shelter to be a gift from God.
I struggle with this a lot - trying to be content with what I have. Perhaps it’s just human nature to always want more. Perhaps it’s a reality of modern life - we’re being conditioned to not be satisfied with what we have.
I thought of this again today, as I came across (via kottke) a collection of photos on Flickr by photographer Tom Stone. Tom is known for photographing the homeless and others “living along the edges of society”. Looking at his photos of people living on the streets of San Francisco, and reading the stories that go along with them isn’t easy. They’re pretty stark and depressing, but it reminds me once again of just how much I have, and how blessed I am.
It’s a poorly kept secret that I couldn’t design my way out of a box (take note of the generic template used on this site). Therefore, when I need to put together a web page I often turn to free html/css templates as a starting point (or if nothing else, a starting point). Here’s a few of the sites I’ve discovered with decent html/css templates:
Open Source Web Design - One of the oldest sites, and one of the best.
Open Web Design - Somewhat of a mixed bag, but there is good work here - particularly if you check out the ‘Popular’ section.
Free Layouts - Not as good as the first two, but some good designs.
Open Source Templates - These are impressive.
Free CSS Templates - These are also consistently very good.
I’ve also got a couple of sites I use for help picking color schemes:
I would be interested in knowing where other people who don’t have the benefit of working with a designer turn for help and inspiration. Leave your favorite sites in the comments.
The latest in a long series of things distracting me from other things that are likely far more important:
Sun: Learn about JRuby - I look forward to playing with this someday soon.
Yahoo: Ruby Developer Network - Yeah, I’m a little late on this one. Included just in case you have spent the recent months in a cave.
The Shire of Bend, Oregon - Middle Earth-ish homes. Very unique, and very cool. Almost makes me want to leave the midwest for Oregon. Almost.
Jack Slocum: Real-world examples of the Yahoo UI Library - This stuff continues to impress me.
Javascript tabifier - Best HTML/Javascript tabs I’ve seen yet. Ridiculously easy to use as well. See them in action here
In response to the previously mentioned buyback of Odeo, David Galbraith has written an insightful article on the topic of building companies with sustainable business models. His position (a smart one) is that venture capital shouldn’t be the default, it should be for the edge cases - companies with big infrastructure needs that are growing more rapidly than they can manage.
From the article:
Every venture funded tech company is predicated on the idea of ’exit’, the point where the company is sold to a bigger one or has an IPO, so that the investors see a return and move on.
…
When I was an architect, you didn’t set up a practice on your own to ’exit’, you setup to build a company that made a profit and made products that made the environment a better place along the way - a sustainable enterprise. The whole idea of ’exit’ in the context of building an architecture firm, or a legal or medical practice is preposterous.
Amen brother.
Words and pictures by Larry Wright. A little bit of everything, mostly nerdy.