Blog Entries tagged 'planning'

Digg Fascinates Me Like A Non Fatal Car Wreck

admin — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You know, when a tanker full of eggs hits a rail car of charcoal and they roll into the propane factory? You don't get omlettes for Lubbock, you just get a stinky mess.

Digg Is Not A Stinky Mess

Well, it's a fascinating mess, some sort of mixture of socialism run amuck and web bubble captitalism.

By socialism I mean that people profess to want to "do good&qu [...]

Fire Fighting

Don — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Seth Godin had an interesting article, Managing Urgencies. Here's one of many money quotes:

The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time....Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

Several years ago on [...]

Plan to Avoid Failure or Just Weather the Storm?

admin — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

I admit it, I am a conspicuous consumer who reflexively buys the latest tech, but I still like to read Consumer Reports and Affiliate Confessions. I really appreciate this guy's pound-it-out style of making a living from the internet. And while his lifestyle is so very different than mine, I think we share the same desire to learn from mistakes and the willingness to share t [...]

Tax Time

admin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

It's that time of year -
tax time for business. March 15, or, as I refer to it: the day when all that expensive record keeping culminates in an
expensive session with your accountant.

Record Keeping

We are pretty careful to keep good records so that we don't have any problem breaking an invoice down, six months later,
between $235K in billable work and $95K in rei [...]

Why System Migrations are Utter Crapola

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

You would think that with 120+ years of experience we'd do a better job at the inflection point - where you start moving test into restricted production.

Or, based on personal experience, you wouldn't.

Well, I did.

Let me count the problems:

Blog disaster - posts lost, URL's not found, etcTemplate dysfunction - widget A breaks, but widget B breaks on A fixDNS error - that one was my fault and I don't want to talk about itCheck-in-Dilbertiasim - like it was [...]

Dude, Where Did The Blog Go?

admin — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Or, a tale of hubris and lack of attention to detail....

When we kicked off this project we spent a LOT of time worrying about the backend, the UI, the toolset, the future directions, etc, etc. All that necessary, dead-sexy, and boring-but important stuff.

Then we went out, grabbed a blogging component, tried it for a rigorous 20 seconds, and said, "meh."

Well, we put in our final Joomla template in preparation for the art guys to do their, er, art, and it broke [...]