Relaxing with some fonts
Hey everyone. I'm on vacation in FL, it's night time, I sat down for some aimless websurfing / massaging the rough edges of some of my projects. After getting a couple of timely things done, I followed the path of least resistance and found myself surfing for typesets and fonts. I like to think of myself as an all around web guy who is strongly skewed toward the tech angle, but my little experience in design has lead to me a tremendous respect and fascination with those who can pull off what is impossible for me with seeming ease and grace. Fonts and typesets are dead center on this. I have a special love for exploring the vast landscapes of typesets and reading what font bloggers have to say about them because they are a tool I don't know how to use. Their examples are like walking into a woodshop and watching the carpenter use a dove-tail guide for the first time. Here are a bunch of fonts that look nice but kind of similar. Apply this one the the heading in this size, this one to the body text at this opacity and BAM. Emminently readable and beautiful prose.
I found the most interesting personality here: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
He works part time for typekit (http://typekit.com/), which seems to be a great typesetting product. One line of code on your pages allows you to use a dashboard to control your fonts. The actual fonts themselves are stored on Typekit's servers, for which they guarantee 100% uptime.
Bubble Timer
If you do anything that involves time, such as living, and have ever had the inclination to 'spend time' more wisely, etc..., check out Bubble Timer. The concept is simple, by tracking how much time you spend on things, you can analyze your habits as data and find concrete, practical ways to improve your use of your time going forward. Then, you can see how you've improved and improve your improvment, ad infinitum.
"Wait," you say (you being me), "there's no way I'll use it. The very factors that undermine my foundation will just undermine my efforts to track it." Not so hasty. That you said this is a sign that Bubble Timer is for you. The happy folks at Bubble Timer have made a very slickapp that makes tracking time as fun as poking at bubbles. So, from the depths of your darkest hours of blocked workage and frustrated communication, you can emerge as your child-self and poke at a few bubbles and revive the rational side of yourself with the joyful knowledge that you just gave your future self the ability to look back at this depraved moment with a scientific eye, one that may just prevent it from recurring quite so often. In short, it brings a glimmer of hope to despair and a framework for practical self-reflection to generally unproductive and self-perpetuating nagging, gnawing moments of self-doubt.
They also have an iPhone app, if you're into that kind of thing.
If you still not convinced, then check out the company's stance on privacy of data collected. Sean Johnson speaks out against RescueTime's (another time isv) tendencies toward usage of time tracking as a managerial tool as opposed to a tool for personal improvement. The discussion that ensues in the comments between Sean and a voice from RescueTime is THE best discourse on privacy-spyware implications in the office that I have read to date. If not that, the Heideggerian reference that is the title of his blog "Being and Time" should assure you that you're in good hands.
Stack Overflow
The link of the day is Stack Overflow. It is a forward looking democratization of the forum concept, populated by some of the more exceptional programmers and tech mangers out there and driven by one of the more sticky and innovative initiative systems out there. Aside from the valuable information and the catharsis of grokking with the old piers, users can gain extra cred through earning 'badges' based on participation and the community's reaction to that participation. This is a great crossover from the gaming world, challenging participants to explore dimensions of community that they may otherwise overlook or not engage by enticing them to achieve quantifiable performance goals. Love it.
Derek Sivers of CDBaby and MuckWork on Startup Success
Even in this age of fear based news, war and famine, contentious politics and avian flu, it is difficult to be a pessimist with people like Derek Sivers in this world.
Derek Sivers is the man behind CDBaby and now MuckWork who parlayed the simple need to publish his own CDs into a company to sell his friends albums as well into a scalable web business into a massive payday, which he parlayed into a tremendous charitable organization designed to aid independent musicians in a much more comprehensive way.
In this interview Derek speaks candidly about his journey from a musician into the big business of music showing that tremendous success can come from following natural, compassionate intentions and be fed back into scaling those intentions to a tremendous degree.
http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/show-40-derek-sivers-cdbaby-and-muckwork/
If you're into the business site of the web, I highly recommend subscribing to this podcast. It's worth going back and listening to the entire season.
Tough love for Firefox
This is a shout to add to the cacophany surrounding how badly Firefox 3.5 sucks. It is true, this post isn't meant to be a bug list or a how to make browsing better page; it is not constructive in that sense. Instead is is a bit of tough love to tick up the stats that some employees over at Mozilla may be reading that will weigh into their strategy meetings and hopefully help steer the project back to it's roots of stability and speed, etc... I mean, I installed Opera today and it struck me just how bad things are getting.
Now, I admit that I use firebug, which slows things down, but the problems reach far beyond that.
So if you have the FF3.5 blues, download an older version and rekindle your romance with what is still the most promising browser project out there.
looking forward to 3.6!
Google Voice pulls phones onto the web
After buying http://www.grandcentral.com/ a while back, Google has launched Google Voice offering a single phone number solution with full searchable sortable transcribed voicemail. The number of electronic lifestyle habits remaining largely autonomous from the web (aka Google’s lair) dwindles. In other news, law enforcement dry cleaning bills skyrocket as police who once had to catch phone calls in the moment begin to drool uncontrollably over the latest and what may be the greatest massive database of personal communication yet.
Getting Real with 37 Signals
37 Signals is a web company that delivers web productivity tools. It was founded by the folks who developed Ruby on Rails. So besides recommending their web products, which is not worth a blog post, why am I talking about them?
They wrote a book called Getting Real and parsed it into a free website. And even better, it’s a book written in straight forward language that cuts across philosophy, procedure, business, design, code, and just about everything else. I’m sure you’ll agree, there are few things digital that are better than such an effort.
It’s really easy to think about ideas that will save the world, or at least help millions and get you rich in the process. It feels really good, makes for great conversation and is a generally pleasant way to pass the time. This is especially true in the world of web development where anyone with a minimal level of experience can, theoretically, reach a billion people without having to leave their parent’ s basement.
Sitting down and making those ideas Real is a different story. If you’re the sort of person inclined to roll up your proverbial sleeves and go head to head with reality, this book is for you.