I’m an avid read of Seth Godin’s blog and most of his posts really hit a nerve for me. But this morning, reading his post titled Direct and Useful Project Feedback, I started thinking about how I run and get involved in projects and it echoed back to my post about personal motivation and innovation. I can’t work in the sort of environment he describes in scenario #1 wherein the team just does what it’s told. And I totally agree that there is quite a bit of difference between #2 and #3. Building a “great product” nearly always yields a product that you can be proud of (though maybe not a product that you “love”). But the inverse clearly isn’t always true. Good insight as always…
Jun
10
2009
HOWTO: Export IIS7 Configuration to Another Webserver
IIS7 has this great new feature called Shared Configuration. Except that it has a tendency to do horrible things which usually result in all the websites and application pools being removed from your server and your production website starting to serve 503 Service Unavailable errors.
For an innexplicable reason, Microsoft decided to kill the Export function from IIS7 in favor of this new feature. But for those of us who don’t trust technology, we like to do things manually and to get a repeatable result that doesn’t update automatically when we least expect it. Yes, I am the sort of person who wonders why the default Windows Update on servers is to Install and Reboot Automatically at 2am…
In any case, in a simple 3 step process you too can export and import your Internet Information Server 7 websites and app pools. Continue reading
Jun
5
2009
My “Return” to Cycling
Between the beginning of February and the middle of April, my mountain bike had been gathering dust in my office at work. It was living in my office because my car has no way to attach a bike rack (no trunk, no roof rack, no hitch) and because the office is closer to the beach than my downtown loft, it seemed like a great staging area. The only problem was that I never rode it and it never left my office for those months. I hadn’t really done any serious riding since my massive-ish wipeout at the end of last year and I was missing those beach at sunset rides. And eventually, as the weather transitioned from winter to spring – which is to say, went from the low 60’s to the high 60’s – I decided it was time to get back on the bike.
So I started riding on the super-convenient Ballona Creek trail which is very nearby my office and starts somewhere up in Culver City and goes out to the beach trail. My casual ride was about 10-15 miles depending on how much time I had. Best way to describe it was “relaxing”. After a long day of working in a chair in an office, I got to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and enjoy that proximity to the ocean.
At some point I got the crazy idea that I could commute on the bike.
I mapped it out on Google Maps and it claimed to be just 16 miles one-way. The terrain looked pretty much flat. And the first portion of the commute would take me on the familiar Ballona Creek trail. The rest of the ride was a road route that I knew very well because I would drive it when the freeways were jammed up. In the car, with normal traffic, the route took just under an hour. I estimated that it would take me about two hours on the bike the first time.
Jun
5
2009
Motivation and Innovation
I have done nothing truly innovative in the first 155 days of 2009.
This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent. I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection. My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.
Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied. I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone. We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later). But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.