- FolioHD – Free Online Portfolio
For those of you who are interested in a super-quick way to create an easy online portfolio, I recently launched a site called FolioHD to do exactly this. We’ve had about 100 people sign up so far and had over 2GB of images uploaded already. So, yeah. If you need a portfolio site, you should try this free online portfolio site and tell me what you think!
We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live. Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…
- UPS: Web-Mobile Integration Done Right
With just a few clicks, I can go from UPS shipment notification to tracking it on my iPhone through the UPS app. It’s really pretty slick.
- The Real Formula for Success
I can’t remember where I saw this, but the truth of it really struck me.
- Attitude is Everything.
Yesterday, I was out riding along the San Gabriel River Trail on a beautiful Southern California morning when something unexpected happened.
After making it far enough south and deciding to turn around I was cruising north, listening to Boston, hands resting lightly on the tops of the handlebars when I noticed I was overtaking a couple young kids riding single file on their bmx bikes. On this segment of trail, which runs directly adjacent to the San Gabriel River, the river is completely concrete with a steep concrete slope at probably 45 degrees from the top of the trail to the bottom of the “river”. Because the speed difference between the kids and myself was pretty high (I was going about 20mph and coming up on them pretty fast), I moved my hands down to the hoods so that I had access to the brakes in the unlikely event that it became necessary.
It became necessary. Continue reading…
- Joshua Tree Decompression
Sometime last week I decided that I needed to get away from the city for a few days. My old-reliable escape destination since I moved to LA has been Joshua Tree National Park. It has several distinct advantages over most every other destination within 2 hours of Los Angeles.
First, it is inexpensive. An annual pass to the park costs only $30 and I’ve had one for the past two years. Camping is just $10/night per campsite. I can say for a week at Joshua Tree for the same price as a single night at an inexpensive hotel/motel. And is an ice machine conveniently located just down the hall really worth 7x the price?
Joshua Tree’s second advantage is that it doesn’t attract large crowds of people. Last time I spent 3 days camping there, I only talked to one other person and only saw several people in total – it was fantastic. This time, even with the 100+ degree days and lack of most services (i.e. real bathrooms and running water), there were quite a few people visiting but still nothing like a state park on the ocean.
Third (and most importantly), it has basically zero cell coverage throughout the entire park area. This allows/forces me to really disconnect from the rest of the world. I get calls and text messages all day long (not to mention emails) and my morning routine before I even get out of bed is to 1) check email, 2) read facebook, 3) skim NY Times headlines and read any interesting stories, then 4) glance at twitter – only after all those tasks are completed do I even bother to crawl out from under the sheets. Not so during my time at Joshua Tree. You realize how long a day really can be when it’s not filled with constant attempts to “keep up” with various, often irrelevant, information. Continue reading…
- The Maker’s Schedule Explained
Another great essay from Paul Graham of Y Combinator about the differences between “managers” and “makers” and how they schedule their day.
I’ve personally found that most non-makers are completely oblivious to how much having even short meetings during the day can disrupt our work process. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe Joel Spolsky) but I recall a discussion about how if it takes 15 or 30 minutes for a developer to “get in the zone”, a couple 15 second distractions can ruin a whole day of productivity.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays?? Dave Winer needs to make that happen.
- Three Ways to Manage a Project
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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
