Quote of the Day

Never be afraid to fail.

The Golden Rule

He who has the gold, makes the rules. FCC clarifies that they do, in fact, control everything: "The FCC files a brief in the ongoing dispute over the mandated broadcast flag claiming unprecedented reach. We cringe." Things like this really worry me. I need to think about this some more, but I'm sure I can come up with an historical example that parallels this. I just don't see how a new medium is going to flourish by taking away rights granted to us on old media. Digital technology is about flexibility and ubiquity, not locks and keys. Intellectual Property is being used and controlled like weaponry. Trade secrets. What we're talking about here are ideas. What has prospered by limiting the flow of ideas? Power and corruption.

Introducing Hannah

Introducing Hannah
Originally uploaded by ryandobson.

So, my parents just got a new puppy. The name for now, is Hannah, and she's a six-week old Yorkshire Terrier. She seems quite cute, and I can't wait to meet her.

How to Persuade People

I wanted to keep track of How do you persuade? from Scoble, because it struck a chord with me. Since learning more about business, I try to not always track down the best products, but also the best service. I've reached a point in life where price isn't always the best measure, and I want people who treat me (as a customer) like a valuable asset to succeed. The article basically sums up how I like to be treated when I'm going in to make a purchase or simply to explore the product. Most of the time I end up knowing more than the sales person of a product, and if they admit that, I'll give them some slack -- if they don't, and try to strong arm me, I'll just leave. It's a shame that there are too many people like that. If they would take the time to probe, the could learn a few things about their product.

The Choices We Make

The True Story of Audion This is a great story. It's inspiring, as a software developer, to see how a couple of guys went off chasing their dreams and made a product that a big behemoth would have bought. They didn't get bought, but don't regret it. I just like that. It makes me think about the future and the present. What you are doing has much greater impact on your life than what you could be doing. So, whenever you start letting your head go off into the clouds about grand plans, just try to come back to earth and think "What would I like to be doing right now?"

The Blue Packet

The Blue Packet This is hilarious! I loved this story. Probably the best thing about it was that I could translate this to my own industry. Developing a software feature for any established product is quite the same. It takes an army of people just to get it out the door and decide that it's the right feature in the first place. I feel like the Linux guy all too often. At least there's hope.

Innovation on Large Projects

I read this article today on The Seed of Apple's Innovation and I was very interested. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and it's something that's just been in my head. As an engineer, I have this creative pulse and I can get really connected to the products that I'm working on. If you're on a large project, you can often become disconnected from the customer. I can sometimes get stuck thinking like 'just another cog' to churn out code. Management teams definitely don't want their employees to think this way, but maybe it's a symptom of the team structure, and not some grand scheme to use people. One of the points of the article was that Apple organizes teams around a product. Companies struggling around how to organize teams know it's not an easy thing for management to grasp this important piece. A company may want to keep common as much code as possible, and keep people in areas of their expertise. I think this tends to organize people around the code, and not around the product which can be a much larger entity. The smaller and closer knit team will always be more effective, and it is a challenge to break up very large projects so that smaller teams can work on them. I would really like to see exactly how this works in the more successful companies.

United States Economy

This is an interesting article. We're all doomed. Especially us tech workers. I'm not a liberal by any stretch, but the middle class is vital to the economy in this country, and we appear to be making it go away.

VDARE.com: The Jobs Crunch: A Progressive Indictment Of Immigration—And Both Parties, by Randall Burns: September 23, 2004 The Jobs Crunch: A Progressive Indictment Of Immigration—And Both Parties [Peter Brimelow writes: At VDARE.COM, we often get mail from disgusted Democrats, and even lonely liberals, wanting to know why their party refuses to address immigration reform too. Randall Burns, one of our ablest correspondents, writes here as a self-described “progressive.”] By Randall Burns The chart below was a centerpiece in the Kerry campaign’s Our Plan for America. It's stark message: America is facing stagnant job growth. Traditionally, progressives have been very concerned about jobs and the distribution of wealth. But do Kerry and Edwards really understand the employment problem—or the..."