|
|
|
Top : Islanders Away
Home | Add Site | Change Site | New | Cool | Top Rated | Random | Email Updates | Search
 |
dotServing, the number 1 choice for Islanders looking for web hosting. Setup your presence today with web design and development plans available. Rates starting at $5 a month. Or take advantage of our affilate program available with payouts as high as $100!! Visit us at www.dotserving.pe.ca. |
The difference between America and Canada is that Americans don't care what the difference between America and Canada is.The second concerns a point that Adams is trying to make:
Adams' method was established in Fire and Ice: he notes at one point that in the U.S. SUVs outsell minivans by two-to-one, whereas in Canada it's vice versa. That's a fact. The fancy is in the meaning he appends to it. "This is a stark difference," he writes, "whose roots can be traced directly to the differing values of our two countries." This assertion seems to have no basis other than a casual assumption that Canadians are more environmentally responsible and thus more concerned with "excessive gasoline consumption, pollution and safety violations."Dhaliwal as a Hamas warlord in a three-ton Cadillac Escalade. Mint.
Isn't there a more obvious correlation? Minivans are cheaper than SUVs, and Canadians have less disposable income than Americans. It's easy to be "socially responsible" if you've got no choice in the matter. On the Continent they're driving around in things the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's cup holder, so presumably they're more "socially responsible" still. In Canada those who can afford SUVs buy them, it's just that their numbers are smaller. Remember Herb Dhaliwal? Well, no, you probably don't. But a couple of years back M. Chrétien made him minister of natural resources, and he certainly got through a lot of them. He drove around like a Hamas warlord in a three-ton Cadillac Escalade. That's bigger than my SUV and I'm in favour of global warming. The difference is that the high living of a Liberal cabinet minister is confined, north of the border, mainly to Liberal cabinet ministers while down south it's more widely available.
I'm doing a talk tonight in Toronto at an event called Sprout Up. During the presentation I plan to reference a few links online, so I'll put them here.
Last week, I was asked to do a question and answer session with Erin from Sprouter. She wrote an article based on the interview, but I thought it would be interesting to also publish the questions and answers in full. On Friday at 11a PST, I'll be answering questions live on the Sprouter site on my profile. Hope to see you there.
A: I'm not sure I really thought about an entrepreneur as a distinctive type of person. My parents encouraged my siblings and I to do business-type endeavors from a young age, but always with a focus on the craft as opposed to the economics. So, we ran lemonade stands when we were little, baked bread for a nearby campground in middle school, and grew flowers and melons one summer in high school. In all of these things, the goal was to produce something of quality that people would want to purchase. Then in eleventh grade (1996, I think), some friends and I started a web business in the attic of my parents' century-old farmhouse. With no small amount of struggle, that business eventually morphed into a company called silverorange. But, back to the original question, I'm not sure I'd even call myself an entrepreneur first and foremost ? I'm a designer who helped start a few companies.
A: Back in 1996, some friends and I started a little company called Whitelands Studio. We had figured out that the Canadian government was offering grants for teams to digitize museums' collections. So, for several summers we secured grants and worked with a local museum to create websites showcasing their exhibits. This was great work (and it paid better than flipping burgers!) and we learned a great deal about building websites and running a team, which was the reason the grants existed in the first place. After a few years, another local company contracted us to work on a fairly ambitious e-commerce system. Ultimately, that system turned out to be to be ahead of its time, but our teams worked well together and we merged teams to form silverorange in 1999. Since 2007, I've played a more back-seat role in the team. The other founders and I meet occasionally to discuss broad strategy.
A: Great question, but a big one. Prince Edward Island has a population of ~120,000 people and is a two hour flight from large cities like Montreal and Toronto. There are only a few web companies that operate from Charlottetown, so you can be both physically and intellectually isolated in many ways. But! It's a beautiful place and the lifestyle there is very relaxed and extremely affordable. Recruiting talent is surprisingly easy with good computer science programs. It's absolutely possible to start a world-class company there, as silverorange has proven, but there are some challenges.
San Francisco, on the other hand, has obvious benefits such as strong networks, ready cash, and a culture where risks are encouraged. However! It's very expensive, it's much easier to get distracted from your core work (building products!), it's easy to get sucked into a fishbowl mentality, recruiting is much more competitive, and peer pressure can push you to take stupid risks.
A: Maybe. Digg was my first experience in a small startup and also my first time leading a design team. I benefited greatly from having deep experience in many types of projects before joining Digg. So, if a first-time entrepreneur already has experience building and shipping products, I'd say wholeheartedly that they should join a small startup. However, someone who has little real-world experience would do well to work with more senior people, perhaps. Just don't go to a huge corp where you risk being ignored ? find someone you greatly respect and convince them to take you on as an apprentice.
A: I learned a great deal at Digg as the company grew from just four of us to almost 100 when I left. I learned the value of hiring great teams and how difficult they are to create. I now put much greater emphasis on recruiting, even when I feel too busy to put the time into it. I also learned a lot about decision-making with larger teams. When you're less than 10-14 people, making decisions by fiat is very efficient, but as teams grow it becomes immensely more difficult to still make decisions efficiently without alienating people whose opinions should be heard.
A: We built Pownce with just three people and two of us had demanding full-time jobs. So! The primary thing I learned is... don't start a company when two thirds of you have full-time gigs. It was a demanding couple of years and when I look back, it's incredible how much we actually got built with our small over-worked team. We also learned a lot about community engagement at Pownce. We had a wonderful, passionate, and occasionally rancorous group of users and we had a great relationship with them. From early on, we put emphasis on staying engaged with the community and we brought in a great part-time community manager to help us stay on top of things. This attention made a great deal of difference for the company. Do I think Pownce was a success? Well, I think the product had a great deal of unrealized potential. But! It was a good ride and we all learned a lot from it, which we've exercised in projects since.
A: Starting Milk was a pretty easy decision. Kevin and I had been discussing creating this kind of company for several years and suddenly things aligned where it was possible to go ahead and do it. We've both wanted to work with a small group to execute on several ideas that we've had percolating. Milk gives the ability to focus on several challenges at once with the kind of nimble team that can build kick-ass products.
A: Make friends. I frequently hear from people who have the 'greatest' idea ever and they want to know how to get it built. Ideas really are cheap, building is hard. So, build it yourself or become friends with people who can build it with you. Hiring people to build your product is exactly the wrong approach ? it's expensive and you'll end up with an inferior product. Don't know how to build an app or don't have any friends who can build it with you? Then you're doing it wrong. Quit running around trying to raise VC cash so you can hire that dream team. Go hang out with product builders until you're friends with them and you've learned some technical skills as well. And more thing. Don't 'network' to find technical people ? go out and make real honest-to-goodness friends.
A: Build things. Coming up with the 'greatest' idea isn't as magical as you think it is. Writing up a business plan isn't very helpful. Go out and make a product. Maybe that product won't be your big thing, but you'll learn a ton and each successive product will get continuously better.
A: We're going to take our own advice and build! We have one large idea well into production, another smaller idea three quarters complete, and a few more large ideas in the hopper. Milk doesn't have a five year plan or even a two year plan. We're going to make several projects. When one of them is a success, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Seriously, we're unabashedly figuring it out as we go along, which I think it's the only rational approach.
A few weeks ago, David Gillis interviewed me for UX Magazine. It was one of the first times I've had a solid reason to pull together some of my thoughts about designing the user interface for a game. What's particularly interesting to me are the parallels and contrasts of designing a game's UI vs developing a web application UI.
Anyhow, I actually don't plan to go into great depth into the issue here today, but considering this space has remained long dormant, this is a nudge for myself to perhaps start writing down my thoughts on some of these issues in a more formal way. I'm really looking forward to speaking at In Control Orlando early next year and hopefully I can gather enough ideas to build a new talk.
Rob Goodlatte and I presented a talk on designing for new-user experiences a few days ago at the SXSW conference in Austin. We discussed getting people invested in your web application, finding the 'aha moment' and getting to it as quickly as possible, developing increasingly large feedback loops, and educating your users.
I promised to post the slides, so here they are. The slides are fairly sparse on copy, but luckily Julie from Facebook took extensive notes so you can actually follow along and get something out of the slide presentation even if you weren't there. Thanks so much Julie for doing that — you must have been typing like a mad woman during our talk.
I believe that the SXSW people were recording the talk (microphone squeals in all their glory) and if it comes online, I'll add the link here. Thanks to everyone who squeezed into that little room! Your feedback and critique would be much appreciated.
An update with the transcript originally posted on Facebook follows.
Woooohoooo! At midnight last night, the press embargo was lifted and we announced that Tiny Speck is building a web-based game called Glitch. The short of it: it's a web-based massively multiplayer game mostly in Flash — think World of Warcraft meets Super Mario Bros crossed with a mishmash of online social games and a splash of Dr. Seuss. Check out the teaser trailer and stick your name into the form to get in for early access to the game. I can't wait to let players in to kick the tires.
Daniel Terdiman, a CNET journalist, has written a series of articles explaining the backstory to the game's development. He had great access to Stewart during the past months and the articles give an insightful look behind the scenes.
I'm super excited that we've launched two new sites with two new logos at the same time last night. The Tiny Speck corporate site has been updated and Glitch is now live. For now, both sites are nice, concise one-pagers. It's a lovely challenge to create something unique and concise in the one-page format. I love designing with constraints and that's what one-page-sites are all about.
This was also one of the first times I've started using more CSS3 in public. I've been warming up to RGBA, rounded corners, minor transforms, and advanced selectors more and more. Hopefully we'll have time for a solid practical discussion of these techniques at my workshop next week in Wellington, New Zealand, at Webstock!
It has been a late spring, hasn't it? I put out the squash and tomatoes this week but only half of them... maybe less. You never know if it is going to be in the 70s or the 30s this week. But I think that is over. We have the best dandelions on the block. Always do. Has something to do with the push mower I think. Not sufficiently black hole like in its capacities. But I do not apologize. I am not like Mitt in that respect. Unlike our stumping skills where we are one. This weekend may be dedicated to whipper snipping.
♦ Good for my old home Kings and good for us all that the selling of citizenships on PEI will now be properly investigated.
♦ Is this bad or good? I would have to know what the other applicants asked for. Who got bumped. But at the Federal level we never learn these things.
♦ Sloppiness. That is what I say about a lot of things, too.
♦ A great depression has fallen upon Red Sox nation. Why. Apparently they have decided to continue to suck. Time for the mega trade that should have happened last February.
Is that all there is? For a tra-la it's May Friday do you really need more?
We each chose a most hated shrub and killed them today. One of the great things about gardening is being that grim reaper who takes away so that others might have a little more light, a sip more water or just the spot occupied by that the ugly thing in the corner by the fence. My own dead semi-tree of choice was chopped and stacked to be replaced by a big pile of sheep poo and peat moss where the squash shall hold dominion this summer. The ground there was a bit mossy and weighed down by clay so I buried a small short gravel and rock drain to draw the water away. The first effort at starting the Blue Hubbards was a total failure but six others live on the kitchen window sill to be hardened off over the next week. Yesterday, was all planting. Purple fleshed carrots. Multi-coloured Swiss chard. 500 onion sets. And a dump run. There was an hour wait at the transfer station all for the joy of dumping broken foldie-uppie camping chairs along with the remains of a basketball hoop, a deceased elliptical training machine and a load of other crap. Sugar snap peas are up. The leeks look hopeful even if only green threads in their laundry room trays. Purple Cherokee tomatoes are leggy but may make it. Time will tell.
Did you miss these bullet points? Fridays have been hard lately. Or at least I have lost all imagination. I think that may be it. Or there are four to six kids in the house at any one time. I am liking the garden blogging. Gar-logging? I miss 2004. When poeple pretended blogging would change the world. But, really, at least I hung around. Jay and Darcey's blog URLs are each now spammy. How sad. Once amongst the greats. I feel like an 8-track hobbyist. The beer blog rolls on and on, of course. But that's because it's about beer, right?
♦ It has to happen sooner or later. No matter how dynamic, imaginative or just pure fun he is, sooner or later people will get sick of Harper. Note: shark jumped.
♦ Missile base #8872 may come to my neighbourhood.
♦ Red Sox now tied for 9th worst team in baseball. Things are looking up.
♦ I am waiting for the schism in the Wildrose party... and not just between those who know how to spell or not. No one loves as schism as much as a fringer.
♦ Does the yikky feeling of regret and a certainty that your skin is not as clear as it was just an hour ago count as poisoning?
Well, that's it for now. Maybe I will post again in May. The peas are popping up, after all. And the squash seems to be refusing to get frost bite, hiding out in the shed. Tomato seedlings are starting to pop up. Though they may be leeks. The lad labeled the lids on the trays.
We were fooled. Warm has been replaced by cold. Next week there is a risk of frost. Fortunately, we did not go too far down the road of planting. The peas are just taking their first peak above soil and the blue hubbard squash has been transplanted into pots that can be brought inside. Seeing as I have not even done the taxes, this is good timing. The Arkansas leeks and Cherokee Purple tomatoes seeds were only planted in the trays yesterday waiting down in the basement to decide when it is time to sprout. Very early days.
Lots of time for digging, however. Me and the lad were out this morning digging out a root ball of an ex-shrub. It took secateurs, shovels and an axe but the score ended up Nature 0 Mankind 1. I appear to be at the one shrub stage of life. Whacking away at the damn thing did not exactly set stars spinning about my head but a second might have. I wonder at what point the gardening shifts from telling me how out of shape I am and move on to letting me know the effort is worth it.
Rhubarb is one of my favorite things. Spring food. Sour and astringent. It makes the years since childhood contract. A cup of white sugar into which a raw stem was rammed, the stalk chewed as if on a dare. Stewed rhubarb leading to the earliest bowel related humour at our table, pretend mad dashes for the washroom mid-dessert. Pies. Lard rich crust glazed with a crackle of rhubarb filling. Later, as a young married couple, we made weak rhubarb juice on a slow simmer that was cooled then mixed with cheap Ontario white wine as a particularly fine weekend drink. Today, I dug up and separated the rhizomes, halfway between thick carrots and thick sweet potatoes. I separated them in the patch where the compost bin used to sit and gave them a long soak of water from the hose. What was one plant should now be six. If I had a farm, I would have a rhubarb house. I understand the best in England are built over coal mines with only the light of one candle to ensure the stems are as pale as possible.
No yard should be without rhubarb.
Feel free to use this button on your site to link to PEIBlogs.com: 