Evernote

Have you discovered Evernote yet? I’ve become very impressed with this simple catch-all for ideas, notes, events, even your favorite wine. Essentially, it can capture just about any content, including web pages, PDF files, documents, text clippings, photos, and email messages. The real power of Evernote is, at least for me, twofold:

It’s cross platform, working [...]

Live longer (and make better presentations)

Want to live to a happy old age? And pick up a few tips on how to make better presentations while you’re doing it? This is a great post from Presentation Zen that gives us a few tips on both (and thanks to the embedded TEDx videocast). Take a look, it’s worth the 20 minutes [...]

The real unemployment rate

The figure we most often hear is 10% unemployment. But that’s not the whole truth — it’s a politically spun figure that minimizes the real story. According to BBC America, we might actually be looking at unemployment closer to 17% if factoring in the “lost workforce,” or those people that have decided to drop out [...]

You cannot not communicate

“You cannot not communicate. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.”—Paul Watzlawick’s First Axiom of Communication
This, according to 52 Weeks of UX. Stated another way, “This is the first rule of UX. Everything a designer does affects [...]

On climate change (yea, you should care)

It always amazes me when people don’t care about important issues. I can understand that many people don’t know if climate change is something they can or can’t affect. But burying our heads in the sand won’t make an issue go away. Investigate further or, if you aren’t willing to, then let the experts decide.
Here’s [...]

No contingency plan

According to the research firm TNS and its Personal Risk Assessment and Risk Literacy Survey, almost half (about 46%) of consumers can’t come up with $2,000 in emergency funds on a month’s notice. Even those making between $100K to $149K, a quarter responded that they couldn’t raise the funds either. Given that the survey asked [...]

A little scifi story

I tap the screen on my phone, and tell it “buy cream cheese at the market.”
The next day, when I walk into the market, my phone pings and reminds me to pick up some cream cheese. It knows this because the last time I was near the market, I tagged the location. My phone also [...]

Our media stinks

So, how many of you took the last few week’s news about better unemployment figures to heart? How many of you would be disappointed to hear its just another failure of our media to report the real state of the nation? How many would be dismayed that even our President is promulgating entirely misleading figures [...]

Open source testing

We use HP’s QuickTest Pro (formerly Mercury QTP) for much of our automated regression testing. Unfortunately, QTP is a pricey piece of software, with a cost in the vicinity of $7,500 per user license. While it is a state-of-the-art automation system, at this price tag it comes with quite a barrier to entry — at [...]

Low IQ connection

I found this post interesting, although the lack of citation means that it’s potentially meaningless. But the graphic somehow explains a lot:

What I really identified with, though, is not the fancy chart that shows how red states tend to have lower IQs, but some of the comments posted by other readers. The fact that the majority [...]

The agile disease

Luke Halliwell recently wrote an exceptional piece titled The Agile Disease. And, as someone that pushes this disease in various forms, you might be surprised to hear that I agree with just about everything he’s written on the topic, save a few points. For example, the commercial trendiness of Agile and its “manifesto” is just [...]

Hear hear

“This isn’t about yelling, this isn’t about politics, this isn’t really just about proposition 8.” This is about humanity, and those of us who don’t have enough of it.

Hear hear, Mr. Olbermann.