Big Dave’s Blog

For those of you with Macs, check out Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty anal about keeping my desktop clean. Ethan is the author of kGTD, a great set of scripts that allows you to use the GTD system in OmniOutliner. It is so succesful that OmniGroup is building OmniFocus as a dedicated GTD app — with Ethan’s help. BTW, OmniOutliner is one of those apps that I can’t live without. I use it all the time.

Anyway, I liked the suggestions in the series, and I’ve implemented most of them. Even if you have a PC, you could probably make use of many of the suggestions. Check it out!

Don’t know what happened, but yesterday all my internal site links broke. Either my hosting environment or I did something goofy. Anyway, after a few installs and data imports, I think I have everything back now. If anyone was watching, that’s why the feed and/or the site may have acted strange yesterday. Sorry about that.

Saw this post on Insignificant Thoughts. If it’s true, Google can forget about their “Do no evil” motto. This sure sounds like SpyWare to me.

I’m glad I have a Mac…

I stubbled on 10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It, and I have to admit it is good stuff. Until my kids were born, I was never much of an early riser, but since then I find that I can’t sleep late anymore. When I do, I feel like I missed something. There is nothing like greeting the day when the sun is just coming up. It’s worth not staying up late.

BTW, the rest of the site has some very interesting tips as well.

“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” by Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator is a great read. The book is a collection of interviews with mostly recent technology startup founders. For a complete list of interviews, click here.

Most of the information is not new, but it is great to read it from the founder’s perspective. I especially liked the sections on companies that I had direct relation to. I was at Lotus in the relatively early days, but I never got to hear it straight from Mitch Kapor. Many of the interviews are truly inspriing for a budding entrepeneur like myself. I’ve been involved with startups for years now (some successful, some not), and I’m embarking on my own startup right now. To be able to get honest opinions and views regarding VC, business plans, startup issues is extremely valuable. Even if you are not planning on starting a company, I still recommend picking up a copy and checking it out. Some of the stories are classic.

If you have any suggestions on who should be interviewed for the next book, there is a thread discussing it on Y Combinator News. With any luck and a lot of hard work, maybe you or I will make the list.

Saw this post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. There are many pictures of the Threadless offices in Chicago. I don’t know how much software or technology they work with, but those have to be some of the coolest offices I’ve ever seem. It’s like working in your college apartment, but with an actual budget for toys. I like it! I bet they are super productive as well because people can be inspired when they are having fun.

Long ago in another life I was a Mac user (at least at home). I also became a loyal Quicken user. This was back in 1991 or 1992. Along the way, I bit the bullet and replaced my home Mac with a PC (grudgingly). Now, I’m back to a Mac at home and loving it. Unfortunately, I’m not as happy with Quicken for Mac. It works fine, and I was able to get all my data transferred over pretty easily. Online banking was a snap to setup, but things went downhill when I tried to add Quicken Bill Pay back to my checking account. Quicken Bill Pay decided to download every bill paid going back to 2004. This resulted in hundreds of duplicates in my register and my balance being way off.

Several more attempts and a lot of web searching later, and I still had no solution. I went to Quicken support and chatted with several people, but they all had the same answer.

“Manually delete the duplicate transactions.”

My response is “Maybe you missed something. This is 3+ years worth of transactions!” I can’t believe that a sane company would not have a solution for this given that I found several others with the same problem. Personally, I could never in good conscience tell a customer to manually delete hundreds of transactions. It shocks me that they could even say it. It’s not like we are talking about a strange scenario.

I came across and interesting article – Fear and Loathing in Software Development. The author starts with the idea that a good API will be very difficult to change because it becomes entrenched. After that, the author discusses a scenario where he did not have a proper test environment, and a mistake could bring down a school’s Active Directory. Ultimately, the project failed due to the fear of breaking anything during the development process. The scenario is interesting, and I can understand how this fear could doom a project. Like the author, I would spend way too much time checking and rechecking everything. There is another scenario, however, that the author did not mention.

Fear of failure can absolutely kill innovation and make software development difficult and stressful. Imagine a scenario where a new innovation is proposed. It is estimated that it will take 4 months to complete, and the performance gains could be huge. The only problem is that it’s never been done before, so there is a very real chance it will not work. If development proceeds but the team is forced to schedule only one confirmation test at the end, it will make for a project likely to fail. Even with a test environment, the team has one chance to get it right. If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?

Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed – even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.

If you don’t fail periodically, you are not learning and growing…