onfocus

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.

Wait for it...

The lesson: "Create a service experience around what you publish and sell." Some nice words about MetaFilter and an interesting way to view online audiences: "Why Wasn't I Consulted?"

The jokes were strong at MaxFunCon. Churchill strong.

"Most of these tweaks, besides providing for a longer lifespan for SSD disks, should improve overall system performance even on an non SSD disk."

It's a good time to revisit this Lakoff article on framing taxes. Basically, taxes are an investment, our fair share, patriotic, and our dues for enjoying our high standard of living.

You deserve this!

This is spectacular. They're suggesting high speed rail between Eugene and the Canadian border.

This is so true.

"We looked at the most compelling social sites across the web, from Twitter to Tumblr, Pownce to FriendFeed, and more. And then we built an application around open standards to offer you the best features of each of these services, on your own site."

self-explanatory, I believe.

"COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews."

"Few men dare ask the question 'What is toffee, exactly?' All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane." [via schampeo]

Rafe on conflicting images of Iran. We're only getting one view of the country in our major media outlets, but the social Web provides a more nuanced, complete view.

haha, let fate determine where you should eat! Jim put together a fun visualization of Yahoo! Local business entries.

this articles dissects the art of comedy and distills it down to a few "joke templates". [via Mind Hacks]

"a musical realization of the motion graphics of john whitney as described in his book 'digital harmony'." By Jim Bumgardner. Play with the hand crank!

Flickr Hacks co-author Jim Bumgardner recently spoke at Yahoo about the visual and audio hacks he plays around with. I hope Yahoo releases audio of his talk.

[via Bruce Schneier]

some of the presentations from the IDEA conference are available now

I already ordered the book. (It arrived today, yay!) But I'd be ordering on Nov. 1st with others if I hadn't. [via Brian Sawyer]

Hex the Mac color picker

handy tip for quick access to color picker, especially when combined with the HexColorPicker add-on

buy these geek shirts. !!! sudo buy these geek shirts.

There's a new version of SQL Server client tools that has better query integration (no more moving over to query analyzer). I'm still getting to know it, but so far I'm impressed.

you can get the best of the web at mathowie's community blog (excepting pancakes)

"To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version..."