Month: May 2013

Farm Fakes: A History of Fraudulent Food:

For all of the current regulation, the United States has a food blind spot: mislabeling products in this country can be a winning (and legal) sales strategy.

Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup. A wonderful post from Alex Payne about startup jobs. The bit about startup culture being the new corporate culture was particularly interesting.

The Anti-Dropout

The Anti-Dropout:

It’s true (and exciting) that so much knowledge has moved online in the past decade. I can learn basic programming via Treehouse. I can learn web design in a course on Udemy. But what if I want to learn about the physics that drive hardware performance? The materials science behind the next generation of wearable computing? Or what about how to bring electronics manufacturing back to the United States? There are real, fundamental sets of knowledge that are still locked up in traditional academia.

How to hire good people instead of nice people. Fantastic post about hiring and the processes Brooke Allen uses. I really liked this bit:

I won’t get between you and your dreams. If you have a dream, I need to know what it is so we can figure out if this job gets you closer.

On Thingpunk. Interesting read via Matt Pearson about what the author dubs Thingpunk. Essentially:

Thingpunk is a deep bias in design thinking that sees physical products and the built environment as the most important venues for design and innovation even as we enter a world that’s increasingly digital.

Not sure how to capture it but it was an intriguing read.

Spending 24 hours in Bath, England

As part of the 3-week vacation I took in April Leah and I spent about 24 hours in Bath, a fantastic city about a 40 minutes by train west of London. I remembered loving Bath when I visited as a kid and it lived up to expectations after returning. Since we were there for just the night we wanted to be somewhere close to the train station and ended up staying at the Parade Park hotel. While the room was small we couldn’t complain about the view.

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After grabbing a quick lunch we headed to the Roman Baths. For some reason it seemed every school-aged kid from France was there that day. Despite the crowd it was interesting to wander around.

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The view from the baths up to the abbey.

The view from the baths up to the abbey.

Our next stop was the abbey. It’s free (suggested donation) to wander around and we paid the £6 to tour the tower, too. It turned out we were the only two who signed up for that tower tour time so we ended up with essentially a private tour.

The abbey has this amazing organ which is quite impressive when combined with the fan vaulting.

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I forget where this eagle was perched but I thought it was a neat piece.

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The coolest part of the tower tour was going up behind the clock face. We were able to walk all the way up to the gear system turning the clock hands. Pretty cool vantage point.

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There’s also a small hole at the very top of the fan vault which gives you a sense of how thin parts of the ceiling are. You can peer through the hole down to the abbey’s floor.

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We also got to check out the bells which sit in the abbey’s tower. Below the bells lie this set of ropes. Each is attached to a separate bell. The abbey still rings its bells the old-fashioned way sometimes so these are still used. The rest of the time they use an automated way of ringing the bells.

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The top of the tower caps it all off with some wonderful views of the surrounding area. We lucked out and had a nice day so were actually able to see for a bit.

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We ended the day with a phenomenal meal at Sotto Sotto. Thanks to a random table of 4 that cancelled we got a table without a reservation. Perfect meal to end a great day.

50 small things you can do to improve customer service. Solid slide deck from Greg Meyer about improving customer service.

Status

Had a great breakfast at Jam on Hawthorne this morning followed by a long overdue run. Nice that it’s finally sunny again.

Measure successful blogging in years. Success in blogging is largely about showing up each day and writing. Piece by piece you’ll create something great.

A Domain of One’s Own. Neat digital identity project from the University of Mary Washington. Looks like a lot of it is based around using WordPress, too.