The biggest problem for productivity isn’t keeping organized, nor is being alone - it’s daylight. Daylight is the perfect killer to most of my work time. It’s way to hard to concentrate with everyone running around and even if you separate yourself from the hussle and bussle of it all - you can still feel the energy of the “working world”.
But when the sun goes down is when that “working world” energy goes away and your creative mind awakes. Pressure to deliver quickly seems to vanish as you have hours of availability with everyone sleeping, no clients that needs answers right away, pointless meetings, or new emails waiting to be read. It’s just you, your ideas and the night.
So if you’re having a hard time getting things done - possibly try taking the day off and working for a night. It may be the best thing you’ve ever done.
posted on July 31, 2006| 11:13 PM EST
About 2 year ago I began to get really excited about tagging and what you could do with it. Tags were amazing, they were like a new toy that I couldn’t get enough of. I would tag my photos, tags my bookmarks, tag my this, tag my that - I thought tagging solved a lot of the world’s problems.
Now - jump ahead to today and I’m realizing tagging is (in its current state) useless for helping people recall information. I’ve been using tagging for keeping track of my bookmarks for quite some time now and without fail, I’m rarely ever able to remember what I tagged a certain website. I’ll spend sometimes up to 5 minutes with a determined focus to find that really cool link I want to show someone. It just doesn’t work.
Working on different apps and thinking about how tags work within those apps, I constantly get stuck on how many tags I’m beginning to generate and there just becomes to many. I try to give an item multiple tags so if I don’t remember it being one thing - I may remember it being another.
First question you may ask - Are you tagging for yourself or other people?
The quick answer is - for myself (at least right now).
Tagging for yourself is what you’re supposed to do and what various experts say on the subject (including Thomas Vander Wal and Rashmi Sinha who I had the chance to see speak in person on the subject).
What I do find tagging extremely useful for it tagging for other people. It’s supposed to be a “no-no” but it’s what I see works within the current state of tagging and how the web uses them. I love being able to search through flickr’s tags or see what’s popular on del.icio.us. Doing things like this allows me to peek into the rest of the world and see what’s going on and begin spotting trends or world discoveries. This all brought to you by the power of tagging for other people.
So what now? If you’re not supposed to tag for other people and only tag for yourself, what are we to do? Your answer, develop better tools to help people like me remember things. My interests change, my experiences change and my knowledge changes. What I used to call something may not be completely different as I obtain those three things. I want a tool that learns alongside me and helps me organize things, not keep track of how stupid I maybe once was or constantly insult me on my previous lack of knowledge.
Until people begin to figure out how to create better interfaces (and experiences with those interfaces), tags are useless when tagging for yourself. I’m fine with going back to categories and sub-categories. Allowing for less is much better long-term than offering me more.
posted on July 24, 2006| 9:08 PM EST
For those of you hosted on the Elevator Up servers, you probably noticed everything was down for most of Saturday (the 22nd). We had a disk drive failure and had to redo everything. The good news is we had full backups and those backups worked perfectly.
We are looking into various methods to avoid something like this from happening again. We sincerely apologize for the outage.
posted on July 23, 2006| 8:55 AM EST
I really don’t know where to start as I’m quite shocked at how I have just been treated. We decided to go with a company called CyberSource to be our merchant account provider (allow us to take credit cards online). They looked like a good company, had really good clients, and even provided developers some pre-written code for connecting to their systems.
Just yesterday however we found CyberSource wasn’t actually being nice by providing developers pre-written code - they were saying you can only use their code and not able to write your own.
This was a huge shock for us as we’ve been developing our web-apps in Ruby and understood from their website that we would be able to write our own SDK to connect to their systems. We understood that we had to write extra code to work with them but we were ok with that and even excited about making our SDK open for others wanting to use Ruby and work with CyberSource.
After talking with them for a few hours, they basically ended up saying we had 2 options. (1) Use one of the programming languages they want us to use, or (2) go with someone else.
Normally it isn’t a huge deal to count your losses and work with someone else, but in this case, I’ve already spend hundreds of dollars to be setup and get started. Not only that, but we were supposed to go live in a week for a client expecting credit card verification to work and now it’s probably not going to happen.
Along with that, they said if I quite, I would have to pay a termination fee because I signed a 2 year agreement. Now, I can understand contracts and agreements but what I don’t understand is getting billed even more for something I can’t use and something that doesn’t work the way it was sold to me.
They said I should have called them to make sure they provided what our company needs. I guess that was my fault - I should have assumed their website wasn’t clear about their offerings and signed up online. I should have wasted my time second guessing them and how well they’re able to communicate online, made a phone call to talk with an account manager and signed up through a bunch of phone call questions and faxes.
So I’m sitting here after being on the phone with various CyberSource staff at various management levels, simply shocked that I got screwed, lost hundreds of dollars and a few hundred dollars more for leaving them.
I should have gone with TrustCommerce from the beginning.
From TrustCommerce
Complex, slow, hard-to-use client APIs seem to be the norm in the payment processing industry. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We offer APIs for most popular web development platforms, including many that the “big guys” like to ignore, like PHP and Perl (two favorites within our development team). If yours isn’t on the list, let us know - we’re happy to develop new APIs at your request.
I guess I’ll give them a call now.
posted on July 19, 2006| 6:36 PM EST
At work, we all browse the web quite a bit. When we find something really cool and think others should take a look at it, we put together an email with a long list of things we’ve found that day (or that weekend).
I’ve been compiling links like this now for a few years and thought I would try and start posting some of them. Later I’ll look into integrating my del.icio.us feed into my posts. To be honest, I haven’t decided if I really want to do that or if I want to have the feed on the side, outside of the main posts area (your preference on this?)
Anyways, here’s a bunch of cool links.
posted on July 16, 2006| 1:01 PM EST
