you really don't want to know

We use Basecamp at work. It’s a good way to make sure all info relating to the active projects is available to everyone on our staff, and the client’s employees can easily access it too. You and the client can upload files to Basecamp, you can set To-Dos and Milestones, you can post messages and comment on other people’s messages, just like any other forum.

It’s supposed to help productivity. When you boost your productivity, theoretically you then become more capable doing more work in a shorter span of time. And as such, the tool pays for itself.

Simple. Right?

We’re a small company. We (the grunts) want to upgrade our account with Basecamp, because we’re not really using it properly. The account we have only affords us 35 active projects. So, what our project manager has done (in his infinite wisdom), is to only assign one “project” to each client. This means that, with bigger clients who have dozens of “actual” projects, all the info for each one gets dumped into one big repository. And at that point, when you’re constantly searching for needles in the haystack, you kinda wonder if the system is even worth the trouble.

It would be $100 per month to upgrade our account so we can have unlimited projects. And my hunch is, if we upgraded and paid that $100 more per month, we’d very quickly recoup that money through one or two more billable hours gained in the month. In reality, we’d more likely gain dozens of billable hours in a month, and profit by thousands of dollars.

But the boss still wants to pass the cost on to the client.

You are part of the problem. You are one of the many reasons there’s a housing bubble. You are one of the many reasons I can’t trust any businesspeople.

You’re also the reason I will never even try to be a businessman. Every once in a while, I wonder what it would be like to own a little hardware shop in a quiet town, live a simple life, have employees, contribute to the community, etc. But that’ll never be an option. I’d never be able to hack it, when the world is so full of cheaters and every-man-for-himselfists.

When I was eleven, my mom was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and her prognosis was grim. The doctors gave her, at best, six months to live. Her response was to rally. To get serious. Along with chemotherapy and radiation, she began to meditate, turn inward, and fight her disease from within. Her meditations included visualizing in a way that my father explained to me (in a perhaps somewhat dumbed-down manner) as “going through her body, bit by bit, and zapping the bad stuff. Telling it to get out, and applying force if need be.”

She lived five years, and I attribute that to her strong will, her perseverance, her determination to manifest her own destiny. She went into remission for a couple years, and when the cancer came back, she was too tired to fight it like she had before. She died when I was sixteen.

The most pragmatic among you may attribute her surprising (though admittedly temporary) recovery to mistaken doctors, increasingly effective treatments, or some other perfectly rational explanation. The more romantic souls out there may believe, as I do, that my mother’s love for her children and her husband and her life in general were the driving forces that helped her to apply positive energy and hope and belief to supplement her medical treatments in ways that helped (and maybe even multiplied) their efficacy. Am I a sap? Yeah. Is that a bad thing? Hell no.

As a result of such beliefs, I’ve always fallen on the side of optimism. I’m the guy who will tell you everything’s going to be okay. And believe it. Because I see what I want to happen, and I believe that if I project my wishes onto the world with a sincerity that cannot be refuted, maybe (just maybe) I can affect the outcome. I believe positivity will get you everywhere. And it’s always very pointedly brought into sharp focus when my own negativity seems to bring about negative results. I think we’ve all been there. But I know for a fact that we don’t all apply the same principle to positivity.

Pragmatism has its place, and I try to be pragmatic when business is involved. Helps me to be a “straight-shooter” at work, and helps me to cement my reputation as someone you’d want on your team. But so does my optimism. Anyway…

I’ve got a few friends who are expecting twins, and their doctors decided a few weeks ago to induce labor a bit early. That’d be today. And both Liz and I are worried, biting our nails, anxious to hear good news.

But everything’s going to be okay. I believe this.

Interesting story on Daring Fireball today, about how Dave Winer couldn’t figure out why his iPhone’s ringer wasn’t working. The short answer: there’s a switch on the side of the phone.

The longer answer: there are four buttons on the phone.
One is the sleep/wake button.
One is the “home” button.
One is the volume rocker (ok, this is two buttons, but it’s one piece, and anyone who doesn’t think of it as “the volume control” is an idiot).
And the last one is the silent ringer switch.
Four buttons. Five if you really want to split hairs.

I want to know if it’s the expectation that it’s going to be complicated that scares people away from actually opening their eyes…or if it’s really just that five buttons is too complicated for one of the founding fathers of blogging to figure out.

Steve Krug wrote this great book called Don’t make me think. However, I think people took it a little too literally, and absorbed the notion a little too completely.

The second season of Heroes is kinda suckin’. If you haven’t seen season one yet, stop reading now, cause I’m gonna give shit away.

At the end of season one, when they introduced that chick who could make you see whatever she wanted you to see, that’s when I started having issues. She was just too much of a pretty-girl to be of any real value. And considering the rest of the cast, that’s saying something. Anyway, it kinda became clear they had lost sight of the story, and forced a few too many things. Seriously, how does a sword get plunged into Sylar’s chest, when he can hear you coming a mile away, he can move shit with his mind, he can liquefy metal, he can freeze shit, he can go nuclear, he can persuade you of anything, etc etc etc.

Anyway, this season is more of the not-so-well-thought-out same. Sad, because the first season really hooked me in.

It’s been years since I was a gamer at heart, but when I see things like this, It gets my brain moving. I wish I had the time and money.

There was a shiny new Infiniti G35 Coupe overturned on La Honda road this past Saturday. The type of road that has 30-40 turns in a span of a mile. Nicely-dressed young asian kid standing with his teeny-bopper asian girlfriend, standing there impotently while the emergency services directed traffic around the wreckage. On the barely-more-than-1.5-lane road.

I’ve driven briskly on this road. And I’ve never come close to losing control. And his car is arguably better-handling than mine. Either he was approaching 100 mph on 30 mph roads, or he was getting a blowjob.

The sad fact is, accidents like this happen up in that area all the time. Silicon Valley millionaires head up into the hills with their new sport-luxury rocket, and come back down in a helicopter. These kids got off light.

There, I said it. I mean, even as biased as I am, I’m usually not one to disparage anyone’s choice of tools, operating system, whatever. But, uh…

The truth is, I’ve installed Windows XP into my Macbook, and it runs better than it ever has on any Wintel box I’ve ever used. And that seems to be the consensus across the web…everyone who’s installed Windows onto a Mac says it’s a stellar performer. Better, even, than it runs on similar-power PCs. My theory is, since Apple requires you to use a “non-branded” installer CD (i.e. it must NOT be the sort that came bundled with a Sony or HP computer), you get a nice clean installation that doesn’t include 150,000 “trial software” bundled applications that bring the computer down to its knees, and complicate the whole damn process of getting the new computer up and running. On a mac, it took me a half-hour. On a PC, it takes hours. And hours.

But the problem is this: I’m now afraid to move. ANYTHING I do from this point onward will put me at risk of getting virii, malware, and other sphelcus in my gineptegazoink (thank you Linda Richman). I don’t really feel like paying real American dollars for anti-virus software, and as such, I’ll probably just re-install the OS if/when it gets crudded up.

However, another related problem is this: I want to get on the web and find freeware that’ll help me accomplish my work if/when I feel like doing it in Windows. I need a code-wrangling app that’ll handle xhtml/css/javascript with some nifty plugins like BBedit, TextMate, Coda, etc. Granted those aren’t free. But there are free alternatives for the Mac that I can find easily. Now, the truth is I can find about twelve hundred such products for Windows within the first 30 seconds of looking. But how many of them are riddled with malware? How many download sites are simply there to propogate digital evil? I actually read a blog entry about a month ago, from a guy who took a text file, entered the text “this program does nothing at all,” re-named it with a “.exe” extension, and submitted it to about a hundred software sharing sites. Within a few weeks, he had received notifications from many of those sites, letting him know that his “software” had been given a “Five Star” award or some such shit.

This is the kind of thing that makes me happy to own a Mac. But it pains me, because I’d really like to be able to use the platforms interchangeably. It’s kinda like wanting to be ambidextrous in hockey. Sure, you can train your hands to do it. But the stick is kinda curved in only one direction.

I was thinking the other day, while hearing Frank Sinatra on the radio, that I kinda wish I could get into the old-time musicals. But, as you’ve probably surmised from my recent blog entries, whimsy and mirth are not exactly my strong suits these days. Well, I’m no real stranger to contemporary musicals, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one that actually got me. Moulin Rouge didn’t do shit for me.

But Across the Universe is absolutely amazing. I heard about it on a radio talk show a few weeks ago, when it was about to go into limited release, and the clips I heard on that show were pretty damn good. And the director made it a point to mention that about 75-80% of the music you hear in the movie is actually done by the actors, in front of the camera. That’s the kinda shit that draws me in. I could give a rat’s ass about your studio-polished sountrack.

Liz and I went to see it tonight, and I’m honestly blown away. Granted, I’m already a huge Beatles fan, but I’m also a picky movie buff. I’m not easily impressed. But yeah. Totally worth seeing it in the theater.

If you haven’t even seen the trailer, check it out. Get sucked in.

Must not forget about this. Heard about it years ago, was fascinated, and promptly forgot the name of it. Whenever I tried explaining the premise to friends, they looked at me strangely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

The info I’m seeing on that page, however, doesn’t 100% match what I recall about the book I had heard about before. What I had heard (I think) was that the beings in the two-dimensional universe were visited by a being from the three-dimensional universe, and they revered this being, but there was something about how they could only see this being as a circle, since they could only perceive two dimensions. So, in effect, a finger that’s poked through the surface of the pool was only seen to be a circle, since all the denizens could see was the cross-section.

Follow?

Seriously. You’ve seen it a million times. Some lady driving by, holding her phone four inches from her face while she tries in vain to maneuver her SUV through traffic. As if somehow having her call on speakerphone is actually helping anyone.

I blogged about a lady awhile back, who almost ran me over because she was paying too much attention to actually holding her handsfree headset’s mic up in front of her mouth. I own the same phone and headset as she, and I know it’s not necessary.

My best guess is, people are just inherently afraid of looking like they’re talking to themselves. I mean, it’s a stark contrast to the folks who don’t take a shower without wearing a Bluetooth headset, but it’s got to be true. I even get self-conscious when I have to use a voice-recognition phone system with my credit card company or ISP. But somehow I’ve come to grips with the fact that I look crazy when talking to myself and it just looks like I’m wearing iPod headphones.

But really. If you’re in a car, and you actually want to drive safely while having a phone call, why wouldn’t you find the time in your life to put 30 seconds thought into just how effective your actions may actually be in attaining that goal? Either that or just go ahead and hold the fucking phone up to your ear. Might as well.