August 2013 was the second time in three months that I left a blank monthly archive. Two out of three ain’t bad, unless it’s a non-updated website. I’ve been traveling a lot this year for work. This isn’t always fun, but it has been a tremendous insight into the idea of gamification. I never knew […]
Daisy Cutter pale ale from Half Acre Brewing Company: one of Chicago’s finest. My friend Mike linked to this NYT article about the birth of the Internet. It spotlights the creation of the Internet as a political football in the government vs. private industry debate, which was news to me: The Internet’s founding history is […]
We’ve had the dog for more than a year and they still hate each other. Chill out, bros. I was talking infamous content farm Demand Media with a coworker the other day and we got onto their accounting fiasco. It seems they faced some deserved scrutiny for their financial practices: Instead of tracking the cost […]
Awesomeness 2009: Nokia phones, Groupon hype Not Awesomeness 2012: Nokia earnings, Groupon accounting Amazing how fast companies go from star to dud in the technology world. A quarter should count for a year of longevity in this field.
I’ve been reading up today on what I once thought was a pretty cool and bold redesign, but now is an evident disaster: the relaunch of Target.com after the company’s break from Amazon. Fun dog photos on the homepage aside, it seems the site is plagued by timeout errors, vanishing wedding/baby registries and unresponsive customer-service […]
All around me are declarations of the upcoming NYT paywall as either a “fraught” decision that “won’t work” or a “big hedge” that, if it works, professional gruff and former coworker Jack Shafer will be “happy to call a success”. I will see Jack and raise him a note of optimism, because despite being one […]
This is an entertaining and logical take on the iPad from my old boss, and reflects very well what bothered me so much about the media’s pre-iPad salivation: The iPad is a gorgeous appliance and I wouldn’t bet against it, or be without one, in the short term. But content creators ought not to delude […]
While running for the border, time to take a detour: And the 3-minute version: The tone of these is really strange — in the 3-minute version, at first Taco Bell seems to be going for a Popeil-esque infomercial parody, but then they bring out Christine the now-hot woman and Ruth Carey the registered dietician (who […]
Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight. Most of you dudes know I split my time these days between school in Ann Arbor and home in Chicago. The best way to get back and forth is Megabus, which I took yet again today. (For anyone interested, here’s […]
Hey, clothes-wearing people. I assume I’m not the only one who’s noticed that clothing sizes have totally changed in the past 2-3 years or so — what used to be an XL is now only a large, what used to be a large is now a medium, and what used to be XXXL is now […]