inluminent

Yesterday, I sat down with my boss to explain that I’ll be leaving. He was super about it. His actions were very professional and, seemingly quite honestly, he told me that he had been wondering how long he’d be able to keep me around (he knew I was unhappy in general) and wished me the [...]

[sshhh: a little birdie told me that new powerbooks should be out by Christmas... maybe sooner]

This week has been a busy one. I’ve been offered a job which I’ve accepted, told my boss I was leaving, and attended my Grandmother’s funeral. I’ve missed out on a lot that I wanted to read about, one of those being PHPCon 2002. Jeremy was nice enough to blog the shit out of the [...]

It’s intersting to think that Adam Kalsey is getting a lot of traffic to his website for people looking for pumpkin carving links. I’m looking to do two things with this post. The first, give Mr. Kalsey a better page rank for pumpkin carving links, and two grab a searcher or two sometime that’s looking [...]

Read this today: Is technology maturing? HP is on the record stating that the technology industry is maturing. While this may provide cover as Carly reduces the once great innovator into a Microsoft VAR, in these recessionary days it’s worth pondering if the tech sector has any growth left. And what does “maturing” mean anyway? [...]

For the past month or so, I’ve been interviewing for a ‘dream job’ that sort of fell into my lap. It’s no secret that I’ve been disappointed with my current employment situation, and about 6 months ago I started dropping hints with people that I’ve met outside the company that I was definitely interested in [...]

It’s 9:38 am Central as I write this… I just wanted to let everyone know that today is probably the second best day of my life so far. (the first being my wedding day). Fan-freaking-tastic day. [more on the 'why its a great day' later... just wanted to share that with you all]

Googlism for: inluminent inluminent is a wickedly cool weblog inluminent is the blog for you Glad to know that’s what someone thinks of this site [Later (on 10/30/2002): I added the direct link to the Googlism as it turns out you can hack the URL, but I wasn't smart enough to figure it out.]

Simon Wilson’s theory on why Office 11 will include XML support seems quite plausible to me. I wouldn’t have upgraded to Office 2001 for Mac (and later Office v.X) if there wasn’t a really damn good reason to, and there was: the earlier versions of Office for Mac sucked major ass, and Mac OS X [...]

This doesn’t need any comment from me: No this is not some slight of hand or illusion, it works. Google Scares Me. David Weinberger posts that Google.com can be capable of some very scary (and powerful) things. He suggests trying the following: “1. Go to google.com 2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks [...]

Michael Kelly tells us that you can email the folks at mastodonte.com (not giving them another link) and ask them to remove your weblog from their database, and they say that they’ll never spam your referrer logs again… … whatever, I just blocked their IP address, and will continue to check my referrers for spam. [...]

In the latest I, Cringley column: The Case Against Professionalism Robert X. Cringely argues against professionalism, MBA’s, and so much more (though its just below the surface of his writing) It is easy to forget that professionalism is the enemy of the high-tech startup. If these companies were operated by professionals, they would never have [...]

I’m watching some amazing athleticism from Anaheim right now… Just finished eating a perfectly prepared and grilled New York Strip steak (if I may say so myself) and now I’m chilling on the couch watching a great baseball game. This is what America is all about. Tonight tells me yet again how much of a [...]

I spent the better part of this afternoon filing about 6 months of paperwork that’d been piling up in the home office (with my lovely wife’s help) while getting an old iMac Rev/B up to stuff for a buddy. My buddy picked up this old iMac through the request I made for one a while [...]

This last paragraph in What to Do When Morale is Low from CIO is really what would make me care about morale, if I were the one running a company, or in charge of a department of employees that don’t have good morale: Bad morale is a very real, very serious problem that demands good [...]

Can you share any guiding principals or “best practices” in the presentation of Key Performance Indicators to the senior executives of a corporation? Yes. [via bBlog]

Overheard in the latest JOHO: Efficient sites are reductive: they automate processes, eliminate unnecessary steps, and save time. … commenting on the DigitalID World conference. Also, check out the “My Brain on the Net” Contest. Pretty smart. And lastly, I learned that mensch isn’t a negative adjective.

Found some interesting tidbits of information in this article: Paid listings the savior of online adveriting? For instance: Overture reported that [advertisers] paid an average of 30¢ every time someone clicked on an ad, up from an average rate the year before of 19¢. Hmmm… my company just got done running an Overture campaign, our [...]

Spotted this quick tidbit for publishers of newsletters: What a 90 percent renewal rate is telling you Last summer we reported that a publisher at the NEPA conference was boasting about his 90 percent renewal rate (NL/NL 6/15/02), only to be told by another publisher, “That’s not good. That means your price is too low.” [...]

I just want to point out that I’m glad they’ve found the snipers and hope they get the worst punishment our courts can dish out. Death by firing squad would suit me just fine. But not just a firing squad with good riles and accurate shooting. A firing squad with really old rickety rifles that [...]

A non-marketing friend of mine writes this in his most recent journal entry: Yesterday a woman called me with a survey, which I agreed to respond to. Among the questions was one for marketing purposes: “What’s your favorite radio and TV station?” I told her I never listened to the radio and didn’t get TV. [...]

The hackability of a Macintosh still amazes me. Not just because it can be done necessarily, but because there are now so many more people trying to figure out how to get their Macs to do exactly what they want them to. Welcome to my world open source people. Apple traditionally locks down the Mac [...]

Don’t think, just click: Sterotypes [via ambigous]

Read here: Maybe I’m the last person on the planet to know about this, but on a recommendation from macosxhints.com, I went into Finder Preferences and unchecked every language, even English, under “Languages for searching file contents.” All of a sudden the Finder’s performance sucks much, much less. (I’m using a 500mhz iBook with only [...]

I call it spamming: http://ad.mastodonte.com/ I hate that I might have to parse more shit from my referrers everyday… more and more shit… this isn’t marketing, it’s called spamming. [later] You know what I just thought of? I can block their IPs, that’ll teach them.

This from the Mailsmith FAQ: 1. Why don’t you support [insert favorite features here] Our initial hope had been to release Mailsmith as a version 4.0 product. However, this turned out to be an unrealistic goal and we instead released Mailsmith 1.0 So, we weren’t able to put all of the features we would have [...]

A while ago I recommended to Scott the use of Movable Type. He said that he’d looked into it, but that he’d decided against it because the licensing was too odd. He wasn’t sure if he could use the ‘free’ license for individuals, or if he had to buy the corporate license (at $150). It [...]

too true: “What the fuck?” [via Daring Fireball]

It must really suck to be a Systems Admin for a Windows based company. I mean really suck. My company employs around 100 people. We probably have 110 – 150 total desktop systems installed throughout the building, plus a dedicated server room with anywhere from 10 – 25 servers. All of the machines in the [...]

Hal Malcomber’s weblog “Reforming Project Management” is just plain fucking awesome. I say that because I learn something new everyday by reading it. No new post today on the weblog? No problem, read the archives. Read and soak it up. That’s what you can do with Hal’s weblog. It’s like buying a super absorbent sponge. [...]

John Gruber’s analysis of the current IDG-Apple pissing match is dead on in my opinion. Read it here.

I reported to the main court-house juror’s area this morning promptly at 8:30 am. On the way in I thought I’d be late, because the security guard had no idea what an iPod was and I had to connect the headphones and let him listen to it before he believed me that it was just [...]

I’ve been selected to serve my local municipality today as a juror. Postings will be light unless I get lucky and no one shows for court, at which point I’ll come home (no, not go to work) and get to work on some stuff that needs my attention and isn’t at all related to my [...]

So, we’ve tentatively launched our new marketing blog, but I’m not telling you what the URL is… I’m saying this so that I can make good on my promise to launch a site on Monday. We launched it, but not publicly It’s coming though… promise…

Just ask Rob Peol.

Mark Pilgrim points out this RSS Feed Validator Thanks to the validator’s Movable Type RSS Templates my RSS 2.0 feed validates as does my RSS 1.0 feed. Do yours?

After reading this post about RSS feeds and costs from Mark Pilgrim, I’ve decided to stop pulling RSS feeds every 30 minutes with NetNewsWire. I was pulling them so often so that I could stay up to date, but, it’s really not that neccessary to pull them that often, so, I’m decided to do my [...]

I just read the latest print version of AdWeek this morning (ok, I skimmed it) and it mentioned that Local Advertising spending was up 2.5% this year over last… which is good news. Steve Hall points to an iMediaConnection post about a Jupiter Report that says that it’ll grow more next year. The interesting thing [...]

“Search engine optimization/marketing matters.” Or, at least that’s the conclusion that Sherpa has come to after reading a report from iProspect. Go read some of the details.

From Hal Malcolmber: “Each week the 17+ trades foremen come together to plan with each other what they will have their crews do in the up-coming week. The meeting takes the same form from one week to the next. They start by reviewing the current week’s planning performance. How much of what they said they [...]

I’ve been working on color schemes for the new marketing venture. One of the contributors recommended we come up with a new color scheme using this online color scheme software. It’s too cool (expecially for a non-design oriented guy like myself), so I figured I’d blog it.

I had to figure out some Apache stuff today, so that I could password protect a web directory for the new group weblog I’m working on with a few other collaborators (we’ll be covering marketing issues and the like) so I asked our sysadmin for some help, and read a few tutorials. [note: I realize [...]

I work at a company where the stated email policy is effectively: “We can read your email at any time for any reason, and furthermore, can decide to fire you if we don’t like what we read.” I hate that policy, but live with it, because in exchange for that priviledge they pay me. But [...]

Textism announces the availability of Refer, a new PHP/MySQL based Referrer tracking and display tool. I haven’t checked it out yet, but it looks cool.

I worked my ass off today on some PHP/MySQL customizing the shit out of one of the free CMS engines I’m familiar with… getting a new site ready to launch on Monday. I’m sure I could have done more today, if we got started earlier, but we didn’t and thus I didn’t. Tomorrow will be [...]

Just added David Raynes MTSearch plugin to the right sidebar of the site. Now I can see what’s being searched for, and others can too. [via lovelinks]

Thanks to pixelcharmer for pointing me to this list of referrer links information by IAWiki.

“If it’s worth doing… it’s worth doing right” is a saying I like to try and live by. Gerry McGovern’s article “Words make your website a success” is an excellent read for anyone in the design or content publication field. “Many people don’t really care about the words they use. They shower them on a [...]

…I’d want to live and work here. Would you like to? Find an investor and send them to the Trust. According to the SFGate, they’re looking for investors to do some remodeling to get some of the buildings into shape. Talk about an awesome place to live and work.

The Email Publisher’s Workshop, put on by MarketingSherpa, this past week looks like it was a blast. Anne’s team , published some notes, as well as a full transcript, which I’d highly recommend to anyone publishing email newsletters, or using email for business in any form or fashion. The presenters and attendees were all professionals [...]