wednesday august 20, 2008
Summer wrap-up / San Francisco, CA / 19 months ago
I'll try to keep this short for the 15-20 of you that read these now quarterly updates.
Our son Ben was born on July 23 here in SF. He's been a lot of fun to date and seems to be a pretty easy baby compared to some stories I have heard from others. I have a lot of photos and video that I haven't found the time to process, but I will get them up over at flickr as soon as I do.
We haven't traveled at all this summer except for regular visits to the country house for a little suburban relaxation. That all changes next week when Juan and I are off to Brazil to speak in Sao Paulo and Rio. The engagement is a conference for marketing and advertising design, as far as I can tell. Our talk is called "The Juanderful World of Cuban Council" and is basically an overview of the company and our work to date.
sunday april 20, 2008
Timely Acronyms / San Francisco, CA / 23 months ago
I don't know when it started and I don't know why I am so compulsively obsessed, but it drives me completely insane that so many people are unaware of the difference between Standard Time and Daylight Time in their communications.
For example, when organizing a phone call or a meeting with someone's personal assistant in say, June, and that person writes "how does 1pm PST work for you?", I sometimes respond "That will be fine, should I put it down as noon or did you mean PDT?", which is totally obnoxious of me, I know... but I can't help it. I get especially bent out of shape when the acronym mis-usage comes from a lawyer, aren't these folks paid ridiculous rates to accurately communicate while crossing all of their t's and dotting every i?
I'm not sure whether it has to do with a lineage of time-sensitive engineering types on my father's side, but somewhere between the railroad engineer, the television engineer and the industrial engineer I have become a relentless time acronym enforcer and it is driving me nuts.
All I can ask is that everyone please do your part to make sure that more people understand how to properly communicate the accurate acronym when referencing the time... and if that's too complicated, then just skip the daylight savings bit altogether and reduce your acronym length by 33.3% by using PT, ET, etc.
sunday april 6, 2008
Flow or Flop? / San Francisco, CA / 23 months ago
Excited about the recent release of Flow this week, I dove right in as soon as I received the release announcement. My first task was to download an entire site to update my working copy. After about five tries and multiple freezes/crashes, I finally gave up and went back to old, reliable Transmit.
Later in the day when I was having an odd problem with the development site on my local machine, but not on the hosted version, I found that Flow had overwritten one file with the contents of another. Obviously this was baffling and quite frustrating as it meant that the application had to completely mix up not only the location of the files, but the naming and contents as well.
Anyway, I think Flow is a great concept, but further development and testing is certainly going to be needed if the product is going to survive/thrive.
