Halb mensch, halb ding.
Phil Harrison on Microsofts decision to release two versions of the Xbox 360:
This is my personal view, not my corporate view, but when I look at those formats, I think it just confuses the audience. They don’t know which one to buy, developers don’t know which one to create for, and retailers don’t know which one to stock. #
To which I can only nod in silent agreement (same with the name, but that’s another story).
I just added a piece of code to the archives page of K2, which shows you some basic statistics of your site (I stole them from the dashboard, though I moved some stuff around to make it a bit easier for n00bs to understand). If you go to my archives page, it should show you something along the lines of this:
Currently the archives are spanning 1,451 posts and 13,939, contained within the meager confines of 28 categories.
Holy crap! Almost 14.000 comments! Where did they come from? Who put them here? Anyway, what’s even more interesting and not a small bit schadenfreude-inducing is the fact that my comment ID’s, that is the unique ID given to each comment in the database, is almost up to 19.000.
What does that mean then? It means thousands and thousands of spam comments and trackbacks have trickled off of the Bonsai, and to my knowledge not a single one is currently present (and not neutered I might add) in the archives. Take that you spammers, you!
Spammers have nothing, if not ironic timing. It has been a good long time since I last felt as un-blog-like as I do at the moment, yet ‘John’ left this comment (which I have now marked as spam) on my Ode to Summer entry:
“Highly crafty and intriguing article. It highlights the intricate relationship between the subject and its essence. It is highly informative.”
How kind of him. Now if only I could believe it, that’d great.
Truth is I’m stuck in no mans land in terms of inspiration and motivation. I’m positive I’ll dig my way out eventually, but for the moment most of my energy is spent either on K2 bug-squashing (grr!) or Binary Bonsai’s new look.
As Chris McLeod said so poignantly, the look and feel of my blog really does a lot for what and how I write. And while I believe K2 is great for its purpose, I need to carve out a more personalized space for me to feel at home.
Minor Update: Chris touches on it up on his own site as well (and might I just add, he has the coolest damn logo in the world; and a pretty damn cool name as well. Pixel Meadow. It’s poetic and playful; good job!).
If you’re considering donating towards K2, please don’t.
Hell even if you’re not considering donating, I’d like to ask you to head on over to the Wikimedia Foundation and throw some money into their donation drive. Help make the world a better place.
Spread the word.
My feeling was (and is): You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”
The really important thing to remember is that what worked once won’t necessarily work again, and in fact is less likely to work again because it’s been done.
For example, the lesson from the iPod should be, “keep doing good designs and exploring new markets and providing integrated solutions until you hit on something people love,” not, “come out with an MP3 player with a scroll-wheel and you’ll make a zillion dollars.” Because, as we’ve seen, companies that have done the latter have really flopped.
[…]
[red: unrelated to the above] This latter point is huge; I must know 100 people who’ve said they’d switch to Mac except for games. Heck, I caved in and bought the littlest Intel box I could find (“Shuttle” case) so I could play Half-Life 2; and yes it’s nice for games but it’s still three times as big as the two Mac Minis that run my entire company, and twice as loud. #
The summer has slipped through my fingers before I really felt I had an opportunity to enjoy it. Perhaps I’m growing older, or maybe it’s just a bit of me that’s decided it was time for a change, either way I’ve never felt the need for good weather as much as I have this last year.
As these things go it wasn’t a ‘flip of the switch’ transition. But if there was a single moment in time that did the most to change my attitude (apart from the 10 month winter we went through) I’d have to go with the day I sat in our bedroom window, Powerbook in lap, working on K2, while listening to a jazz band of sorts performing just down the street.
It was the most idyllic moment of recent memory, and it emobodied everything Copenhagen is to me.
Sun-soaked skies dominated the last few days of the previous week, much to Rikke and my enjoyment. We took a one-day trip to Hven, a small swedish island off the coasts of Denmark and Sweden, where we rented a tandem and biked around. I secured myself a minor sunburn (my nose is still peeling), and another lasting memory of a summer which has been good, but a bit lacking in the sun department perhaps. Photos are coming.
A change in the air promises autumn and the winds are picking up again, soon forcing me to change my t-shirt/shorts uniform to something a bit more weather resistant. Too bad, I like shorts and t-shirts.
Ahead lies an unbearable frozen tundra of winter, a season which invites spooning, hot chokolade and movie-nights, but otherwise has very little to offer in terms of morale-boosting. One good thing though, is that perhaps the blogosphere will pick up some steam again?
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