My Name is Wes

"The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that."

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:22:44 -0400

“The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that.”

- The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words (via Instapaper)

"Don’t try to be original, just try to be good."

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:22:43 -0400

“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”

- Paul Rand via

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas [longform.org]

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:11:32 -0400

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas [longform.org]:

Latitude 48° 14 North. Longitude 174° 26 West. Almost midnight on the North Pacific, about 230 miles south of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. A heavy fog blankets the sea. There’s nothing but the wind spinning eddies through the mist. Out of the darkness, a rumble grows. The water begins to vibrate. Suddenly, the prow of a massive ship splits the fog. Its steel hull rises seven stories above the water and stretches two football fields back into the night. A 15,683-horsepower engine roars through the holds,…

merlin: New Rider

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:26:46 -0400

merlin:

New Rider

Being Genuine

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:19:53 -0400

My attention is a fickle sort, it flits back and forth between topics on Philosophy, Psychology, Business, Design and Programming. The idea of being genuine has seen a sort of resurgence in all of these topics recently and I don’t completely understand why it ever went away. It seems that we’ve pushed genuineness aside in lieu of higher profitability, quicker results or some other batch of snake oil. I see and can comprehend that some folks will ignore their morals and their self in order to profit (financially or otherwise), but I think in the long run you are hurting yourself.

Think of the last time you were on the phone for customer support for your credit card. What do you hear every 15-30 seconds? “Thank you for your patience, one of our staff will assist you momentarily.” They think constantly spewing that every so many seconds will really tide us over until we start talking with the customer support representative. Yet, it just seems to incite anger in most people. They don’t seem to have a genuine care about their customers, just their bottom line and a 15 minute wait time doesn’t matter one bit if they aren’t losing customers at an alarming rate.

Contrast that experience to calling Apple for support. First you have to log in using your Apple ID to their website, it’s a hoop but a small one. Then you choose from the hardware you have registered with your account. Then the system checks for your warranty coverage instead of the customer support rep asking for your serial number. (I have to imagine that saves Apple wasted time from misread and mistyped serial numbers.) Then you describe the problem using a few drop-downs and a description. Then you are presented with three options: Call me now, Call me later and I’ll call Apple later. It’s those first two options that shows that Apple genuinely cares about you, your problem and your time. Why do they care? Well, for one, they aren’t wasting your time while you sit with a phone pressed against your head listening to awful hold music for 15 minutes, they call you when they’re available. The other real benefit to it, is that they review your case and can take a look at what’s going on and come up with solutions before they call you.

Marketing is another area where there’s a rediscovered interest in genuineness. In Social Media if you aren’t being genuine folks will very quickly figure that out. Also, look at books like Speak Human, a whole guidebook on “outmarket[ing] larger firms by getting personal”, and being genuine goes right a long with being personal.

Now, traipsing across the internet we end up at The Art of Manliness. In their own words they are “a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.” I think this is another case of folks trying to build a certain amount of genuineness back into their lives. If you take a look at some of their posts, you’ll see that the core of being a man is being genuine and expressing your needs and wants, not cowing to some image of what you think the ideal man is—typically an over-sensitive people pleaser who’s afraid to say what he thinks.

So then, what am I getting at? Being genuine is not a self-improvement project that you’re going to start next year. It’s not some fad that a social media guru concocted. It’s not the newest way to curb ADD. It’s a way to live that enriches every aspect of your life.

"The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that."

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:58:23 -0400

“The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that.”

- Tweetage Wasteland : The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words

Photos from Titanic 2 Oh, for goodness sake, not again.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:57:35 -0400

Photos from Titanic 2

Oh, for goodness sake, not again.

"That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself..."

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:15:38 -0400

“That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.”

- The Top Idea in Your Mind

Because we all need to drink liquor as if it were beer out of...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:39:22 -0400

Because we all need to drink liquor as if it were beer out of a squirrel wearing a top hat.

BrewDog’s 55% ABV beer: the strongest and most expensive beer in history - Image 1 of 4

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 (by Peter...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:23:29 -0400

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 (by Peter Samuelson)

Hacker Monthly

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:43:27 -0400

Hacker Monthly:

Regarding my earlier post about MagCloud and Hacker Monthly, I’ve learned that you can just download the PDFs of the magazine. Throw em into iBooks (or GoodReader) and have one less app to worry about.

Multi-server Setup for EE 2 - EE Insider

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:17:00 -0400

Multi-server Setup for EE 2 - EE Insider:

Great tutorial on how to bend EE2’s config.php to your will. Here’s how mine ended up looking: http://gist.github.com/484873

Overheard @ LessConf - DHH on Luck (via lesseverything)

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:17:33 -0400

Overheard @ LessConf - DHH on Luck (via lesseverything)

http://hackermonthly.com/ + http://magcloud.com/ipad = Fantastic. If you have an iPad, go download...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:29:47 -0400

http://hackermonthly.com/ + http://magcloud.com/ipad = Fantastic.

If you have an iPad, go download Magcloud and start reading Hacker Monthly. It’s all of the fantastic stories from Hacker News all rolled up into an easily digestible magazine.

"Without a certain comfort level with ambiguity – an uncertain outcome – we would never experiment...."

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:41:18 -0400

“Without a certain comfort level with ambiguity – an uncertain outcome – we would never experiment. If we never experimented, we would never make mistakes. And if we never made mistakes, we would never learn anything.”

- What We Can Learn from Babies: Experimentation, Failure & Creative Genius

"Designers, like many others, started doing less and thinking more. A profession that straddled white..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:09:27 -0400

“Designers, like many others, started doing less and thinking more. A profession that straddled white and blue collar worlds became a managerial profession. We pay premium for high-level hand-waving practices while deluding ourselves that it is smarter, better—even faster—way to achieve progress.”

- Designers: Stop Armchair Quarterbacking. Play The Damn Game | Co.

(via Frank Chimero)

"I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:13:21 -0400

“I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!”

- Princeton University - 2010 Baccalaureate remarks

EPICWIN

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:48:10 -0400

EPICWIN:

This will change everything.

"Inspiration is about stimulation. It encourages the development of something new. We are often..."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:58:00 -0400

“Inspiration is about stimulation. It encourages the development of something new. We are often inspired because we like the character or spirit of an object, not because someone else did it therefore it must be “right.” Inspiration intrigues us to work towards an approach, not copy or mimic another’s. Inspiration acts as a fuel to catapult us in our own direction. Inspiration, for me, is trying something different.”

- Brian Hoff’s Design Cubicle | Logo and Web Design - Part 2

It’s The Little Things :: Echo Enduring Blog

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:35:12 -0400

It’s The Little Things :: Echo Enduring Blog:

From my perspective, the little things in design are all those finer details, which, though they may often go unnoticed by the most non-designers, still work to complete a design and give it that professional polish that separates the attractive from the truly beautiful.

My Name is Wes

"The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that."

"Don’t try to be original, just try to be good."

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas [longform.org]

merlin: New Rider

New Rider

Being Genuine

"The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that."

Photos from Titanic 2 Oh, for goodness sake, not again.

"That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself..."

Because we all need to drink liquor as if it were beer out of...

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 (by Peter...

Hacker Monthly

Multi-server Setup for EE 2 - EE Insider

Overheard @ LessConf - DHH on Luck (via lesseverything)

http://hackermonthly.com/ + http://magcloud.com/ipad﻿ = Fantastic. If you have an iPad, go download...

"Without a certain comfort level with ambiguity – an uncertain outcome – we would never experiment...."

"Designers, like many others, started doing less and thinking more. A profession that straddled white..."

"I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating..."

EPICWIN

"Inspiration is about stimulation. It encourages the development of something new. We are often..."

It’s The Little Things :: Echo Enduring Blog

http://hackermonthly.com/ + http://magcloud.com/ipad = Fantastic. If you have an iPad, go download...