Category Archives: Asides

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I really enjoyed this HBR article by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh on “the New Employer-Employee Compact”:

The key to the new employer-employee compact we envision is that although it’s not based on loyalty, it’s not purely transactional, either. It’s an alliance between an organization and an individual that’s aimed at helping both succeed.

These are smart guys and this is a great read for any person working for (or managing) any business in any industry at any level. I especially enjoy the action items…

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From Alex MacCaw:

Culture can be hard to define, and it certainly can’t be created with mission statements and performance reviews. However, there are certain steps that founders can take to create an amazing place to work.

I think this is true. Culture evolves by people doing what they do naturally in their given environment. But, thinking about what that environment looks like and how its shaped has come to mind a lot more lately…

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We at Crowd Favorite get email notifications for every commit in the company. This leads to some fairly entertaining commit messages coming across. Mine typically consist of “oops, forgot semicolon” just because I don’t know what I’m doing. I can see how this site could take off pretty quickly in the developer community. (via @kottke)

Want your name in lights on the new “Credits” page in [WordPress 3.2](http://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/wordpress-3-2-release-candidate/)? This page shows up in all WordPress.org blog dashboards (but interestingly enough, not on WordPress.com). If you use WordPress every day it’s pretty easy to get involved testing, filing bugs, and submitting patches on [Trac](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/). I found two small bugs in the new Twenty Eleven theme in about 30 minutes and submitted patches in just as little time.

Add missing file extension to file names

For Mac users: if you ever happen to download a bunch of similar files and they’re all missing extensions (like a directory full of photos crawled using wget), here’s a quick one-line command to add the extension to all the files: for i in * ; do mv $i $i.txt; done;

On changing icons

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>“Since iTunes is about to bypass CDs in sales, we thought it was appropriate to ditch the CD.” – Steve Jobs on the new iTunes 10 icon

Ok, so when are you and the rest of the industry going to remove the floppy disk (which you killed) as a ‘save’ icon?

Your current possessions

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>You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
>1. Beautiful things.
>2. Emotionally important things.
>3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
>4. Everything else.

[The Viridian Design Movement](http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html)

Found via [David’s Log](http://www.davidslog.com/806912418/i-just-wanted-to-give-credit-for-liquidity-is-the) and [Tim Shey](http://tim.shey.net/post/810861819/credit-and-stuff), this is an excellent read on a recurring theme in thinking about possessions; from quantity to quality.

AmazonTote

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Place an order with AmazonTote and you get free batched “shipping” to your door once a week. No minimums, no obligations, no subscription. If you have Amazon Prime then you have two delivery days available each week. At first I thought this might cannibalize Prime subscriptions (I only have Prime so I can get free shipping in just a few days) but this just extends the benefit.