July 2000

About a week and a half ago I went on a retreat to Sweden with about 30 other Razorfish employees. In preparation we were to think about our vision for ourselves and the company, among other things. My vision was a bit idealistic, or so I thought at the time. I think of all this…

“It’s as if we’ve landed on Mars and we’re constructing a commercial and business setting.” — THOMAS VARTANIAN Chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Law of Cyberspace That comment, from the article Net may need cyber-borders, really speaks to the megolomaniacal nature of attorneys these days. Listen folks, just because there’s no…

Some amusing want ads. I especially like this part: “…You will have at least three years experience of doing jobs for which you have no skill or aptitude, ideally in a Unix environment…”

IBM’s Pervasive Computing Glossary, and a whole issue of the Systems Journal dedicated to pervasive computing. Surfing around IBM’s sites I actually noticed how easy they were to read and navigate. Although I design web sites for a living I’m rarely struck by this. Kudos to the Ease of Use team.

Upbeat article on Razorfish. I think the cult-culture is overdone a bit, you don’t have to “drink the Koolaid” to work here. Nice photo of the CEO’s dog, Sophie, on the cover, though.

Bill Gaver has produced some fun work lately. I returned to his page as I’m researching auditory interfaces, and he has several papers available for download. I especially like his idea of everyday listening.

I think I’m averaging about a post/minute this weekend. Just shows how my life descends into utter geekiness when Sarah’s out of town.

Amazon.com is five years old. The original home page is funny in a quirky way, and the timeline is not only interesting, it’s downright hilarious.

Found the Mac version of a Gnutella client, Mactella, but I was unsuccessful after several attempts of trying to download files with it. It’s almost ready for prime time though. This reminds me of something I wanted in the early days of FTP and the WWW: task based downloading. I want to tell the program,…

Just discovered Gnutella (how did I miss this one?). At first glance it doesn’t seem much different than an FTP/WWW server/search engine for everyone, which Apple started shipping with the OS a while ago. A key difference is that this is anonymous; It seems you can’t reference a server by an IP address; your identity…

A while ago I ran an experiment testing the acuracy of the 5-day forecast. While my sample was small, I found the forecast for the 5th day had only a 50% chance of nailing the basics (precipitation or not, significantly higher or lower than the average temperature). After reading a great article by Howard Rheingold…

I had to edit the below post once I learned some more about the IAM situation. The reality of the situation is just not as significant as the Standard article sounds.

TheStandard.com: IAM Sues Razorfish for Poor Design. IAM, among other things, is looking for “a formal declaration that the five-day period in Razorfish’s contract is legally unconscionable.” What happens if the contract is declared “legally unconscionable”? Will a judge sentence the developers to 10 Sundays in church?

In the New York Times this morning, a story about the Tour de France mentions a statue to Tom Simpson, a rider who in the 1960s cycled himself to death. Like the Vasa entry below, it struck me as another example of a European country praising a somewhat disturbing failure. I wonder if Amercans are…

Regarding business plans, Lane at Deepleap (an actual startup) has some oh-so-helpful advice: most of the people these days — and they’re pretty much all vcs [ venture capitalists ] — recommend you don’t bother with a full biz plan, and just do a 6-8 page executive summary, since it’s all they’re going to read,…