The Food Blogging Technician
–Chris Guillebeau
Posted in advice.
– August 5, 2011
dim for as integer
dim loop as integer = 10
dim next as integer = 12
for for = 1 to loop
goto:
if for > loop then
for next = loop to for
exit loop
next next
else
goto goto
end if
next for
for = next + loop
Posted in Humor.
– July 29, 2011
Posted in advice.
– July 22, 2011
Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning.
Any problem can be made unsolvable if enough meetings are held to discuss it. — Don Guinn
Posted in advice.
– July 15, 2011
Posted in advice.
– July 8, 2011
If you’ve been online long enough to have found this article you’ve probably seen, or even participated in, a flamewar. Seen from the outside, you know you’re looking at two people exactly like this guy:
Duty Calls
You don’t normally see flamewars in real life except in special-interest forums: politics, academia,[1] sports,cosmology.
Then there are those special people, the polyflamers who will argue on any topic. No, not lawyers. Geeks.
Something in the geek psyche makes them — okay, us — prone to obsess over pedantic distinctions that ordinary people just don’t care about. If you think about flaming in geek terms, though, you see a way out.
When writing code, a programmer usually writes instructions that are in (somewhat) human-readable form. These instructions are then “compiled” into commands that a computer can interpret and execute. If the output from the computer is wrong, either the commands the programmer entered were wrong, or the compiler didn’t work correctly.
Experienced programmers quickly learn that it’s very unlikely they’ve found a new compiler bug. If there’s a problem, it’s almost always the code they wrote. Sometimes, though, there really is a bug in the compiler. Compilers can get fixed, but not quickly, and not often. The changes have to be small enough that they don’t introduce new problems. And they will potentially break any code that was designed to work around the bugs. Which is exactly what programmers do: They work around the bugs.
Now think about a political campaign as a computer program. The campaign staff is writing instructions (commercials) that they hope will cause the public to exhibit specific behavior. But the target platform is the brain of each individual voter. Each one has its own rules, so every compiler works differently. But here’s the important part: You can’t fix the compiler. No matter how broken you think someone’s thinking is you can’t change the basic rules.
What you can do is figure out what rules they’re using. Which means stereotyping people. pigeonholing them based on a few characteristics you’re sure of, and assuming that a whole bunch of other things are probably also true. The sad fact about humanity — sad if you’re a fan of individuality, that is — is that this tends to work pretty well.
So now that you know each brain is wired differently, and you don’t have much chance to “fix” it, what are you supposed to do about it? Stop using arguments that work on you, and start using ones that work on them. Whoever “them” happens to be at the moment.
Posted in Uncategorized.
– January 15, 2011
Photo by egavad / per
If you like dirty jokes, go check out this one from Penny Arcade, then come back.
Read it? Okay, look at that last panel:
They can’t cut out the middle-man! The middle-man is the whole point!
This is a good lesson for any small business owner, or the people who do marketing for them.
When you’re a chef, sometimes you want someone else to cook for you specifically so it’s not just like you always do it. Sometimes it’s not just okay to be a middle-man. Sometimes that’s exactly what your customers want.
Same for garbage collectors, travel agents, crime scene cleaners. You’re not doing anything your clients couldn’t do. They just don’t want to. If they don’t want to badly enough, you can make some serious money doing it for them.
This works for managers, too, but for a different reason. Don’t hire people who will do everything just like you. Hire people whose skills don’t completely overlap yours, and let them use those unique skills. If your employees do everything just like you would, you keep hiring copies of yourself. That’s not a good strategy. (Unless you’re perfect.)
Posted in management.
– September 27, 2010
Based on a request from one of the users, I just updated the Recipe Card Creator plugin to include “branding”, a text string you can configure to automatically appear at the lower-right corner of each card. This can include the name of your blog, a URL, whatever text you want to include. Here’s an example:
Posted in WordPress Tips.
– August 16, 2010
No, not that. I mean your first time reading your favorite marketing blog. It wasn’t your favorite at the time, but something made you stick around. Do you remember what it was?
Odds are, that day was nothing special to the blog’s author. Just another day, just another post. They didn’t know you’d be coming by for the first time today.
But there was something good there, something worth seeing. Something worth coming back for.
A reporter was talking to Joe DiMaggio after a late-season game, after the Yankees were already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. DiMaggio had made a spectacular running catch. The reporter asked why he would risk an injury in a game that didn’t matter. DiMaggio told him:
There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.
Most people don’t see your site for the first time just as you’re starting a launch. They show up in the middle of the launch, before it starts, after it’s over.
What will they see?
– June 10, 2010
