December 27, 2006 – 4:37 pm
Do you want to be an expert at something? Expertise is important, but don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Focusing on getting better and better and constantly evaluating your work against some external standards, or worse, taking other people’s evaluations as objective truth, can slow or stop the creative process entirely. Some activities […]
December 22, 2006 – 3:56 pm
Disclosure: this post assumes knowledge of baking techniques and an appreciation for classic cookie recipes. There will be no mention of SOAP or REST except when I instruct you to wash up with SOAP before stirring the dough or tell you that you must take a REST before we decorate the cookies.
Following along my thoughts […]
December 21, 2006 – 8:08 pm
Tagged by James and Amy. Five things you might not know about me.
1. I know how to build a latrine. When I was sixteen, I lived in a rural village in Mexico for eight weeks, where I helped the townspeople to build latrines with the goal of slowing the spread of intestinal diseases. I actually […]
December 17, 2006 – 5:46 pm
January approaches; time to figure out what we want to make happen in 2007. Here are my goals for the coming year:
Get a book contract. That list of top technology books of 2006 really bummed me out. Where are the women? So maybe I can’t get a book published in 2007, but I bet I […]
December 17, 2006 – 4:12 pm
This blog started slowing down in the past couple of weeks. I tried dropping tables I didn’t need and optimizing the rest, but it was still sluggish, even using phpMyAdmin to access it. I’ve solved the problem, but in case anyone else runs into something similar, I wanted to share my experience.
Don’t bother calling GoDaddy […]
December 13, 2006 – 6:07 pm
From Ellen Langer’s On Becoming an Artist:
Mistakes, like all evaluations, are context-dependent. In one context a mistake is an error, while in another it can be a surprise advantage. Others have spoken to the dual nature of mistakes but typically in reference to grander events. We all have heard that “there is opportunity in chaos.” […]
December 11, 2006 – 9:38 pm
I’m really pleased that Judi Sohn has joined Web Worker Daily. Her first post is up now: 11 Tips for Time Management in a Web Worker World.
Welcome to the team, Judi! We’re thrilled to have you.
December 10, 2006 – 4:36 pm
I read Michael Goldhaber’s draft chapter on how attention works for his book on the economics of attention this morning. I have many thoughts after reading it, but no firm conclusions, so this post is of the thinking out loud type.
What’s the context? That clearly we need a post-industrial economics, something other than an economics […]
December 2, 2006 – 1:08 pm
I’ve been playing around with Ajax start pages today. I plan to review the more popular ones for Web Worker Daily or perhaps just write some sort of feature article about using them, but so far I’ve just felt frustrated by them. They are so far from doing what I want.
The three I’m trying so […]
