Letters Remain

Month: July 2008

  • Mamihlapinatapai

    This “most succinct word” is classed as one of the most difficult to translate. It’s definition is beautiful and painful… I can’t count the time I’ve experienced this. A look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could…

  • Transparent or Secret Salaries?

    Penelope Trunk—The Brazen Careerist—on why salaries should be transparent (and how to find out how much you should be paid). Who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company. You’d think that companies benefit from…

  • Peopleware and Private Offices

    A Field Guide to Developers is an article by Joel ‘on Software’ Spolsky. From reading this you can tell that Joel is a man who knows how to run a software house and how to keep staff happy. From it, I’ve also added another book to my reading list. Last year I went to a…

  • 37signals on Creating a Devoted Audience

    37signlas—creators of the book for software designers—have given us a round-up of how they built a devoted audience/client-base. From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention, experiments with new ways of selling our services, ways to show off our design thinking, etc. Here are a few…

  • Joel Spolsky on Strategy

    Trawling through the Joel on Software archive, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the Strategy Letter series. Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or…

  • Ayn Rand in Playboy (Interview)

    Playboy‘s 1964 Ayn Rand interview in full; a deep and prophetic discussion. PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life? RAND: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith,…

  • Time Lapse: Magazine Page Design

    You’ve likely seen this time lapse video of a magazine page being designed before: Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. Anyone who’s designed a magazine will recognise the process — a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at. via Kottke

  • Radiohead – House of Cards

    The Official Google Blog on the making of Radiohead’s latest music video; House of Cards: In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that…

  • Let Jesus Protect This Powerpoint

    Yes, that is a real quote. It’s from Jesus Camp, an incredibly interesting—yet infuriating and disturbing—documentary recording the indoctrination of North Dakotan children to Evangelical Christianity. I just had to search for The Creation Adventure Team after I saw a child watching the show in the film and came across this 3 minute segment –…

  • 10 Psychological ‘Mind’ Myths

    PsyBlog presents 10 psychological ‘mind’ myths that can catch you out: We Don’t Only Use 10% of Our Brains Blind People’s Other Senses are Not More Acute Why Psychology is Not Just Common Sense The Attitude-Behaviour Gap: Why We Say One Thing But Do The Opposite Newborns Don’t Bond Immediately with their Mothers (or Within…