Not the other one.
Having trouble seeing underscores in Terminal.app? Bump the font height slightly above 1 in the font dialog in the Terminal Inspector (accessible via Command-I or the “Windows Settings…” menu item).
There was a fantastic interview on The Daily Show last night with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of Carter’s administration and author of Second Chance. He was very sharp and reasonable and spoke very profoundly.
In reference to the period directly after 9/11 he said:
That was the moment of global solidarity which we then squandered by a war of choice in Iraq.
The clip is below via the increasingly excellent MotherLoad:
I’ve had consistently great service and uptime from TextDrive but today set a new record. Basil, one of their admins, managed to complete an email request (marked as not urgent) to upgrade MySQLdb in around 14 minutes flat, after I was blind-sided by a new dependency in Django. Highly recommended.
Via Daring Fireball, lots of interesting bits in this Fortune article on Apple. Their sales per square foot is hard to fathom:
And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.
But the thing that caught my eye was the genesis of the Genius Bar:
“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”
I don’t normally think of Apple being a company that would use a lot of market research. In fact I’ve read several times that they make a point not to. (And wasn’t the Newton largely a product of focus groups?) I guess the distinction here is that they are researching general market attitudes, not fishing for reactions to a design, which, as Gladwell has argued, is frequently misleading. It would be interesting to see how many guerrilla research projects of this type they conduct.
If you’re at all involved in marketing research you should definitely check out the ResearchTalk podcasts. They’re a collection of conversations, interviews, and conference sound bytes with various research industry luminaries. It’s surprisingly well produced and the hosts are very sharp. The Daily Research News Online bits in particular are worthwhile — they seem to hover around the 5 or 6 minute mark which makes for really easy consumption.
I wandered over to BarCampSydney on Saturday and it was much more fun and stimulating than I had expected. The number of startups represented was roughly equal to the number of attendees, or so it seemed.
Joel Pobar did a session on Google style scaling. It looks like those guys have put together a slick MapReduce implementation in .NET, all from a garage in Brisbane, no less. I wonder, though, whether it’ll be prohibitive tying a technology such as that to an operating system with a non-zero licensing cost.
Ben Hogan, an old colleague now part of the ThoughtWorks brotherhood, delivered a sermon on agile. I’m still not sold on forced pairing, I tend to defer to Mr Yegge on matters agile, but it was a class presentation, and loads of fun to catch up afterwards.
Mike and Marty gave a talk on all things startup. Marty was good cop, Mike was bad cop. It was loose and interesting and full of anecdotes. The one thing that stuck with me was Mike’s comments about keeping pricing simple. In industries that have complicated pricing structures, a simplified pricing scheme becomes a feature. Possibly even something remarkable, literally. iTunes with 99c songs, all-you-can-eat food and phones and bandwidth, the FreshView guys with email marketing tools at 1c per email. Definitely something to ponder…
