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A Bright Beginning

August 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Colorado Bright BeginningsI am very happy to announce that today I accepted the position of Chief Operating Officer for Colorado Bright Beginnings.

Colorado Bright Beginnings is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to provide a bright beginning for all Colorado children by helping families support their children’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development during the critical first three years of life.

The Executive Director, Jean McSpadden, and the staff are all talented, bright, and passionate people and I am excited to work with them for this great cause. Moreover, the formidable CBB board of directors is ambitious and determined. I am honored to have been chosen to play a key role in making their vision a reality.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , , , , ,
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“I write to find out what I think.”
-Stephen King

Moreover…

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
-Joan Didion

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Who Made That Soy-Sauce Dispenser?

June 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It took three years for Ekuan and his team to arrive at the dispenser’s transparent teardrop shape. More than 100 prototypes were tested in the making of its innovative, dripless spout (based on a teapot’s, but inverted). The design proved to be an ideal ambassador. With its imperial red cap and industrial materials (glass and plastic), it helped timeless Japanese design values — elegance, simplicity and supreme functionality — infiltrate kitchens around the world.”

Filed Under: Design Tagged With: , ,
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2012 WWDC Specials

June 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This week is Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference and some of the best software companies are trying to raise their profiles. This means there are some killer software deals right now. Here are some of my favorites for productivity:

  • 1Password (20% off) Simple password storage for Mac, Windows, and iOS. You are nuts if you don’t use this. I trust it with my 725 logins/passwords, all my personal license keys, and all my financial account numbers. Nothing could be easier: Go to a website, hit a key, and it automatically fills in the correct username and password information and logs you in. No lookups, no searching, just BAM and your in! And if you have multiple devices, it keeps them all in sync via Dropbox. Just get it. (And if you don’t have Dropbox, get that too. It’s free.)
  • Pixelmator (50% off) For me, it’s a full-blown Photoshop replacement. So much easier and faster for editing graphics and photos.
  • OmniFocus (50% off) If you are a GTD (Getting Things Done®) fanatic, this is the only tool you need to wrangle your Todos and Action Lists. It’s made for busy people managing complex projects.
  • OmniGraphSketcher (50% off) Create elegant and precise graphs with data from any source. So much better than Excel graphs for presentations!
  • Fantastical (50% off) Menubar Calendar app for iCal. My primary calendar tool.
Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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If you’re absent during my struggle,
don’t expect to be present during my success.

-Will Smith

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“Please Do Not Climb on Rocks”
What?

20120601-132035.jpg

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Having not found any useful information on the topic, I created a stub for interstitial suspension on Wikipedia.

I can’t wait for next year’s presentation on “How to Use One Piece of Toilet Paper”.

Update: I’ve been trying this and it’s remarkable how well it really works.

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Coffee Math

May 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment


I happened upon the interesting formula below while reading about cooking thermometers. I understand that fountain drinks are even more profitable.

Coffee

Great Coffee = Great Profits

One location
Buys coffee at $14.00 per pound
Using 4 ounces to brew a 64 ounce pot
Serving an 8 ounce cup
32 cups per pound of coffee
At 100 cups per day, with 50 refills at no charge
Selling each cup at $1.95

At 54 cents per cup COGS, you profit $44,484.38 in one year
Can you afford NOT to serve delicious coffee?

Source: http://componentdesign.com/article/coffee-math

What sort of “coffee” can you easily add to your business?

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , ,
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How to Reduce and Optimize PNG Images

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Let me start by stating:

  • I’m not a web-designer.
  • I’m a hack at Photoshop.
  • I’ve fumbled with Pixelmator and Acorn.
  • If your working in Windows, I can’t help you.

I build a lot of web site concepts and write a fair number of blog posts. Regardless of which I’m working on, I like my sites to look good and open quickly. The key to both of these goals is to use nice screen-optimized images.

If you just take the picture you snapped with the 8 megapixel camera in your new iPhone and upload it to your site, it may look great, but the file size will be gigantic. Large images load slowly and that will annoy your visitors.

What’s the problem?

Design215's Megapixels ChartLarge image sizes allow you to print large photos. According to the handy Design215 Megapixels Chart, a photo taken by an 8 megapixel camera has a pixel resolution of 3264×2448 and will look very nice when printed as an 8×10 inch photo at 300ppi (pixels per inch). What does that mean? It means your image will look nice when printed. The more megapixels, the more you can enlarge the printed photo without it looking pixelated or blurry.

Pie 113kb

Meh. 113KB Pie.


The thing is, most computer screens only display 72ppi, which would, if my math is correct, display your 8 megapixel image at around 42×32 inches. That is considerably bigger than my monitor, or for that matter, my dining room table. This is a ridiculous size, of course, so you will probably specify that WordPress (or whatever) constrain the image to fit on a normal web page at, say, 300×219 pixels. What happens to all that extra detail and size? Nothing. Your site visitors will have to load your entire giant image yet it will display the same as if it were a less detailed, much smaller image.

Why not just use a less detailed smaller image in the first place?

Because that doesn’t make you want to buy a new camera. Sorry, I mean, great idea! Here is what you do: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Geek Stuff Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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We live in an age when being invisible takes some creativity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIGzpi9lCck