Lars Pind

Shortly after I last posted about time tracking tools, Basecamp launched their time-tracking feature. It does the job and it’s nicely done, and I’ve been pondering over this for quite a while, and I still don’t think this feature justifies the additional cost of $456 per year. That’s more than what Microsoft Office costs, and you can keep that for as long as you want. I’m going to stick with Excel for now. It’s clear from the forum thread that I’m not alone on this.

I was so excited about RJS I just had to put Boxes and Arrows on edge rails so I could use it there, too. I figured if edge Rails was good enough for IconBuffet, it was good enough for us. Soooo nice :)

I’m spending a few hours today working at the Copenhagen IT University for the first time, and it’s bringing back memories. It reminds me of the days in 1999 when I had just moved to New York, but I had to come back to Copenhagen quite a bit because of visa issues. I would stay at a friend’s place on Istedgade and go to work for ArsDigita at a nearby internet cafe, bringing my own laptop, just paying to use the network cable. That was not only before wifi, but also before you could get DSL around here. Times have certainly changed. Now I just bring my laptop to the ITU, and there’s wifi, excellent workspace, a canteen, funy meeting rooms. What a rich country.

It also reminds me of my own days at the computer science department in Århus. Boy, had I known then what I know now. I remember reading about the first reboot conference. I really wanted to go. But the DKK 1500 price tag seemed way over my budget as a student, so I didn’t go. I probably should’ve.

David Galbraith: “Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers.” Perhaps this is why Olle likes my short posts? (Via Scripting News.)

Guy Kawasaki: “Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here’s what you should do. When you judge others, look at what they intended to do. When you judge yourself, look at what you’ve actually accomplished. This attitude is bound to keep you humble. By contrast, if you judge others by their accomplishments (which are usually shortfalls) and yourself by your intentions (which are usually lofty), you will be an angry, despised little man.”

Sounds like good advice to me. It’s quite easy to see the intention behind your own work, but every so often, especially when you show it to someone else, the gestalt changes and you can see it with their eyes—and it’s usually not as pretty as you’d hoped. It’s a good exercise to see if you can do that on your own: Squint your eyes, pull back a bit and take a fresh look.

Conversely, when you look at other people’s work, you only see the results unless you actively seek out or ask for the intention behind it. Which is usually a lot better than what you first saw. Lesson learned! ”;->”

Ran across this post by Thomas Fuchs a few days ago, and recalled it today when I needed to do several simultaneous updates to a page.

rake freeze_edge, write the template, remove the obsolete javascript functions and calls, and voila!, much nicer code, and working, too.

I’ve really been experiencing more joy from programming recently, it’s quite a ride. Thanks, boys!

Er der nogen der har mod på at åbne en Paradis is franchise? Om ikke andet vil jeg gerne lure dem deres teknikker af. Men for 800.000 kr udstyr mm. er alligevel en del.

You have to wonder why all the IM services haven’t made it dead simple to add presence to web sites. Yahoo has had it for ages, but this new SkypeWeb API from Skype is much neater—just add an extension or some URL elements, and you get different formats, even localized.

The SkypeJournal, where I found this via Om, even goes on to speculate about a Skype identity/authentication service like TypeKey or Passport, which would be an interesting addition to the space. Already I’m seeing more and more folks move their IM usage to Skype, despite the fact that their client is one of the worse in my experience (I prefer iChat). It’s pretty obvious that voice is a killer app, and the fact that they “own” that space means they can move into other areas. I wonder how far they can take this.

Ajaxian: “FireBug: It’s not your Grandma’s Javascript Console.” Installed!

I met with an old friend right before New Years. He told me how in the beginning of 2005 he’d decided to only do projects that he would only do great projects in 2005. He’s a film director, and so he would say no to commercials, and focus on making music videos where he was in charge of the whole thing, from idea to production.

Well, he did, and it worked. He didn’t make a ton of money in the past year, but now he’s getting calls from Depeche Mode and Coldplay to do their videos. That’s what I call a breaking through.

So I’ve decided to only do great projects in 2006. I’m going to pour my heart and soul and everything else that I’ve got into the projects that I do, and only take on projects where I know I can and will make a world-class product. Good enough just stopped being good enough.

It’s all too easy to slip into doing work that’s less than stellar. But if not now, when? Is there a better way to greatness than to make that simple choice?

I’ll be in London on the evening of February 7th, before the Carson Summit on the 8th. I’ll be staying at the Kensington Hilton, same as Jarkko, who I’ll meet with to discuss his thesis. Who else is in London? Want to meet up?

Jeg kan godt lide at lave mad, god mad, og det bliver til en del, når man gør det hver dag. Men der er områder hvor jeg godt kan mærke, at bøger ikke helt slår til, hvor jeg ville kunne lære mere ved at have en rigtig kok til at stå ved siden af mig og vise det.

Så hvad med om vi slog os sammen nogle stykker, og fandt en kok, som vi kunne hyre, og som kunne undervise os lidt i hvad vi nu mener at kunne lære? Jeg tror ikke det bliver svært at finde en kok, og man kunne være hjemme hos en af os, eller hos kokken selv.

Så fortæller vi hver især hvad vi kunne tænke os at lære, og så tager vi den derfra. Og så kan vi jo gøre det igen, hvis det bliver godt. Skriv dig på i kommentarerne, hvis du er interesseret.

Clayton Christensen: “Their time horizon is shorter than even that of even the shortest-term managers. So I don’t think it’s right to think of [these investors] as shareholders of your company. They’re investors who temporarily own securities in your company at a particular point in time. They’re responsible for maximizing the stock value of their investments. You as the CEO are responsible for maximizing the long-term health of your company. “

It’s good to hear some common sense in this department, after many years of the maximizing shareholder value mantra.

Seems there’s a parallel to the current debacle over the sales of Danish TDC: Should we manage for short term profit or long term growth? Here, management is voting for the short term, while one of the main investors (5.5%) is taking the long term view.

Mike Arrington: “Some people take the “rolling feature release” idea above to mean they can release half-baked stuff. [...] This is a bad idea. You will be crucified for wasting people’s time and they will leave brutal comments slamming your product.”

Strongly worded advice for people launching new web products. Maybe one should give one’s app another spin through the machine. ”;->”

I had to share this. The kid went absolutely crazy the first time she was in here new chair at the dinner table, eating with us. It cracked us up.

I just got most of my credit cards renewed last month. So now every time I use them online and have to enter the expiration date, I have to reach for the far bottom of the list of months. Dammit. I should’ve waited a few more weeks.

There’s a debate currently in Denmark about government support for innovation and research, particularly in small and medium businesses. The debate is centered around Højteknologifonden (The Hi-Tech Fund; page doesn’t work in Safari), which has impressed everyone by giving around US$ 2 million to Microsoft for developing an ERP system.

I have to agree with the critics such as Finn Helmer. This is no way to get more successful entrepreneurs, startups, innovators. And not just because it doesn’t work. Because it is downright hurting the goal.

Startups need to focus on one thing, and one thing only: The market. They need to develop a product and quickly get paying customers for it.

When you are doing true innovation, by definition you cannot know how the market is going to react in advance. And the details matter a lot—almost right can easily be as profitable as completely wrong. So you need to get out there before you’ve sunk too much money into it something that is almost guaranteed to be wrong in some respects.

The longer you wait hurts, not just because you will have wasted more money, but also because the more you have invested in something, financially and emotionally, the harder it is to change in response to the market.

For governments to throw in this kind of funding hurts in two ways. First, it allows entrepreneurs the luxury of waiting longer before they confront the market. But just as important, it diverts their attention away from the market, and into the rules and restrictions and processes surrounding the funding, something that is guaranteed not to contribute to market success. Now you have two masters, the funder and the market, and your goals are not likely to be aligned.

During my time as an entrepreneur (4 years so far), I’ve had countless offers from people wanting to do EU-funded projects. And they’ve always struck me as overly complicated, doomed to fail from the project definition alone, and generally suggested by people who weren’t all too busy serving a real market need.

I’m not sure what to do instead. A reading of Porter would suggest growing more sophisticated buyers. This might be what Finn Helmer is getting at when he suggests that we invest in high-speed internet like South Korea. It would also make distributed production and global selling cheaper. Then again, Porter may be too focused on the local market—it seems natural for startups in this age to sell to the global market from the get-go, like Skype.

I don’t know the answer, but I’m convinced that the notion that you can help people make it in the market by giving them support wheels is flawed. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve it.

I’ve been reading in my sick bed, and stumbled over this sentence in The Professional Chef’s Knife Kit from the CIA:

As with writing, your primary goal is to be as accurate and precise as possible, even if you aren’t working at lightning speed.

I think it’s worth noting, and not just for knife skills.

I’ve certainly had situations where I wanted to get fast a little too quickly, and it’s always come back to bite me later. If you do it fast but wrong, it’ll just stay wrong forever. Only by insisting on doing it right, will you learn to do it right.

This goes for web development, love, parenting, job hunting, learning Dvorak, and much more.

I wanted to share how I’m doing backups, something I learned from Anders Pollas. The solution involves two external hard drives, and SuperDuper!, a disk cloning software.

I have created partitions large enough for everything on my laptop’s hard drive on each of the external hard drives. Then I periodically clone the laptop to the external disks using SuperDuper!’s Smart Update feature, which only copies changes. It usually takes 30 minutes, where I do something else. I then alternate between the two drives, so that if something fails during backup (which is likely), I’ll still have a working copy.

The major benefit of this system is that I can plug the external drive into my Mac Mini (over FireWire, not USB), and boot from it, and immediately continue working from exactly where I was while my computer is away for repairs. Not worth doing for a hard drive replacement, but for something more serious, it’s an option.

With my Thinkpad, of course, I could have replaced the hard drive myself and saved the 1760 kr. ($280).

This brought a smile to my face. When I lived in New York working for ArsDigita, the company headquarters were in Cambridge and it was always a struggle to find good places to eat and drink, because we’d work late and go out late. It made it feel so good to be back in New York.

We always ended up at the B-side, as they had good food and were open relatively late. I also remember it being quite noisy and smoky.

Hard drives are fragile things that can easily break. And mine did so yesterday. A few months ago it started to make funny sounds when I moved the laptop around while it was on—you could hear the plates in the drive turn. I wasn’t sure if it was normal, but I can see now that it wasn’t.

I tried first to get it fixed through Fona where I bought it, but they were going to take 2 weeks. I called the repair shop they use, Elektronik-centret, and when I asked how long it would take, the kind receptionist made up all kinds of stories about how Apple didn’t have any regularity to their parts deliveries, until I pressed her to ask one of their technicians, and she discovered that they didn’t make any such repairs themselves, but instead passed them on to another company, Infocare. I called them, of course, and they weren’t exactly helpful, either. It would still take up to 2 weeks, even if I paid for everything myself. Jesus, it’s a frickin’ hard drive that needs to be replaced, there’s really no way to make it take more than an hour

That’s when I recalled that my friend Pollas had the same problem a while back. I managed to find the company he used, which was Office Line who happen to have their own repair shop in Allerød. I called a couple times, getting different messages, but finally ended up just going up there, hoping to wing it.

True to Pollas’s experience, I was immediately greeted by someone who recognized me from my blog (hi Preben). And thanks to some helpful people and an extra 800 kr., they agreed to do it on the spot, even though it was already past 2 pm.

I called Pollas to ask what hotdog stand he had gone to back in April, since clearly it had brought him luck, and there’s no reason to pass up an opportunity to establish a new tradition. So I went to the same one, and sure enough, when I got back, the machine was done ahead of time.

I have now reinstalled from backup, and I took the opportunity to get a bigger and faster hard drive installed, so now my machine is faster as well. Not bad. Hopefully it’ll now last me until the second generation Intel PowerBooks.

The lesson so far is that if you depend on your machine for work, it’s better to spend your money on repairs than on insurance. It may cost you more (then again, it may cost you less, that’s the nature of insurance), but at least you can get it done when you want, how you want.

Dave Winer discovers Guy Kawasaki’s new blog. Subcribed? Me too.

I read his book Art of the Start, and it is one of the best and most practical startup books I’ve read. I’d love to hear him speak when I have the chance.

Happy new year. Today marks one year since I quit smoking. Wohoo!

And no, it wasn’t a resolution, it just happened that way. I’m celebrating by being sick in bed, and not from drinking. What a way to start a new year. Sigh ”;->”