June 2012

This month I posted 4 entries, crafted 44 tweets, listened to 188 songs, bookmarked 2507 sites, took 5 photos and favorited 111 things.

Symbolset

Most web designers are familiar with the pains of creating image sprites for their icons. It’s easier with things like LESS, but still, sucks. The good folks at Oak Studios have created an icon set that is built into a font (a growing trend), which uses ligatures to insert the icons. For example, if you type “heart”, it will automatically insert the icon for a heart. Pretty smart.

Paul Ford's "10 Timeframes"

In said piece, Paul tackles time, its relative value, and your control over it. He also manages to write it beautifully, which I hope you’ve grown to expect.

There are 200 of you in this auditorium. So every minute I don’t talk saves about three-and-a-third hours of human time. That’s a pretty serious ratio. Every one of my minutes is collectively 200 of yours.

It’s worth your time.

The $4 Million Complaint Call

I’ll try not to give away the big reveal, but it’s a story of a hands-on CEO who benefits from doing the right thing.

I climbed out of bed, closed the door behind me, and spent the next two hours coaching Bob on how to configure the start-up options for Microsoft Windows. It wasn’t an issue with our software, but it was a problem for our customer, Bob-which made it our problem. At the end of the conversation, I thought we’d made a lot of progress. Bob was enthusiastic. I was hopeful.

The story also reminds you that successful companies are built very slowly. You’ll read that just about everywhere (except for Tim Ferriss books), but it can’t be said enough. Paying attention to details, having patience, and treating your customers like humans will almost always lead to success.