February 2012
1 post
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January 2012
12 posts
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WatchDr. Brian Goldman’s TED talk from this year’s TEDxToronto event has just been featured on TED.com. It’s a great talk and well worth your time
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“You have great ideas, but the only way you can feel ok about not realizing them...”
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Move. Eat. Learn.
This is what travel is all about.
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My Favourite Albums of 2011
In keeping with a somewhat regular tradition, I’m documenting here my favourite albums of 2011. If you haven’t listened to these, you would be doing yourself a favour to check some of them out.
M83 — Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Girls — Father, Son Holy Ghost
The Strokes — Angles
Bon Iver — Bon Iver
Real Estate — Days
The Kills — Blood...
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December 2011
2 posts
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Simple Computing or: Why Closed Systems Need to...
Over dinner this evening, my family and I began discussing some issues they’ve been having with their computers. The details of these techincal issues aren’t particularly important, but it’s worth noting that they all stem from multiple devices or components that aren’t playing nice together.
And so, as I tried to explain to my parents what might be causing these...
Feedback and Context in Web Design →
Here’s a blog post I wrote on my company’s blog on the importance of feedback in user experience design.
November 2011
8 posts
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Fembots
Me: do you think TSA robots would care if they saw your junk on those airport body scanners?
Jay: depends if they're kinky robots or not
Me: fembots
Jay: friggin fembots
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Adrian Ho on the Future of Strategy
Zeus Jones’ Adrian Ho recently blogged about his advice to young planners, and provided this great answer on the future of planning. I couldn’t help but copy it here as it’s so dead-on.
As you know, I believe that marketing is about doing things for people rather than saying things to them. A direct implication of this is that marketing ideas are things we do, not things we...
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WatchLiminal Phase. Great new band discovery. Just bought their album.
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October 2011
10 posts
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WatchFourCast 95: We’ll archive our brains, defy gravity, and colonize planets with SimCity Arcologies.
I was a guest on Tom Merritt and Scott Johnson’s FourCast podcast last night on the TWiT network. I had a great time chatting about my predictions for the future.
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Remembering Steve →
We gathered the old Mac Dose cast together to record a very special episode of the podcast last night. I’m really proud of this one and hope you’ll take some time to listen and provide some feedback.
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Mac Dose - Special Live Episode →
We’re getting the old Mac Dose crew back together for a very special live epsiode tonight to celebrate Steve Jobs and his influence on us. You can tune in live at 7pm EST/
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“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap...”
– Steve Jobs
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“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round...”
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Slowing Down, Looking Around
I’ve been going at life pretty hard for the past month or so. Between the combination of work, organizing TEDxToronto, and some kind of social event almost every evening, the pace has been a bit hectic. But I realized I was starting to wear myself out and spread myself too thin. So I forced myself to spend the past two nights at home recuperating, rebuilding, and doing some thinking about...
September 2011
21 posts
Whatever Happened to the iPad Rivals of 2010? →
How many of these did the media call “iPad killers” at some point?
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Disruptive Innovation and RIM
Upon re-reading Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ blog post about splitting off their physical disc rental business into a separate company called Qwikster, I was struck by a sentence and how it applies to so many tech companies:
Most companies that are great at something –- like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores -– do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they...
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A Flawed Historical Lens
Is there something in human nature that makes us consider time in blocks, rather than as a continuum? So often when looking back at history, we talk about months, decades, centuries, events, and pretend that they were events isolated in a bubble. That, for instance, the 80s just started and stopped one day. I don’t buy it.
A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing how, in his...
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Netflix spins DVD rentals into a separate company →
I have to say I’m quite surprised to hear that Netflix is launching a new company called Qwikster.1 The new company will take over their entire physical disc mailing business, while Netflix will be streaming-only moving forward.
The stated goal is to better focus resources on each of these products, which have their own cost structures and so on. Fair enough. It’s clear they have...
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20 Reasons Not To Date A Digital Strategist →
Pretty funny and fairly accurate. In response to 50 reasons not to date a graphic designer.
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Evolution
As you might have noticed, I launched a re-design of this blog today. One of my goals was to find a theme 1 that would be better suited to long-form text posts, of which I’m hoping to write a lot more in the coming months.
Years ago, I had a Wordpress blog where I would frequently write opinions on politics, technology, and other things. Over time, I let that blog stagnate and came to...
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