I’ve been using some simple translation techniques to manage passwords that I’m forced to change on a regular basis. As well, I have the beginnings of an application I wrote to store my passwords. As with anything I’d much rather use something already written than building something from scratch but to this point I’ve never found anything I’ve been willing to use fulltime.

I’ve been testing KeePass and I think I like it. It has every feature I could want plus a few I hadn’t thought of AND it’s open source. Why does it matter to me if it’s open source? Basically I know it either has a future through it’s main developer keeping it moving. If that isn’t the case then someone else can take it over or I can manage it myself. I don’t have to worry about a company closing up shop or jacking up fees etc.

I returned today from a few days off. A few meaning barely three days, not a real vacation by any means. Even in that small amount of time I managed to accumulate enough emails to require several hours of culling and triaging. Ah yes, the promise of the digital world where we’re all optimized and empowered by the digital communication tools at hand.

I hate to piss on anyone’s parade with my seemingly luddite rants but this sucks. All we’ve done is flip the funnel. In communications, the burden used to be on the sender. You had to write a letter, buy a stamp, walk to the post office, or at the very least pick up the phone. If I didn’t answer you had to leave a message or try calling back. It made you think twice about what it was you were communicating because it took time out of your day to do so. The result being that you performed more triage on your end. Ah, maybe I don’t need to talk to him about that, or maybe I’ll just mention it when we see each other next month?

Now that we’ve flipped the funnel and made it too easy to send communications, the sender has little to no burden. Send, send, send, cc, bcc away and let the receiver to the filtering. This same problem exists in digital photography. In the olden days, you had to take your film in, drop it off for processing, pick it up, and most importantly pay for it. With digital photography, you no longer have to worry about whether you’ve got the right shot. Shoot it ten times and worry about it later. Well when’s later? All that filtering, editing, and processing is now flipped as you accumulate thousands of digital pictures you have to ‘go through’ some day.

Maybe I should start charging ten cents to the sender for every email I read through?

Tad, Rudi, Mark and storystream kids have a new site. I’ve never been a fan of flash based sites but they deserve credit for building a flash site that isn’t completely obnoxious. Even though the navigation is unique in each area, it’s still simple to figure out and use.

I know they’ve done something right when they have me considering using flash on our site. Considering I said.

In reading this, the vim tutorial part surprised me:

“Feedback overhead on irc from Damian’s vim tutorial: hardwarehank: ahhh the vim tut is friggin aawesome. Damian said someone leapt up after the third vim technique and testified: “WOO! This was worth the tutorial cost alone!”. I love it when I follow my gut and the instinct pays off: who would have thought that he’d have about a hundred people in a tutorial room for a tutorial on vi?!”

It’s easy to assume everyone else knows what you know, or more. While I’m far from being advanced, I do understand how to use some of the more advanced vim capabilities referred to in this tutorial. Would anyone be interested in some straight forward tutorials on them being posted here?

If you don’t use vi(m) and were intriqued by my previous post, take a peek at this and join the cult.

Tom reminds us it’s about sales NOT marketing. It’s interesting that sales has taken on that dirty word status. The idea that marketing’s fine but whatever you do, don’t sell me something.

These guys were mentioned on a recent twit. The twit site is built on drupal and those guys helped build it. They seem to be taking an approach we’re always discussing when it comes to simple website development, that is using drupal to build sites but making sure they don’t actually look like ‘drupal’ sites.

No one should be building simple websites by hand anymore. Use drupal or one of the blog engines so that you’ve got a publishing platform underneath.

We’re contemplating building our new site using drupal in contrast to the new CreationStep site which we built on WordPress. Oh, by the way, our brand new CreationStep site is now live.

For a high end example of what you can do with drupal, check out the onion which is built on drupal. Can you say 5 columns?

I’m a huge fan of wikipedia. It really takes some time getting used to reading an encyclopedia like format that’s truly live. We’re conditioned to date shift information like this based on the published date, or at least I am. I was curious about some technical bits related to the World Cup and in looking at the page today noticed this:

“The current Cup holder, Italy, follows with four titles, while Germany holds three.”

I thought, wait a minute Italy didn’t win the last World Cup before remembering that this was live information and it was referring to the World Cup awarded yesterday. In looking at this page’s history, it’s been updated over 50 times since the final yesterday. That’s cool.

Of course, I am slightly concerned about all these elves spending their lives updating wikipedia. I hesitate to suggest they get a life because I’m hooked on this live info. Um, keep up the good work.

Ok, so this may not be the ideal place to post about sports topics so I’ll just say I’m with Andrew on this. I’m doing my best to watch some world cup games, I swear.

“There is more action in five minutes of hockey than in your average 90-minute game of soccer”

I’m not a user interface designer, maybe I should be as I always seem to have strong opinions about it. I always push the idea of allowing users to grow within an interface. New users have a way to learn the interface within interface itself. As they grow, and work towards becoming power users, the interface gets out of their way and let’s them be power users.

Seth had a recent post related to training wheels that applies nicely. More software interfaces need training wheels that you can remove when you’re ready to go.