I’ve often wondered myself, does visual studio rot your brain? I openly admit I’m a vi and vim bigot. I used vi back in university, however, it wasn’t until my mks days that I solidified my bigotry. I worked primarly on a java codebase with the odd bit of awk or make files mixed in.

So without further ado, here are the top x reasons I’m in love with a text editor that’s name begins with the letters “vi”:

• Command mode. For me, that is the key feature in vi. I have access to my entire keyboard for commands instead of having to use key modifiers like alt, ctrl etc. I tried emacs, if I was good at chords I’d have played piano. This is also the biggest hindrance to new users adopting vi.
• I despise using a mouse. To be more precise I hate moving my right hand between my keyboard and my mouse.
• At times, I work in various operating systems, most of which have some flavour of vi out of the box. I know I can login to any *nix OS, open a shell and type “vi” and be up and running. Contrast that with an IDE like visual studio.
• I’m part of a club. Let’s face it, vi is a clique bordering on a cult. In order to get in the club you have to tolerate months, if not years, of being utterly unproductive in this crappy editor if you want to have any hope of getting in. The average person’s experience with vi consists of opening it, trying to type a line, getting three key strokes in before the computer starts beeping. They then look around the room for anyone who has any clue whatsoever how to close this shitty editor. After rebooting they type in “pico” and get back to work. It’s an editor that comes with a built-in hazing ritual. That alone is enough to solidify my love.

Being that we do a lot of time and materials projects at ClearSpace, tracking hours worked on what project is very important. I’ve recently switched from my trusty OO spreadsheet to using MyHours.

It’s an easy to use web-based time tracker that includes a mobile edition that works well on my blackberry. It’s also completely free at the moment. They claim that their “Basic Personal Account features will stay free to use.”

While this may at first appear to only apply to you if you’re doing consulting or time and materials type work, it may be worth checking out even if you’re a corporate man. I started tracking my hours at my last office gig as a means of figuring out where I truly spent my time. The first thing I realized was that I spent way too much time in meetings. Try it, you may be surprised or not, ignorance is bliss.

So I still sit firmly on the fence when it comes to hungarian notation in code. I’ve experienced it misused so badly over and over again that I’m hesitant to commit myself again. You can look into it’s history here (link courtesy of Joel). I will, however, say that I love it when used on database table indexes.

I find that prefixing a table’s index with “ix” makes life so much simpler. The table named “User” has an index named “ixUser”, “Role” has an index “ixRole”. It’s quite clear when you’re looking at the columns for User that the column “ixRole” establishes a relationship to a table called “Role”.

Contrast that with the myriad of databases I’ve seen with tables filled with index columns named “index”. How does that do anything for anyone? Or inconsistent naming where some indexes are “UserIndex” while others are “RoleId”.

Obviously the important part is being consistent but the ix prefix is where I’m at today.

Hugh pitched at idea for English Cut to limit their production to 100 suits a year. Apparently they’re now going ahead with it. As Hugh explains, this approach really brings focus to their team as it’s clear they have to nail the quality and service part as they can’t rely on increased volume or new business to make money. I love that type of clear focus and it gets me thinking how we can apply it at ClearSpace. How would that even work in custom software development where you have multiple clients running multiple projects?

Apparently not everyone’s in love with LogoWorks. I’ve created logo’s in the past for companies I’ve started or been involved with. Not being a designer in the least means I spent a lot of time looking at other people’s logos for inspiration. I suppose I’m okay with some overlap but I draw the line if someone is truly outright plagiarizing another logo.

I’m very curious to see what logos come back tomorrow.

I decided to give LogoWorks a shot at designing a logo for BlueTurbine today. We’re exploring a rename of ClearSpace and BlueTurbine is the most likely candidate. For the price, as low as $299, we figured it was worth seeing what they could come up with for a logo. Maybe it’d seal the deal in terms of us falling in love with BlueTurbine as a name.

LogoWorks blew my freaking crocs off. I was three pages into their four page ‘start a logo’ process when a few questions came up. I started flopping around their site looking for faq’s or a contact number. While doing that my phone rang. I answered to find a guy from LogoWorks on the other end calling to see if he could help me out at all. He proceeded to ask me some questions, we looked at some logos together, he took notes and before I knew it he said they had more than enough info to get started.

I suppose I’m used to most companies these days who drop the ball completely on customer service and just don’t get it. You want to talk to your customers. You should do everything you can to have meaningful conversations with them. Most companies instead do everything they can NOT to talk to customers as a cost-cutting tool. The extreme is my bank where they have the arrogance to charge me to talk to a human.

LogoWorks went the other way and made this process work by having me talk to a human for 10 minutes. Without those 10 minutes, they would have had poor information and most likely have come back with inferior designs leading them to believe their offering isn’t working or leaving me with a bad taste for their designers. Simple but brilliant.

I don’t have an MBA, don’t plan on getting one, and view that as a positive not a negative. I personally agree with Seth’s assessment of financial and social pressure although his comments apply to post-secondary school in general not just an MBA. Having said that, we can’t ignore what an MBA is intended to teach. On that note:

• Josh Kaufman wrote a ChangeThis manifesto titled The Personal MBA: Mastering Business Without Spending a Fortune. “If you care more about increasing your effectiveness at work than a diploma and a few lines on your resume, the “Personal MBA” is for you.“
• Rajesh Setty wrote an Ebook titled When You Can’t Earn An MBA: Thoughts on getting ahead without an MBA.

I haven’t had a chance yet but this is something I will try out, I’ll let you know how it works for me. With any team, especially a remote one, every meeting you book requires back and forth on the best date/time. It scales exponentially with every person you add to the meeting. We continually struggle with this and it takes up people’s time.

Mark Hurst has now added meeting maker functionality to their Goovite offering in an attempt to tackle this. Goovite is a “fast, free, easy invites, with no registration required”. Only question I have is why give it a name that will have people thinking it’s a google thing?

Bug tracking software for only $5, even Scoble linked to it. I admit I didn’t read the fine print, but it got me thinking, initial licensing costs for a bug tracking product would be the least of my concerns. Support, maintenance and upgrades are what I’d look at. The reality is it’s ugly and costly to migrate your data out of a bug tracker into a new product. So once the average customer is in, they’re in for the long haul.

Example, the Fogcreek boys charge a flat $2995 US rate to migrate your data out of your old bug tracker into Fogbugz. I’ve done that work for a client and that’s a reasonable rate and by no means outrageous.

A not-so-nice company could base their business on this type of lock-in model. Discount, or give away, the software, get clients in, get their data and then make it painful to leave. Create borders to exiting your product. (Note, I am by no means claiming this is the case with the above product.)

Most software companies don’t necessarily do this on purpose but don’t fool yourself into thinking some don’t. When I was with MKS, we spent a lot of time and resources moving new customers off old source control and issue tracking products onto ours. I was directly involved in building tools to make this process easier for our services team as it lowered barriers to entry for our products.

I went so far as to suggest several times to product management that we build tools to do the opposite, ie get our clients off our products. We had the tools to go one-way, it would actually be fairly simple to have them go the other way as well. We could then offer this up during the sales process. We will help you painlessly get off our products if you want to. We do not base our business on lock-in and only want you using our product if it’s serving you effectively.

Ah, needless to say product management never quite latched onto that idea.

So I’ve never really gone for this whole emoticon business. I don’t write “LOL” in emails, my message client Gaim doesn’t render emoticons so I get a lot of :), $;/ and whatever else that I really have no idea which emotion the person’s trying to pass along.

Why am I such an emoticon bitch? It just doesn’t work so I don’t bother. It’s hard enough to convey emotional context over the phone, but through a text based software application it’s just pointless so why try.

Years back I used to play some chess online in an attempt to learn how to play the game. I had no clue what “LOL” meant in the game chats. My first assumption, which lasted months, was Lot’s Of Love. I was getting loads of love until I figured out they were laughing at me.