past

My mom is wicked smart. When I was a kid I would often say "I'm sorry" in a manner that wasn't good enough for her. She had a formula for how to apologize and amazingly enough it has proven enormously valid and useful. One drawback for me is now that I've been trained in how to apologize I insist on receiving apologies in this format from other people. They're not always so ready to do this and are sometimes genuine in their apology without doing the whole system, but usually I can recognize that and move on. Usually.

1. Look them in the eye

This is good advice whether it's about a handshake or an apology, but when you see kids apologize they will often look down when they do it. That's not good enough, you should look people in the eye. Perhaps you can't always look someone in the eye, but the real point here is to be genuine in tone and delivery.

2. Say I'm Sorry for X

Don't couch it in "I'm sorry for X, but..." or "I'm sorry for the misunderstanding." If you're really sorry you'll say what you did and not reduce the sincerity with limitations like "but." If you don't fully understand what you did wrong and why it was wrong from the perspective of the people you are apologizing you can never get better, and getting better is step 3.

3. Give your best assurance it won't happen again

People don't like being tricked twice. Give your best assurance that you will not let the event happen again. If you were careless offer to pay more attention. If you made a bad judgment call offer to get their advice.

4. Offer solutions and ideas to make them whole

If you can do something to fix the situation offer to do it. It's that simple. If you can't fix it you should at least acknowledge that it can't be fixed and offer to do something else to try to make it up to them.

This is great advice whether it's person to person or a company apologizing to their customers for a blunder or anything else.

This is a pretty simple recipe:

• 1 sweet potato
• 1/2 tablespoon butter
• Dash of cinnamon (to taste)
• Dash of curry (to taste)
• Dash of salt

Peel and cube the sweet potato and then boil the sweet potato for 20 minutes, or until tender. Drain away the water, add butter and potato to a mixing bowl and smash and blend as you would regular mashed potatoes. This serves as a side dish for 2 to 3 people.

You want to have some leftovers so you can make some sweet potato pancakes.

T

• 1 cup beef bullion
• Peel a couple of potatoes and cube them
• Peel carrots and make them bite sized as well
• Add a couple of chopped hunks of celery
• Dredge the beef "stew meat" in flour/salt/pepper and sear it in a hot frying pan
• Pour on chopped tomatoes
• Cubed onion
• Garlic
• Salt/pepper
• Bay leaves, oregano, taragon, cilantro?
• Red wine

Pour it all in the crock pot, with veggies on bottom, and cook for 2-4 hours until the meat is really tender.

So, I'm outfitting my office which has me thinking back to all the great articles I've read over the years about offices. There's Joel on Software's 12 Steps to Better Code which is largely just common sense of developer types explained using traditional business language. And Jason Calacanis about how to save money running a startup which is largely more of the same.

Cheap tables and Expensive Chairs (like... Aeron chairs)

Jason's tip that really resonated with me was this one:

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon[sic] chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters... invest in it.

This was the first "New Tech Meetup" that I've attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at "The Cup" in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like "The thing about Boulder is that there's more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here."

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the "polling" model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I'm not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: "We got $h*t to pop". Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn't 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What's the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I'm not a business guy....Let's say for now we're doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn't get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it's hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it's a fitness guide via cell phone that's for sale now.

I use a lot of firefox extensions. You might call me a power user. Yeah, that's right, powerful.

Here is the list of my favorites. They are broken down into extensions that make Firefox better, those that make my general life better, things for "geeky stuff" and things for my life as a web developer/sysadmin/competitve webmaster. Yeah, I'm competitive. My stable of sites is better than yours!

Enhanced Firefox

• Cute Menus - humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Download Statusbar - I want the information compact, in an overview, and readily visible. I hate new windows.
• Flashblock - I hate flash. It's amazing how much better the internet is without flash.
• Google Gears - Since I'm in places without internet pretty regularly, it's nice to be able to get my Google feeds in an offline mode.
• PageStyle2Tab - again, humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Image Zoom - Firefox lets me zoom text, image zoom lets me zoom images. Duh.
• Locationbar2 - Prettify the URL bar. Also happens to make it safer by clearly identifying the domain and downplaying the importance of subdomains (i.e. the phisher phavorite ebay.com.shadysitestealpasswords.com/enter-username is clearly visible as "www.ebay.com" as a subdomain of "shadysitestealpasswords.com". Whoohoo!

Enhanced Life