Link | Seth’s Blog: If you could meet one person…

Seth’s Blog: If you could meet one person… to help your business. Who would it be?

There is hope for the rest of us Seth says …

… the person who can help you the most is almost always someone who doesn’t appear that powerful on the surface.

Spinning Spinning Spinning – Cat Power’s Free

I’m diving deeper into Cat Power’s catalog. I just got You Are Free (2003)
There are sooooo many good songs. I’m playing song 2 “Free” alot right now. wow!
You can listen to it here on hype machine

40,000th Hit Today!

My blog is “Small and Steady”. The most popular posts are as expected — “in areas where I have expertise and provide something of value”. I enjoy writing about books, music, marketing, career mgmt, etc. It really helps me learn about those things. But you (the readers ) definitely prefer reading posts that are about something that I actually know something about

It’s also cool that the most popular search term is my name.

Here are the most popular posts (all time):

1. My longing for Amazon MP3 in Canada
   Amazon’s New MP3 Service – Not in Canada
2. Using BackupPC on Mac OS X
   • BackupPC on Mac OS X – part 1
   • BackupPC on Mac OS X – part 2
3. My observation that the “Internet network” is becoming less about network equipment and more about network applications
   Thinking About Network Diagrams For the Internet
4. My yahoo mail plus outage and resulting rant. After ten years I abandon Yahoo mail
   • re: Yahoo to Shaw e-mail problems
   • Whats with Shaw.ca mailservers and xxx@yahoo.com e-mail addresses?
5. My trials and tribulations with iGTD and Journlr
   iGTD Mac ToDo List Manager

Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas.

iMac Blue Vertical Lines :(

Serious bummer. My 2 year old iMac started to display a blue vertical line a week ago. The Apple dealer “fixit” price is 1/2 a new iMac. Of course I’m not alone on this one. ( ie it’s far too common). There is a blog dedicated to Blue Vertical Lines

I’ve been a dedicated Mac fan since my first Mac SE in the late ’80s. But this is really bugging me.

I wonder if I’ll be as tenacious as these guys http://imaclines.blogspot.com/

TV Addictions – Smallville

Our house is in the midst of an addiction to Smallville. Yes that show about Superman’s teen years. It’s lotsa fun. I like watching Clark learn about his powers and where he comes from. It’s a good mix of action, long-term-story, teen angst, teen love/lust, superman history, etc.

It would make a great christmas gift. But beware. You’ll be mainlining discs at a rapid pace.

My Music — A Dozen From 2008

2008 was a strange year for me. My favorite album Jukebox was purchased in January, and didn’t get a ton of play until the fall. My most listened to album was the extremely quiet Music For Airports (LIVE) by Bang On a Can. (My family felt very tortured). I picked up the pace with Jive Soweto, Santogold, and Army Navy. Jason Collett is one of those guys that didn’t grab me at first, but I’m still playing it a lot months later. M. Ward’s new gig She & Him is a lot of fun. I really like the noise of The Raveonettes. Gui Boratto’s Beautiful Life is very additive. Thievery Corp is Theivery Corp. I found Attack & Release a bit disappointing, but still played it a ton.

Finally, Sigur Rós continue to be amazing!

DD-WRT | Fixing Home Router Slowdowns

If you’re experiencing home router slow/melt downs this DD-WRT note on Router Slowdown may be helpful

• Go to the Web Interface of the DD-WRT Device and log in
• Go to ‘Administration’
• Go to ‘Management’
• Enter the following values at ‘IP Filter Settings’
  • Maximum Ports: 4096
    (For an 8MB RAM model set it no higher than 1024)
  • TCP Timeout (s): 300 is a safe choice.
    default 3600. Change to 90, up to 500. (lower if you must have many TCP connections).
  • UDP Timeout (s): 300 is a safe choice.
    default 3600. Change to 90, up to 150. (lower if you must have many UDP connections).

The source of these slowdowns should not be a surprise

Useful Mac OS X Software Dec 2008

Here’s an update wrt/ “Useful OS X Software” posts.

I’m really liking the Smultron text editor and Sleep Display. My kids are liking SketchUp 3D drawing. I had to do some work on the “Dark Side” (ie Windows) laptop this summer. I found Notepad++ text editor and Strawberry Perl very useful for editing and running perl scripts developed on mac onto a PC.

Smultron is a text editor. I’ve now fully switched from textwrangler. I like the “command and snippet” features. The one thing that I’d wish it had is ability to save searches. But I can work around this by creating & saving perl search commands. (ie perl -pe s/FIND/REPLACE/g; %%p)

Sleep Display does exactly what you think. It works great for Skype phone calls. I find the screen distracting during phone calls. Turning the screen off is very useful

My kids really like’s Google’s SketchUp 3D sketching software. They’ve been drawing all sorts of cool stuff.

Strawberry Perl was a big find for me this summer. It allows one to embed perl code into PC world .bat files.

I’m still Experimenting with CLIX and Lingon

Link | The product manager’s lament » Eric Ries’ Lesson’s Learned

The product manager’s lament Good discussion of Product Manager hell and some possible solutions to it

fyi … Eric Ries’ startup used the “customer development” model developed by Steve Blank. Eric’s blog Lessons Learned has lots of good posts describing issues in “customer development” and discussion of how technical staff fit into it.

Link | The making chasm » Seth’s Blog

ouch. Seth Godin unleashes another gem today.

Link: “In my exposure to companies big and small, this is probably the single biggest gulf. Lots of people there for the ride, not so many actually doing.“