Monthly Archives: March 2009

Back Home—Home Always Feels Nice

We’re back in St. Louis after a day trip up to see Amanda’s mother and visit with her while she recovers from surgery. The good news is that it looks as though she is doing much better than even yesterday, but we still do not know when she will be able to leave the hospital.

Amanda and I thank you for your prayers and wishes for her recovery and for our safe travels. Thankfully, the children made the trip with a minimum of fussing. They really were very well-behaved in response to our asking them to bear over twelve hours in the car.

Tomorrow is a day for getting some web work completed and also for relaxation.

First Responsibilities

The family and I are packing up this morning and leaving for the day to make the trip north to Chicago to visit Amanda’s mother.

She continues to be hospitalized in intensive care due to complications following normally routine surgery. The situation appears to be more serious than we had first understood.

We would appreciate your prayers both for safe travel and for her continued recovery.

Have We Learned From "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"?

Seth Godin:

A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. When I started my first web combany fifteen years ago, the idea that you could be successful with six or ten employees was crazy, but today many of the most successful companies have not many more than that. That’s 15,000 fewer employees than eBay has.

It’s tempting to get bigger. But is bigger better? In many cases, it’s worse, particularly when you can leverage reliable systems that are cheaper and faster and more stable in the outside world. If you can make your product better by assembling it yourself, you should. But if that action makes it worse, why do it?

Is your organization too big? Too small? Just right?

I Hear They Serve Coffee-Flavored Coffee

Michael Kelly:

The reason we have something to learn is that we have tried to be Starbucks. We’ve tried to be slick, trendy, and hip. We’ve tried to be a place that is non-threatening and easy to come to. And when you walk in, you see beautiful people in holy jeans and black glasses, all looking very intellectual and hair-frosty. Additionally, we have tried to make church a low-demand environment, much in the same way Starbuck’s is. It’s low demand in that even though the basic premise of the store is selling coffee, some people don’t even go there for coffee at all. And nobody’s going to pressure them about the coffee. That sounds familiar, too.

A good point.

(via Cyberbrethren.)

Are You a True Believer?

Mark Hurst, on Good Experience:

New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.

What we need is new thinking. We need some true believers to stand up and say: we’re going to serve the patient, serve the traveler, serve the student, serve the customer, rather than follow the script of the past. No longer will we make them pay, or wait, or suffer only because we can get away with it. Now we will work in their interest, because it’s the right thing to do for them, and it’s the right thing for us in the long run.

Read the whole thing.

Something for Nothing Can Make You Something

Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired.

I don’t expect that to draw you in for a very exciting post. What I do want to share with you is that he believes that the future of commerce and business, especially over the Internet, is in giving things away for free. An article about this very subject was the cover story in Wired about a year ago, and Anderson is writing a book that will be out in July called, simply, Free.

Pay attention to this one, because it’s possibly very revolutionary and is likely to turn some heads. He thinks you should be giving stuff away in order to make money.

He’s not necessarily talking about the Gilette model, either:

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

As examples, he mentions that after experimenting with paid content, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are now free to read on the Web (excepting some information in WSJ). At the time of this writing, I can even browse NYT on my iPod touch, using an application they wrote that is also free to download.

Continue reading →

Photo Album: 桜

Last year, we planted a flowering cherry tree in our front yard. By the time we bought it, it had already flowered for the year. This is the first year we’ve been able to see it in bloom. The 桜 (sakura) appear in bunches of three on the branches. It’s not overly impressive yet, but I imagine as it matures, it will become very impressive to see.

As we are scheduled for some rough weather in the next couple of days, I decided to take some pictures now while the blossoms were still in one piece. I hope to take some pictures a little later after more of the buds have properly opened.

Perhaps we’ll grab a picnic blanket and lunch and celebrate 花見 (hanami). It’s nice to have a fun connection—however tenuous—both to our nation’s capital and to friends who live quite far away.