Electric Mind Control Blog

Today I released the first public release of a trivial little plugin for wordpress that I wrote.

It simply picks a random quote from a unix fortune cookie file, and inserts it into your wordpress template.

I wrote it when I created this blog, to enable that random tagline you see in the top-left, under the blog title.

For More Information, visit the GoodFortune Home Page

Or just download the GoodFortune Plugin now.

I was updating a site that was built using prototypejs, and needed an image carousel element.  I ran across the prototype-ui project, which has just the right kind of code.  While the documentation seems pretty good, there was no obvious (to me) “bare-bones” demo that I could peek at to see how to set up a basic carousel.  So, I made one, and put it up here: Prototype-UI Carousel Bare Bones Demo/Tutorial

The New Denver Ad Club hosted Jason Fried of 37signals the other night (Thursday, 7/31/08).  I convinced a couple of folks from the o2 Group to come along and listen to what he had to say.

It was a bit funny, watching the schism between product-centric people like Jason and client-services people (like most agency people) flare up.  However, I find that a lot of what Jason talked about was what I tend to agitate for when starting new client relationships.  Client-services people are generally terrified of saying things like “We think we can do something great for $X, let’s get started”.  My thinking is that if you do good work, and are worth what you’re getting paid, this can serve as a great filter for clients and projects.  Clients that want everything specced out, discussed, wire-framed, etc, before they open their checkbook are just asking for free work.

I managed to get a decent audio recording on my laptop, and took some notes.  Here are the notes and audio.  Perhaps I’ll add more commentary later:

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This little project prompted the creation of this blog.

After I suggested to some folks on the nyphp “talk” list that compiling your own daemons from scratch isn’t painful so long as you maintain some scripts to do it for you, Dan Horning called my bluff.

So instead of just dumping some stuff on a server, I went all out and created a blog (since I have some other code I want to publish sooner or later, anyway).

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