What's your core competency?

Playing off my earlier post, Duncan talks about buying a laptop in an emergency. I had a similar situation once too: my MacBook (then my sole machine) had been afflicted by the random shutdown problem that some early units had. I can't exactly remember what I was working on, but it was about six days before I had a major deadline.

The next day, I went out and bought a Mac mini and delivered on time.

Duncan says:

This is a lesson I need to figure out how to apply to other decision making processes in my business when I’m not up against a wall. For example, I think that I’ve agonized way too much over figuring out what my next storage solution should be. At some point, I’m going to have to just pull the trigger and get out there and make more photographs.

I think the key question here is this: what's your core competency? The smaller a business you are, the more critical your focus on that core has to be.

For Duncan, his competency is delivering a great shoot to his clients. For me, it's delivering robust, well-designed, well-supported useful Macintosh software. I'm not a great web designer, nor a payment processing expert, nor a crack webserver sysadmin. So I outsource two of those three, and burn with shame at how ugly the site is.

For me, running Connected Flow on what is still a minority of my working week, time savings are of the essence. Here's one example where I did spend the money: when I added a second 30" Cinema Display to my Mac Pro. The efficiency gains are incredible when you can look at four code windows side by side at the same time, each showing 200 lines of code, with a run log across the bottom. When I come home from school, get the kids down at 7 and sit down to 3 hours of coding, I know that I can more done, faster and with less frustration on these big displays.

My core competency isn't flipping windows, it's writing code. Investing in better tools to do that makes all the sense in the world.

Coverflow Hater

I'm generally a pretty easy-going guy on UI matters, but one Apple innovation that I absolutely cannot stand is Coverflow.

It seems to me that Coverflow replicates everything that is frustrating and unpleasant about looking for something in the real world. In stark contrast to the organised drill-down structure and instant searching of iTunes' library views, Coverflow brings you ordering on one axis and the need to flip through item-by-item.

At least, with Coverflow on the new iPods, you can go from start to finish in a continuous spin around the click-wheel. On the iPhone and iPod touch, it's an even more tedious and inaccurate flip-flip-flip action. Simply put: Coverflow, compared to the iTunes library, is the difference between searching the racks at a record store and walking into the store, saying the album name and having the CD magically fly into your hands.

Lazyweb: London

I'm planning to take April to London for a day or two on October, and I'd like some help: I need a child-friendly hotel somewhere in central London.

There are precisely ten bajillion hotels in London, and I'm struggling to find something that fits the bill. It doesn't need to provide anything in particular, just to be suitable for a three-year-old and her dad and the price needs to be in the 'sane' range (i.e. I'm not on anyone's expense account but my own), but I'm prepared for what London costs. Bonus points for being very near an Underground station and perhaps extra bonus points for being near Paddington station, where we'll arrive from Heathrow. We're basically visiting the Tower, Buckingham Palace and the London Eye, if that helps to narrow it down.

Any personal experiences or recommendations would be great. Thanks!

MarsEdit 2

One of the things that inspired me to switch from my seven-year-old LiveJournal over the summer was my experiences beta-testing MarsEdit 2, which was released today. That's a pretty big deal for me, considering that I wrote Xjournal, the main LiveJournal blog client for Mac OS X. Yes, I got iTunes'ed by Daniel Jalkut.

Xjournal had been languishing for a time. The main reason why was the success of FlickrExport. FlickrExport paid the bills and Xjournal didn't. It's now open source and in new hands, but I had rather let it go in my heart some time ago. It became clear to me that LiveJournal was becoming an old blog platform, hamstrung by its legacy roots. It was also clear that Six Apart didn't really know what to do with it. LJ has a lot of users, but a lot of users very used to getting a lot of service for very little money. When Vox was launched, it was clear to me that Six Apart wasn't investing in LiveJournal in the way it needed to in order to have it keep up.

Anyway, I actually worked with Daniel on the Flickr integration features of MarsEdit 2. You'll see my credit in the About Box. MarsEdit 2 contains some of the code that underlies FlickrExport, and uses it to make adding Flickr photos to your blog incredibly easy. I think I said to Daniel at some point early on, "If you do this feature right, I'll switch to WordPress/MarsEdit". Well, he got it very right.

MarsEdit 2 is a great update to an already good app. Definitely check it out.

Fallen

I went out shooting with my buddy Eric tonight. It was one of those evenings where you set everything up, get into position well before sunset....and then the sun drops behind the hills like a stone in two minutes flat.

Really very disappointing, but I found this crazy fallen tree stripped of most of its bark by the water.



Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 17


1/200 @ f/10, ISO 100