Tag Archives: Off-Topic

The Art of the Narrative

I just bought the most expensive iPhone application since I began using my iPod touch. $9.99 doesn’t sound like much, but for an iPhone application, that’s a premium.

Allow me to explain how this happened.

When I was a kid, once or twice—or perhaps if I was lucky, three times—per year, my dad would round everyone up in the car and we’d go for a little drive. Sometimes, he’d even invite his old college buddies (who were basically like family to me) to come along. The drive wasn’t always the same route, and we didn’t always need to take the drive at the same time, but the destination was always Michigan and Trumbull.

Tiger Stadium.

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links for 2009-04-01

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?