
(originally posted on Twitter)

(originally posted on Twitter)
A few observations on Up:
When my parents made the switch to a plasma TV, ditched their old bulky six foot tall cherry TV cabinet, replacing it with a cute little table.

But what to do about those nasty cables hanging out the back?

My ever inventive dad found a thin board, painted it the same color as the wall, and nailed it to the back of the table. The back crossbar, conveniently positioned at the top of the white baseboard trim, hides the seam. The cables and the board are completely invisible, from almost anywhere in the room.
Think he could get a job at Apple?
This is an impressive piece of email communication from the White House.
The email aims to debunk myths about the U.S. health care reform bill by explicitly co-opting the format in which these myths are disseminated: a forward-friendly email of memorable bullet points. This brilliant choice allowed them to cram a lot of information about a complex, emotional, scary topic into something digestible.
They’ve also managed to nail a bunch of other great practices for email newsletter writing:
My only gripe with it is consistency. The section titled “8 common myths about health insurance reform” mixes restatement (e.g. “We can’t afford reform”) and refutation (e.g. “Vets’ health care is safe and sound”), effectively reinforcing the myths, weakening the refutations or both for less careful readers.
A few months ago, Coca-Cola introduced a new line of bottled water in Japan called I LOHAS, that uses 40% less plastic than most PET bottles.
The image of the bottle crushing down into a vase for a little sprig of green is branding genius, memorable and communicative. But why did Coca-Cola make a single product, rather than bottling ALL of its drinks in the lighter bottles? The whole endeavor is either a cynical greenwashing or a gutless baby step.
They’re Coke. What’s stopping them from taking making a bolder move?
p.s. I LOHAS’s tagline, “Delicious + Good for the environment” is a less illegal but no less ugly lie than if Phillip Morris still claimed low tar cigarettes are good for the body.
As seen on Flickr:
Ever since The 4-Hour Workweek, I’ve been hearing a lot about the wisdom in working smart rather than working hard. I work quite a lot, smart enough I think, but with plenty of mistakes as well. What bothers me about the “work smart, not hard” mantra is that it implies that hard work is necessarily an undesirable weakness to be overcome or cured.
I have a few responses.
1. Sometimes you need to work hard, even when you are working smart.
Creative work rarely goes from good to great without some hard work. This doesn’t mean that every job needs to take 500 hours, but some just do. And the ones that only take 5 minutes often take only 5 minutes because you’ve worked hard at similar tasks years ago and now they come easy.
There are plenty of other legitimate reasons to work hard, even when you’re working smart: your partner is out sick, you made a mistake, someone else made a mistake, you’re on a roll, etc.
2. Who wants a 4-hour work week?
I have no interest in a 4-hour work week, I love my job. I work in a comfortable office with people I respect and care about, doing projects which are enjoyable.
If the idea of a 4-hour work week is attractive to you, you’ll probably have better luck at happiness by looking for a better job or looking to make your current job more enjoyable than by searching for a way to get rich quick, get other people to do your work for you, or whatever other snake oil this book is selling.
(It seems like the easiest way to achieve the 4-hour work week is to write a book about the 4-hour work week. Except that someone already did that.)
3. Working smart is not a bad idea.
Of course it’s not. But it does mean different things to different people and professions. For me?
I learned (and am learning) most of this stuff through experience gained while working hard, as most people probably do.
Hard work is not necessarily a virtue and certainly not for everyone, but some people (myself included) enjoy it. We may change our mind someday, but in the meantime, skip the lecture and let us get back to work!
—
* In my college summers, I used to work light construction with my father and uncle. One morning my uncle gave me a tiny closet to paint, and left me be.
He came back a few hours later to check up, shocked to find me still in the closet, sweatily struggling to get the paint strokes to all go in the same direction. He boasted about how he and my dad used to compete for who could get more apartments painted before lunchtime, and then he told me my closet was fine as is.
I protested and pointed to the uneven brush marks, when he smiled as his eyebrows arched upwards.
“I have just the thing to fix that.”
Then he reached up and pulled the little string hanging from the light bulb in the ceiling and the closet went dark.
Since it might be a while before we get to a full writeup of the ASICS EU redesign, I thought I might share a few little points of happiness we found along the way:
A Problem:
We decide to bring the country selector down to the bottom of the page, to save valuable real estate up top. If you have a long list of countries, the typical dropdown list will make the page get longer, and when the user scrolls to find their country, the dropdown closes back up again, essentially making it unusable.
A Solution:
Make the drop down drop up, with a little bit of Craig’s Javascript magic. Page doesn’t get longer or scroll, and the entire list is visible and clickable.
Don’t worry, I won’t make this a habit.
Mankind seems royally f**ked these days. . . how is this headline even possible among rational beings?
Israel halts firing to allow aid into parts of Gaza
“Israel is halting its military operations in Gaza for three hours today to allow residents of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory to obtain supplies. The truce is scheduled to take place every other day. “This is in order to enable replenishing of supplies and allow aid activities,” Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Peter Lerner told CNN.”