Doodling, Memory and Capturing that Flash of Inspiration

Today was a very active day for my brain. While I didn’t solve world hunger I do think I had some pretty nifty ideas. One of the ideas that I had, for the life of me I can’t remember now, but what I do remember is a feeling of excitement and thinking it warranted further investigation. Gone now, no further investigation possible – I guess you get that. The idea must not have been very good if I can’t remember it now – that’s what they say anyway.

I decided today I don’t agree with them. I want a way that I can effectively capture ideas that come in that flash and are gone when more pressing issues arise…

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Starting Sidelab

As I indicated a little while ago, in I have been thinking about starting my own business and weighing that up against staying in a stable corporate job for some time. I finally reached a decision point around a month ago after much discussion with many different people. To those who spent the time talking with me about my options I am very grateful for your time.

After weighing up the options, my desires and history, I have decided to give it a red-hot go and start Sidelab – a small software development company, focused on innovation services (both development and consulting) for Australian business.

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Appcelerator Release Titanium 1.0

It’s been a while since I posted my comparison of the various iPhone and Android Web Application Frameworks, and quite a few things have changed since that time. Nothing completely disruptive or game changing, but things are definitely moving along.

The latest piece of news that I just received an email about is Appcelerator’s 1.0 release of its Titanium platform, which is obviously a bit of a milestone for the guys over there at Appcelerator.

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AppEngine and Resource Performance: Why you need a CDN

Google’s AppEngine is not a CDN (or Content Delivery Network).

How do I know this? Well I’m in a process of setting up a new site in anticipation of going out and doing my own thing (nothing finalized quite yet). While not really the point of this article it was the trigger for investigating AppEngine performance with regards to load times of resource files (images, css, etc).

While the results aren’t suprising, it definitely highlights the continued need for a CDN (even if you read the occasional post that tries to tell you that using AppEngine as a CDN is possible).

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Creativity and Depression

Very recently, the New York Times ran an article on the correlation between depression and certain mental disciplines. It’s definitely a thought provoking read, and the title “Depression’s Upside” is bound to spark some controversy. If you experience depression or know someone that experiences depression then it’s well worth the 7 page read, as it’s probably one of the most well crafted pieces of text I have ever read on the topic:

Depression’s Upside @ NYTimes.com

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Amazon AWS EC2 vs Rackspace – High Level Comparison

Let me start by saying this is in no way an in-depth comparison of these two excellent cloud based hosting services. It should serve, however, as a good resource to help you determine which of the options is better suited to your needs at a high level, and point you in the right direction for further investigation.

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Time to leave the corporate nest?

A little over five years ago now, my wife and I arrived back in Australia from a year over in the UK. It was a great year, and I’d enjoyed the work I’d being doing over there (coding at a smallish Biotech) as well as the ability to travel. Additionally, I’d left on good terms with my employer and had the opportunity to do some work with them from Australia. Great, I thought – an opportunity to get my own software development business started; which I guess has always been my dream.

While, I think the idea was good in practice, it wasn’t the right time. My current struggle is attempting to determine if now is the right time.

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Monitoring Keyword Bounce Rates with Google Analytics

It’s confession time. Firstly, I have a blog. Secondly, it has a very high bounce rate. Now I’m not trying to make money from blogging or anything like that, but I do shed a small tear when I think: “Most people stop by for a quick visit, and then leave without looking around.”

Now there are a lot of articles out there that give pointers on how optimize your blog/site to reduce bounce rate, so I’m not even going to try and talk about that here. If you are after a good source of information, however, I’d recommend checking out problogger. What I am going to talk about though, is how you can use Google Analytics to determine where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics is very good at showing your overall bounce rate, but you can get more detail and start targeting particular posts and keywords to reduce that bounce rate.

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Running in Thongs (Flip-Flops) – My Struggle with Depression

Living life with depression in my own words, “sucks arse”. I do generally try to keep my language clean, but I have no other way to really describe the condition. Certainly not in my case at least. Today is the third day in a row that I have been away from work due to depression.

While I have always attempted to be as open as possible with my managers (given the impact the condition has on them), I have found it much more difficult to be open about things with my peers and people who work for me. Well today, I just chose to tell it how it was, and I honestly think that was the best thing to do. That does, however, mean I need to be this open with everyone so I am not putting others in a difficult situation of knowing something about me that is not widely known.

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Competitive Website Metrics are Broken: A Twitter Study

The amount of discussion that has gone on projecting twitter’s demise based on “stalled growth” is very interesting. I think this particular example demonstrates very well that current competitive analysis techniques used for web business are broken and failing to deliver the information genuinely needed.

I believe the web is currently informationally, functionally and economically constrained from further evolution.

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