THUG LIFE
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Clever. Cheap. Lasting. Pick two.
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As Briana says, “I love the chubby, ‘Tim & Eric’ version of Jony Ive.” (via Peter Vidani)
(Source: elirousso)
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Really looking forward to having a copy of Jon Hicks’s fantastic looking “The Icon Handbook” on my coffee table.
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But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared servers I would auto-run a shell script that would parse ‘w’ and highlight my friends and see what they were up to and if they were available to talk. If they were in Pine of course you wouldn’t bug them, but if they were just idle in a shell or working on homework, they were probably up for talking or helping you find some new warez site or want to meet up for a slice of pizza.
Andre Torrez: notes on “i miss w”
This reminds me of a simple app I wrote when I worked for Apple. It was 2003-2004, the heyday of post-iPod but pre-music store iTunes, and the local subnet at 1 Infinite Loop was rife with hundreds of employee iTunes shares. I had my own, of course, and I was always disappointed that iTunes provided no way to see who was listening to my music and what they were listening to. So I wrote a really simple Cocoa app that parsed the output of the UNIX “lsof” command to show me, in a pretty, iTunes-style window on my desktop, which remote hosts were accessing files in the directory where iTunes stored its MP3 files. It was a crude hack, but I could generally tell which songs were being played (I even used the iTunes database to match a song title to the filename) and, often, who was playing them based on hostnames. It felt pretty magical to take an opaque system like that and figure out a way to surface the hidden human activity behind it.
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“Think Different” Ad Sketch by TBWA/Chiat/Day (from The Real Story Behind Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign)
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We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”
Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something.
Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.
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Eat your heart out, Google! (Illustration by the wonderful Zack Sultan)
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The trouble usually arises when, under the guise of efficiency, people stop talking and just start doing. Small cliques within teams begin to form. Passive aggressive tendencies surface as work is withheld from judgement until it is totally finished. Information is hoarded or controlled. The frequent talks, IMs or status updates begin to trail off. Establishing the communication culture of a company is every bit as impactful as a shipping or hiring culture. Creating an environment where people can be recognized, challenged and valued is key in the earliest days of startup. When that communication breaks down early on, it’s a warning sign of trouble not to be overlooked.
BRYCE DOT VC: Early Warning Signs of Startup Trouble
In my experience, this is a very real problem. Culture and communication are difficult to retrofit into an organization once it’s grown to a certain size but most growing companies don’t take it seriously enough until it’s too late.
