Author Archives: Chase

Expectations are the devil: There was a boat-load of excitement on my part when this came out.  So much so that I took the Best Buy gift cards that had been in my drawer for over a year and without thinking twice marched to Best Buy to get one.  I had messed around prior and [...]


Overall very happy and wondering why I need the huge desktop computer that is next to my desk making the sounds of a robot with pneumonia.I have been most impressed with the speed and hardware of this machine.  It is very fast in booting up and returning from sleep.  Connecting to a network is remarkably faster [...]


“I got up on a desk, with a loudspeaker, and told everybody that I was giving one order: They were to treat anybody they came into contact with who had been affected by the storm like a member of their own family.  Their mother, father, brother, sister, whatever.  And I said, ‘If you do that, [...]


It will often happen that you inherit a project from someone else.  Usually this project is well down the path towards failure which is the reason it’s switching hands: The project isn’t going well, is running behind, or things are changing in your department or organization.  This can be enormously frustrating when you feel that [...]


“When we’re starting a new project, I’ll first meet with one or two people. I try to keep the meetings small, especially when we’re doing product design. If you have eight people in the design meeting, it doesn’t work. Everybody has an opinion. Everyone wants to weigh in on what the font should look like. [...]


A well-communicated vision and business strategy are essential for maintaining focus and alignment across an organization. Take a first step and establish these simply by: 1. Defining what your differentiator is as a company (We do more? We do better? We do faster?) 2. Defining what your market and your audience is (for example are [...]


I felt like trying out a new look for my site but I didn’t want to lose the one I had.   So I thought I would leverage all the same pages and just create a new stylesheet and a method of selecting which style to use.  Then I thought, I’ll just create a random [...]


I was beginning to get annoyed at how long the twitter search was taking and then I was redirected to a page with this: I can’t be mad now. That’s a funny visual. And, they told me what was going on. Sure, I’ll look at the pretty picture and laugh and try again in a [...]


I like to get people fired up in the work place.  I like when the positive energy is palpable and teamwork is turned up to 11.  I decided to make some motivational posters for the work place that will hopefully remind everyone that we enjoy what we’re doing, we’re good at it, and we’re not [...]


I’ve been a long-time reader of Signal vs. Noise the blog of software company 37Signals. Recently, I picked up their new book Rework and was immediately enraptured by their advice to ignore the real world: “That would never work in the real world.”  You hear it all the time when you tell people about a [...]