Umamiblog

Now that it’s past 9am California time we can finally announce something we’ve been wanting to talk about for a little while now…

Ponoko is part of the TechCrunch40, and we’re one of the companies presenting. Huge achievement by the team to get selected and invited over. They received over 700 applications and personally interviewed over 175 companies to narrow it down to 40, of which Ponoko is a part of.

Geeking out at The Palace – stay tuned.

My go bag:

Found at Ajaxload.info.

If you need a spiffy Ajax loader, like this… …then it’s a very handy site.

I wrote this post last year and saved it as draft only to promptly forget about it. The links are to older posts and I know this has been continuously discussed since then – but I still think it’s relevant. Enjoy

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Did you know multitasking makes us stupid? It really does. Research is starting to pour out on this point and I get the feeling too few people are paying attention. Consider the way Itzy Sabo puts it.

How quickly would you be fired for being stoned on pot at work?

Or to rephrase this, how quickly would you be fired for multi-tasking at work?

Research found that people who completed an IQ test while multitasking actually scored lower than people who took that same test while stoned.

And he’s not the only one to start attacking our culture of multitasking. Alexander Kjerulf of Positive Sharing talked about a CNN study into the work and time habits of 12 reasonably well known leaders.

His favorite answer was this one:

I know that it’s de rigeur for executives to start the day extremely early, but frankly I feel I make better decisions and relate better to people when I’m well rested. So I usually get up around 8 after a good night’s sleep.

I also make sure to work a standard 40-hour week and never work in the weekends. This is important to me for two reasons. First of all, I have a life outside of work. I have a family who likes to have me around and friends and hobbies that I also want to have time for. I find that the time I spend outside of work recharges my batteries, expands my horizons and actually makes me more efficient at work.

Secondly, if I’m always seen arriving at the office at 6 in the morning and leaving at 9 in the evening, not to mention taking calls and writing emails late at night and all weekend, it’s sure to send a signal to my employees that this is what the company expects, that this is “the right way”. But it isn’t.

It’s a simple fact that for most leaders and employees, the first 40 hours they work each week are worth much more to the company than the next 20, 30 or 40 hours. But those extra hours spent at work can harm your private life, your family and your health. Which in turn becomes damaging to the company.

Frankly, if you can’t structure your time so your work fits inside a 40-hour week, you need to get better at prioritizing and delegating.

Only, not one of the 12 leaders gave that response – or even came close… It makes for interesting reading.

For your reading:
The cult of overwork – Chief Happiness Officer
The cult of overwork again – Chief Happiness Officer
Multitasking makes us stupid? – Creating Passionate Users
How quickly would you be fired for being stoned on pot at work? – Email Overloaded

With a few minutes to go until the judges announce the winner of the first FullCodePress, I think the Kiwis (aka CodeBlacks) have done it.

Compare the CodeBlacks:

To the Aussies:

Update: The CodeBlack win (of course!)

For the first half of this year when I was still at Intergen one of the major projects I was working on was ActionThis. It was a load of fun and I learnt a tonne from working on it. Indeed, the most popular post on my blog at the time of writing is the post where I introduced ActionThis for the first time.

I visited the website today and got excited to see the site had changed – including this groovy looking button on the right of the homepage above the fold:

Cool! It’s a free trial and I can sign up now. I clicked on the link and was led to:

Hang on, you said I could sign up now. You didn’t say I’d have to wait for a few weeks!

People are ruthlessly brutal with their expectations these days and you really only get one chance (if you’re even that lucky) to make the impression you want. Any mistake you make, and remember this is purely in the eyes of your potential users, will be paid for.

You can’t really afford to do anything expect put your best foot forward… and then do better.

You have to be fundamentally unhappy with the way things are to leave Microsoft, and yet unrealistic enough to believe the world can change to join a start-up.

- Glenn Kelman proclaiming Start-ups are freak-catchers

I wish I had this article on blasting the myth of the fold earlier. I think it’ll be useful to anyone working in services and gets that common request from clients to cram all the “important” stuff on the page above the fold.

The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them?
- Milissa Tarquini on Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Now I just need a similar article for why you don’t want a liquid design for your website. (No, its not wasted space, it’s called design.)

I recently upgraded to Adobe’s CS3 on my Mac and found a problem with my colours changing when saving for the web in Photoshop. Why o why were my colours changing!!

This page here has the solution, I assume everyone will have this same issue once they’ve upgraded…

How on earth could this possibly be useful to be enabled *by default*? I feel hurt Adobe.

I got to play with Ponoko’s frickin’ laser cutter yesterday with dave5. It is unbelievably and insanely cool. Rod is right, dave5 is winning.

Must, play, with it, more… you can still sign up for the beta!

I was in Auckland yesterday for work and bumped into a University friend who I hadn’t seen for ages. As we go to part ways he says “Are you and S on Facebook?”.

What’s more interesting? The fact that he asked or that I said “yep!”.

P.S. Auckland keeps growing on me. The more time I spend up there, the less I dislike it.

Hi to all the ALGIM folk who’ve made it to my blog. I really enjoyed presenting to you yesterday and found the Auckland and Northland case-studies very interesting. If you are here in search of my slides, you have two options:

You can download the (very large) PDF here [8.6MB].

Or you can view the slides on Slideshare.net (or here on my blog):

Thanks again for the chance to talk to you all about Web 2.0. Good luck with the challenge.