streamofconsciousness

Podcasts I Listen To

15 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment

by Tim Taylor in Entries

I’ve had more than one person ask me for podcast recommendations. Here they are:

WYNC’s Radiolab – the best public radio program I’ve ever listened to. Combines science and philosophy with high production values. Entertaining, informative, and moving. Interviews combined/produced into compelling narratives (like “This American Life” meets “Mr. Wizard”)
http://feeds.wnyc.org/radiolab

BankSimple responds — or — Rachel is a human being

05 Mar 2011 2 Comments

by Tim Taylor in Entries

In my previous post I shared my wishlist for a 21st century bank, a response to BankSimple‘s beta signup confirmation email. Well, Rachel from BankSimple responded to my email (additionally I’ve received some tweets from BankSimple and employees). As someone who was around when The Cluetrain Manifesto was penned I still find it refreshing to encounter a company that “gets it”. So thank you, Rachel, BankSimple, @takeo, and @btmerr for conversing with me in a genuine voice. Thank you for asking to talk.

So Rachel isn’t a bot. Nor is she a mechanical turk, nor disinterested. Entirely the opposite. She’s a human with a sense of humor. And a self-professed Star Trek nerd.

Rachel’s response, followed by mine:

More

BankSimple will save us all — or — Tim’s public therapy session

02 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment

by Tim Taylor in Entries

I signed up to be notified of the BankSimple beta. In return I received a pleasant confirmation email soliciting my banking story.

I’m pretty ashamed of this story, actually. I struggle internally with an idealized vision of how an organized “normal” person manages their finances — the person I should be — and the equally unrealistic desire of what I want to do — which is none of it. I tend towards the ignore and procrastinate mode of coping, so my personal finances are currently in bad shape and it depresses me. So when (future online banking company) BankSimple asks me directly what I want from a bank, my “loves, hates, quibbles, desires, hopes, and dreams regarding your financial life”, well, the dam broke and I gave them damn near everything. More

Move to WordPress.com and other stuff

18 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment

by Tim Taylor in Entries

I’ve moved my blog from my own installation of WordPress to one hosted at WordPress.com.

Upsides:

• All the content migrated
• Same top-level URL: http://blog.tool-man.org/
• Version of WordPress will always be current (security holes fixed, spammers defeated)

Downsides:

• Permalinks broken (if I’d stuck with the default scheme that wouldn’t have happened. Meh.)
• Comments’ author names retained, but I think you’ll need to register again
• Old RSS subscriptions may be broken (if you were previously subscribed via RSS and you’re seeing this, comment below and I’ll change this to an upside)
• WordPress.com doesn’t have a MarkDown plugin (boo, hiss) so my manual conversions after the migration showed up as a bunch of article updates. Only a downside, really, if old RSS subscriptions still work.

GitHub Repository for DHTML Library on the Way

Sometime before 2011 arrives I’ll release my dated DHTML library to GitHub. Then anyone who uses it — no, really, you should be using JQuery, Dojo, YUI, GWT, but if you insist — will be able to fork my library and, say, fix that pesky IE8 bug, and easily share it back to the world on GitHub. This will be far superior to the current approach of pasting fixes in comments which everyone has to manually apply to their copy.

I’ll probably also add another license (LGPL or something) in addition to the current MIT license.