Mr. Darcy Murphy

"Is Square an unpleasant place to work?" Sounds like it.

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:32:14 -0500

"Is Square an unpleasant place to work?" Sounds like it.:

Speaking of Jack:

Town Square meetings have thought out answers that perfectly fail to address the issues raised. Jack is great at speaking in a compelling way that makes everyone forget what the original question was in the first place.

I love this view of Jack Dorsey, an impressive contrast in...

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:37:00 -0500

I love this view of Jack Dorsey, an impressive contrast in styles.

brushling: High-res view of the Brushing avatar/app icon. A...

Mon, 21 May 2012 19:05:00 -0500

brushling:

High-res view of the Brushing avatar/app icon. A taste of what’s to come.

“Fight fire with fire,” they say. Alright, here’s my fire.

Wind and Fire.

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:40:13 -0500

Life is scary and hard. Either you can run from it, meekly, and stay in your desk and work for other people and trade your time and your soul for some semblance of stability and comfort. Or you can step out into the wind and fire and cast your lot with the rest of the world.

It takes courage. It takes determination. It takes conviction. To succeed.

But I feel it’s worth it.

Tower.js

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:23:24 -0500

Tower.js:

“Full Stack Web Framework for Node.js and the Browser.”

Not bad.

The Naive Optimist: I'm tired of the opportunists and their hackathons

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:17:30 -0500

The Naive Optimist: I'm tired of the opportunists and their hackathons:

ryanleecarson:

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Yup.

Life is short, and way bigger than that desk they’d like you to sleep under.

oatmeal: Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived....

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:07:36 -0500

oatmeal:

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. View comic.

Perhaps the greatest Oatmeal comic yet.

NodObjC

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:05:16 -0500

NodObjC:

I’m not sure about this yet, but it is intriguing. Might just have to take it for a spin.

Org. Charts are for Followers, not Leaders.

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:33:31 -0500

If you’re content fitting into your slot in the Org. Chart, and doing the minimum necessary to meet expectations, then you’ll never accomplish anything meaningful.

The Map is not The Territory, and an Org. Chart is as artificial a map as you’ll ever come by.

White Men Can't Jump

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:13:00 -0500

White Men Can't Jump:

…but they can design. Me, on Dribbble.

Chomsky: “Jobs aren’t coming back”

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:18:52 -0500

Chomsky: “Jobs aren’t coming back”:

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Emphasis mine.

I’m not entirely informed about the Occupy Movement or it’s agenda, I have a personal bias against getting angry and making a sign, but I agree that some serious corruption has gone on long enough and that big changes are headed our way (including but not limited to Climate Change, and Peak Oil) whether we want them to or not. It’s a question of survival at this point and influencing which way the hammer will fall. While the Tech industry has been primarily unscathed thus far, it’s deeply invested in another bubble and when it pops I fear the last economic refuge may go with it.

Ultimately it’s time for people to take control of their own destinies again.

I may be applying my own bias to the rest of the world, as I’m currently in a phase of combatting indiscretions in order to own my own life, but I still think that in the larger scheme of things Humanity itself is on the precipice of dramatic, national and global upheavals.

Who knows what the next 30 years will bring? I suspect that it will be interesting to say the least.

(via Why Design Isn’t Just the Responsibility of...

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:30:28 -0500

(via Why Design Isn’t Just the Responsibility of Designers)

“Design is what happens when you give a shit”

Absurd.

Sun, 06 May 2012 12:23:23 -0500

After reading the Timeline of the Far Future (via @tcollen) I can only conclude that Albert Camus was right about one thing.

Life is absurd, but suicide — giving up — is not the answer. The answer is to live as fully and richly as possible, rather than acquiesce to mediocrity in the face of inevitability.

Voice and Tone

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:10:46 -0500

Voice and Tone:

MailChimp’s Style Guide.

Nicely done. Enviable, even.

The _new_ new work setup. Standup desk FTW. (Taken with...

Thu, 03 May 2012 20:30:47 -0500

The _new_ new work setup. Standup desk FTW. (Taken with instagram)

Computer Simulation of Star Being Devoured By Black Hole (by...

Thu, 03 May 2012 08:34:57 -0500

Computer Simulation of Star Being Devoured By Black Hole (by HubbleSiteChannel)

My favorite video so far this week.

LinkedIn: Node.JS, yes; Responsive Design, no.

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:27:00 -0500

LinkedIn: Node.JS, yes; Responsive Design, no.:

The core concept of responsive design is that the designer/developer would create a single design that can scale up and down fluidly across scores of different devices.

But Prasad thinks it’s all wrong. Responsive design might work for uncomplicated, one-off websites, he said, but for applications or networks (such as LinkedIn is), responsive design is actually bad.

That was my initial response to Responsive Web Design as well — great for blogs, terrible for full blown applications.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try though. If it can be pulled off, then fuck yeah.

The new work setup. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:09:03 -0500

The new work setup. (Taken with instagram)

…then I took an arrow to the knee.

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:33:00 -0500

I once ardently fought for web standards in the war. I vigilantly coded my CSS to the highest standard of the W3C; I ensured every <br /> was closed with a slash, there were no inline styles except for my emails, and every tag was lowercase, dammit.

Then, we won. More or less.

Along the way I got a new job too. I’m still loving deeply the craft of writing CSS by hand, but I’m not following any righteous path from on high. As the war had gone on I learned the hard way how pointless it was because everything kept changing. The browsers, the standards, the possibilities. Nothing that mattered before mattered anymore.

It wasn’t a deliberate transition at first, I often caught myself fantasizing about following an ideal yet having no ambition at all about actually fighting for it. The bitterness of the futility of fighting had settled within me.

What ended my naivety was the gradual death of IE 6. As fewer and fewer people cared about it, I too stopped caring about it. I stopped wasting hours getting things to line up right and eventually settling upon a simple yet solid rule that makes me giddy to this day — zoom:1; or display:none; and done. Through that I learned that I didn’t care about fighting for anything anymore, I cared about not fighting with things.

I’m so very glad for having been so jaded.

"You started a company so you’d never have to work for some asshole. -> We all work for our..."

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:52:57 -0500

“You started a company so you’d never have to work for some asshole. -> We all work for our customers. -> Fire bad customers. -> QED bitches.”

- Startup L. Jackson, mother fucker.