In July 2006, I co-founded a startup along with three of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. Four and a half years later, the company has just recently launched something that I’d consider pre-alpha. Although I’m no longer with the company, I truly wish the remaining team the absolute best. We had some groundbreaking and innovative ideas, and I hope that a real, viable product will emerge soon. Thomas Edison — inventor of the lightbulb — once said “I’ve never failed.

Dear technical recruiters: I hate you. As far as I can tell, the entire technical recruiting community is just a bunch of mindless spammers — and I have the proof. Update: I’ve recently been contacted by one of these recruiter types throwing around words like libelous and defamation, so I feel the need to clarify some things. First of all, this is my opinion — one that is shared by 100% of the colleagues that I’ve spoken to about the subject.

Although the AWS SDK for PHP is growing as fast as Amazon’s breadth of web services, it should still be easy to find the information that you need in order to develop. This is a goal that I take very seriously. Back in 2005, I took a job with Stryker Endoscopy as a member of their Internal User Experience team, where our focus was on Usability and User-Centered Design (UCD). (I take no responsibility for how bad their public website is!

You can either spend money on iPhone ringtones on the iTunes Store, purchase an application that makes them for you, or you can make your own for free. I make all of my own ringtones from music that I already own. There are a few steps involved here, but overall, the process is pretty straightforward. Getting Started The first thing you’ll need to do is find a song that you want to convert into a ringtone. iPhone ringtones can only be 30 seconds long, so if you find something you like that’s 30 seconds or shorter, skip directly to step 9.

“There’s things I remember and things I forget / I miss you, I guess that I should / Three thousand five hundred miles away / But what would you change if you could?” — Raining in Baltimore Fourteen years ago, we met when I gave her a wedgie in the middle of our high school Chemistry class. Ten years ago, we were married on the first hot day of summer in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony.

I’ve been heavily invested in Delicious as a bookmarking service for many years. However, after learning about Delicious’ sunsetting, I’ve decided to join the ranks of the Great Delicious Exodus and sign up for an account with Pinboard. One tool that has been an important part of my workflow is a tool called delimport, which automatically indexes my Delicious bookmarks and makes them available via Spotlight and Spotlight-powered tools (e.g., Alfred on Mac OS X). While delimport hasn’t been updated since 2007, it has continued to work remarkably well.

I’m not normally one to sit down and make New Years’ resolutions because I’m a big believer in constant, ongoing self-improvement as opposed to a big bang of improvements once a year. That said, I’ve also learned that sometimes you need to simply draw a line in the sand to kick-start your motivation to actually accomplish tasks from that crazy-long to-do list you have. And that’s where I am. I spend too much time thinking about the things I want to do, and not enough time actually doing them.