Igor's Computer Blog

I love monitors. I already have a  27" monitor and a 30" monitors , and now I've added t he dell 34" . It's huge, elegant, and has all the ports a geek could dream of.  Ultra wide are sold as being amazing for productivity and movie watching.   I don't disagree, but there are a few gotchas you should know about.  For productivity ultra wides are extolled as the equivalent of two monitors side by side.  For me, the width of the ultra wide is a bit shy of what I'd like for two windows side by side.   Don't get me wrong, it's doable, but with my old eyes and jacked up font sized, half a 34" monitor wide is too skinny a window.     I usually end up make one window take up 2/3s of the screen and another window take up 1/3.  It's too bad the windows snap feature doesn't allow you to do this automatically. If you have a good software solution for this holler.  For movies, especially ones available in 21:9 the 34" ultra wid...

If you're interested in learning more about How Igor ticks,  Emotional Intelligence and Strategy, check out my alpha "blog" @ idvorkin.github.io It's currently very rough but has a few interesting properties: From a content perspective, it's focused on less technical topics - book reviews, strategy, emotional intelligence, and my own self discovery. From a technical perspective, it's a jekyll static  markdown blog, something I've always wanted to try because I can use powerful editing tools, keep the content under source control , and never need to worry about being at the mercy of my service provider.

We all have to support our friends and families on their broken computers. Recently I was introduced to teamviewer . It's a remote support application that free for non commercial use, and works perfectly.   May your next "mom's computer doesn't work" incident be less stressful.

Computer folks spend LOTS of time on monitors, so getting the right ones matters .  Monitor dimensions are incredibly important, so here's the dimension table for the high resolution monitors Diagonal Ratio Size 27" (2560x1440) 1.77 (13.2, 23.4) 30" (2560x1600) 1.6 (15.8, 23.7) 34" (3440x1440) 2.3 (13.5, 31.1) In case I need to do this again, here's the computation in R  

TL;DR: Principles are unchangeable objective truths, values  are your subjective prioritization.  The better you can align your values and actions with principles, the easier your life will be.  Differentiating principles and values sounds pedantic, but it's important to differentiate the concepts. You choose your values, but your values have no impact on principles. Conversely, principles, can have a huge impact on your ability to live life according to your values.   When your values and principles are out of alignment, you're bound for some suffering. Stephen Covey differentiating principles and values: Principles apply at all time in all places. They surface in the form of values, ideas, norms, and teachings that uplift, ennoble, fulfill, empower, and inspire people. The lesson of history is that to the degree people and civilizations have operated in harmony with correct principles, they have prospered. Correct principles are like compasses: they are alway...

It's important to uncover "how you want to live your life", and to review it frequently.  Much of how I want to live my life is based on the 7 habits of highly effective people, and I've created a handy infographic to help inspire, remind, and encourage me. ps. If you're curious how often I review this infographic, I'll tell you a story. Turns out I drew this infographic in December 2013 while on vacation, and promptly forgot about it.  A few days ago, I was rummaging through an old sketch book, found the infographic and decided it was perfect.  To avoid forgetting it again, I'm adding it to my blog, and  am setting a weekly reminder to review it :)

Imagine a Fortune 500 company trying to build a car.   Because the company has lots of resources, they likely have a customer research team dedicated to understanding what the customer wants. They have lots of engineering experts each of which is able to produce products of technical complexity. Finally, and probably most importantly they have a culture which rewards accomplishing big things, often before they hit the market. As a consequence, at a large company a car would probably be developed one functional component at at time.  However, the risk here is that the customer never wanted a car, and you build the wrong thing. By contrast a startup has almost no resources, and is usually evaluated by customer growth rate.  This has the virtuous side effect that product is constantly being guided by customer need. In Startupville it's essential you are always building something the user wants to achieve their goals, in the car analogy, you'd progress by building a ska...

TLDR:  When you're disheartened, do something that you can control and succeed at. Succeeding recharges your motivation and lets you take another run at your most important problems. Staying motivated is easy when you're having wins, or executing again a plan you believe will succeed.   Unfortunately, there will be long stretches where you won't have wins, and the longer it has been since a win, the farther you will be from believing your plan will succeed. When it's been too long since I've had a win, my motivation will tank, and I'll find you stop doing much of anything. For me to get back on track, I need to start working on things I can control and succeed at.   Often that means working on things that are less important then the things that have me disheartened. Except that's a fallacy.  See, the thing that's most important when I'm disheartened is finding my mojo. So, when you're disheartened, do something that you can control and su...

*This post is a work in progress, in the madman/architect phase, if you'd like to help flesh it out, I'd love the help.  please add comments or ping me.* Why mortality software? To be satisfied we need to live in accordance with the person we want to be. Unless we know who we want to be, and act deliberately to achieve it, our satisfaction will be infrequent, and often accidental. Mortality software helps you understand who you want to be, and supports you in being that person. In a nutshell, making your satisfied. The first step for mortality software is helping you figure out the person you want to be and your values. Who do you want to be? What are your values? To figure out who you want to be, write your eulogy.  To make it easier, figure out the roles in your life. Imagine the person who would speak to each role of your life during your funeral.  What would you want each person to say?   That eulogy is the person you want to be. Now imagine how ...

Happiness is a coarse term, and often leads to cumbersome discussion and confusion. Martin Seligman provides a more granular model of happiness: pleasure, flow and satisfaction.   This model will be useful as we discuss positive computing.  Pleasure is the happiness of doing what feels good in the moment.  It's the happiness of consumption.  Eating, drinking, buying something.  Pleasure is easy to achieve, but the happiness is lost within minutes.  Flow is the happiness of being engrossed in a a challenging, enjoyable task.   It's the happiness of production. Making art,  baking cookies, working on a project.  Flow takes effort to get started, but the happiness last the length of the task, often lasting hours. Satisfaction is the happiness of  being the person you want to be.  It's the happiness of identity.  This happiness is deeply personal, for me it's being a deliberate person who can put a smile on a strange...

Writing breaks down into 4 distinct phases:  brainstorming, organization, writing and editing. To  reinforce the distinctness of these  phases, think of writing as four distinct jobs:  Madman, Architect, Carpenter and Judge.   Maximize your efficiency by doing each job, distinctly, deliberately and serially. Each  job has a specific goal,  and  that goal should be your  sole focus during while doing that job.  Do not do the next job, and do not go back to previous jobs.  To reinforce the distinctness of each job, consider using a different tool, and physical reminders of each job. As madman, your job is brainstorming.  Take your brain's musings and get them down on paper. Maximize creativity, find as many interesting ideas as possible. As madman don't waste time "arguing" or "revising" what you're spitting out.  Personally, I use pen and paper when  I'm the mad man to prevent  myself from revising, editing, o...

Books I recommend: Start small stay small  - How to build a realistic software business.   Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition design - Value prop, and business is king. This book is a must read.  Be sure to by the print book as it's full of pictures and diagrams.  V is for vulnerable - A cute book on the attitude you need to survive as an entrepreneur.   Lean startup - The book that kicked off how to run a startup Traction - A treatise on customer aquistion strategies or how to get traction. Books I'm reading now: Zero to one - In progress looks great.  Blogs/Articles In progress Paul Graham  - Paul is the founder of y-combinator and his writings defined the startup industry. Brad Feld - One of the other best loves VC's. Often talks about funding, very interesting. We don't sell saddles here  - A treatise from the founder of Slack. How to think about MVPs  - A classic picture of how to build ...

To be successful, you must communicate your ideas. The heart of communication is a story which must be written. Emma Coats wrote stories for Pixar, and tweeted a series of “story basics”. Most of these are applicable to communicating, and I’m posting them here to remind myself how to communicate better. What do you want to say? Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there. How you want to say it? You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. Simplify. Focus. Combine chara...

The positive computing book lays out a simple model for the approach your designs can be taking, I summarize it here: Approach Description Example None Happiness ignored Most applications today - no attempt to make users happy Passive (reactive) As issues are found which effect happiness, features are redesigned Comment systems allowing anonymous comments. As anonymous comments filled with negativity, comment systems evolved to allow enforcing a user identity, and to block "bad" users. [TBD: Get a better example] Active Augmenting existing features to make users happier Bing home page - displaying beautiful images that makes users happy. Deliberate The goal of the feature is user happiness exclusively Happify- a tool to train users ot be happier

This post is in progress to help me flesh out my progress -- feedback please!  TL;DR:  Moodles, abbreviated Mu, is a measure of in the moment  happiness" (InMoHap), which is extremely helpful when exploring positive computing.  The case for moodles.  The goal of positive computing is to make users happier, which means we need to measure happiness to tell if users are happier.   The current methods to measure happiness have limitations (details on request) , so we'll define a new ideal unit for in the moment happiness (InMoHap)  called the moodle, abbreviated Mu. The properties of the Mu is it can be objectively measured at any moment of time with minimal  user interruption.    For example, just as a fit bit can transparently count your steps through the day, a Moodle-O-Meter can measure your InMoHap throughout the day. Examples of using moodles.  To get a good understanding of InMoHap and moodles the following graphs show...

TL;DR - Optimizing, is figuring out how to do make a result better.  Testing is checking if something is so good it doesn’t need to be optimized, or so bad you're better off doing something different. Founders spend a significant portion of their time comparing alternative to see which is better and why. For example how to make a landing page more appealing, or what price they should set for a product. This process is incredibly important and called optimizing. Optimizing is often expensive so before you start optimizing, test to see if something has so little traction it's not worth starting to optimize, or has so much traction there's no need to optimize. For example, imagine you have a customer acquisition cost (CAC) budget of 5$ and you run some search ads and get a 0% click through rate.  In that case, instead of trying to optimize search ads, you are probably better off trying a different channel like social network  ads.  Now, imagine when you try social...

Ira Glass describes the problem of sucking  with the eloquence of the master story teller that he is. Jeff Atwood  has the solution: 1) Embrace the suck - you'll keep sucking until you don't. 2) Do it in public - that way you can get feedback and learn how to suck less faster 3) Pick stuff that matters - the more important it is, the more motivation you have, and feedback you'll get.

TL; DR: Positive Computing is understanding how computing can make normal people happier. Psychology started life as a science dedicated to helping people reduce mental illness.  Recently some psychologists wondered how their craft could help normal people be happier.  This new branch of psychology is called positive physiology. Similarly computing started life dedicated to making people be more productive.  Many early computer engineers expected the increase in productivity to increase happiness. But, while productivity soared, happiness remained flat.   Recently some computer engineers wondered how their craft could help normal people be happier.  This new branch of computing is called positive computing. Positive computing is a brand new field, and I look forward to investing in it heavily.  If you want to go deep into positive computing, there are some resources below: A  slide deck   on positive computing The  book on positive c...

As an entrepreneur, figuring out what your customers need is your top priority. When you have lots of customers, surveys are a great way of doing this. If you're doing surveys I strongly recommend typeform . It's simple to setup, and produces beautiful ux on phones and desktops for data gathering.  When you're thinking of using typeform, don't limit yourself to surveys. For example, I use typeform for sign up forms.  This saved me several hours of initial development, and even more hours when I made changes to my sign up process. 

If you would, I've got news for you, he already knows, and what you said was futile. Just as the single father already knows his child would benefit from a Mom and telling him won't help, it's not helpful to tell a founder he needs a partner. Like a single father, a Solopreneur knows the benefits of a partner are huge, but is wary of settling on the wrong partner. Having a partner who wouldn't cherish their baby through thick and thin, is far worse then going through the same think and thin alone.