http://www.erickarjaluoto.com Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:39:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I normally limit my posts about MakeFive to the MakeFive blog. That being said, I think we're on to something sort of cool, and as such I thought it was worth a posting here too. When we first came-up with the notion of a widget for MakeFive, I had a hard ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/you-should-use-the-shiny-new-makefive-list-widget/ When I first found Y Combinator's Hacker News I thought it was a piece of crap: awful design, a sea of text, and seemingly arcane functions. Day by day though, I found myself coming back to it; it's now one of the sites I frequent most. In a way, I feel ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/smashlabs-holiday-gift-to-all-of-you-folks-in-the-industry/ I remember my first year after college. I scrounged my pennies to buy a rocking 66mhz Pentium 1. It was awesome. It made that lovely "glee-da-da glee-da-da-glee" sound as I went "on the internet". I built a pretty bad website (at the time the coolest thing we’d ever seen) with ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/i-cant-keep-up/ This morning I received an email from a designer who I've been in contact with digitally. We are connected on Facebook and have shared the occasional back and forth through it. In his email he noted that he's just started out on his own and is finding himself discouraged by ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/why-we-suck-at-business/ I'm not sure how I'm going to mess-up my kids, but I suspect I will anyway. It seems that each generation is intent on not repeating the mistakes of the one prior; nevertheless, they seem to either do so, or invent whole new ones. Either way, we can be pretty ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/fuck-yeah-daddy/ When I was twenty-two, I met a girl. We dated for a brief while, and although the relationship came to an end rather quickly, something did stick. She was a vegetarian, and in order to impress her, I stopped eating meat. In retrospect, however, I realize that my real reason for ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/vegetarian-for-the-planet/ As of today, there are 1,516 topics on MakeFive. I expect that within a year, that number will be ten times as high. The fact is that lists are just addictive. They aren't like my long rambles--you actually have to force yourself to "edit" in creating one. Some of the ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/my-favorite-top-five-lists/ [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1387252[/vimeo] Bill Green and the fellows from Plaid dropped by the smashLAB office last summer on their annual road-trip. It was really fun to meet the fellows, and I'm amazed by how fun they made our office seem, given how incredibly boring we are. Thanks guys! http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/plaidnation-visits-smashlab/ A few years ago I wrote a post called "9 to 5 = average". It was largely inspired by a couple of people who we had been working with. In some respects it was a bolder post than I intended and in retrospect, I probably should have toned it down ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/i-didnt-sleep-much-for-a-couple-of-nights/ Back in 2000, when we started smashLAB, we had a regular assortment of nutty folks who'd come to us with some scheme for a web-based business. Often they weren't even users of the web, but figured they had the next "Yahoo" (which was successful at the time, remember) floating around ... http://www.erickarjaluoto.com/the-business-model-for-makefive/