Disqus - Latest Comments for charliepark

Re: Tumblr Theming Tips (Quote Lengths)

Charlie Park — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:37:47 -0000

You'd simply include a class tag in your CSS file (or in the "custom CSS" area of your template, if you have one), like this:

.short { color:blue; font-size: 39px; line-height: 40px; }
.medium {color:green; font-size: 26px; line-height:30px; }
.long {color:red; font-size: 13px; line-height:20px; }

... except that would look terrible. You'd just need to style those attributes in whatever way you want to. But you'd simply need to call them with those class definitions.

Re: Pomodoro Pushups

Charlie Park — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:55:17 -0000

Is it stable? It looks like it'd be wobbly, but I can definitely see the appeal of having one of those in the office. Would love to hear how it works out. Also, just signed up for the Social Workout dealy. Looks great, but it'd be cool if there were a collective goal we were all working towards together. Or maybe there is, and I'm just blind. Either way, onwards and upwards and then downwards and so on!

Re: Installing Phusion Passenger on Mac OSX

Charlie Park — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:40:20 -0000

Thanks for the note about removing the "# <– be sure to point to ‘public’!" comment. I kept getting the DocumentRoot error and had no idea what was going on. ("I've pasted it in, just like they have it?!")

Re: http://whatahack.tumblr.com/post/1189095328

Charlie Park — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:55:04 -0000

I'm glad your university has an EIR program, and that K makes himself available to you.

In general, I have to agree with him on his points, but I want to note three things.

First, if your 40 units is better than everything else on the market, then — even though it isn't perfect — it'll still be an improvement in the lives of your users.

Second, you aren't stuck at that 40-unit level forever. Arguably, if Apple hadn't ever made (or, more important, *released*) the first generation of iPod, we wouldn't have any of its descendants, including the iPhone. *Maybe* Apple would have eventually come up with them, but it's doubtful. Effectively, the only way for Apple to come out with their 70-unit iPhone was to first come out with their 40-unit 1st-gen iPod. I'm not necessarily trying to argue the MVP line here, as that's more an argument for startup survival, where you're arguing in favor of excellence and idealism, which I appreciate.

Third, perfection's development curve is exponential. Sports is the natural analogy. Pick a sport (say, baseball). It'll have, say, 1,000,000 rec-league athletes, 100,000 college-level athletes, 1,000 professional athletes, and around 100 world-class athletes at any given moment. The amount of effort to get from a rec-league player to a college team is significant. The amount of effort it'll take to get to the pros is even more significant (and that's on top of the effort put in to get on the college team). The amount of further effort to get to be a world-class athlete is unbelievably huge. If you were to draw it out, you'd get an exponential curve. Same thing applies to perfection in product design, UX, etc. It's not that hard to make an app (or whatever). It *is* hard, though, to make an app that's really good. And it's excruciatingly hard to make an app that's truly great. If you decide that you're only going to release a 70-unit product, you could very well give up before you get there. It could take *years* to perfect it. In fact, you'll almost certainly give up before you get there.

Back to my first point ... your 40-unit product will only sell to a million people if it's really, really good. If a 40-unit product is good enough, you'll have the capital (both in money and in brand) to develop 50-, 60-, 70-, and maybe even 80-unit products. Wouldn't it be a shame if there's an 80-unit product waiting for you to develop it, but it never emerges, as your company went out of business before you could release your paltry 70-unit version.

One final note. You wrote, "I’m still hoping to either start or work for a startup after I graduate." DO NOT WAIT. You will never have more time, energy, or free resources as you do right now. Figure out a problem that you and your friends have, and solve it. Try to add the condition that it's a problem that's significant enough that you/they would actually pay money for it in order to fix it.

If I can be helpful, ping me (charlie@monotask.com). I'd be more than happy to bounce ideas around or otherwise be available.

Re: Underhyping your startup

Charlie Park — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:54:48 -0000

No comment on the business strategy itself, but I'm sorry for you and Chris (and al3x) that you can't record your fleeting thoughts without someone trying to capitalize on it. It's a sad commentary on the state of tech/biz press.

Re: The Rebeginning

Charlie Park — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:10:21 -0000

Yeah, I'm on Firefox on Mac. Version 3.6.2.

Echoing Stewf, it's working now!

Re: The Rebeginning

Charlie Park — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:32:47 -0000

Awesomesauce!

Just an FYI, though, the @font-face changeover isn't working in Firefox. Maybe you know that? Maybe that's a Firefox issue? (It looks dandy in Safari.)

Regardless, I'm looking forward to whatever comes next!

Re: Bidding Goodbye to Andrew

Charlie Park — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:59:55 -0000

I know you'll miss him, but it's always great to see great people doing great stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Re: Boston-Bound: Leaving USV and Next Steps

Charlie Park — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:34:31 -0000

Congratulations, Lisa, and to you, too, Andrew.

Out of curiosity, which hospital / residency program? My sister and her fiancee will be moving to Boston in June to start at Brigham & Women's, in psychiatry and internal medicine. I'd love to connect you with them, as I'm sure the transition will be taxing for all, and it's good to know good people.

Congrats again!

Re: Metric-Driven Design

Charlie Park — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:25:59 -0000

I commented on this in my reblog, but I'll add it here, to get feedback: I agree with the entire thesis here, except for that last line.

User Experience is inextricably linked with usability. Bowman wasn’t optimizing for user experience, he was optimizing for aesthetics. And, as a designer, that’s what he should do. The failure in the Google/Bowman situation was that the process of selecting that blue wasn’t a cleaner, more automated A/B process. (And maybe it was, but that aspect of it hasn’t surfaced.)

So, I’d recast the last sentence as this: “It should be optimized for usability (think: efficiency) over design (think: prettiness).” (And, even then, I’m not totally happy with it, as that sets up design and usability as contradictory forces, when I don’t believe that at all. But in the sense of Google-as-utility, I agree, that usability takes precedence over aesthetics.

Re: The Cashless Exercise

Charlie Park — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:38:33 -0000

As it turns out, PayPal just (now) released a "bump to transfer money" update to their ipod app. Here, at the iTunes store.

Re: The Profit and Loss Statement

Charlie Park — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:21 -0000

Good thoughts on that. I currently use a free, web-based accounting tool (Outright) that I like a lot for its simplicity. At the moment, their P&L reporting isn't as detailed as Fred's Google example (I just submitted a feature request to them), but Outright's tax reporting features are pretty good (at least for my needs).

I think a combination of Outright and Google Spreadsheets would work, but I'm eager to see Fred's upcoming posts on balance sheets and cashflow statements, to evaluate whether our current tools are up to the task.

I agree about the cost savings being important. At the same time, I don't want to disregard the importance of efficiently using my time, and the dangers of misinterpreting my own data. Either way, the core point is understanding what the status of the finances are, and how they're going. I'm thankful for Fred's MBA Mondays posts. It's nuts-and-bolts stuff that few startup blogs cover.

Re: The Cashless Exercise

Charlie Park — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:51:46 -0000

I agree, in an ideal scenario. I like Morten Josefson's comment (here) suggesting that the merchant show/print a barcode that the iPhone can scan, confirm payment, and then store a local receipt.

I worry, though, that if the desire is to "go cashless," it's going to take a certain amount of flexibility on the part of the early-adopting consumer, as it'll take a long, long time for enough merchants to get on board with whatever new technology develops.

Ultimately, cash's fungibility is going to be hard to beat. It's going to have to be a pretty compelling system to get people onboard ... especially considering that the people who aren't currently letting us use credit cards as transaction vehicles aren't even willing to adopt a universal, established, standardized form of payment.

If someone can cross the chasm, they'll have earned whatever riches come their way. I'm eager to see someone do it.

Re: Software as Serendipity Engine

Charlie Park — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:25:27 -0000

Great thoughts, although (per your final quote) I don't think "purposeful" negates "simple" or "serendipitous". That is, I think there's a distinction between intent and cognitive overhead required to function, and I think "purposeful" is normally more closely linked to what you want to do (intent) than to what it takes to get it done (required cognitive overhead). If that makes sense.

Essentially, I'm trying to say that software can be both simple and purposeful.

Re: The Profit and Loss Statement

Charlie Park — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:01:01 -0000

Great info here. Last week, you recommended Quickbooks for general small business accounting. Would you recommend making P&Ls from Quickbooks? Or making them by hand in a spreadsheet?

Re: Developing new startup ideas

Charlie Park — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:23:47 -0000

Mmm ... I don't think opening it up completely would add to the value he gets from talking to a subset of trusted advisors. Consider posting a generic request on Twitter, or to a group e-mail, versus having a beer with someone and asking them to help you solve a problem / think through an issue.

There's a chance that someone "out there" would be able to benefit you in some new way, but I don't know that the quality of input would be very high. I imagine the signal-to-noise ratio would be a lot lower.

If there were a community built around giving good feedback, critiques, etc. of startup ideas, I could see that having some potential. But even in an environment like Hacker News (presumably established with that as one of its purposes), when people post "hey, here's my idea, can I get some feedback?", the responses are usually pretty milquetoasty.

(Update: Seems like mechanical_fish had the same thoughts, posted at HN here.)

Re: The Cashless Exercise

Charlie Park — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:19:31 -0000

Yeah, as I was thinking about it later, I came to the same conclusion ... a dongle isn't really better than a stack of cards. I've had some more ideas on it ... I'll be replying off Fred's comment in a few minutes.

Re: The Cashless Exercise

Charlie Park — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:40:35 -0000

Agreed on both the utility of credit cards over cash, and the inevitability of keeping payment data on our phones.

It seems like the "least invasive" choice would be a "Square-in-reverse" ... you input your credit cards onto an app on your phone (which encrypts the data). When it's time to make a purchase, you select the card you want from the list of cards on your screen, enter a password, pop the "male" dongle onto the phone jack, and then slide the dongle's strip (emitting magnetic encodings that ape the card) through the card reader. Obviously, this doesn't deal with machines like gas pumps that have "insert your card and pull it out rapidly" interfaces, but a single backup credit card in your pocket resolves that.

I could also imagine a scenario where card data is emitted as audio tones, and the seller's phone has a means of reversing the bleeps and bloops into the actual data (per old dialup connections). For security, the seller shows the buyer a security code printed on the screen of the seller's phone; the buyer inputs that in; that code is part of the encrypting/decrypting process. The big downside here is that it requires all those sellers to get on board, and to have a phone capable of running the program at the point of need. So I think the "dongle" approach is probably a more likely scenario.

Re: Ruby on Rails Limited Progress

Charlie Park — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:20:49 -0000

I can completely relate with the difficulty of getting going with it. And, for better or worse, I fear that Rails 3 is going to throw a bunch of wrenches into the mix. If I can help, let me know.

Regarding git, have you set up an account at Github? I'd recommend that you do that. Also, their overview (http://help.github.com/mac-... of getting an SSH key generated and set up is good.

Again, if I can help with anything (I'm only a few steps further down the path than you, but that might be enough), let me know.

Re: Vactrain Network

Charlie Park — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:04:57 -0000

It's you, sir. You and the visionary engineers we have to thank, for the fact that we now live in The Future. And that we have the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. Can't write more. Must catch the tube.
http://www.idlewords.com/20...

Re: http://www.jackcheng.com/guestbook

Charlie Park — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:26:54 -0000

Hi, Jack.

My name's Charlie Park. I'm in Virginia. (Would LOVE to meet other readers of yours that are in the Richmond / Williamsburg area. If there are any besides me.) I think I first read your stuff in your "Maximizing Your Triangle" post, and have really enjoyed your thinking / writing / etc. since then.

The thing I'm building that I'm most excited about right now is a tool for attention management, called Monotask. monotask.com is where it'll be living, but there's nothing there at the moment. Without getting into all of the details on it, it's hopefully going to help people (like me) who need to be online for most of the day, but who don't necessarily need to be on … say … Wikipedia / YouTube / Facebook / Twitter / Reddit all day. Kind of like Invisibility Cloak and whatnot, but more granular, and with a much nicer UI. The hope is that it'll help people make more, and consume less (except for when they're in "consume stuff" mode). I think you'll really love it, and I'm looking forward to being able to share it with you down the road.

Re: http://www.jackcheng.com/in-praise-of-lo-fi

Charlie Park — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:51:28 -0000

I find that most of the *pointless* conversations I'm in end up as arguments over assumed facts. Having Wikipedia and Google within easy reach has allowed a number of those arguments to resolve, so the conversation could move on towards more productive things.

Re: http://www.jackcheng.com/in-praise-of-lo-fi

Charlie Park — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:48:53 -0000

Brilliant piece. Thanks for this. The Hanjin Boston sequestration reminded me of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_, where the coffin hotel acts as a respite from the noise and bustle of the always-on world of the brain-computer interface. I always thought that was just a sci-fi construct. Turns out they really exist.

Re: The PearBudget Blog - Just enabled comments, using Disqus. If you have...

Charlie Park — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:38:33 -0000

Right. So. That didn't really work like I thought it would.