Communiqué

Music and programming seem to go hand in hand.

Steve Albini plays and records music. In addition to playing guitar and singing for the band Shellac, he is also a highly recognized audio engineer.

I'm not sure if Mr. Albini knows anything about computer programming but he certainly understands the concept of encapsulation. Encapsulation, in computer programming, conceals details of how a piece of software works. Sometimes called information hiding, one of the goals of encapsulation is to provide the most restrictive, most protective interface into the software.

The concept of encapsulation is clearly demonstrated in Steve Albini's beautifully simple, homemade guitar amplifier.

Read More

It's an age-old problem in a modern small business. How should we answer our phone? What follows was about 1 second away from being an internal email, but I thought I'd open it up to more general comment. Non-iMarcians and iMarcians alike, please weigh in.

For a little background, we've had a longstanding policy for all 10 years we've been around that a human would answer the phone. It's one of my peccadilloes, but there is something too impersonal for me in serving our customers from behind an auto-attendant. I want our customers to know that we are always accessible to them.

So the policy for all these years has been that we all take turns answering the phone, more or less by the honor system. Inevitably some folks are more willing then others, and that sometimes ends up inequitable, but it has generally worked out fine.

As we've grown however, it's becoming a bit more of a burden and an honest drag on productivity. Let's face it, if you're in the throes of writing the Best Proposal Ever or the Most Elegant Code Object it's frankly disruptive to see if I'm in, try and be polite and helpful to a caller when you're on a deadline, etc. We need a better solution.

Here's the almost-sent email. I would really appreciate your comments:

Gang,

I'm having a chatty evening.

New topic, how we answer the phone. Consider this a request for comment on a proposed change in policy. The goals of a change would be to:

- Spend less time answering the phone.

- Spread the task of answering around better because it becomes less onerous to do so.

- Still provide human contact in nearly all cases, and a prompt, easy-to-access human alternative to voicemail.


This is what I'm suggesting we adopt.

The phone rings, we answer it. We also do a better job about taking our respective turns in doing so :-).

Caller asks for Craig. We say 'just a moment please', and transfer the call to Craig's line. We don't see if he's there, we don't screen. Poof, transferred. 15 seconds elapsed.

Craig answers or not if he's there or not. If he's not it goes to vmail.

Here are the critical factors in this working well:

I DO NOT want us to adopt a culture where we routinely let our calls go to voice mail when we're sitting there and then call folks back. I would accept that no more than 10% of the time. Note the rare use of all caps. We're not doing that.

Our vmail greetings need to be short and sweet, and need to direct them to call another specific extension or 0 if they need immediate assistance. This part needs some consideration because dialing 0 means they all land on Nick and that's not a good default solution either.

Ringing extensions can be annoying. It'd be good if we could shorten up the number of rings before a call goes to vmail. Furthermore, we could all turn our ringers down to the minimum and still hear them fine. In fact, please do that.

We've all got to bone up on transferring calls quickly, and keep the phone rosters handy and up to date.

Last thought: The dreaded auto-attendant answering. My knee-jerk reaction is that I do not want to go there, but let's have a poll of everyone's opinion on that issue too.

Comments please.

Best,

Nils

Question: Can you link developing an ebay clone to first degree murder?

Today, in the developer room, we managed to do it in about 10 minutes.

Here's how it happened:

1. We were talking about a hypothetical ebay like system to scalp vacation trips that you may have already purchased.
2. It came up that scalping tickets was rampant on ebay, and some states might legalize it.
3. A debate ensued over whether scalping tickets should be allowed. Somehow it boiled down to a free market pro-scalping system vs an anti-scalping Karl-fest
4. The anti-scalping bunch equated the act with buying up domain names with the intention of swindling money from a big corporation.
5. Will said that intention doesn't matter, only trademarks do.
6. Elaborate scenarios about revenge, friendship, domain names, love, money, and truth were given.
7. Turns out, intention is part of first degree murder. So one could say that, in some cases, intention DOES matter.
8. Conversation dissolves back into actual work.

Coming next week: iMarc associates pickpockets to the Nerf Turbo Football, with complimentary twists and turns.

We've had a succession of coffee making hardware at iMarc over the past couple years. We've yet to find a great solution and need advice. Read on, and tell us what works for you...

When I first started, we had a Starbucks Barista Aroma 12-cup coffee brewer. (Very similar to the 8-cup model that was recalled.) It made pretty good coffee. It died a in year or so.

We took it back to our local Starbucks, and they gave us a replacement DeLonghi 10-cup brewer. It turns out that missing extra capacity makes a difference at iMarc. We always run short. Its usability is terrible — in the first weeks here, people would press the "start" button and walk away as it blinked encouragingly and lit up its blue LCD display... but it doesn't actually make coffee until you press the button a second time. Hello? We want coffee, that's why we loaded it and pressed the button, so just make the coffee! Sometimes it overflows, or leaks — we're not sure where the water comes from.

These quirks would be an excusable if it made great coffee. Even if it made decent coffee. But no matter how we varied the dial on top, the grinds-to-water ratio, the absolute volume of coffee made, or cleaned it (with water, white vinegar, or Starbucks' own coffee machine cleaner) .... it makes bad coffee. On a good day it makes really mediocre coffee, but nothing I'd want to serve to guests.

A few days ago Dave and Jeff gave up on it, unplugged it and set it on a shelf in the kitchen.

(We're not the only ones unimpressed with it. Epinions reviewers absolutely savage it — remarkable for a site whose reviews typically read "This rocks LOL !!!1!buy1!!!!".)

Staples had recently sent us a freebie, a (really) cheap automatic drop coffee maker with an ON/OFF button and no other features. I carried it upstairs and set it up. It makes really good coffee. Smooth, rich, strong coffee. But it has no auto-shutoff — okay for home but hazardous for an office with no fixed responsibility for the coffee maker. Left unattended it will cook down the coffee. But fresh, it's good.

[UPDATE] In terms of function, the cheapie is marginal; it's carafe has a nasty tendency to pour coffee down its own side onto the counter while pouring the first cup from a full pot. Structurally it's flimsy; I'm really not sure it will survive office duty.[/UPDATE]

This morning, Nick brought in a "pod" style coffee maker. Neat idea, terrible usability -- there are two different places to set "Brew" vs "Frorth" and if they aren't in agreement, hot water jets out the frother arm. But that's okay — we like danger.

If you want espresso, you're in luck — this bad boy makes a great half mug of Manly Man grade coffee. You could use it to launch the Space Shuttle. If you want a mug of regular strength coffee, you're out of luck.

So the jury is still out on the pod machine. Great espresso, and we should keep it around for that, but we also need something that can just brew a big pot of coffee and keep it hot without boiling it down.

Suggestions wanted. What works for you?

This week is the season-finale of a lot of shows on television. Last night was the end of the first season of Heroes (among other shows, but I don’t watch those). After it was all over, it seems as though half of the people that watched with me were disappointed.

They didn’t seem to like the answers given to the questions that have been building over the last 21 chapters. What happened to Peter and Nathan? Are either still alive? Where did Sylar run off to?

Of course, on top of these things was the big problem (which, clever enough, was the title of this chapter), How to Stop an Exploding Man. This problem was nicely resolved: it seems that you can’t, but that doesn’t mean that he has to destroy your cities.

I was satisfied with the ending, as it was more or less what I was expecting. But from seeing the reaction of the others in the room, I think Lost is making a whole lot more sense. Read More

This past Monday marked the one week anniversary of our new website. With our lead designer Craig back from his Galapagos excursion, we decided to have a project retrospective.

The general concept of a retrospective, or "post mortem", is to bring everyone involved with the project together after all the work is done. Team members discuss what went well, what could have gone better, and what they learned.

For this retrospective, we got the core team together – the designer, project manager, programmer, copywriter, and information architect. Even though we had input from a much larger group, only the core team attend the retrospective to preserve some semblance of sanity. Fred, a senior developer who was not heavily involved in the programming on this project, led the retrospective as an impartial outsider.

Read More

It started in a late afternoon meeting last November with the realization that we have experience in Biotech websites, and the International BIO conference is in our backyard this year...

Then a plan was outlined. Here’s an excerpt.

Core booth design goals were:

• Have at least 2 or 3 stations with computer screens at eye level to talk to prospects and demonstrate work.
• Create signage and spend budget on pieces which could be re-used for other events.

Other goals included, reflect iMarc’s core brand attributes, demonstrate relevant experience of our work, and, of course, gather good new business leads.

The booth design began with several internal meetings where we reviewed conference exhibitor rules and brainstormed. As you can see in the sketch below, the awesome creative minds hatched a plan. From this drawing – we started to divide responsibilities and order the necessary items.

Every part of iMarc played a role in the event’s success (which I’m sure Event Planners out there can agree- it takes an entire team to make all the pieces come together seamlessly).

In short, Nick and the creative trio, led design, getting the pop up booth artwork, Bio website sign banner, and the iPod giveaway table signs made. Nick commissioned the construction of the large Cube. Kim made sure we got carpeting, internet, and electrical services in the booth and if you got one she is the one to thank for the Cube of Truth business card holder giveaways and for the iPod raffle. Rob found a place to rent the “no longer in production” Mac G4’s. And he and the developers turned the heat up to launch the new iMarc site in time for the Exhibit Hall opening. As with any event, there are many other unrecognized tasks that happened - here’s how the booth looked.

Also see Rob's blog from the show floor.

Overall, we executed the original plan and had a very successful show. The booth design worked to achieve our demo and lead gathering objectives, strong branding and the new web site created a presence at the show and we’ll be able to re-use the booth at the next iMarc event.

Smashing Magazine does an excellent job of providing quality resources for web developers. Today while checking out Digg, I noticed that they have a new article entitled 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding. The article contains lots of good information on how to improve your CSS, however there are a number of ideas presented that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Read More

Quick and dirty, photos from the show floor:

(Click through for more)

We've been having a tremendously fun time meeting people in the biotech industry. We've talked to corporate researchers, academics, lawyers, strategy consultants, students, you name it. We've got a few photos uploaded to the Flickr set above, with more coming through the day!