The co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, are two of the best-known figures in the tech industry. Now, after 15 years, they’re changing the name of their company to Basecamp, which also happens to be the name of their flagship product.

Fried and Hansson have long been proponents of unconventional strategy, such as remote work and “underdoing the competition”, which just seemed, to me, to be obvious in that way that revelations often are after we stumble across them.

I think changing the name is a great move.

37signals
Basecamp

Man, totally shitty. I even loved this guy in Mission: Impossible 3. And then there was his role as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. Great stuff.

Here’s a clip of him receiving his Best Actor Oscar for Capote in 2005, for which Heath Ledger was also nominated for his role in Brokeback Mountain.

Couple of fun infographics from visual.ly, one on surprising salary disparities and another on the downsides of multitasking.

Surprisingly these people make more money than you!

The High Cost of Multitasking

Multitasking in particular seems to be shunned by people in the engineering professions and revered by those in other fields. Any developer with some experience will tell you that it’s impossible to write good code without focusing only on that. Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky wrote one of the classics on the harm of task switching.

As an aside, I love the attribution at the top of each visual.ly post with the option to hire the team who worked on it. Slick model. Wonder how it works in practice…

I’ve always considered myself a pretty expert navigator of airports despite the poor presentation of info on boarding passes. Even so, these redesigned ones are very sexy.

The notion that they should fit easily in your passport has not been a particular problem for me, though. When traveling abroad, I don’t reference my passport nearly as often as my boarding pass. Maybe I’m doing it wrong?

http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/

It’s stories like this that make me grateful that I’m not famous and have almost nothing that people would want. And what’s the point of having secure credentials if any random call center associate can override them?

John Gruber:

What I don’t understand: Now that this story has been publicized, why hasn’t Twitter intervened to give back Hiroshima his Twitter name?

Great question.

https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd

I get a strange look from people if they’ve never heard the term, but a “daily ritual” is just a set of activities that you purposefully do every day.

If you subscribe to the idea that your life is, at least partially, the sum of what you do every day, a good daily ritual is really sexy. So far here’s mine in 2014:

1. Take some protein. It’s non-whey and sure as hell not soy. It’s this stuff.

2. Do a pull-up/push-up pyramid. Exercise shortly after waking starts your metabolism and, well, wakes you up.

For this pyramid, I do 2 push-ups for each pull-up. So you start with 1 pull-up then immediately do 2 push-ups, then 2 pull-ups followed by 4 push-ups, etc. Then you come back down to 1 pull-up.

The entire sequence:

1 pull-up – 2 push-ups
2 pull-ups – 4 push-ups
3 pull-ups – 6 push-ups
4 pull-ups – 8 push-ups
3 pull-ups – 6 push-ups
2 pull-ups – 4 push-ups
1 pull-up – 2 push-ups

3. Learn Spanish. I do 1 course in Duolingo on my iPhone each day.

4. Write. Writing really forces you to think and that anchors you to the present. It’s hard to focus on the past or the future when you’re in the act of mentally and physically constructing a sentence.

That’s it. Coming soon: reading, yoga, meditating, programming and probably a TED talk or two.

Relevant, good:
http://austinkleon.com/2013/12/29/something-small-every-day/

http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-Mason-Currey-ebook/dp/B009Y4I4OM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391090436&sr=8-1&keywords=daily+rituals

– Jim Malone (Sean Connery) in The Untouchables, 1987

After all, that’s the Chicago way.

Overall, looking really good. Except for rookies, salaries were up in 2013 across the board.

No surprise that Silicon Valley is still tops. What would be interesting is to see this same article adjusted for cost-of-living.

Just a note: the “See Also” links at the bottom of the article are ads with no indication until you follow them. Gross.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/01/29/the-highest-paying-cities-for-tech-jobs-2/

Way back around 2003, I had a web page on the intranet at my first programming job. And on that web page, I wrote that you could count much faster if you didn’t say the numbers in your head as you counted. In fact, I wrote, you could only count as fast as you could talk, which is REALLY slowly once you get into two- and three-syllable digits. The possibility of counting almost as fast as I could move my eyes or cycle my brain really excited me.

Fast forward 10 years, and now I know that mentally “saying” words as you read them has a fancy name: subvocalization. Eliminating or reducing it is a key to improving your reading speed.

If I had 2014 resolutions, one would be to increase my reading speed. I haven’t found many great resources yet, but Tim Ferriss is always solid. Here’s one of his posts on speed reading…

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-learning/

I’ve always been a sucker for the lone performer onstage in a vulnerable role, whether they’re an artist, musician or comedian.

In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Mike Birbigilia manages to ride a perfectly balanced wave of stand-up mixed with personal storytelling.

One of my favorite things of 2013 and now available on Netflix.