May 2008

The following posts were written in May 2008.

Thursday, May 22, 2008, 12:47pm

Doodle 4 Google

Unbelievable. I wish I had this type of creativity. Take a look at these designs.

Doodle 4 Google

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. This year we asked U.S. kids to doodle around the theme “What if…?”

Our winning doodle, selected from over 16,000 entries, was created by Grace Moon, a 6th grader at Canyon Middle School from Castro Valley, California. Grace’s lovely doodle, “Up in the Clouds,” will grace our homepage, Google.com, on May 22nd, 2008.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008, 7:09pm

How Do I Manage Growth at Snowdrop?

Snowdrop is running into a pretty cool problem: too much work.  I never really gave much thought to the idea that Snowdrop could eventually have too much work spread over too many projects, but after putting in 98 and 107 hours each of the last two weeks, respectively, I realized it’s time to start managing growth a little better.

To do this I’ll actively try two new things:

  1. Value My Time A Little More - Colleagues at work always ride me for charging too little, so from now on I will make a better effort to charge for value, not for time.  Through this I’ll probably piss off a few more people, but the clients I do take will be much more valuable.
  2. Ask For Help - If there are several interesting or profitable projects running in parallel, I’ll turn to colleagues, outsourcing websites, and other outlets to offload and share work.  I’ve already started to do this and it has worked out well so far.

May will be Snowdrop’s biggest month ever in terms of profit and revenue.  Since the beginning of the year, business has grown almost 300%, but to maintain that type of growth we need to be smart about our decisions.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 8:25pm

Home Office v1.0

ikea-office.pngI’m about 75% finished putting together the brand new home office, anchored by the IKEA Mikael office set, and I’m pretty pleased how things are coming out considering the entire room cost less than $500. In fact, I’m so happy with my purchases I don’t understand why anyone would want to spend thousands of dollars on their home office unless it was to buy a new computer, printer, and speaker system.

Hopefully with this dedicated office space I’ll be able to separate my work from my sleeping and relaxing spaces. That’s always been a problem for me - I would sit up in my bed late at night doing work before going to sleep, but I never could fall asleep right away. Now I have a room for work, a room for play, and a room for sleep. Perfect.

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Thursday, May 8, 2008, 7:56pm

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

Somewhere in-between moving, learning about homeownership, and working I’ve managed to let this blog slip for almost a month.  Frankly I can’t believe that it’s already May and that I’ve been in this house for over two months.

Anyway, today I got the go-ahead on a very large project over at Snowdrop so I’m pretty excited.  Although I’ll be booked up pretty much solid for the next two months, I hope to make more of an effort on this blog and maybe even use it as a little vent when work starts to pile.

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