Month: August 2011

A Tribute to Items

I’ve been a fan of Gowalla for a very long time. I’m sure many people know the application simply as a check-in service. To me though, Gowalla has always been about the items. Over the last 2 years, I’ve taken different routes home, gone out of my way on trips and arranged swap meets with fellow Gowalla users nerds to collect all the items. In it’s heyday last year, Gowalla was introducing a new item every week (New-item Tuesday!) and sometimes even did surprise, real-item giveaways like a new AT&T Smartphone or a pair of TOMS Shoes. At that point in Gowalla’s history, every user was an item collector, or at least paid attention to them for the chance of winning real items. Since then, Gowalla has made lots of incremental changes to their service to appeal to a wider audience…

Bring Out Your Dead

There’s been a lot of talk lately surrounding the future of client services since Khoi Vinh casted them as the man who didn’t want to go on the cart in his The End of Client Services post. Khoi was essentially saying that if you want to do great work, you either have to go “in-house” as he did at The New York Times or be a part of a company that owns a product. The conversation continues this week after Khoi posted a follow-up, In Defense of Client Services yesterday. In it, he essentially says, “Ok, fine. Client services will still exist. Do not want.”

Here We Go Again

When Amy and I were planning our move from Florida to South Carolina in 2005, we knew that we wanted to buy. Having lived in 3 different tiny apartments during our last 2 years in Gainesville, we were fed up with renting and desperate for a place of our own. Knowing that the PhD program at USC was going to be a 5 year commitment, we forked over every penny we had toward a down payment and dove head first into home ownership.

Given our still-fresh-out-of-college budget, most of the properties we found needed work – a lot of work. I don’t think a single house we looked at was staged to sell and many of them were, well, pretty boring…

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