You might remember a few years back I talked about why Automattic has a creed, and shared ours. Here it is again:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

One of the parts of Automattic that has grown the most over the past few years is our design corps, now over two dozen people. This group, led by creative director Dave Martin, has come up with a supplemental Designer’s Creed for followers of their craft at A8C:

I take pride in my craft. I ensure that everyone — regardless of ability or device — can use my designs. I routinely ask for feedback, even when it’s uncomfortable. I regularly watch people use my designs, because testing leads to clarity. I will never stop at “good enough.”

You can read more about it on Dave’s blog. »

 

The Pun-Off, held annually since 1978, matches the peculiar energy of a place where the unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird.” This is the city, after all, that organizes Eeyore’s Birthday Party, an outdoor costume party honoring the depressed donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. […]

It’s a reunion of legends past. Steve Brooks, a country singer with a mop of gray hair, is the only other person besides Ziek to have won both Punslingers and Punniest of Show in the same year. Retired from competition, he now serves as a judge and emcee.

Everything about this article about the World Pun Championships in Austin is amazing, I want to quote the entire thing.

Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:

I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.

Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”

Your one #longread today should be the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker. This anecdote resonated with me from the time I (poorly) did design for a living, and how much patience and stoicism are part of the job when working with a deciding stakeholder, often known as a client:

Bob Mansfield, a former senior hardware engineer at Apple, who is now semi-retired, recently described the pique that some colleagues felt about Ive’s privileged access. As he put it, “There’s always going to be someone vying for Dad’s attention.” But Mansfield was grateful for Ive’s cool handling of a C.E.O. who was “not the easiest guy to please.” Mansfield’s view was “Jony puts up with a lot, and, as a result of him doing it, people like me don’t have to.”

This also made me giggle.

Brunner is proud of the Beats brand, but it took him time to adjust to a design rhythm set as if for a sneaker company: “Originally, I hated it—‘Let’s do a version in the L.A. Lakers’ colors!’ ” He laughed. “ ‘Great. Purple and yellow. Fantastic.’ ”

Check out the entire thing.

Panels Finished

Asides

My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.

Usable Security

Asides

Usable Security is a new blog about—you guessed it—the intersection of usability and security. This comes up every few weeks since I improved the error messages on the WordPress login (and bbPress) to specify which part of the login was mistaken, the username or the password. Security folks see this as a problem because you’re revealing more information but I see making the error message more generic as premature security optimization. Plenty of systems where login names are public or easily discoverable, such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, most email systems, and so forth, seem to be doing just fine.

The ability of radiation to cause cancer is dependent on whether or not the radiation is able to alter chemical bonds. This occurs when electrons involved in bonding in a molecule absorb radiation with enough energy to allow them to escape – this is called ionization. The thing is, whether or not radiation is ionizing is based solely on its energy, not on its number, and as we saw above, its energy is determined entirely from its frequency.

Cool article on WordPress.com about Why Cell Phones Can’t Cause Cancer, But Bananas Can, which I read while eating (and finishing) a banana. It covers dielectric heating too.