Apple stores get the last laugh. Apple: America’s best retailer is a great article about Apple and its stores. The critics were way off… “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. “It’s desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.,” opined TheStreet.com. “I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning [...]

Jon's best practices for servers. This is a consolidation of general best practices for servers I've learned and developed over the years. Feel free to share some of your own as well! Never use telnet or ftp – use ssh or sftp instead. Never use HTTP with anything that could compromise the integrity of your [...]

Rails File Uploading 101. Mike Clark has put together a stunningly simple tutorial covering how to create a complete file uploading and image resizing system in mere minutes using Rick Olson's attachment_fu plugin. What impresses me the most is that he shows how attachment_fu can automatically store uploaded files on Amazon's S3 service with only [...]

George W. Bush, Branding Guru? Think brand guru, and what names come to mind? Theodore Levitt. David Ogilvy. Phil Kotler. Regis McKenna. But one brand guru is widely unrecognized — George W. Bush. Bush as brand guru? Bush occupies the White House. His historic role will be long be debated for initiating the war in [...]

How to Defeat Brand Insurgents The video of the Comcast technician asleep while on hold to his company’s technical support. The numerous online forums about Dell’s shoddy customer service. The broken screens on Apple’s Nano and poor battery life on early generations of iPod. The tax return errors of H&R Block. Wal-Mart’s labor policies. What [...]

All GTD, all the time, in one place. There's a great new meta resource for people interested in GTD: The Ultimate GTD Index. It's an automatically generated index of GTD bloggers posts, news and software. If you want (or need) a quick shot of productivity, browse this page. Here's a few of the gems I [...]

Proactive Customer Service. Business Week magazine this week has a cover story titled “Customer Service Champs.” The opening paragraph of that article highlights Southwest Airlines for their proactive customer service: Bob Emig was flying home … on Southwest Airlines … when an all-too-familiar travel nightmare began to unfold. After his airplane backed away from the [...]

Ghawar in decline?  Evidence is mounting that Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's largest oil field (the king of kings…), is in decline. Here's some excellent analysis from Stuart Staniford on 2006 production data. Particularly telling is the rapid growth in new wells as production falls along a steady slope (a classic warning sign): The Oil [...]

By the way, Happy Birthday to me!

Sorry for the long hiatus in posting.  Work has been fairly crazy lately and then I had some problems with Radio.