The Tyler Hayes

Friday, 6 January 2012

Nordstrom's Employee Handbook

This has made the rounds numerous times. I love it but I’ve never formally shared it. Enjoy:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

(Via 37signals.)

Thursday, 5 January 2012

Steve Jobs' Vision of the World

Steve Jobs:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

Time Lapse View of Earth Taken from the International Space Station

Should have sent a poet.

(Via Jason Major for Discovery News.)

Don’t Be a Free User

Maciej Ceglowski on the pattern of free-of-charge web services getting popular and then cashing out and shutting down:

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

(Shamelessly stolen from John Gruber.)

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Brilliant

George Vaillant:

It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.

Added to Quotes.

Nick Bilton Interviews Scott Harrison

Bilton:

What have you learned that can help other nonprofits?

Harrison:

Simplicity is key. Be able to tell your story simply. I can’t tell you how many nonprofits I meet and after three minutes talking to them, I still have no idea what they do. Show. Don’t tell. And do it visually. Use the Web to tell people where their money has gone and let them see what it has done.

'Portal 2 Is The Best Movie Of 2011.'

Neven Mrgan recounts his favorite things in 2011.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

How Netflix gets out of the way of innovation

Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft:

But when I talk to other large companies about what we have done, they seem to have a lot of reasons why they couldn’t or didn’t do what we did, even if they wanted to.

(Via Scott Smith.)

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Think Long, Think Wrong

MG Siegler, on Google removing his Google+ profile picture without warning because he was flipping the bird:

Google continues to walk this oddly vague line when it comes to Google+. At first it was all about real identity, like Facebook, but then when people complained, they backtracked from that. Now it’s all about “sharing in real life” — but it’s not real life. It’s some sterile representation of real life.

Google+ is having an identity crisis. This is understandable and even acceptable given how young the product is. But, as Apple learned when they dragged out publicly documenting the App Store’s app approval guidelines, the longer the Google+ team drags out their soul searching the worse this will get and the less relevant they will be.

Unfortunately, whereas Apple has always had the leading app store — they effectively created the term “app store” — Google+ is still struggling to justify to the majority of the world why it should be used instead of Facebook.

Saturday, 24 December 2011

So The Real Question Is: Are We Still A Superpower?

Ford Fox:

The EU is now blocking importation of technology into the United States that we cannot be trusted to use properly. As widely reported yesterday, the EU is cutting off our supply to the drugs we use for lethal injections […]

Monday, 19 December 2011

'Remix Culture Is The New Prohibition'

Andy Baio studies the use of the phrase “No copyright intended” on Youtube videos.

(Via John Gruber.)

Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Siri and The Parent Test

My mom, in a recent email:

btw, we both used Siri for the first time last night. I asked it today what time the post office closed;). It didn’t know, and apologized.

The fact that my parents are using ‘btw’ is big. The fact that they finally bought iPhones (their first non-clamshell feature phone) is huge. The fact that they’re using Siri and then emailing me about it is remarkable.

In my book, Apple, its iPhone, and Siri have successfully passed the Parent Test. The iPad did last year. You know what never did? My Droid, my Gateway, or my Linksys router.

'Don’t buy this product.'

Garrett Murray reviews the UP, Jawbone’s new “app-powered wrist band that inspires you to feel better and live healthier” competitor to the FitBit. Ravaging.

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Correlation or Causation?

Or, answer the following question: There is a high degree of [correlation or causation?] between ice cream sales and murder rates.

(Via Oliver Reichenstein.)

Saturday, 3 December 2011

Dan Frommer's 10 Steps to Better Blogging

Spot-on.