Links
If you're looking for my professional links, click on Mobile Opportunity. What you have here are my other links, a few interesting things that I've found on the web. There's no common theme to these sites, other than my desire to point them out.
Great Ideas
Interesting businesses you can visit on the web.
The world's most luxurious dog kennel
I've never been there, but what a concept. For $15 extra a night, they'll even sleep next to your dog (seriously).
Design your own Jack Purcells
Classic footwear, now built to order. An outstanding use of the Web, and a great way to add value to what is basically the world's simplest tennis shoe.
Fun Sites
California Coastline
Aerial photography of the entire California coast, strung together so you can move up and down the coast. You can even view changes over time. A great five-minute vacation on a tiring day.
Palm Powered Expert Guides
I think this is the best guide to software available for Palm OS. But I'm biased -- I helped to create it.
Pictures from Mars
NASA posts all the photos from its Mars rovers almost as soon as they come in, but they're grayscale and fairly hard to work with. This is the Flickr site of an enthusiast who's stitching the photos together into panoramas, and doing his best to colorize them properly. It's a fun place to browse around (if you're into pictures of red sand and gray rocks).
Useful Resources
If you need marketing and strategy consulting, you should contact the company I work at, Rubicon Consulting. Here are some great companies doing other sorts of consulting. I've worked with them and strongly endorse their work.
Beam Inc.
Dan and Meredith Beam, the principals, are extremely bright and helpful consultants. They combine thinking about issues with insight about human beings better than anyone else I've ever worked with. They are my first choice when I need to figure out how to get an organization on the same page about both what to do and how to work together.
Fitch Associates
I knew the principal, Tobey Fitch, when he was a senior manager in Apple Computer's employee training organization. But it would be a big understatement to call Tobey a trainer -- he's an outstanding facilitator, executive coach, and just great thinker regarding business and people. He also has a wicked sense of humor.
Cool Weblog Software
ColorPic
An awesome little tool for working with colors when planning a website. It lets you find the HTML code for any color on your screen, and also makes it easy to look up "web safe" colors.
Iimage Browser
An image management plug-in for WordPress.
Spam Karma
When I set up my first weblog on blogger.com, I was delighted to see that within ten minutes of making my first post, I already had received eight comments. "Wow, my blog is really popular," I thought, and I eagerly clicked over to read all the comments. That was my first exposure to comment spam. Since then I have become a fan of spam-blocking software, and Spam Karma is the most ridiculously over-featured WordPress anti-spam plug-in I could find. I don't even know what half of it does, but it makes me feel secure.
WordPress
The tool I use for my blogging. Speaking as a newbie, I have been very impressed by (and grateful for) the completeness of its documentation, which is unusual for a freeware product.
People
Mike Rohde
Mike runs a graphic arts firm. He designed these pages. He does beautiful work. He's also a handheld computing guy and posts interesting commentary in his weblog.
Michael T. Ashby
Michael runs an IT, web, and mobile computing consulting firm. He
programmed these pages, doing great work on short notice. You can visit his
weblog here.
And Also…
Back to Iraq
The blog of a Time magazine correspondent in Iraq. Often pretty depressing reading, but much more detailed than what you get in the general press.
Interactive earthquake shaking map
If you live in the Bay Area, this interactive map system is a great way to scare yourself. Pick a fault and then zoom in on the map to see how badly it would shake your house.
Clear air turbulence forecast
So you have a flight scheduled and want to know when it'll be bumpy? This is the place to look. I've found it to be surprisingly accurate.
Landscape tree planting
An outstanding site, created by a University of Florida professor, on how to plant trees. If you live in a warm climate and want your landscaping to live, this is very useful reading. His advice is different from what you'll read in most books but it works, especially if you have heavy soil.