pointing out the obvious

If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet - NAU.com is open for business. For those who don’t know, NAU is a clothing retailer that uses sustainable fabrics, is eco friendly and 5% of each purchase goes to a charity of your choice.

I saw some of their fabrics in the early stages of development - they were extremely interesting. NAU has definitely done their homework in terms of developing and using new renewable fabrics that perform as well as, or better, than conventional fabrics.

They also took a great step in terms of making outdoor clothing stylish. NAU’s lead designer, Mark Galbraith, did a fantastic job with the design.

The site, developed completely in flash, is pretty impressive. The imagery and transitions are nice, you get a great feeling for the people behind the clothing.

Clearly I have a soft spot for these guys.

I think bookmooch hit the nail on the head. For those of us who are looking for a particular book, don’t want to spend $22 and have a bookcase full of other $22 books collecting dust, this site will make your day. I’ve been a member for a while and am guilty of not actually doing a book transaction yet, but I’m in a bit of a reading rut.

Reading ruts are usually well solved by Indigo or Amazon’s “other people liked” recommendation engine. If that doesn’t work for you, LibraryThing aims to fill the void. While none are perfect, they give you helpful suggestions that end up pointing you in the right direction.

Unfortunately, this gets me all hot and bothered about the state of online personalization. It seems no one has an effective solution yet for recommendations, aka cross-selling. I could go on and on about this, so I’ll save the rant for another post.

In an interesting turn of events (which totally makes sense now that I think about it), businesses are considering off-shoring within the country. So, for example, a company based in Toronto would offshore to Sioux Lookout, Ontario - where the cost of living is lower, thus salaries are cheaper. This keeps companies happy by exploiting cheap labour, and people employed in smaller cities.

I would seriously consider a pay cut to live in a remote area for a few years. If anyone is actually reading this, I would relocate to the Northwest Territories, the Yukon or Newfoundland, so long as they have a decent net connection and Apple delivers hardware out there.

Checkout Rob’s post, it’s interesting.

This is a fantastic analogy for a development approach. I totally understand, and completely agree. I’ve been on my share of jackhammer projects, and although I understand why the business selected the jackhammer, it almost* never makes things better. It just seems to make people (clients, stakeholders) feel better - as if we are doing more to solve the problem.

The spoon can be carefully sold to a client as the right approach, with lasting results, but it’s tricky. This business typically demands results yesterday, and want an approach that has a chance of making the deadline, no matter how unreasonable.

Unfortunately, with tight timelines, both approaches fail. The jackhammer is messy, expensive and produces a Frankenstein-ish result. The spoon is smooth, calculated and efficient, but takes time to produce results.

Knowing what I know, I would always push timelines for quality/cost - those two factors always end up biting you in the end.

* Rarely, projects finish ahead of or on schedule using this approach, but there are usually many casualties as a result. So it is effectively a net loss.

It’s amazing how the workforce changes over 10 years or so. This post discusses how the workforce is shifting to small business and which groups are the most influential in that shift.

I’m happiest when supporting the little guy. More and more frequently, I will go out of my way to purchase from the entrepreneur than the chain or corporation.

I figure I’ll be one of those starving entrepreneurs one day, so what goes around comes around.