It seems that in my line of work, there is always some sort of "reorganization" going on. One week we hear one rumor, the next another. Things are always in flux. Over the last eight years at my J.O.B., our department has been officially reorganized three times. We've gone from 30 staff members to 17, and our workload of active computers on the network has doubled. When things get hairy during roll-outs or upgrades and we start whining, the boss always brings up the fact that our jobs could be outsourced.
May 2008 Archives
sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents. sIFR is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. Mike, Mark and an invaluable stable of beta testers, supporters, and educators like Stephanie Sullivan and Danilo Celic of Community MX completely rebuilt a DOM replacement method originally conceived by Shaun Inman into a high quality cross-browser, cross-platform typography solution for the masses.
The current sIFR release is version 2.0.5. sIFR is released to the world as open source, under the GNU Lesser General Public License (see human-readable summary at Creative Commons), so anyone can use it free of charge.
Put simply, sIFR allows website headings, pull-quotes and other elements to be styled in whatever font the designer chooses - be that Foundry Monoline, Gill Sans, Impact, Frutiger or any other font - without the user having it installed on their machine.
sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader's browser will automatically display traditional CSS based styling - the user won't know the difference.
Take a look at the examples page to see some examples of sIFR in action.
See also Mike's original article on sIFR: Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.
On LinkIn, recently there was a question about what a client had to do to hire a consultant who wouldn't rip them off, just taking money for no measurable result. In my response to the question, I wrote:
I make this easy for my clients by two principles of my consulting business:
1. At the end of every consulting visit, I ask them to evaluate the worth of my contribution. If it's not worth more than they paid me, we either adjust what I'm doing or we terminate the relationship.
2. If they don't feel what I've done is worth what they've paid, they can have their money back, no questions asked. I make sure they know this up front--though I've never had to give back their money.
If a consultant doesn't give you both these things, don't hire them.
I make this easy for my clients by two principles of my consulting business:
1. At the end of every consulting visit, I ask them to evaluate the worth of my contribution. If it's not worth more than they paid me, we either adjust what I'm doing or we terminate the relationship.
2. If they don't feel what I've done is worth what they've paid, they can have their money back, no questions asked. I make sure they know this up front--though I've never had to give back their money.
If a consultant doesn't give you both these things, don't hire them.
Why Give Their Money Back?
These days, with all the talk about "internet time," professional workers are always trying to be the first with new ideas. But is that really the only path to success? Is it, indeed, a very effective path at all? What about being second?
Our culture certainly encourages people to be "first." In school, the emphasis ranges from who raises a hand first in class to who graduates with the highest grade-point average. The valedictorian - first in the class - gets lots of honors, but the salutatorian - second in the class - has to make the speech (phooey!).
Sports competitions also honor the "winner," and books on problem solving and business often borrow this metaphor - emphasizing finding the "winning" idea before anybody else. But most problem-solving areas of life are not, in fact, like sports. It's not having the idea that matters, it's what you do with the idea that counts.
And, in fact, ideas don't count that much in sports, either. Anyone can have the idea, "Hit a home run now and win the game," but there's a lot more to hitting home runs than simply having the idea. To have a fair chance of hitting a home run, you have to practice, practice, and practice. As in most of life, the key issue is not who is there first with the idea; the key issue is how you develop the idea once you have it. It's not your ideas alone that win, but ideas plus capability and the will to develop your ideas.
If you think having ideas first is the issue, consider this. Every year, tens of thousands of individuals start businesses based on being the first with a "new" idea. If that was all it took to be wildly successful, many of these firms would quickly displace all of the giant firms and become giants themselves, every year! Yes, we all know stories of small firms that had a better idea and indeed succeeded at becoming giants, but most of the time, the giants persist and the midgets fall humbly by the wayside.
Giant companies survive the onslaught of little start-ups with one of two strategies:
1. Exploring many parallel ideas and developing the few good ones.
2. Letting others do most of the searching for ideas, then developing the few good ones.
What can the individual professional learn from these strategies?
