Another best answer on ask.mefi!
I don't answer many questions on
ask.mefi but
this response did get marked best answer. (Yes, I know I need a line editor.)
And yes, it is about something I'm an expert on--resigning. I've had 10 jobs since starting my software career in 1988, everyone one (except my current one) I've ended with a resignation. (I've dodged the layoff bullet a couple of times--as I like to say, the rats are the first to jump ship.) As I recalled my past resignations, I realized I followed my own advice--I once talked to the ceo about some job concerns, was told that those concerns would not be addressed. I resigned a week later.
Shortly before I left, the CEO backtracked and assured me that I misunderstood him and that we should continue negotiations. That move, based on the MSFT-YHOO talks, should be called the Jerry Yang.
Often constraints or limitation can fuel innovation. Today, when you need to create a company or brand-name, you have to take into account the scarcity of internet domain names. This limitation, exacerbated by the practice of
cybersquatting, has lead to some creative nomenclature: flickr, digg, netflix, google, del.icio.us.
I was reminded of this when I discovered
muxtape.com, a web 2.0ish site that allow you to create an online
mix tape. It's simple execution of creating a set of songs quickly became popular and the term muxtape entered into lingua franca of web 2.0. Had the mixtape.com domain been available to muxtape.com's creators, I bet they would have used it. But the side-effect of this limitation is they had to be creative and now muxtape is an unambiguous band-name for their service.
On the opposite side, some company's chose
overloaded product names that may not cause as much confusion as demonstrate the lack of creativity. In fact,
MBC pleads guilty here.
When faced with a company name, brand-name or feature name, use all the creativity you can muster to discover a name that both is sticky and unique and has a chance to to be an unambiguous term that will be associated with your company.
And here's a great example of a
muxtape.
Whiskey Rebellion, Part Two?
I was amused while reading
Undaunted Courage that Pittsburgh was one of the flash points of the Whiskey Rebellion. With my fair city currently embroiled in
a drink tax controversy, it's obvious that whatever is old is new again.
Reading a bit more about the whiskey rebellion, I found it interesting that the arguments against taxes that prompted the Revolutionary War were the same in the whiskey rebellion--except it was the newly formed US government playing the British role against the whiskey-drinking frontiersmen revolutionaries. And it seemed the US government acted without any acknowledgment of its hypocrisy as it attempted to crush the rebellion.
And it seems that the man has long, enduring roots of messing with your hooch.
Information Overload...TO THE EXTREME
Boy, do I have some
feed reading to do today...
[Yes, that's over a million items...]
Busted HTML
Oops...in my previous post, I linked to what looks like (and I guess is) a site about [that little purple pill]. (The site is 32584 dot com.) Definitely a copy-paste mistake.
The site was a colleague's personal blog that appears to be have hijacked by pfizer. Or his career has taken a wild turn.
