Derek Scruggs

Yes, I know it’s been ages since I posted, mainly because I’m busy as all hell and also because I prefer microblogging on Twitter. But I thought I’d share this simple little widget we created for South by Southwest Interactive. I’m heading to Austin tomorrow and this is what my schedule will probably look like for the next few days. Ping me if you’re there, and check out our online rating tool built specifically for the conference.

Great idea:

Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book.

An acquaintance of mine, a direct marketing guru, once told me that he writes the sales letter before he ever creates the product. Only after he’s explained exactly what you’ll get and why you need it does he set about creating the product. (And sometimes, if the sales letter isn’t compelling enough, he just abandons the product altogether, saving him a lot of time and effort.)

Yeah, yeah - I know. I’ve been a terrible blogger of late (though a little better about tweeting). And so now I finally have the energy to write something and it’s nothing more than a commercial for the panels I’ve submitted to South by Southwest. So sue me. But make sure you vote first.

When my sister gave me the news of Charlton Heston’s death, the first thing I said was “Did they pry his gun out of his cold, dead hands?”

Tonight I did a demo of SurveyGizmo at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. I was fortunate to get a few laugh lines, but the credit really goes to Scott for putting together some nice screen shots and helping me work out exactly what to present.

A typical client demo or webinar can go on for up to an hour. Cramming the highlights into five minutes was like explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics as “basically, a lot of weird unpredictable stuff happens.”

It’s especially gratifying to hear what David Cohen had to say:

Thank The Magic Diety in the Sky for SurveyGizmo, who is doing well and is having an open house at their new digs in downtown Boulder later this week. The room erupted with glee when they showed actual technology that was cool, as well as “a demo of Keynote transitions.” SurveyGizmo has a very deep and well established product for creating, managing, and analyzing surveys. If you’ve experienced Survey Monkey, it’s kinda like that but has a more “enterprise” feel and is targeted slightly upmarket. It has nice-to-have features such as two-way Salesforce integration and stuff like scalability (they currently handle 20-40k responses per minute). Pricing ranges from free to $159/month. Go check it out if you need to find out what people think, and you need it to be real.

Thanks David! See you Friday?

I was a fan of Arthur C. Clarke when I was a kid and, like many, was sad to hear of his death. Today I learned this:

While a radar technician in the Royal Air Force (1941-1946), Clarke had an idea which he wrote up in a 1945 technical paper: “Extra-terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” It was the invention of the geosynchronous communications satellite. He calculated that by putting a satellite at 22,300 miles above the equator, it would orbit the Earth at the same rate that the Earth rotated on its axis, making the satellite appear to always stay directly above a point on the equator. That way ground stations could always point to it, and it could relay signals. The 22,300-mile orbit is now officially known as the “Clarke Orbit”, but it took nearly 20 years for the first operational satellite to be placed there (and 10 before the first orbital rocket flight). Today, that band of space is stuffed with satellites. He mused he “lost a billion dollars in my spare time” by not patenting the idea.

Courtesy of This is True’s always-interesting Honorary Unsubscribe.

Hilarious!

“Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003 on Meet the Press.

Five years later:

Iran leader’s Iraq visit eclipses US, Arab ties

BAGHDAD, March 2 (Reuters) - Pomp and ceremony greeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his arrival in Iraq on Sunday, the fanfare a stark contrast to the rushed and secretive visits of his bitter rival U.S. President George W. Bush.

Heckuva job, W.

This post about a group of students who got to question Warren Buffet is making it’s way around the blogosphere. I particularly like what he says here:

I know a woman in her 80’s, a Polish Jew woman forced into a concentration camp with her family but not all of them came out. She says, “I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind; would they hide me?” If you get to be my age, or younger for that matter, and have a lot of people that would hide you, then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life. I know people on the Forbes 400 list whose children would not hide them. “He’s in the attic, he’s in the attic.” Some of them keep compensating by joining board seats or getting honorary degrees, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one will give a damn when they are gone. The most powerful force in the world is unconditional love. To horde it is a terrible mistake in life. The more you try to give it away, the more you get it back. At an individual level, it’s important to make sure that for the people that count to you, you count to them.

Via Brad Feld, who I would feel privileged to hide in my attic.

Wow, who knew William Shatner could be so philosophical?

Q: If that horse had killed you, what would you have regretted never achieving?

A: Everything. I’ve done nothing. What have I done? I’ve blundered my way through life. So I have my picture on the wall. The minute I die, that picture will start to yellow and fade and eventually be gone. Blown in the wind and become part of the molecular structure of something else. These things we see as “success,” they’re non-accomplishments.

Q: So is that how you think of your Emmy for Boston Legal? And the millions of lives you touched as Captain James Tiberius Kirk?

A: Careers are here and they’re gone. I enjoy performing, and I feel lately like I’ve reached the apex of what I can do as a performer. Even my memory for dialogue has never been sharper. But no matter how great we think we are, we’re nothing but the temples of Ozymandias—we’re ruins in the making.

Found via Brijit.