A place for our creative musings on web-design, technology, and life.
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A very interesting clip from Seth Godin (marketing guru) on curiosity. A lot of it has to do with noise pollution - and the lack of curiosity being rewarded in the modern world.
"It is easy to underestimate how difficult it is for people to become curious. That for 7, 10, 15 years of school you are required to not be curious." - Seth Godin
Wow! It's hard to believe it has been a whole month since I last posted. February has been super busy for us. We've moved into our own design studio, which we are now in the process of renovating and we've been deluged with all kinds of new client work. I've been meaning to update our portfolio for some time but it looks like it is going to have to wait just a little while longer.
This week I've been up to the Yukon on business, leaving Nathan and Anthony to hold down the fort at home in Victoria. They've got their hands full so I'm certain they will hardly even notice that I've left. The weather up north has been quite good with most days averaging -5 to -10 degrees Celsius in Whitehorse.
On a particularly cold evening I had a chance to sit down at a good friend's birthday party and meet two truly unique Yukoner's who run Dechenla Adventure Nature Tours. After seeing photos of the lodge and surrounding area I'm hoping to find a number of solid outdoors men or women to put together a group to visit the place. The photos speak for themselves. Stunning!
We have been thinking a lot about the benefits of collaborative work spaces as we have been recently hunting for commercial office space in our home town of Victoria. Evidently it is a lot more difficult than you would think to find good commercial space at a good price - and it makes a lot of environmental and financial sense to share space with another company if you can make it work.
Earlier this week I came across a site which got me even more interested in finding collaborative workspace partners.
Jelly is casual coworking. We invite people to work from our home for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.
You bring a laptop (or whatever you need to get work done) and a friendly disposition.
What a novel idea! Though it wouldn’t really work well for us right now to have an open space in our homes to have people stop by, it might if we could find some good office space. We just love ideas like this that are forward thinking and innovative. Some great ideas have come from Jelly as well. CommandShift3 for starters was a product of these Jelly sessions. Finding interesting and diverse people to work with is all part of the process.
Well it’s the time of year for resolutions and thinking up new and creative ways of staying excited about work and about life. One of the things we’ve been talking about is getting out as a group once a month for a hike, rock climbing adventure, or surfing expedition. We were all talking about how great it is to mix work with a little play once and again and as we’re all pretty outdoorsy guys it makes sense to augment hard work with some good fun. This is designed with three goals in mind:
We plan to kick off the program in May this year. We may of course start a little earlier if we get a good weather window on a Friday.
We just wanted to extend a hearty happy new year to all of our clients. We have appreciated your business over the past year and we look forward to another good year of working with you. All the best!
From all the guys at Simple Station: Stuart, Nathan, Anthony and Graeme.
No it’s not some a keystroke in Microsoft Word, it’s a website where you can rate websites against one another. Think “Hot or Not” but with more of a web design focus.
Link: CommandShift3
For each word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. Apparently this site is doing quite a bit for raising literacy rates in American public schools while also contributing to a worthy cause. The program is made possible by advertisers who pay to have their marketing material displayed on the site.
As mentioned in our reasons why to choose us we touched briefly on web-standards. This is something I've felt needs a little more explaining, and it's worthwhile taking a read through this article if you are unsure what web standards are, or how they might apply to the design and development of your website.
Well I’ve finally made a decision to attend my first ever Green Drinks upcoming on the 11th of December. The green business network meets from 5-8pm down at the Canoe Club in downtown Victoria. My colleague Roger Colwill started the organization, being a passionate man with a very green thumb. Unfortunately Roger passed away this fall while I was away in South America so now I have taken it upon myself to join his network and contribute to the growing number of small businesses here in Victoria that are looking to make a change for the environment.
Today I was browsing through websites looking at innovative electric cars when I came across the Zenn (Zero Emissions No Noise). The car is built right here in Canada and was recently featured on The Rick Mercer report. I've never heard of the company before now and thought that it was a marvelous concept. If only it had a range of 300km and could go 100 km/hour I would definitely consider buying this enterprising little car. It sure would be great if I lived in Vancouver or Toronto, but here on the island it's just not practical.