Open letter to Keith Lang about Skitch

Dear Keith,

I read your letter about Skitch and would like to respond to all that has happened from my end-user perspective.

I am a long-time Evernote user and fan. Evernote changed note taking by being truly searchable. I can confidently drop all the websites, receipts, todos and ideas in there, and clear my mind of the “I must remember that” burden. The OCR of Evernote works beautifully on photos of whiteboards, making even my whiteboard notes searchable.

In 2010, I discovered Skitch. The simplicity and razor sharp focus on anotating a screencapture and share the anotated image by dragging it anywhere was sheer brilliance. My daily work includes making annotated screenhots and mailing them to team members to discuss improvements. Skitch changed this ugly capture-save-edit-save-attach-send cycle to pure poetry in motion. Dragging images into Evernote even made my screenshots searchable. It instantly became second nature and my go-to image tool.

Why you should not use SOAP Headers

In the project I am working on right now we use apache XCF and Spring to provide a SOAP service to our customers. As part of the messages, there is a userid/password combo telling the application which user sent the request. I struggled with that today because I think that userid/password info should actually be in the SOAP Header, cleaning up my API, enable me to implement different authentication techniques in the future and generally be more “compliant” to the SOAP standard. Boy was I wrong.

Mortgage Awareness

This weekend I tinkered around with Apple Keynote. I thought I’d make something useful. In this video I’m trying to show you how much money the bank makes on your mortgage. Banks like you to pay a low monthly fee on your mortgage because it keeps the loan higher for a longer period of time. This way the bank can cash in on the interest rate, and then cash in again at the end of the mortgage contract, when you are still hopelessly in debt.

“Financial advisors” working for the bank will throw sand in your eyes, saying that keeping your debt high gives you all kinds of tax breaks. But in the end, it’s them who get better of that construction, not you. Don’t fall into this trap. Understand your mortgage contract, learn how the model works, and check your model against the bank’s model (without that financial advisor or the lady at the helpdesk talking to you). You have more room than you think. Use it.

Join, don’t judge

Like many people, I like to dine in a good restaurant, where the mood is mellow, the waiter is a fine host, and the cook is passionate about good food and nice presentation. The courses are perfectly timed with your appetite, and each shiny polished plate of food contains the best looking, smelling and tasting food with the nicest textures. After desert, you get the best fresh mineral water coffee, and just sit there, satisfied, happy, in good company. The waiter discretely places the check on the table, and you happily pay whatever that check tells you to pay, and add a big tip for good measure, to show you had a great evening.

Review: Lamy Pico pen

A few weeks ago I saw this amazing pen design by Lamy, the Pico. I’m a heavy computer user so I don’t do much handwriting, but I do like nice tools so I thought I’d get this. Particularly the small form factor when retracted and the sleek design attracted me.

There are some things about the Pico that nobody is telling you, so I thought I’d write a little review.