One of the great benefits of working at Yahoo! is participating with a diverse pool of colleagues in our quarterly Hack Day competitions. Google has its weekly “20% time,” where individuals go off and build whatever they’d like; Yahoo! takes a less time-intensive, but fundamentally different, approach which really resonates with me: Every 3 months, […]

The other night, Bryce Glass publicly made me aware of two major mistakes I made, each dutifully documented on his site. First, I misspelled the name of Ohio’s great citadel, Cincinnati, with the word “cincinatti.” Second (and most importantly), I mis-tagged Bryce with such a label when (in actuality) he lives in Columbus. Now, I […]

Every couple of months I am usually hit up by a friend (who knows of me as a Mac user) for sage advice on what software to get for their new laptop or iMac. Invariably, I write up a long email with the latest and greatest freeware/shareware that I can’t live without, as well as […]

NetNewsWire is my RSS newsreader of choice. Originally developed by Ranchero Software, it is now owned and under active development by NewsGator. Built from the group up with AppleScript support, NetNewsWire allows non-NewsGator employees to enhance the application with simple scripts; due to this foresight, several enhancements (such as the “Post to del.icio.us” action available […]

(Pacifica, CA) 2006 was a banner year for Laaker.com, seeing not only a relaunch and optimization of the site, but also the first new press release in more than a year. To help readers new to the site, Mr. Laaker took a poll of the year’s content; overwhelmingly, users agreed that “Made in the U.S.A. […]

(Pacifica, CA) There is a wave slowing crashing across the blog fanboy community these days centered on the idea of sharing “five things about me.” As such, the baton was recently passed to me by a certain Matt McAlister, product manager extraordinairre over at the Yahoo!’s Developer Network. Never one to let a fellow fanboy […]