A bit of background from my 2013 preamble for those new to my lists: I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. […]Continue Reading →

James Carroll at “Ceridian” sent us a quick note today: Don’t know if you’ve seen the e-mail blast(s) from marketingprofs.com. I liked their apology, plus it makes me feel good that not everyone’s perfect! It appears that most (all?) of “MarketingProfs” subscribers received numerous messages, all with slightly different offers […]Continue Reading →

A bit of background from my 2013 preamble for those new to my lists: I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. […]Continue Reading →

A bit of background from my 2013 preamble for those new to my lists: I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as much joy from these amazing artists as I did this year. […]Continue Reading →

Hello World! (Moving blog to Medium edition)

I was soooo close to not publishing my Top 30 list this year. But after some thought I realized there was a lot of good music this year and future me would kick 2015 me in the ass for not taking a bit of time to acknowledge that. A bit

I’m a bit late publishing my traditional year-end “Top 30 Albums” list this year, but it’s a good one, so I hope you’ll forgive me. I do this more for me — as a way of discovering new music — than for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to get as […]Continue Reading →

The sixth and final season of Mad Men has started and it’s got me wondering about how the series will end. Here are a few possible ways I can imagine the writers wrapping everything up for Don. Sally Draper follows in her father’s footsteps, becoming a partner at the firm, […]Continue Reading →

It has become my tradition to publish a year-end “Top 30 Albums” list — at least it’s a tradition if three years in a row makes a tradition. Last year I posted my Top 30 Albums of 2011 and the year before I had my Top 30 Albums of 2010. While I

With today’s sad news that Neil Armstrong has died, all the participants in this story are gone and the truth can be revealed. Armstrong didn’t actually say “This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. He said, “this is one small step for man, one giant […]Continue Reading →

Reading Fred Wilson’s post about tax rates made me want to share my (incomplete) thoughts on taxation. I’d like to see a Flat Tax on income with only a few tweaks to remove some of the inherent unfairness in that approach. I’m not sure if this is a model already […]Continue Reading →

Last year I published my Top 30 Albums of 2010. I quite enjoyed that project and decided to do the same thing again this year and to make it a bit of a tradition each year. For me 2011 was a fantastic year for music. Tons of new artists and

Lucy and I were watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” tonight and we started talking about movies we were happy to watch repeatedly. Here’s a quick list I made. (500) Days of Summer 24 Hour Party People A Simple Plan Almost Famous American Graffiti Anchorman Back To The Future Close Encounters […]Continue Reading →

There is an old saying, meant to shame those of us working on websites into acknowledging that we really don’t care about other human beings. “The only two industries that call their customers “users” are software developers and drug dealers.” This raises the question of what the appropriate collective noun […]Continue Reading →

When I was young (in the sixties) my parents weren’t really into music. But we had the radio on all the time. We listened to Easy Listening stations. This naturally drove me crazy. But it also embedded these songs in my head. This BBC 4 documentary (below in six parts) […]Continue Reading →

Here we see a very young me (I’m pretty sure I’m four years old) with my sister Karin (who would have been 23). Don’t we look young and happy and (at least in my case) sun-stroked?

I love this John Stossel segment with Michael Shermer. He presents a funny, articulate and relatively non-condescending world-view, arguing that reason, logic, and science will serve us better than superstition and the opinions of the famous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YJqeTJdRQM

I almost forgot to mention that today is the 15th anniversary of schafer.com. I registered the domain for personal use back in 1996 and it’s had something on it pretty much ever since. It’s been a resume for me, a list of links, a corporate site for while I was […]Continue Reading →

I’ll let you in on a secret: If you’re going to do a “Best of…” list, wait until the year is over so you can see what everybody else thought was the best and add to your own list. This is not cheating. No one can keep up with all […]Continue Reading →

I’ve been really happy with my Hug Bunny experiment and now that I’ve got a better handle on WordPress, I’m moving my personal blog (this one) over to WordPress (hosted at Page.ly) too.

One clear result of the rise of Twitter and Facebook is the ever-growing number of abandoned blogs out there. Blogs have always had a high abandon rate. It’s “cool” (well it was) to have a blog and it’s dirt simple to start one. Much harder is the task of keeping […]Continue Reading →

Paul Graham just wrote a wonderful overview of how to disagree. Go read it. I’ll wait. My guess is this was spurred by a mildly controversial post he did a few days earlier called You Weren’t Meant To Have A Boss which was widely commented on. I don’t disagree with […]Continue Reading →

I hadn’t heard of Mary Barclay before stumbling across her obituary by the BBC. While I know nothing about her other than what I read today I can’t help thinking she’d get a good laugh from the unfortunate juxtaposition of the headline and caption in her obit: I’m sure it […]Continue Reading →

A while ago I started collecting up all the old photo albums and shoeboxes of pictures and slides that have been stored at the back of closets with the hope of starting a scanning project to share these with family and (to a lesser extent) the world. I did a […]Continue Reading →

I just checked my calendar to see what my week was like and nearly fainted: I never have weeks like this. We’re not big on “standing meetings” at Tucows but I do like to make time to sit down with all my direct reports at least once a week. And […]Continue Reading →

Earlier this week I was reading a post on Fred Wilson’s blog and clued in to the fact that he’s been using Disqus as a substitute for the TypePad commenting system he used in the past. I really liked the Disqus approach to commenting and, given that this blog runs […]Continue Reading →