Jason's Notes About Stuff

I "banned" McDonald's food years ago, after living in Atlanta, Georgia and realizing that the food standards there were significantly below those in Canada. Today I read an article describing the 38 ingredients found in Chicken McNuggets . Surprising facts: They're mostly made of corn (56%) They have trace amounts of several suspected carcinogens They contain trace amounts of a type of butane (lighter fluid!) Yummy! UPDATE: Apparently there is some controversy about whether TBHQ (the ingredient in question) is actually a form a butane.  Chemists seem to think not.   Nonetheless, eating one gram of TBHQ will cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse."   So it's clearly not great stuff to be ingesting.

I just read an article that summed up some common mistakes when starting a business that rung true to me. They mentioned the following (which I've put in the order I think is most important): Not focusing on the user Not having enough infrastructure (money + time) Forgetting about branding, marketing and sales Trying to do everything (similar to #2) Staying in "Stealth Mode" too long Have a look at the original article here: http://startupspark.com/the-5-most-common-mistakes-made-by-startups/

I've created a web development summary chart comparing the major web application development platforms out there today. I've tried to make the comparison as unbiased as possible, and stick to mostly to business and technical reasons for choosing each one. As you can see, there is no one perfect platform. They are all very capable, and which one you go with depends a lot on your business priorities.

Last week I closed two accounts at Bank of Montreal. The one account was a corporate chequing account I’d had with them for 4 years. The other account was opened when I was 13 years old. It’s been active for more than 15 years. Moving all of your financials from one bank to another is a pretty time consuming process, and not usually done unless there are significant reasons. I had several: BMO wanted to charge me $500 just to apply for a corporate line of credit, whereas RBC approved me quickly with no upfront fee RBC’s online banking system is better than BMO’s I don’t like my closest BMO branch The service fees at RBC are marginally cheaper for the number of transactions I do The amazing thing? Nobody even asked me why I was closing two major accounts after being with them for over 15 years. The CSRs didn’t care – which means that upper management doesn’t care either. In a normal competitive environment, a service company would be very concerned about losing a good, lo...

Estimating software development time is hard. There are so many variables, unknowns, "unknown unknowns", and the specification always changes. Besides that, developers tend to be optimistic by nature. Here's a handy little way to come up with a quick, yet accurate estimate: Come up with your best, overall estimate that you feel is realistic using your favorite technique, or pure "gut feeling" if you are a very experienced developer and you know the problem domain well. Ok, you have your absolutely realistic number now, right? It's not realistic. I guarantee you there are aspects you haven't thought of. Double the number. This is your best case scenario estimate. This is how long it will take assuming everything goes well and there are no snags or major changes along the way. Now double it again. This is your most likely estimate. This is how long the project will probably take, when all is said and done. Now double it a final time. T...