Each year in March, “La Sufrida” organize an event in Ronda, Spain, in homage to their annual “101km of Ronda” race (which takes place in May). The March “Homenaje,” just like its big brother in May, offers three modes of participation — a 69 km mountain bike ride, a 44 km run or a 70 km duathlon (run and bike). Last weekend, Pino and I participated in the event — her doing the run (crazy, I know), and me doing the mountain bike ride.
It’s springtime in Andalucia, and that means weekend hikes. On Sunday, we drove out towards Casarabonela (about 45 minutes from Marbella), to hike the 3.5 km trail around Puerto Martínez.
Today at lunch, the Makalu design team had a fierce debate with the Makalu development team over the relative merits (or lack thereof) and likely…
A few weeks ago, a Securitas salesman popped into the office, offering deep discounts should we be interested in upgrading our three-year-old alarm system. Given three years of technological advances, my expectations were high, and Securitas certainly delivered. In addition to the old features, we’ve now got magnets on the entrances, and their latest, easy-to-use alarm panel — which you’ll have to see to believe.
So this blog used live at thisusersexperience.com. When I first registered that name, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s kind of long. I sure wouldn’t look forward…
When I started Makalu, over a decade ago, I remember longing for a user’s manual to help with questions like, “How much should I charge?”…
One of the things I’m really enjoying being part of this relatively-nascent — in the big picture, as in “Usenet before the AOL gateway” sense…
Javier Diaz Carretero, of Andalucia, is one of Spain’s top marathon, half-marathon and cross-country runners. He’s also role model for those willing to take risks in order to follow their passion. Makalu decided to become the exclusive sponsor of Javier in his 2010 season, during which he’ll attempt to become the Spanish national champion, for the second time, in the marathon event. As part of that sponsorship package, we recently designed and launched his personal website.
Communicating well in 140 characters is one of the newer dimensions of “communication design,” and its importance was discussed at length some time ago by Rands in, “The Art of the Tweet.” Just like blog articles, I often draft tweets outside of my Twitter client, in a dedicated writing application. Since I sometimes have URLs, references and other text sitting alongside the drafted tweets, I really needed a quick and efficient way to count the characters of the tweets themselves.
This morning we launched the redesign of the Makalu Aerospace and Makalu Interactive websites. Makalu designer, Alex Bendiken (@minimaltwist), loves to add a twist to our designs. To celebrate the relaunch, we’re running a small competition.
On February 17, Jason Fried wrote an article announcing 37signals’s intention to hire an outside firm to redesign their blog, Signals vs. Noise. Companies wishing to be considered for the project would be required to have a Pro listing on Sortfolio.com — 37signals’s yellow-pages service for finding web design companies. March 8th was the date earmarked for choosing the winning firm.
I remember, as if it were yesterday. I was sitting in the ground station laboratory at the European Space Agency, needing to setup a test…
