I recently gave away an ugly backyard shed for free on CraigsList provided the person came to pick it up. Within minutes of posting the item I got 7 emails. I deleted the post immediately. I responded to the person who seemed best able to take it (she had a tiltable trailer with a winch on it) and set it up for Saturday. She failed to show saturday, so scheduled Monday. She failed to show Monday, but came Tuesday. I wasn't too worried about which day she came but did want it gone.

The 9.5 foot wide shed was at the end of a 20 foot long concrete pad that was 10 feet wide with a tree on one side and my garage on the other side. At the end of the pad was my alley. So she had to thread the shed down the pad between the tree and the garage without hitting anything, turn the corner at the end of the pad so it could be loaded onto her 20 foot long trailer. The winch on her trailer was broken. It took my battery charger, several screws and boards I had handy, and a few hours of my time to get the thing loaded on her trailer. Her truck hit my neighbor's fence and left tracks in the alley. I am not happy about that.

Structuring better "free" sales for Craigs List

If you are giving something away for "free" as long as they pick it up, I suggest you keep the listed price at zero and keep the title as "Free" but then in the details and in your communication with the person strike a slightly different deal: they pre-pay you $100 for the privilege of taking it for free which you decide whether to keep or give back. If their removal of the item meets your standards then you promise to give back the $100. If they ruin something or break something or - worst - abandon the pickup you keep the $100 to help pay for whatever the problem is.

My theory is that this will reduce the demand to only serious people who will show up on time, with the right tools/equipment to get the item.

I realized a while ago at work that when you ask someone to do something you have to include a few key elements if you actually want it to get done. This is particularly relevant in a work environment.

I'm writing this so other developers can share in the laughter (ha!) and designers/managers can learn.

I've seen this a few times. It feels like there's a mad-libs form that designers/managers use to communicate things in a software project.

Hey:

$normal_behavior_of_our_product_for_the_past_year, $insulting_phrase, $client_need_never_mentioned_before_this_month, $high_stress!!!!!

Thanks,
$designer_or_manager

So, an example letter:

Hey:

I recently accepted a position as an employee at Acquia. I have been "my own boss" since about 2006. I had a brief stint as a part-time employee at a company that has now ceased operations, but for the most part I've been the "owner" of GVS.

Thoughts on GVS

I founded GVS with a few goals. I wanted a company that mirrored open source values of do-ocracy and collaborative decision making. In part this was to make it easy for us to hire community rock-stars and have them feel right at home. In reality that didn't work perfectly though it worked pretty darn well. In part this was because I don't really like being a "manager" and wanted to have an empowered independent team. That mostly worked :)

GVS has had a ton of amazing clients and projects. Some of my personal highlights I'm most proud of are the work on Economist.com, California Closets, and the Drupalcon Chicago site which really helped push forward the COD platform. Not everything turned out perfectly. We had our fair share of mistakes but I think in the end we at least were honest and did our best to deliver what we promised and what the client wanted.

One of the real highlights was that working at GVS allowed me to take a 9 month long trip through Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru with my wonderful wife. We visited 30+ wineries, drastically improved our Spanish, and had an amazing time. I've asked every employer I worked for to support me in doing that and none really did. Working for myself I could do that. Of course, it was a lot of work to make that a reality. I had to be aggressive about accepting certain clients that would be flexible with me while I was abroad and on flakey internet connections. I also used that time strategically by investing much more than normal in my community work which has had long term marketing benefits.

I am an early adopter, packrat. When people need an extra phone charger or connector cable they come to me.

So if I throw something out, that means it must be old as dirt. Here is a list of things I threw away today.

• A Dell PS2 keyboard I got for free with my computer in 1997
• Palmrests for two keyboards I'm not even sure I own any more
• A Belkin vga/ps2 KVM switch I purchased in 2004
• A IEEE1394 (Firewire) PCMCIA card I purchased so I could connect my first generation ipod to my Windows XP powered 2003 HP laptop (I'm keeping the laptop)
• A PCI E-Sata connector - I think I got this with a 2.5" hard drive enclosure that ran on USB2.0 or E-sata (actually, I'm so keeping this if I can just find the e-sata cable!)
• 2 RJ11 (yes, 11!) cords - one approximately 10 feet, one 20 feet. Wired telephones??!?! Ha!
• A 6 foot long USB extension cable (i.e. male to female) that we bought in 2002 so we could put the computer behind the couch and the monitor on the side table like a TV
• A serial to ps2 connecter that I got for free from upenn.forfree so I could plug in a serial mouse I got somewhere...I don't even remember how this story ends
• A plug that goes from UK to standard power supply - WTF did I need this?
• A USB to Sony Ericcson T-9(?)00? connector cable I purchased in 2004. The software it came with sucked
• A PCMCIA adapter for compact flash I bought in 2000. This was awesome. But, it turns out that compactflash is the biggest kind of flash. Also, I have another 9 way flash adapter that has compactflash in it! :)
• Not one, but TWO power chargers for mini USB phones. Too bad the industry just standardized on micro USB.
• An adapter that takes USB/PS2 power and uses that to give energy to an external 2.5" hard drive enclosure just in case your USB1.1 doesn't give the drive enough power. (Yes, USB 1.1!). I bought this in ~2005.
• A PS2 mouse from a computer I bought in ~2005

The Denver Library is checking out these "power meter" kits. You can buy one for about $30 on amazon.com or get it from the library for free.

I feel items like this show off one purpose of libraries in a digital age: sharing physical items that a single house needs for a short time. I need a power meter to do tests on one day, not many days. I need a book only as long as I read it. etc.

So, I'm a Drupal fanboy. Naturally. But there's been some amazing work recently by the Drupal Accessibility Team that I wanted to highlight.

Accessible CMS: Drupal!

According to Drupal's Statement on Accessibility: