A friend of mine keeps chickens to provide him with fresh eggs. Recently, I asked how they were doing. “I killed them all,” he said. “They stopped being productive egg layers. I ordered three dozen new chicks by mail. They arrive next week.”
Make sure you continue to be perceived as productive.
My personal update to the questions would be:
- Do you use a distributed source control system?
- Do you use a bug database where users can report bugs directly?
- Do you have a testing protocol, and specific resources for testing?
- Do you fix bugs before implementing new features?
- Do you have automated build or deployment procedures?
- Do you have a roadmap, and you don't make important changes to the short term priorities?
- Do your team work in good conditions (quiet environment, flexible schedule, freedom to choose development software, fair paycheck...)
Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.)
Are you fucking kidding me, FCC? Google is already worth more than AT&T or Verizon. In a year, this publicly traded behemoth could be worth more than both, combined, but they'll look after our best interests? What kind of job have they promised each of you on that commission? Tell me, what other $200 billion corporations have my best interests in mind? America's? General Electric, perhaps? PepsiCo? Shit. You do know why Google gives away Android, don't you? Or are you as dumb as you are greedy?
Speaking of MTV, MGMT thinks that’s a station with reality shows. Lewi’s kids don’t realize MTV EVER played music! Things change.
With Nullsoft, Frankel's modus operandi had been to write the best software he could, then give it away for nothing. At AOL the business of selling software threatened to overwhelm the software itself. "The products that I worked on, it was very much like, We want to make this money out of this. We're doing this deal with these other companies, and so the product is going to do this as a result," he remembers. "No one cared about how users actually experienced it."
It's that Apple don't have that many partners.
Pretending that because history has been mostly good, we should take a blanket optimistic outlook is just Whig history nonsense. Whig history is the line we were all fed in school, and its main purpose seems to be to tell us that the status quo is great and there is nothing to worry about.
In a thread on the EC2 forum, Marko describes a situation where an outbound firewall prevents the ability to ssh to port 22, which is the default port on all EC2 instances.
In that thread, Shlomo Swidler proposes creating a user-data script that changes sshd to listen on a port the firewall permits.
Here’s a simple example of a user-data script that does just that. Most outbound firewalls allow traffic to port 80 (web/HTTP), so I use it in this example.
The first step is to create a file containing the user-data script:
cat <<'EOM' >user-data-ssh-port-80.txt #!/bin/bash -ex perl -pi -e 's/^Port 22$/Port 80/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/init.d/ssh restart EOMThe first statement changes the sshd config to listen on port 80 instead of port 22, and the second statement restarts sshd so it will start using this new configuration.
Now you can run a new instance on Amazon EC2, passing in this user-data script. Since the AWS APIs use standard web ports, most outbound firewalls will let through these types of requests. In this example, I use an Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid AMI from Canonical which was current as of this article. Please use the most recent AMIs available.
ec2-run-instances --key YOURKEYPAIR --region us-east-1 --instance-type t1.micro --user-data-file user-data-ssh-port-80.txt ami-6c06f305Save the instance id created and make a note of the IP address once it starts. Now you can ssh in to port 80 using the keypair you specified:
ssh -p 80 -i YOURKEYPAIR.pem ubuntu@184.72.134.192After testing this, don’t forget to terminate your EC2 instance.
See also: Escaping Restrictive/Untrusted Networks with OpenVPN on EC2
Disclaimer
These instructions are not intended to assist in illegal activities. If you are breaking the laws or rules of your government or college or company or ISP, then you should understand the implications and be willing to accept consequences of your actions.
This post by Boris is funny as hell.
Books are a waste of time… [TNW Entrepreneur]
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2010/11/24/books-are-a-waste-of-time/
“I hate reading books. I just don’t see the point. In fact, I don’t understand where people find time to read. And why should you do it anyway? What do you get out of it? Nah, I’m skipping the whole book-reading hype”
Saying something like that will certainly make you a social outcast right away. You just can’t say something like that. Books are beautiful, full of knowledge and entertainment. Books are holy.
So why is it perfectly fine for that same group of people to mock the Internet? Why is it okay, when you are above a certain age, to be so dismissive about blogs, Twitter and Facebook?
I don’t go around claiming that I suffer from information overload when I enter a library? Or that reading magazines is a waste of time? Then why is it just fine to ignore the biggest source of information the world has ever seen?
I just don’t get it when intelligent people think it is okay to be so dismissive about new technology. The next time someone is telling me they don’t like the web or don’t see the point in Twitter I’m going to tell them that books are a waste of time. And then I’m going to smack them over the head with one.
You see it worked. On paper, it looks like Apple’s losing money. Having its tech support in America, spending all this time on the phone, sending me free software. But now I’m evangelizing. I’m just telling you, you want to be a member of the cult. You want people to take care of you, you want them to care about you. Owning a Mac is like following the Grateful Dead. Jerry took care of you. Steve might not be as benevolent a character, but deep inside we believe he’s taking care of us too.
Even Bob Lefetz is singing Applecare's praise.
So now I write. Mostly blogs, but I’ve experimented with fiction before. I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that other people see me as a writer – maybe not a Writer, but someone who enjoys and does well with words. I read. Mostly nonfiction, but also children’s literature (which I like because it tends to be unpretentious and not over-wrought), classics, and odd discoveries. I still can’t dissect the things I read, although I’m starting to be able to tell why I like some things and not others. I draw. Not the beautiful drawings my friends could make, but enough to make people smile. I revisit the shop and home economic skills that gave me anxiety in the classroom. I reclaim those parts of self that I’d discarded along the way.
The truth is that I feel little nostalgia for ’90s grunge, and almost no connection to the version of myself that once felt part of the Alternative Nation. I once believed that the rise of so-called alternative music in the early ’90s was the greatest thing to happen in my lifetime—world-changing, no less—but now this notion seems almost too embarrassing to admit in print.
I can't find a single person from my generation who will admit to still listening to grunde... ok, except Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots.
On the other hand, people have no shame about liking old school hiphop.
Same generation of music, very different outcome.
Then came the “Social Media Challenge.”
“Our industry is changing,” said the prospective employers explaining the twist. “Social media has become an essential front in stakeholder interaction. We need to see how skillful and creative you are with these tools.”
At first blush, the challenge sounded to Fiona, who quietly nursed a raging Facebook addiction like everyone else she knew, like fun: Log in to a special Facebook page and get as many people to “Like” you as possible. But it wasn’t merely a game.
Fiona was told that she was one of two remaining applicants being considered by the company. The “Social Media Challenge” would not be conducted in some isolated spare office space at her potential place of business, but as a public, week-long contest between her and her competitor for anyone, including and especially her friends and family, to see. If and when she won the challenge, it would increase her chances of getting hired.
It hasn’t always been this way. Somewhere in the history of recruiter/recruitee relations, between the advent of “The Apprentice” and the decline of the global financial industry, the rules of the game took a turn for the dramatic. Beyond simple supply-and-demand, securing a job today—even those of the less-than-glamorous variety—has become something akin to a tooth-and-nail fight to the death in the Roman Colosseum: a spectacle of personal desperation for audiences either real or imagined.
I've seen job posting where part of the job requirement was to have X number of friends on Facebook.
Ridiculous.
One of the more common sentiments heard this weekend was this realization that conventional PCs are being replaced by one or more different types of computing devices. For example, one friend has recently run into issues with his home router, and himself had been using a Palm Pre Plus to get his email and communicate with people. He’d gotten tired of his wife asking for his mobile for email/games/browsing, and she soon also adapted the use of a Palm Pre Plus. Now, their laptop sits mostly unused, and they manage most of their digital lives on smartphones.
I remember the sad words of my Cello teacher when I announced I was quitting that:
“Don’t tell me you’re starting a bloody rock band.”
I told her I’d defected to the guitar because it doesn’t have a nine-inch steel spike in one end, a missing fret board, or a sad role in a Bond movie where Timothy Dalton uses a £1.4m Stradivarius to steer a makeshift toboggan. The truth is this: the Cello got tough at around grade six, so I switched to an instrument that any talentless shitbag can play.
Best quote of the day
The word 'bespoke' always confuses me. Every time. No matter how often I look it up in the dictionary.
I think it confuses almost everybody.
But it's only confusing if you think of Newsweek as a magazine that's not doing very well. Think of it instead as a new host for Tina Brown, a parasite, whose own host—The Daily Beast—is dying.
Funny and kind of mean.
Don't have an opinion right now about this.
I am probably one of the few people in the world who switched from an Android to a Symbian (a little bit of Maemo in-between) and then an iPhone. All in the same year. All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses.
“This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it,” Zuckerberg said. It’s all about making communication simpler. “This is the way that the future should work,” he continued.
Here are the keys to what a modern messaging system needs according to Zuckerberg:
- seamless
- informal
- immediate
- personal
- simple
- minimal
- short
To do that, Facebook has created three key things: Seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. Essentially, they’ve created a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS — they’re all included. “People should share however they want to share,” engineer Andrew Bosworth said.
All of this messaging is kept in a single social inbox. And all of your conversation history with people is kept.
 Wil Wheaton (@wilw)10-11-14 23:37 Just watched Scott Pilgrim using Amazon on-demand via Roku, and loved every second; it blew away my expectations. 4.5 out of 5 evil exes. |
After weeks of rumor, 77-year-old weekly print publication Newsweek, and 2-year-old online news and opinion site The Daily Beast have announced a 50/50 joint merger — and the union’s first casualty is Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim, according to The New York Post.
The new company — to be called The Newsweek Daily Beast Company — will be owned equally by Sidney Harman, who purchased Newsweek for a reported $1 from The Washington Post Co. this summer, and the The Daily Beast’s owner, IAC.
Tina Brown, the current editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and former editor of Vanity Fair, Tatler and The New Yorker, will serve as editor-in-chief of both Newsweek and The Daily Beast. The news of the merger was officially released this morning.
Wow. I know I don't read Newsweek much anymore. I kinda knew this was coming. But to see this up on Mashables ... all lined up together is scary.
Yeah. This is a takeover.
I still remember when the Daily Beast first started: people were wondering openly if Tina Brown has lost her sanity for choosing to participate in some blog. Now, they are taking over Newsweek.
Who knows what is going to happen? Maybe this is the mini-"Times Warner-AOL" deal for the 2010's. I wonder if anybody used the word "synergy" in their pitch.
Here's a transcription of the whole list, for search engines' sakes:
- When in doubt, let a manuscript go back.
- Always remember that the fastidious element in the Atlantic audience is its permanent and valuable core.
- Don't over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.
- Avoid mistakes of fact. If a paper is statistical, question the author closely.
- The Atlantic has always been recognized as belonging to the Liberal wing. Be liberal, but be radical only as a challenge to be answered.
- Be careful about expenses. Calculate the cost of each number. Remember that our margin is always narrow.
- A sound editor never has a three-months' full supply in his cupboard. When you over-buy, you narrow your future choice.
- Follow the news. Remember that timeliness means being on time, not before the time.
- Interesting papers on conscience, personal religion, theory of living, are always precious. The Atlantic has three dimensions -- breadth of interest, height of interest, depth of interest. Individual personal philosophy always adds to the depth.
- Keep all suggestions in the Black Book, so that they can be followed up.
- Humor is precious and correspondingly hard to find. Most humor that reaches us is merely jocularity, and it is well to be jocular only when really funny.
- Quick decisions -- except in poetry. Collect groups of verse and make a selection after several readings.
Blogging it here so I can chew on it later.
4Chan and Tumblr.com war?
November 12, 2010 By 21 Comments
4Chan's "Operation Overlord Tumblr" poster
Tumblr and 4Chan war? “Ideas” and not copyright are the reason.
But I guess I can still use my Posterous account.
the same approach is applicable to a lot of business relationships where you need to prioritize who you spend your time with. I will take an initial thirty minute phone call with anyone; I love how many interesting people this allows me to discover.
This is cool. Like an old movie. Pure instrumental song from the latest Gorillaz Album -- Plastic Beach.
The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP's basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?
I still love SMS.
I try not to be a snob. Because I think it just closes doors. For example, I have written before about not being a language snob. If you are, then you stop yourself from learning about language. And being a snob about copyediting perfection is terrible, too — you end up never writing anything because it takes too long. Even career advice snobbery is bad, because people who fail give the best advice. So it's no surprise that I find book snobbery self-destructive as well; when I'm a snob about books, they take over my house.
My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn't wanted to conserve. And, of course, the number of actual objects the culture conserves is even smaller. If enough people want to read an older work, it comes out in a new edition. More often, I find the old editions, variably handsome or yellowed and trashy, which will almost all be tumbling in the darkness of a dumpster soon after I pass on them.
Be aligned with a profit center, not a cost center – tie yourself to revenue, where you can be measured...When times are tough, cutbacks come first from cost centers, and no matter how “valuable” you think your contributions are, if they can’t be measured and tracked against revenue, you’ll be hard pressed to justify your existence at some point;
In other words, a book section isn’t only about letting people know that such-and-such a work has been published. It’s a place where consideration happens — and the nature of a consideration is important, whatever book or idea sets it in motion. Consideration, for me, isn’t so much a matter of determining the ultimate value of a work, but rather of allowing a community to participate in the evaluation of the work.
I finally got around to reading this meanderingly beautiful article on literary criticism and its previous semi-existence in Canada.
Personally. I liked books. I liked writing. I even liked "Anatomy of Criticism." But I always hated the BOOKS section of the newspaper.
I never understood:
1) what they are trying to convey.
2) who the intended audience is. (I can never see somebody reading TLS and afterwards say, "Wow, that was a riveting piece, I am going to buy the book." I always imagine literary critics seems to intend for the authors themselves to be the true audience.)
3) Is this a good book? Is this a book worthy of attention? Is this book relevant to my wants and interests? (Most review seems to be some kind of onastic, lit-crit, find-the-stylistic-flaw exercise that is better kept in private letters between friends. )
The whole thing has an over-inflated sense of the importance of criticism. I think it is a bit rich to call Book Sections "agorae." And why should the writer privilege the critic (who is only one reader in a mass of reader) in the determination of the meaning of a work over the mass reader? The quoted above seems to give all the weight of consideration to a bunch of people (community) that has access to be published in newspaper and no one else...
Here’s the big secret about dating hipster girls: we’re just the same as everyone else, only cuter, better dressed, and know way more about music and pop culture than you do.
A good friend of mine recently moved to Holland. These are his stories.
Today I got a lecture from the security guard at the Canadian embassy about how you *must* speak Dutch if you live in Holland. The security guard was Moroccan, but I initially started with him in English because it was the Canadian embassy, and I thought he would be Canadian. My mistake was that I'm living in Holland, but nevertheless used English. He gave me the lecture in Dutch.Another story: A couple of days ago, I saw a little black girl who I didn't know in the elevator of the building where I live. We hadn't said a word to each other, but then she just looked up and said "Sir, I know I look like a foreigner, but I'm actually Dutch." I'm still trying to analyse this one. One potentially important fact is that I live in an immigrant neighbourhood - "the projects" of Delft - and I'm one of the only white people here.
When we played with the N8 and its Symbian^3-based stablemates at Nokia World last month, we perceived the long delay between swipes and home screen changes as sluggishness; at the time, Nokia insisted it was a feature, not a bug. Pauses of any sort on a phone are rarely good, however, and Nokia seems to have taken the complaints to heart because the delay is nearly imperceptible on the production firmware. We'd note that there's still a minor learning curve here if you're coming from an iPhone or an Android device because the screens don't move with your thumb -- rather, you execute a swipe gesture, then the screen changes. Takes some getting used to.
?
So. The lag that everybody complains about is ... on purpose?
They designed the interface to look like there is a lag?
WTF
Isn’t Nokia supposed to get the best prices on everything since they order components by the millions of billions? If they’ve lost the 1 advantage they had, their size, then where’s the future of the company heading?
The only thing that’s different is that we don’t sell as many records because there are so many downloads and things of that nature, but everything else is the same. We seem to move the same amount of merch, we seem to draw the same amount of people. It’s just that now record sales are dead in the industry everywhere. You know you could sell 10,000 records in a week and you could be No. 50 on Billboard, and back in the day you couldn’t even make the top 200 with 10,000 copies.
"You know Miracles? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song everyone would have called it fucking genius."
Wow.
I love magnets too!
I haven't heard a ICP video for years. After this, I downloaded a whole buncha shit.
Yeah, that's right. Miracles. Books sucks.
“When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,” said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. “The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.”
I remember a few years ago. I asked a guy in a dorm room about the Scarface poster on the wall.
"Awesome," he said, "that movie was like, awesome."
Then he start gibbering like a monkey about his little friend.
I asked him if he understood that Tony Montana -- just like Michael Corleone -- was a tragic hero in the movie.
He looks at me and said, "you didn't like The Godfather? It's awesome. That's a classic."
Over in Brookfield Place, my first contender for best of: Micah Lexier and Martin Arnold’s music-made-tangible exploration of Erik Satie’s Vexations; Satie intended the piano piece to be played 840 times in succession, which Lexier and Arnold saw to; they also had 840 pieces of sheet music folded identically into simple sculpture to mirror, materially, Satie’s discipline of perfect, sequential repetition. If it sounds dry, it’s not: the quiet tinkling keys, a growing plateau of blue paper sculpture, all under the equally disciplined steel wing by Santiago Calatrava made for the night’s first unmitigated moment of magic.
This was my favourite of the night.
It made number 2 on his list. I didn't see Nuit Market, which was his #1.
1. Have talent. (Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don't like you have to admit it's good.)2. Understand how the world works. (Not just globally, but on a macro level. Understand what people need and don't need. Understand when to approach people and when not to. Develop social skills.)
3. Choose good friends. (There's nothing like an effective network.)
4. Be modern. (Don't do anything that looks like it's someone else's work. Stay on top of technology. Engage on multiple platforms.)
They are written as advice to young photographers.
I just realized that a lot people don't like me.
YES YES YES!! I am GOOD!!!!
Exhibit is called Naught here. The pipes are hollow and you have to figure who is talking to you.
Video game on a projector
The drake kinda do the same thing at every Nuit Blanche
Claustraphobia
Blowtorch on canvas
Knitting circle
Balloo art
Shred (encyclopediae)
Lipstick on bathroom mirror
Mural of Storm
Lots of TV
Peep hole
Getting a massage
