I think that’s why merely reading a lot won’t make you a great writer, just like listening to a lot of music won’t suddenly make you a piano virtuoso, because reading emphasizes the drawbridge words. On the flip side, writing a lot without reading much leaves you all backwind and no drawbridge, trying to get from point A to point B without stopping to admire the view. It’s only by doing both reading and writing that you start to understand how to string the different words together.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
excellent readd by @jackcheng "The Keyframe Bias" on #writing and #Gatsby
Saturday, November 12, 2011
@adaptiveoptics - many of the things that make Ubuntu more accessible to the masses is making it more difficult for me. http://bit.ly/vySAwD
Perfect quote on current power user's hate on #Ubuntu | @adaptiveoptics "The irony is, many of the things that make Ubuntu more accessible to the masses is making it more difficult for me. I think I am not alone in this." http://bit.ly/vySAwD
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
James Watts
Too many people seems
to be complaining about how Steve Jobs isn't James Watts.
Who is?
- Posted from my mobile
to be complaining about how Steve Jobs isn't James Watts.
Who is?
- Posted from my mobile
Monday, October 03, 2011
Itinerate writer talks of living, and dreaming, on $20,000 a year - The Washington Post
Possessions tend to breed more possessions. Once I started ridding myself of them, it became clear just how little I needed and how easy it was to live without.
Friday, September 23, 2011
David Graeber: On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics « naked capitalism
Economists always ask us to ‘imagine’ how things must have worked before the advent of money. What such examples bring home more than anything else is just how limited their imaginations really are. When one is dealing with a world unfamiliar with money and markets, even on those rare occasions when strangers did meet explicitly in order to exchange goods, they are rarely thinking exclusively about the value of the goods. This not only demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person—basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy thinking only about marginal rates of return—but that what economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as the purported reason for the invention of money and markets themselves. Logically, this makes about as much sense as saying that the game of chess was invented to allow people to fulfill a pre-existing desire to checkmate their opponent’s king.
This is fucking awesome.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
The Blog of Helios: Can You Teach Computer 101?
We ran into a gentleman that had no clue about these commands. When he wanted to keep or send a particular part of something on a website, he would shrink his browser to half size, open an instance of notepad and then type the text verbatim and then save it. He had an entire library of folders, based on subject and date, filled with text files of things he had copied over time .Keep in mind, the gentleman did not touch type...it was index fingers and cramped wrists for his efforts.
I swear, when he finally grasped the concept of copy and paste, I thought the Hallelujah Chorus was going to fill the room.
Switched to Vimperator
So I just "switched" to Vimperator today. Switch is a hard word since I am still using Firefox. It's just that I am surfing the web with a bunch of hard to memorize keystrokes instead of a mouse.
Dunno. It is more engaging for me. Will have to see if it sticks.
How Africa Led Me To China - Jende Andrew Huang - Diaspora @ chinaSMACK
Growing up, I never thought much about my Chinese heritage. Despite Saturday mornings at Chinese language school and living next door to my grandparents—who fled China with the Kuomintang during the civil war—my main interest in my “Chineseness” was in wondering why was I Chinese? How was it that I had an unpronounceable name and no one else? Who was this Sun Wukong and why did I have to watch his exploits? In my elementary school, there was one other student who spoke Mandarin, and we avoided each other like the plague so as not to be too obliviously branded as outsiders.
The Chinese community in Minneapolis was a small one. I think I may have seen my schoolmate at one of the many social events that Chinese families flocked to. Meeting the friends and acquaintances of my parents only solidified my belief that I had very little in common with those people. These gatherings and the people at them were not a part of who I was. I was only there because of the randomness of ancestry. I didn’t loathe my background; at worst I scorned it. It was clear that all things “American” were naturally superior to anything “Chinese.” At best, being Chinese was simply inconsequential to who I was as a person. The only times I would actively attack our family background was as a means to offend my father, who had come to the United States in his 30s and represented the catchall idea of the “Chinese.”
As the years passed, my time at Chinese school ended and the links to that world grew even fainter when my grandmother returned to Taiwan following the death of my grandfather. I was happy to embrace the American aspects of my life, though there was always a slight unsettled feeling at the edge of my consciousness. Like I knew that I never fully belonged. But I ignored it and pushed on. At university, passing a foreign language proficiency test was a requirement for graduation. Despite knowing that learning new languages was not a strong suit, the unhappy memories of my Saturday mornings in Chinese class led me to try Latin, and finally settle on sign language as my language of choice.
I passed the proficiency test, graduated, and after a few years of working, decided to join the Peace Corps. Though initially unenthusiastic about the thought of his only son volunteering for two years doing development work in a far off country, my father eventually suggested I try to get sent to China, which has a small Peace Corps presence. But in the same vein as my resistance to studying Chinese at university, the idea of going to China held no interest for me. And besides, my sights were set on Africa. I was eventually sent to the Republic of Cape Verde, a small archipelago of ten islands off of the west coast of Senegal. Once in country for training, I quickly learned that the Cape Verdeans were well acquainted with the Chinese.
As the story goes, sometime in the early 1990s, a Chinese businessman from Wenzhou who was based in Africa sent two of his nephews to Cape Verde to see what sort of business opportunities might be found. Nothing interested him, but his nephews opened up a small store selling household goods and clothes. Their initial success led them to lure over family and classmates from Wenzhou, who then repeated the cycle. By the time I arrived, there were over one thousand Chinese operating 300-odd shops throughout the islands.
I was assigned to a community that, over the course of my time there, saw the establishment of three Chinese shops (or, “loja Chines” in the local language). Four Chinese shopkeepers ran the lojas. They were all recent arrivals to Cape Verde and the distances they were willing to travel and the sacrifices they made as they chased opportunities to the edge of the Atlantic fascinated me. I had no romantic notions regarding their motivations for being there. It was simply money and business. And their aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children are part of the same story told by waves of immigrants throughout history. But these Chinese from Wenzhou stuck a different, much more resonant chord in me. Perhaps because I was seeing their stories unfold up close and personal? Or maybe I could see traces of my own family’s history in their stories? As a result, I began (perhaps for the first time) to grasp the scope of the struggles and achievements of my parents and grandparents, in their quest to build a new life for themselves in a distant land.
Though I was in Cape Verde to immerse myself in the local culture, there were times I was focused on creating stronger connections with the shopkeepers. We discussed their lives in China, the culture of the Chinese in the U.S., and daily life and the goings-on in our community. That scorn I had for all things Chinese had disappeared, having been replaced with a deep and almost unexplainable urge to absorb as much as I could from the shopkeepers. I wasn’t just trying to explore a culture I had a passing familiarity with, I was trying to better understand a part of myself that I had ignored. The way these shopkeepers saw the world reminded me of what I heard from my parents—especially my father. Their conversations led me to better appreciate the mentality of my parents and the decisions they made for me as I was growing up.
For all the insights I gained and the interest that was awakened in me, language still limited the amount of communication we had. My Chinese had grown weak over the years, which wasn’t a problem in the U.S., because I could simply insert an English word or two into an otherwise Chinese sentence. But that wouldn’t work with the shopkeepers, whose knowledge of the local language was commerce-centric, and thus ensuring our encounters always to be in Chinese. So my time in Cape Verde was also marked by the daily use of Chinese – something I hadn’t done since living next to my grandparents.
So an unlikely result of my time in Africa was my improved Chinese skills. I also rediscovered something of myself. You might think that this new found desire to reconnect with what I’d disregarded for so long would create some sort of resolution for me but, instead of settling that unsettled feeling, it only stirred up more issues about myself. And it seems that my father—who has now spent an equal number of years in Asia and the West—anticipated this years ago. A Chinese relative recently visited him and asked if my father considered himself Chinese or American. My father replied that when he saw Chinese people doing something he didn’t like, he thought of himself as American. But when he saw Americans doing something equally disagreeable, he considered himself Chinese. My father wanted me to avoid this fate, so he decided to allow me to grow up as an American, and not have to choose between that and the Chinese.
But my time in Africa made me realize that even with a primarily American upbringing, I would never fully fit into one world, and would always be caught between them. Cape Verdeans had a hard time believing that someone with the shape of my eyes and the color of my hair could be American. To the shopkeepers, I was a bit of an oddity that spoke Mandarin, but how could I be one of them if I didn’t understand that in the heart of every Chinese laid a dragon? And no matter that I was born and raised in the U.S., it never escapes notice that I am not a full, unhyphenated American.
So here I am, too Yellow to be American, and too White to be Chinese. Though I’m lucky to be the child of two cultures, where this leaves me, I’m not totally sure. The path I took from Africa to a rekindled the interest in my Chinese roots is perhaps unique. But what’s more common is the struggle that many face in reconciling the mix of cultural and ethnic backgrounds that make up who they are as a person. When others ask me about my background, I can say Chinese-American or Huáyì. But does this really explain anything about me? Sometimes, I can barely understand what those words imply. How, then, can someone else nod their head and truly comprehend?
I am American. I am not. I am Chinese. I am not. Someday, I’ll figure out what I am. Or maybe not.
chinaSMACK has been doing a series on ABC (American Born Chinese).
Interesting because most of the writer are fairly normal people and not academics. All are Americanized, but realized sometime in their mid- late- twenties that they can never be fully American.
Frat boys are arses
There's something about intelligence agencies - maybe the familiar comfort of a three-letter acronym on the wall, maybe the late-night spanking parties - that draws fraternity boys like ants to a picnic, and right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom. Their complete lack of a sense of irony allows these students to combine sincere appreciation for The Fountainhead with a desire for a lifelong career in government service, and the hardest part of studying Arabic is having to listen to their asinine opinions after they have gained enough proficiency to try to express them.
via idlewords.com
Best quote ever!
Thursday, August 18, 2011
On the Relationship between Marketing and Sales
“Steve, I’ve never seen such a perfect datasheet. It answers every possible question a prospective customer could have about our product. The problem is that our computer sells for $150,000. No one is going to buy it from the datasheet. In fact, reading these, the only thing your datasheet will do is give a prospective customer a reason for saying “no” before our salespeople ever get to talk to them.
Do you mean you want a datasheet with less information?!” I asked, not at all sure that I was hearing him correctly. “Yes, exactly. Your job in marketing is to get customers interested enough to engage our sales force, to ask for more information or better, to set up a meeting. No one is going to buy our computer from a datasheet, but they will from a salesman.”
- Told to Steve Blank by the CEO of Convergent and retold here.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Arch Linux is more popular than Debian, Mint, and SUSE?
I saw this chart on GigaOm today. Apparently, so – if you read the fine print. Almost all the entry for “Other” were for Arch. I am not sure it the survey was flawed or if Arch has become some kind of dark horse in the Linux distro race.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Monday, August 01, 2011
This Tech Bubble Is Different - @BusinessWeek @valleyhack
Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."
via businessweek.com
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Inside Match.com - FT.com
Despite these concerns, it is becoming accepted wisdom that any lingering shame around online dating is gone. Familiarity with the internet, a more casual dating culture and verifiable success stories have all helped. By now, most of us are not far removed from a couple who met online. “There’s a tipping point happening,” says Ginsberg. “There used to be this stigma, or it was ‘good for my friends but not for me’. People don’t realise how pervasive online dating is.
via ft.com
Everyone I know has privately told me that they have an online dating profile. They just don't tell anybody they know in real life.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Old Urbanist: Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values?
The vacant landscape of portions of inner Detroit has retained its vestigial low-density residential zoning, which the 800-page Detroit zoning code dutifully recites is "designed to stabilize and protect the essential characteristics of the district," even after virtually all the structures once present have been burned, demolished or abandoned.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
@racialicious Critique of "Paper Tiger" #Asianpeopleproblems
 Racialicious (@racialicious)11-05-15 14:12 links for 2011-05-15: #Asianpeopleproblems: A Critique of "Paper Tigers" | Scattered SpeculationsThoughts on thi... http://bit.ly/iRoAcW |
Sent from my mobile
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
How Commission structure can distort your business. "Sins of Commissions" - @Spolsky
Instead of buying the exciting new products I wanted, I was hurled into a mass of people scamming one another -- and all because of stupid, perverse commission systems that seemed like good ideas to the M.B.A.'s back at corporate.
via inc.com
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Restaurant-Failure Myth - @BusinessWeek
The Restaurant-Failure Myth
Research shows that some popular perceptions about the rate of failure in the restaurant industry are just not true
By Kerry Miller
"Do you know me?" asked Rocco DiSpirito in a 2003 TV spot for American Express. "I'm a chef who already runs two restaurants in New York. Now I'm opening a third on national television in a time when nine out of 10 restaurants fail in the first year."
Like many viewers, H.G. Parsa did know DiSpirito from his NBC reality show The Restaurant. The nine-out-of-10 figure was familiar, too. As an associate professor in Ohio State University's Hospitality Management program, Parsa had heard it many times before. But based on his 13 years of restaurant-industry experience, he still didn't buy it.
Parsa says he spent three months trying to track down someone at American Express who could give him a source for the 90% figure quoted in the ad. As it turns out, they didn't have one. "American Express has not been able to track down a specific data source for the statistic," reads a written statement a spokesperson sent Parsa in response to his request.
Urban Mythbuster
Parsa wasn't surprised. He had run several spreadsheet simulations to verify the statistic himself and found that not only is the 90% figure off base, it's practically impossible, given industry growth rates. He decided to do his own research on failure rates, using Health Dept. records to track turnover among 2,500 restaurants in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-year period.
His research—consistent with similar studies—found that about one in four restaurants close or change ownership within their first year of business. Over three years, that number rises to three in five.
While a 60% failure rate may still sound high, that's on par with the cross-industry average for new businesses, according to statistics from the Small Business Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Parsa's study garnered serious attention within the hospitality field: Within a year of the paper's publication in the Cornell Hotel & Restaurant Administration Quarterly in August, 2005, Parsa's research had been downloaded nearly 2,000 times, a record for the trade journal. But in the culture at large, the nine-out-of-10 myth has stubbornly defied debunking.
Wary Lenders
While it's certainly not the first urban legend to fly in the face of facts, Parsa holds the banking community largely responsible for perpetuating it. "They are the ones that benefit from the myth, and they use it more than anyone else," he explains, though he's quick to note that his opinion is based on logic, not research.
Because of the belief that restaurants are high-risk investments, he says, many banks won't lend to restaurants at all. Typically, the ones that do require would-be restaurateurs to pay sky-high interest rates or put up significant collateral (say, a house) to mitigate the perceived risk (see BusinessWeek.com, Winter, 2007, "Tapped Out"). Ironically, Parsa's research identified lack of sufficient startup capital as one of the major elements that contribute to a restaurant's failure—making the myth a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
Of course, a lot of restaurants do open and close each year, because opening a restaurant has such low barriers to entry and exit. And because the figure seems true—after all, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence—statistics-quoting experts who don't cite their sources often go unchallenged. The media—BusinessWeek included—adds fuel to the fire (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/19/03, "Cooking Up a Global Empire"). And every "under-new-management" sign in a restaurant window acts as an independent confirmation, cementing the idea that restaurants are impossibly risky further into our collective memory, continuing the cycle.
Franchise Safety Is Overrated
And it doesn't end there. Research shows that a lot of the conventional wisdom about failure in the restaurant industry is similarly faulty.
One widely held belief is that franchise restaurants are much safer bets than independent restaurants. But Parsa found that the three-year success rate for franchised restaurants is actually only a few percentage points higher than it is for independents—about 43%. That's a far cry from the 90% or higher success rates trumpeted by many franchisors.
So far a cry, in fact, that the International Franchise Assn. decided it had to step in to clear things up. In 2005, the IFA issued a letter urging its members to remove from their Web sites or printed materials "any information claiming that the success rate of franchised establishments is much greater than that of independent small businesses," calling the information "potentially misleading."
The IFA specifically called out franchisors for using old Commerce Dept. data that has been shown to be invalid. But because changes in franchise ownership usually remain behind the scenes, Parsa says it's still easy to make franchises look like a much safer bet than they are. "In the Yellow Pages, a Taco Bell is still a Taco Bell," Parsa says—even if it's had five different owners in a year and isn't turning a profit (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/29/07, "Franchise Owners Go to Court"). On the other hand, Parsa's failure-rate statistics are somewhat misleading too, because they count any turnover as a failure, including restaurants that close or change hands while still profitable.
Juggling Family Ties
Given the immense time commitment that goes into owning a restaurant, it makes sense that some owners want out, even if they're making money. And in fact, the number of profitable "failures" is not insignificant. A 2003 report from an economist in the SBA's Office of Advocacy analyzed unpublished data from the U.S. Census and found that one-third of closed businesses were financially successful at closure.
"It appears that many owners may have executed a planned exit strategy, closed a business without excess debt, sold a viable business, or retired from the workforce," the report noted, adding that business-failure statistics might therefore present "much more daunting odds for business success than is actually the case."
Whether failure rates overstate or understate the odds, no one disputes the conventional wisdom that making it in the restaurant industry is no cakewalk. What entrepreneurs might find surprising is just how much a restaurant's success hinges on an owner's ability to keep the pressures of work from affecting life at home.
Parsa says how well an owner juggles the demands of the business with family life is actually one of the most critical factors contributing to a restaurant's success—more important, even, than "location, location, location."
Overcoming Geography
His conclusions were based on in-depth interviews with 20 successful and 20 failed restaurateurs. He determined that "beyond muddled concepts, failure seemed to stem in large part from an inability or unwillingness to give the business sufficient attention, whether due to lack of time, passion or knowledge."
Most of the failed restaurant owners themselves attributed their failure at least partly to competing family demands, including divorce, ill health, and retirement. Some owners voluntarily closed when the family sacrifices became too much, like one owner who said she didn't want to miss seeing her children grow up.
Location, while an important factor, appears to be more of a "moderating variable" than a causal one, Parsa says, ruling that "a poor location can be overcome by a great product and operation, but a good location cannot overcome bad product or operation."
DiSpirito—whose restaurant Rocco's on 22nd Street shut down just over a year after its well-publicized opening—might well have a few moderating variables of his own for the list.
Miller is a New York-based staff writer covering startups and small business. Miller is a graduate of Brown University.
via businessweek.com
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Dropbox Lack of Security - Miguel de Icaza
Dropbox recently announced an update to its security terms of service in which they announced that they would provide the government with your decrypted files if requested to do so.
via tirania.org
I am a long time Dropbox user and think it's swell.
On the other hand, I don't think I -- or anyone else -- had expectations that it will refuse DoJ requests or warrants.
(I know that this isn't Icaza's point. But we really don't know what level of disclosure Dropbox can realistically provide law enforcement officials.)
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Motorola just don't get it.
 Motorola Mobility (@Motorola)11-04-17 10:01 It's the ultimate phone faceoff: Calling or texting? |
I thought this was important enough to merit attention.
Yeah,totally. Most phones today are still dumb, 12 button phones. And in North America, talk and text are still the number one and two usage for smartphones.
But you're on twitter. Social network for techno-dweebs. We all have a smartphone already.
What's next? Home: Cave or Tree?
Sunday, April 10, 2011
@Scobleizer where referrals come from.
 Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer)11-04-10 22:52 Today I got 1,303 views from @techmeme 179 from Facebook. 151 from Twitter. 83 from Google Reader. 70 from Hacker News. #Readingtrends. |
But what are his Google numbers?
@matttbastard, 11-04-10 9:37
 Matthew Elliot (@matttbastard)11-04-10 9:37 Epic aging hipster battle royal: The Strokes vs. The White Stripes is.gd/g8vqzt (Clearly, the answer is 'LCD Soundsystem'.) |
Sent from my mobile
Saturday, April 09, 2011
The Illustrated Gentleman - Opening
Light over the high ceilings.
Illuminated like stained glass in the breaking sun.
Illustrated chronicled you made large with small words, pictures.
Illuminated like stained glass in the breaking sun.
Illustrated chronicled you made large with small words, pictures.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Dean Spade -- "poly essay take 2"
One of my goals in thinking about redefining the way we view relationships is to try to treat the people I date more like I treat my friends—try to be respectful and thoughtful and hav boundaries and reasonable expectations—and to try to treat my friends more like my dates—to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together. In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal, often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support, and build deep supportive structures with other queers.
Hard to read. Very good.
Love and respect are not commodities.
A Statistical Test, Statistical Significance, Gets Its Closeup - The Numbers Guy - WSJ
It is unlikely that chance alone could have produced the improvement shown in our clinical trial. Because it seems unlikely that chance produced the improvements, we logically conclude that the improvement is due to the drug.
Shane Reese's explanation of Statistical Significance via blogs.wsj.com
Thursday, March 31, 2011
The Next Web/
Question: What do lingerie, insurance and seat belts have in common?
Answer: They all provide a service that you only benefit from in extreme circumstances.
Question: What do lingerie, insurance and seat belts have in common?
Answer: They all provide a service that you only benefit from in extreme circumstances.
Why Apple Wins
Meanwhile, all the BlackBerry hype is about the PlayBook. I don’t want a damn tablet, I just want a phone that works, that doesn’t require me to study a manual to figure it out.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
This is why you should read @Anandtect - crazy detailed reviews
The design language used for the iPhone 3G/3G-S and iPod touch 2G/3G was based on accelerating curvature continuity (known as G3 continuity in industrial design terminology), in contrast to the tangentially continuous design (G1 continuity) found on the original iPhone. What this meant, basically, is that the first iPhone had a relatively flat design, whereas the 3G/3G-S had a gently crowned back that aimed to fit the contour of one's hand.
via anandtech.com
They are knowledgeable even about industrial design.
This is why you should read @Anandtect - crazy detailed reviews
The design language used for the iPhone 3G/3G-S and iPod touch 2G/3G was based on accelerating curvature continuity (known as G3 continuity in industrial design terminology), in contrast to the tangentially continuous design (G1 continuity) found on the original iPhone. What this meant, basically, is that the first iPhone had a relatively flat design, whereas the 3G/3G-S had a gently crowned back that aimed to fit the contour of one's hand.
via anandtech.com
They are knowledgeable even about industrial design.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Why we have worker's safety programs - @SteveBlank
After spending the last four years around microwaves I had become attuned to things that you couldn’t see but could hurt you. In the Air Force I had watched my shop mates not quite understand that principle. On the flightline they would test whether a jamming pod was working by putting their hand on the antenna. If their hand felt warm they declared it was. When I tried to explain that the antenna wasn’t warm, but it was the microwaves cooking their hand, they didn’t believe me. There were no standards for microwave protection. (I always wondered if the Air Force would ever do a study of the incidence of cataracts among radar technicians.)
via steveblank.com
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Raison d'être for Blackberry
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2011/03/data-roaming-why-non-rim-smartpho...
Why use a blackberry? For the super efficient data compressions!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Dear Dockers. My pants pockets are too big. Fix that. | brian s hall
I have this problem all the time.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Big thumbs-up from @Lefsetz for @PorterAirlines, #canada, and #Toronto
But what opens my eyes most is a company believing in giving you more, being nice, focusing on service. I didn’t want to fly into Newark, hell, when I booked I didn’t even know I was going into Newark, but I’d take Porter every time in the future. Not only because it’s close to downtown Toronto, but because they make me feel like a human being, like I deserve respect, like we’re all in it together.
via lefsetz.com
I have been missing Lefsetz's blog the last month or so. Didn't realize that he was here and wrote about Toronto.
This is a big thumbs up for Porter.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
A cautionary note about Acrobat - @ksoltys
So you have a fancy new computer running the latest greatest O/S from Microsoft, the 64-bit version of Windows 7. All is well until you try to create a PDF from a Word document using the PDF Maker add-in, which is part of the full version of Adobe Acrobat. Guess what – you can’t – it isn’t available for 64-bit Windows. Way to go, Adobe.
via soltys.ca
So @NYT is waterboarding torture or not?
So according to The New York Times, it's journalistically improper to call waterboarding "torture" -- when done by the United States, but when Nazi Germany (or China) does exactly the same thing, then it may be called "torture" repeatedly and without qualification. An organization which behaves this way may be called many things; "journalist" isn't one of them.
via salon.com
Monday, March 07, 2011
Poor @Symbian. Now being used as a in casual essay to epitomize dying markets.
The worst possible place to be is to focus on a shrinking segment of a market, even if it is underserved (think e.g. of launching a product for people who only want high specialized, auto-tuned, emo ringtones for their Symbian phones).
via blog.eladgil.com
But I still want emo ringtones! Just for my iphone.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Loss of empire
There is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirty of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny; it may have been wrong to taake it; it i certainly dangerous to let it go. And the kind of people who talk of doing so and persuade others to adopt their point of view would very soon bring a state of ruin, and would still do so even if they live by themselves in isolation. For those who are politically apathetic can only survive if they are supported by people who are capable of taking action. They are quite valueless in a city which controls an empire, though they would be safe slaves in a city that was controlled by others.
(Book II, History of the Peloponnesian War)
(Book II, History of the Peloponnesian War)
Books I am discarding
I have to clean my house today. I went thru my bookshelf and found all the books I don't realistically need. I love my books, but honestly, when am I ever going to read Portrait as a Young Man? I tried burning it in 2001. That copy of the Cosmic Code? I had it since I was 14. I loved it then, but I am not about to create an entire site on it.
Some are more interesting but I will never find the time. Like Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism.
Sigh. Au revoir, Zola.
Some are more interesting but I will never find the time. Like Jerry Z. Muller's Conservatism.
Sigh. Au revoir, Zola.
Strange find from my Thucydides
I found these with the copy of History of Peloponnesian War I had. I didn't know I was such a big fan.
Friday, March 04, 2011
How did MySpace, with a smart team of people, do such a BAD UI/UX job with the new design? - @Quora
Answer edited by Andrew Chen....he answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetizat, and the redesign reflected that.First off- let meHowever, However the new MySpace is s: :
When the team was woin, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So tfeed newsfeed to generate short-te. This kind of thing happens all the time.
However, when .
When you are asking what ... (view context)
The answer's simple:
In the new redesign, MySpace prioritizes prioritized short-term monetization ahead of user experience due to its failing business fundamentals, and the redesign reflected that.First off- let me state that I think the new MySpace is actually better than the old one. However, However the new MySpace is still not good enough, obviously, to turn around the product.
I recently spoke to an interaction designer who worked on the new MySpace, who told me an anecdote that blew my mind: :
When the team was working on the new feed at the heart of MySpace, the interaction designers wanted to make bigger images so that it'd be easy to see what users' friends were doing. Similarly, they wanted to make the feed more easily scannable and have more content per page on the feed. Basically, to turn the feed into a modern implementation the way Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and many others have set up.
However, they were aware that if they did this, then users would be less likely to click through to the images and thus would decrease pageviews. Given MySpace's declining revenues, the interaction designers there were asked to actively design in, as a goal, for with the goal of more pageviews. So they added smaller images than they thought optimal, and fewer images per page than they thought optimal, just so that they could generate more pageviews. Basically they were now designing a worse feed newsfeed to generate short-term revenue.
As I understand, this happened systematically within the product which led to many compromises in the user experience, and the business needs won every time. This kind of thing happens all the time.
However, when .
When you are asking what ought to be the strongest user advocates at the company to design for the business goals as a priority, you do not end up with an inspired product experience.
You have to prioritize having a great product experience to end up with a great product experience- it doesn't happen by accident.
Anyway, the site is still huge and influential in many ways, so let's hope the team there figures it out and there's a resurgence in the future.
#2415931 • Mar 04, 2011 12:26 AM
via quora.com
Great insight on UX and how good ones (and bad ones) are made by skilled people.
Found via HNews.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Steven Hyden on Grunge Music and Nostalgia - @AttemptMustache @The_AV_Club
Now is a good time to finally address an issue that’s been hovering in the background of this series from the beginning: the distinction between “cool” ’90s rock and “uncool” ’90s rock. I’ve made an effort to focus on some of the era’s biggest names and most commercially successful rock bands because 1) those are the bands I liked at the time; 2) those are the bands that millions of other people liked at the time; and 3) I find it strange that many people, including myself, don’t seem to remember it that way.
When I look back to my music-listening habits in 1995, I tend to overlook all the time I spent listening to Throwing Copper and instead think only about how I obsessed over GBV’s Alien Lanes, which I bought after reading a glowing four-star review in Rolling Stone. That summer, I tried to make heads or tails of a record that boasted 28 absentmindedly recorded songs in just 41 minutes. I was lost until I realized that the whole record was basically like the second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which stitched a series of melodic fragments into an extended suite. Just like that, Alien Lanes made sense, and GBV quickly became one of my favorite bands. In hindsight, Live seems likes a footnote, despite selling millions of records and playing 25,000-seat amphitheaters in its heyday, while Guided By Voices appears a lot bigger and more important today even if it reached only a fraction of Live’s audience in the ’90s.
via avclub.com
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Reblog: 15 Tips for Twitter Bios
5. If you go out to bars like every night of the week, you’re not alcoholic. You’re a Foursquare Ambassador.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Middle-Class Americans receive $1.30 of benefits per $1 of tax
http://baselinescenario.com/2011/02/11/1-30-1-00/ Brilliant! Why does the American middle class consistently vote avaunt
their own self-interest?
their own self-interest?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley « Steve Blank
If you didn’t come in your own 747, here’s a guide to what to see in the valley (which for the sake of this post, extends from Santa Clara to San Francisco.) This post offers things to see/do for two types of visitors: I’m just visiting and want a “tourist experience” (i.e. a drive by the Facebook / Google / Zynga / Apple building) or “I want to work in the valley” visitor who wants to understand what’s going on inside those buildings.
I’m leaving out all the traditional stops that you can get from the guidebooks.
via steveblank.com
This is the coolest post on tech I've ever read!
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Opera Mini browser to be pre-integrated onto Brew Mobile OS
This is mega news. How come nobody else has reported on this?
Mobile Knots
Opera has just announced at MWC 2011 that they have got into a agreement with Qualcomm to integrate their world leading mobile browser Opera Mini onto Qualcomm’s Brew Mobile OS.
From the press release:
Opera Software today announced that it has signed an agreement to ship the Opera Mini browser worldwide on Qualcomm Incorporated’s Brew MP™. Millions of consumers worldwide will benefit by having a smartphone-like browsing experience on mass-market devices.
The Opera Mini browser is one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers, with more than 90 million users.
Incorporating Opera Mini as part of Brew MP simplifies the process of making a powerful browser available to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and ODMs (Original Device Manufacturers). OEMs and ODMs will benefit from simplified development, faster time-to-market and inclusion as part of the Brew MP OS.
Consumers will have access to the one of the fastest possible browsing experiences on their mass-market handsets and enjoy a desktop browser-like user interface tailored for smaller handset screens. Because of Opera Mini’s compression technology, these benefits are achieved while reducing monthly data charges.
“Recently, we announced 90.4 million Opera Mini users worldwide. With this agreement, millions of more consumers will be able to experience a superior mobile browsing experience which is fast and cost-effective,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “The combination of Opera Mini and Qualcomm’s worldwide reach means we are bringing the power of the Internet to everyone and not just smartphone users.”
“We are excited by this collaboration as it provides the option of a turn-key mobile browser as part of the Brew MP OS,” said Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm Internet Services. “Opera Mini allows us to provide a best-in-class mobile browsing experience across a range of mass-market devices.”
Opera Mini browser to be pre-integrated onto Brew Mobile OS is a post from Mobile Knots
Sent with Reeder
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Qualcomm the big winner?
via http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-nokia-the-biggest-winners-and-losers-2011-2#
After all these years, who would've thought that Qualcomm would be the main beneficiary from a Nokia-Microsoft "partnership?"
Saturday, February 05, 2011
How Tech Tools Transformed New York's Sex Trade | Coolest thing I've read on @wired in a long time
Changes in the sex industry have rendered them superfluous. I met 11 pimps working out of midtown Manhattan in 1999, and all were out of work within four years. One enlisted in the military; two have been homeless. Only one now has a full-time job, working as a janitor in a charter school. I asked one of them how pimping experience helps him in the legit economy: “You learn one thing,” he said. “For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.
via wired.com
It's an infograph!
Read it! All of it!
Facebook will be the leading market for the sex trade?
Crazy!
Thursday, February 03, 2011
What is a fair price for Internet service? - via @GlobeandMail
What is a fair price for Internet service?
Published Tuesday, Feb. 01, 2011 3:52PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Feb. 02, 2011 11:26AM EST
To find out what is a fair price, I contacted several industry insiders. They informed me that approximately four years ago, the cost for a certain large Telco to transmit one gigabyte of data was around 12 cents. That’s after all of its operational and fixed costs were accounted for. Thanks to improved technology and more powerful machines, that number dropped to around 6 cents two years ago and is about 3 cents per gigabyte today.
Apple's take on secure, user-friendly password via @DaringFireball
It’s password protected by default, and Apple even auto-suggests good passwords like “closed53soaps” — two words, all-lowercase, separated by two digits.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
D spiffycliffy Optimal Employment? Australia? Bartender? Outback?
The USA is not the best place to earn money.2 My own experience suggests that at least Japan, New Zealand, and Australia can all be better. This may be shocking, but young professionals with advanced degrees can earn more discretionary income as a receptionist or a bartender in the Australian outback than as, say, a software engineer in the USA.
via lesswrong.com
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Pain Checklist via @Pitch_Doctor
Pain Checklist
Before you quit your day job and put all efforts in to making your idea a reality, make sure that what you have come up with, is not in fact a solution looking for a problem or cure looking for pain. The following checklist will help you determine if you are on the right track:
1. What segment of the market experience the problem?
2. Is the problem widespread or isolated?
3. What evidence is there for the problem that is independent of your own belief? Are there respected market research reports or credible customer surveys available that support your belief?
4. What level of pain does the customer experience? Is it sufficient to cause them to pay for your solution?
5. Is your solution a ‘must have’ or ‘nice to have’?
6. How are customers currently solving their problem? If there are no ‘competitors’ providing alternative solutions, then you have to very think carefully as to whether there really is a problem. Multiple solutions tend to appear wherever there are problems.
7. Does your product solve the customer’s problem better than your competitor’s solution?
8. Is your product sufficiently better than your competitor’s solution, to cause their customers to switch?
Excellent, succinct summary.
The Tyee – Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers - #UBB
So what's this really about? Bear in mind that Bell Canada and other big telecoms also are invested heavily in an old-fashioned media-delivery model called television. If you now have to pay by the byte to live your version of a rich digital life on the Internet, maybe the hits to your bank account will push you back in front of the television set.
via thetyee.ca
Bell owns a Television distribution thru FibeTV. The current version of Usage-based billing would stop people from using Neflix-type services as an alternative.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Confirmed: @Netflix say @Rogerbuzz is the fastest ISP in Canada
Charter is in the lead for US streams with an impressive 2667 kilobits per second average over the period. Rogers leads in Canada with a whopping 3020 kbps average.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
What Money Can’t Fix - @ericabiz -
So I used money to try to solve the problem again. Only this time, I hired a therapist.
In my first therapy session, my therapist warned me that he would say what Richard couldn’t or wouldn’t say–that I might get mad at him at first, and even be tempted to quit therapy. I told him I was pretty strong and willing to listen.
He then said something that was eye-opening. He said, “Pretend the time you have in a day is made up of 10 units. How many of those units do you devote to work?”
I said, “Eight.”
He nodded. Then, “How many on your relationship?”
I said, after a long (and humbling) pause, “One.”
He said, “I don’t think so.”
And that’s when I broke down in tears.
via erica.biz
Wow, I felt so bad when I read this.
:-(
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Quote - On Complexity from @MarcoArment
The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.
This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.
These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.
If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of those huge time-sink features. At most, I can afford to have one or two components of moderate complexity, such as the HTML-to-body-text parser and the Kindle-format writer. But even those are barely worth the time that I put into them.
Bye bye #OpenID sez @37signals
We're sad to see OpenID go. The promise was grand. Life would be simpler if we only had one login, but in this case, the cure was worse than the disease.
I used OpenID on other sites before. Yeah. Cool concept. But the execution was crap for everybody. Especially Yahoo.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Documentation. Why it is important. #techcomm
Documentation is hard. It's ugly. It's boring. It's not the kind of job that hotshot engineers want to do to further their careers. But if you're trying to help customers -- especially business customers -- solve complicated problems like printing over the Internet, it's totally essential.
Microsoft has been doing this ugly work for more than two decades. Google is just getting started.
Documentation. Why it is important. #techcomm
Documentation is hard. It's ugly. It's boring. It's not the kind of job that hotshot engineers want to do to further their careers. But if you're trying to help customers -- especially business customers -- solve complicated problems like printing over the Internet, it's totally essential.
Microsoft has been doing this ugly work for more than two decades. Google is just getting started.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
To Err Is Human, To Arr Is Pirate - Court Forces Major Labels To Pay $45M In Copyright Violation Claims - hypebot
The big four major labels - EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner - are being required to pay upwards of $45 million to a group of artists and composers to close a class action lawsuit filed against them in Canada. This agreement will resolve the copyright infringement claims that were brought against them for selling CDs containing songs that the record labels had not secured the rights for.
via hypebot.com
Tweeting from QuickSliver
A few months ago, I modified a small script from Graham English to tweet from Quicksilver.
Graham's script had stopped working after Twitter adapted Oauth. I managed to get around by using Ttytter -- which was a console based Twitter client.
This script has now been superseded for Mac users with the new Twitter for Mac -- as long as you install the Services Menu module for Quicksilver.
I am including the script here for archival purposes. Please remember to install TTYtter before using it. Thanks!
using terms from application "Quicksilver"
on process text QStweet
-- See if message is longer than 140 characters
-- If it is longer than 140, Send Growl msg to user
set wordcount to do shell script "echo " & quoted form of QStweet & " | wc -c"
set wordcount to do shell script "echo " & quoted form of wordcount & " | sed 's/^[ ]*//'"
if wordcount as integer > 140 then
my growlRegister()
growlNotify("Tweet too long", "(" & wordcount & ") characters")
return nothing
end if
-- Send tweet using TTytter
set results to do shell script "/usr/local/bin/ttytter -status=" & quoted form of QStweet
-- Inform User if QStweet is sent or if it failed.
my growlRegister()
if results contains "post attempt SUCCEEDED!" then
growlNotify("Tweet Sent", QStweet)
else
growlNotify("Error Sending Tweet", results)
return nothing
end if
-- Sets iChat status message to QStweet
tell application "System Events"
if exists process "iChat" then
tell application "iChat"
set the status message to QStweet
end tell
end if
end tell
-- Sets Skype Mood Text to QSTweet
tell application "System Events"
if exists process "Skype" then
set commandText to "SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT " & QStweet
tell application "Skype"
send command commandText script name "QSTweet"
end tell
end if
end tell
end process text
end using terms from
using terms from application "GrowlHelperApp"
-- Register Growl
on growlRegister()
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
register as application "QSTweet" all notifications {"Alert"} default notifications {"Alert"} icon of application "Twitterrific.app"
end tell
end growlRegister
-- Notify using Growl
-- Example: growlNotify("This is an Alert","This is a test of the Growl Alert System")
on growlNotify(grrTitle, grrDescription)
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
notify with name "Alert" title grrTitle description grrDescription application name "QSTweet"
end tell
end growlNotify
end using terms from
Monday, January 17, 2011
Mom, dad, answer the phone. Answer the phone. Just answer the phone already! @brianshall
The phone at my parents' house, a landline, cordless, rings 20 times a day, minimum. And each time it's like some momentous event. Every freaking time.
via brianshall.com
This is easily the best post Brian S. Hall has ever written. And he writes a lot of good posts.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Nokia N8 Review: Nokia's New Flagship
Nokia N8 Review: Nokia's New Flagship: "In many ways, with the Nokia N8-00 (referred to as the N8 from here on) it seems as though Nokia let its hardware and industrial design teams have a field day; this phone feels almost over engineered when held in your hands. While the current flagship demonstrates Nokia’s engineering prowess quite well, previous models seemed to epitomize what I felt was the company’s philosophy; build the software around the hardware. This worked just perfectly for as long as mobile phones were just that, devices used to make and receive calls and/or texts. Sometime in the last decade, Apple, Google, Palm and Microsoft redefined mobile experiences, and as a result old flaws have slowly become gaping holes in the Finnish device manufacturer’s proverbial armor."
(Via AnandTech Article Channel.)
Probably the fairest, and most technically-driven, assessment of the Nokia N8 I have seen so far.
Tiger Mothers now, Therapy in 20 years.
I'd call the piano "lesson" child abuse. Telling her daughter that her doll house was going to be given away piece by piece? Emotional abuse. Telling her she couldn't get up and go to the bathroom or get a drink of water? Physical abuse. Doing it out of "love"; I shudder to think how much therapy it'll take to unravel that.It's taken me 30-some years and more than 2 decades of therapy starting in my teens to get over some of the parenting techniques described. I know my parents love me, I know all the crazy controlling behavior was because they cared and wanted the best for me. I can't begin to explain how TWISTED it made my views on relating to other people, love, and what is acceptable behavior in an interpersonal relationship. Equating love with controlling behavior has resulted in unstable relationships professionally and personally.
via quora.com
I think this whole "Chinese Mother" debate has really hit a raw nerve in the pan Chinese-American/Canadian community because a lot of people were really affected by it. A lot of people were really traumatized growing up by high-pressure parents who did what they did because they think it was the right thing to do.
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