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South African news/links — cool!
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“I mean, welcoming grass-roots voices is good, but if you want to know where Python is going, you need to listen to Guido …. Which is to say, information transfer from obsessives is a valid sub-function of tribal gatherings.”
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“At the same time, i’m faced with the challenge i always face when in a room full of women. I’ve definitely grown up in a boy’s world, trying to out-boy the boys.”
I feel like this a lot of the time too — danah’s right, it is very sad -
“One thing that strikes me is that I’ve heard these stories before in other fields. I ran into similar situations as a lawyer and as a traditional journalist. There are lessons to be learned and solutions to be had there.”
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“I think any online service can call itself “Open” if it makes, and lives up to, this commitment: Any data that you give us, we’ll let you take away again, without withholding anything, or encoding it in a proprietary format, or ….”
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“Not every programmer wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaradarie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don’t fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony.”
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“You probably forgot that most of the people that read Inc. are geeks. And we buy insurance. Lots of insurance. Like me. And in fact I used to buy it from you. But not any more.”
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This is the most dangerous thing I’ve seen in AGES. I have thousands of bookmarks in my Firefox, largely due to a habit of saving all the tabs I still have open at the end of the day in a “day” folder.
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“Hipster 2: No one updates their LJ anymore. Vox is for, you know, grown-ups.”
LOL! -
“Whenever a thought crystalizes in my head, I type it up and post it here. I don’t read over it, I don’t show it to anyone, and I don’t edit it — I just post it. I don’t consider this writing, I consider this thinking.”
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“People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves.” -
“There are preparations and ingredients that cost her a fortune, and it’s clear why she’s doing it. Not for the bulk of her customers, but for herself, for her staff and for the chowhounds she encounters at random.” I love this approach.
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“I don’t eat anything I don’t feel I could personally kill.”
This sums up my personal philosophy perfectly — I can respect anyone choosing not to eat meat, but personally I’d happily hunt my own.
On One Map is possibly the coolest Google Maps mashup I’ve seen so far. Not that it’s the most innovative — more that it’s the most insanely useful. Looking for houses is a pain in the arse if you don’t know exactly where you want to live — you end up browsing the house descriptions first and having to branch out to find out where the place actually IS. Whereas we all know that the number one rule in househunting is “Location, location location!”.
Now I just have to resist the urge to find another house — we’ve only been in our current flat a year and 7 days!
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“Sixth formers expect to owe about £6,000 when they graduate from university - less than half the average of what graduates actually owe.”
That’s one hell of an underestimation … even before the tuition fee increase most people I knew owed >£12k -
Lovely story from Molly about both sides of Hawaii
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This is probably the coolest sysadmin job on the planet
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“My three favorite software interfaces are:
* The Unix command line
* Google’s search box
* Mac OS X’s Quicksilver
And all three have only one input box.” -
“We’ve never been interested in the typical traditional VC deal. With a few exceptions, all the VCs could offer us was cash and connections. We’re fine on both of those fronts.”
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I love this idea. I want petrol stations to have “Petrol”, “Diesel” and “Catfish Guts” options. With little icons to match
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I like this idea, less as a way of managing time and more as a way of helping people identify why they aren’t happy. If practice doesn’t reflect the theory of what matters to you, then you’ll always be dissatisfied.
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“Critics exist for another reason - they are not barometers of success, not even predictors of my enjoyment in a film or game. They contribute to my understanding of a particular film in a larger context”
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“…if the ripping of the crust continued, the horn of Africa would eventually split off from the rest of the continent, in about a million years.”
So glad it’s the BBC reporting — can you imagine the tabloid headline?? -
“Whether the image is taken by a professional photographer overseas or by an amateur experimenting with a camera phone in New York City, each image posted on Flickr and “tagged” as a self-portrait will automatically be filtered and directed into the exhibition”
I had a hell of a day today. I needed to be in central London for an event lasting a couple of hours, sandwiched between two 4hr+ journeys on what was one of the hottest days on record.
The saving grace? Wifi on the train. For free, today, as part of an introductory offer, but even when you’re paying for it, you have to admit the prices aren’t too horrendous (especially the 24hr rate if you’re doing LONG journeys).
What I’d like someone to explain to me now, please, is how come I can have wifi on a train moving at 80mph, but coffee shops think it’s too much to offer it?
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Very nice — I keep finding great Lifehacker posts that I never want to lose again!
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More good advice. My personal “trick” is to never check email when I get back from lunch … all too easily half the afternoon can be lost to “firefighting”.
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“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
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Coool….
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This sums up the most important thing that I ever learnt about marketing. Someone said to me once “If you look at an ad and think it’s really lame, then it’s probably not aimed at you”. 99% of the time, they were right.(tags: marketing targetting)
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“It’s the classic problem of becoming a manager… We got good enough at what we did before that now we’re paid not to do it anymore.”
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Beautiful, elegant, SIMPLE design to solve a very specific problem. Nice!
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the Daily Express’ “We stand for traditional values” TV campaign more than a little sinister?
I don’t like people pointing guns at me. It makes me nervous.
Last week I went on a business trip to Bucharest — my first ever visit to both Romania and Eastern Europe in general. I didn’t have much time to see the city itself (other than out of hotel and taxi windows), but I did like what I saw.
I was fascinated by all the contradictions — impressive traditional architecture … covered in neon signs and Coke ads. There even appeared to be entire blocks of flats with HUGE banner ads over the front — I hope that there is some kind of profit-sharing for the tenants, else they’re having sunlight stolen from them!
My most persistent memory of Bucharest, however, is likely to be the traffic. It was absolutely INSANE. Many of the roads, like that in the picture, were very wide — 4 lanes each side, but with any lane markings completely disregarded by the drivers all desperate to inch ahead any way possible. I was amazed that I didn’t see any crashes or prangs the entire time I was there … although a local colleague reassured me that a quick visit to the police station would provide plenty of evidence to the contrary!
Hopefully next time I’ll have a little more time to see the city — but I definitely won’t be driving myself!
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Some lovely elegant advice on good programming principles from Rich
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“Endless options can actually produce genuine suffering.”
This is why personally I think individually customised products are unlikely to become widespread — it’s only when someone REALLY KNOWS what they want that they want that level of choice. -
“I, for one, *love* the persistent beta. It signals that the system is continuously updating, never fully baked and meant to be organic. This is the way that it should be.”
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“Essentially, there are two things at stake. One is a numbers game. … The second is a networks issue.”
Nice practical discussion from Molly about inclusion and representation -
I love this kind of idea — something so simple that it just beggars belief that everyone hasn’t solved the problem in such a simple elegant way
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White African :: where africa and technology collide » Blog Archive » Beating the Big Guys to AfricaCompletely right — and personally I really hope that it is the African companies that really capitalise on this. There is a huge opportunity that is being ignored currently by the Powers That Be
Amsterdam really is one of my favourite places in the world. This week, I only managed to stop off at Schiphol Airport on my way to Bucharest. But even the airport in Amsterdam is brilliant, not least for the following reasons:
- The sushi doesn’t come with the usual little plastic trees, but instead with little plastic dope leaves
- It has great, cool sculptures. In an AIRPORT, people
- There are funky little maps that you can pick up everywhere that ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE and help you find places
Seemingly trivial, but how bad are airports normally?
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What always horrifies me about these type of stories is that I imagine the abusers must have felt they could act the way they could because they regard the patients as subhuman in some way. Noone could treat someone they thought of as an equal like this.(tags: mentalhealth health)
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Internet tie-ins to mobile phone services are probably the way forward — even my gran can use a mobile these days
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“Customers have been crying out for a tool which could tell them if they have been duped” — LOL, I love that this is the conclusion that MS comes to from customers going “I was told it was real, honest guv”
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“In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.”
Completely right and worth remembering — often too easy to get caught up in the process and forget -
Caterina’s right: the philosophy of only working when work has at least some of the characteristics of play is wonderful. I think even the big corps are starting to latch onto this concept now too
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Too funny!
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“…the lesson of the Web, written in letters of fire 500 feet high: agree on the smallest-possible number of data formats, and compete on what you do with them.”
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“I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite.” — Craig Newmark
Another good philosophy -
“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.” — Laurence J. Peter
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Filed in my “I want one” folder for when the financial impact of our upcoming nuptials has dissipated a bit
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This does look really really cool — although the South African traditionalist braaier in me objects
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Oh wow — I really really really want to eat here one day. I saw a tv programme about Heston Blumenthal once and his approach to food seems so amazingly fresh and innovative.
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“This is the way the Web is supposed to work.”
I have to admit, I absolutely love Bloglines
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Nice detailed article about how to securely keep track of your passwords. I use Firefox for all my web stuff, but should probably invest in a general password tracker at some point.
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Nice advice on secure passwords. The only thing it doesn’t cover is that staple of corporate life — how to cope with forced password changes every 30/40/60 days
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“We assume our agenda is exactly the right one, and we tweak it, we don’t overhaul it.”
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“CSS hasn’t revolutionised web design. The reason lies not with the technology (which is revolutionary), but with the designers using it.”
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I know this can seem like scaremongering, but I figure if there’s debate and conversation about it, then hopefully “best practice” will get out to the kids. Same as “don’t take sweets from strangers” — “don’t meet up with random ppl off MySpace without p
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Heh. Cool way to get rid of stuff (tags: selling)
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Best. Bumper Sticker. EVER.
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Seth Godin’s advice on dealing with back pain.
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This is like a real life bonsai kitten!
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This is truly laugh out loud funny. You have been warned.
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Ouch. This is one real danger of the new web2.0 surge — if the smaller “just running an app” companies don’t have industrial-strength backup etc plans then we may get a very bad rep.
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Otis Lee Crenshaw is the best character EVER. I remember catching this at like 3am at the end of an overlong hotel bar shift once and not being able to work out if it was serious or not.
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Along the lines of the “hackers for managers” and “managers for hackers” articles.
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I love this analogy. I realised early on in our relationship that both Elly and the other architecture students in her studio all saw something VERY different in the pages full of lines than I did.
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Kickass!
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“If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting.”
Is it just me, or does “Together we could upgrade the universe” sound as much like a Microsoft slogan as a Dr Who plotline?
