Category Archives: new!

Maria Bustillos captures Evgeny Morozov nicely in this Awl piece and pins him up so all can see the flaws in his thinking (U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, And The Failure Of Invective | The Awl). Anyone impressed by Morozov’s skepticism and negativity owe it to themselves to read this. While the Internet and technology in general needs more skeptics, they deserve better skepticism than Morozov’s.

She also covers Jaron Lanier, and while she takes a few good swipes in his direction, he manages to escape the fate of Morozov. Earlier I recommended not bothering with Lanier’s book (Jaron Lanier is wrong again | Smart People I Know). Based on her review, you could argue that you would find some value in reading Lanier. I still believe it’s not worth your while, but Bustillos is a sharp reader and if you has found value in his work, then you may, too.

I’d like to see her take on Nicolas Carr at some point. He’s another one that seems to get a pass when it comes to making pronouncements on the negative effects of the Internet.

Then you should read this article: Worry Isn’t Work – Dan Pallotta – Harvard Business Review.   Key quote:

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.

The part I highlighted is most important. Your goal at work should be creating value for your customers, your employer, and yourself. It’s the best way to maximize all three. If you are worrying all the time, you are never going to maximize them. You are never going to do the best job you could be doing.

Read the article. Think about what you are worrying over. Leverage the notion of achieving more value to help you reduce and eliminate the worry.

If you feel like you want to start eating less meat, then you may want to start doing it on Mondays and join the Meatless Monday crowd. If you feel it is a daunting prospect, here’s some inspiration for you to get started: Meatless Mondays: Even Mario Batali’s Doing It.

Jaron Lanier has a new book out called “Who Owns the Future?” and like his last book, “You are Not a Gadget”, he is out promoting it. (Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class – Salon.com.) In this Salon article, you find this:

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

When I read this, my first impression is: wow! Instagram in combination with other forces destroyed Kodak and all those jobs. Impressions are deceiving. In fact, what destroyed Kodak was Kodak management. As early as 1997, Kodak was under fire from Fuji and doing poorly (WHAT’S AILING KODAK? FUJI WHILE THE U.S. GIANT WAS SLEEPING, THE JAPANESE FILM COMPANY CUT PRICES, MARKETED AGGRESSIVELY, AND NOW IS STEALING MARKET SHARE. – October 27, 1997). Indeed, while Kodak has gone down, Fuji continues to do well, as I point out here: In considering Kodak’s demise, it’s important to remember that Fuji is still going strong | Smart People I Know.

The problem with Kodak was Kodak. It couldn’t deal with Fuji or the Internet. But Fuji was smart enough to do so, and if Kodak was as smart, they’d still be a going concern and alot of Kodak jobs would still exist.  If Lanier hasn’t done enough research to see that, I don’t know how much value you will find in his book. Maybe he gets alot more right and this is just a bad example, but I doubt it. Indeed, I blogged about him when he wrote his last book and how I thought that that book was troublesome: Jaron Lanier needs someone else to promote his new book, “You are Not A Gadget” | Smart People I Know. I’d expect more of the same from this book.

I don’t know what motivates him to write these books. He seems to get a pass when he does write them and the people who interview him seem to be impressed with his credentials and his appearance. To add to that, he is a well spoken individual, and I think there is even something in what he says. But I also think his writing is lazy and uninformed, and if you do wish to read authors critical of technology, I recommend you look elsewhere.

Whether or not you are the Canadian Prime Minister, I highly recommend openparliament.ca. In particular, I  really like how if you type in your postal code, it will show you the MP that represents you and also give a run down of what they are doing in and out of Parliament. So, not just their voting record, but their twitter log! Brilliant stuff. Well worth a look.

People who love reading political news may want to skip this article, but for those of you who are skeptical of what you are reading and feel it is manipulative, puffy,  or overall a waste of time, I recommend this: What if political scientists covered the news? from Slate Magazine.

If you find that you are feeling overwhelmed with work or the people at work, then you might find either one of these articles from the zenhabits blog to be useful: 13 small things to simplify your workday and 10 Ways to Deal With the Non-Simplifying Others in Your Life. If you read them now and then go on with your weekend activities, you may find that you have a plan to deal with these difficulties, come Monday. At the very least, knowing you have options can help you have a more relaxing weekend.

Good luck! Bon courage!

Need a good workout? You need this: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout – NYTimes.com. Do these 12 exercise, 30 seconds per exercise with 10 seconds in between, and in 7 minutes you have worked out all your major muscle groups.

If you take 10 seconds between each exercise, it adds up to 8 minutes. If you take no time between exercises, it 6 minutes. Either way, in less than 10 minutes and you are done.
If you want the details on how effective this is, the paper on it is here: HIGH-INTENSITY CIRCUIT TRAINING USING BODY WEIGHT: Maximum R… : ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal.

Yes, it’s a funny sounding name, but of all the ways I use to get faster,  I find fartlek training the most effective. Regardless of whether or not you have ever heard of it, I recommend this article, The Art Of The Fartlek – Competitor.com. It has a good description on it, who used it and how, as well as some good examples.

I want to hit some garage sales this weekend in the hopes of finding some bad landscape art that I can paint over. In the meantime, check
this out from the MAKE web site.

Apparently this is Banksy, but who can say?

So says this Buzzfeed article, Teens Abandoning Social Networks, Study Says. Where are they going?

What do these sites have in common? According to the article

The sites that are either ascendant, holding steady, or holding relatively strong are feed-heavy and profile-light; the sites that seem to be hit hardest are those that have a more traditional, MySpace-y structure, centered around a detailed profile. (Tumblr is the odd exception here.)

After all that fretting about teens giving up their privacy, they seem to have decided to go to sites that provide more of that. Smart. (Or lazy, but I am going with smart. )

Really terrible. Besides his homophobic comments, he has a terrible record on economic prediction, as this article in Business Insider illustrates.

There’s been such a pile on these days, it is pretty easy to find posts and articles discrediting him. If you haven’t seen any, start with the one linked here.

Google Glass has come in for a pile of negative press lately. I can understand this, but I still think they will be useful, and I thought that when I saw this:

This is taken from this article, This Is What the World Looks Like Through Google Glass. What I think is useful about this is how a heads up display can reduce complexity and increase your perspective.With such a display, you can get an enhanced view of what you are looking at, which in this case is a streetscape. It tells you where to go to get to your destination and how long it will take to get there. For people doing alot of commuting, that alone is valuable. Not that it has to be limited to directions. It could be a visual representation of where your friends or coworkers or clients are. It could notify you of an book or some other purchase you wanted is available in a nearby shop. Or it could warn you of a dangerous neighborhood in a city that you just arrived in. There are lots of examples when such a display would be useful.

Of course you could look at your mobile device and get that too. I don’t think it is an either/or situation. Some people will like the display, others will have a watch or other wearable device, and still others will use their phone.

Go to HERE IS TODAY. Click on the screen. It puts your day in perspective in a few clicks.

Thanks to @pyuan on twitter for this!

You have data. You want to show either the relationship, the composition, the distribution of the data, or you want to compare the data.

Which chart should you use? Pie chart? Scatter chart, bar chart? Why not start with this chart? It’s will help you immensely.

In reading articles like this, Microsoft cedes consoles to Sony, gives up on gaming | SemiAccurate, and others, I think it is important to keep this chart in mind:

As you can see, Microsoft makes relatively little on Entertainment (and they lose with Online Services). All their money is made with Office and the Windows OS. And I am guessing with the challenges they are having from non-PC devices like iPads and others, they are having to focus their resources on the big revenue generators. That will likely affect development of the XBOX 720, though I expect Microsoft will ultimately deliver, based on their long reputation of hanging in.

Sony has a totally different focus, although they too are being challenged by tablets and the like (as is evident by articles like this: Seven signs PlayStation Vita is a failure (Wired UK)). I expect them to push hard against Microsoft and try and dominant the console market. It will be interesting to see, and I expect gaming is going to see along of shifts in the next two years.

Chart from CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft Income By Segment – Business Insider.

As far as prejudices go, Ageism is a mild one. Perhaps that’s why the Globe and Mail thinks it’s ok to write about it, especially on the topics of food and restaurants. This entire article, Young, hip restaurants? No thanks, I’m happy being the unwanted oldster – The Globe and Mail, is a rant filled with generalizations. While it is fun to read, it is also lazy and indulgent, like much ranting about prejudices is.

It wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to have an article that took the time to separate the fashionable restaurants that are good and professional from those that are fashionable and pretentious. Ranting gets more viewers, I suppose. Taking the time to better understand the motivations of restaurants takes longer.

There will always be places that cater to specific groups. And when it comes to new and hot restaurants, there will always be those that appeal to young people. Just like there are very established places that appeal only to an older clientele, or a business clientele, etc. And for every restaurant lucky enough to have the attitude of the customer isn’t always right, there will be many many more that strive to meet your needs as a guest.

Restaurants are social businesses, and as Adam Gopnik explains in “The Table Comes First”, part of what some restaurants sell is exclusivity. How they exclude, be it price or demographic or social status, is part of their overall strategy to be successful. Some of that exclusivity will eventually filter you out somehow. If you don’t like it, take your business elsewhere. There is a wide range of establishments in Toronto: it’s not a simple divide of either trendy gem or fast food joint. Do some leg work: there are plenty of web sites that provide more information on places to eat. Check out how the restaurant uses social media.

I don’t believe every new restaurant in Toronto has a strategy of excluding everyone that doesn’t fit a younger demographic. If they do, then all the power to them: unless they are a pop-up restaurant, they will be joining the deadpool of former restaurants very soon.

As far as older people go, I recommend you hold your prejudices to them the same way you would hold your prejudices to any other group, which is to say, you should abandon them. You will be doing so for your own benefit as much as theirs.

If you are an IT person or geek like me, chances are you wish you could read more non-technical books that still appeal to your technical side, but that also manage to go into areas that you are not used to reading. While it is easy to find lists of great fiction and non-fiction, there are not too many lists of great books that directly appeal to you as a technical person.  I think this list might. I am not the best read person, but I think this is a good list of books to read. Furthermore, I have read each of these books at least twice, and some of them more times than that.

The ten books are:

1. Everything and More : A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace
2. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
3. Ficciones (English Translation) by Jorge Luis Borges, with translation by Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner
4. Inferno: First Book of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri with transalation by Allen Mandelbaum and illustration by Barry Moser
5. A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith
6. How Proust Can Change Your Life-not a Novel by Alain De Botton
7. Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer
8. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Kaufmann
9. Lessons for Students in Architecture by Herman Hertzberger
10. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 by Ian Kershaw

Here’s the details, including book plates why you might like them, and what you might want to read next. (Note, I have included links to Amazon: you can click on the link and go and buy the book if my description sounds appealing.)

1. Everything and More : A Compact History of Infinity: David Foster Wallace: Amazon.com: Books
David Foster Wallace is one of the great writers of the late 20th century who also really knows mathematics. This book wonderfully illustrates the story of mathematics and Georg Cantor while telling the history of the concept of infinity in a way that only DFW can. How many hard science books are written by great authors? There’s one: this one. This book is singularly great: you get superb writing and you get to learn/relearn a lot about mathematics. I know some mathematicians complained about some of the math, but they missed so much by doing so. (Plus, I studied this in university and to my feeble undergraduate mind it looks ok.) I can’t recommend this book highly enough. This book is a gift for people who enjoy mathematics. And math phobes, give it a try.
 
If you like it, read more Wallace. Really, anything is worth reading.  And there are other books in this series as well.

2. The Periodic Table: Primo Levi: 9780679444633: Amazon.com: Books

Primo Levi was a chemist, an Italian, and a Jew living during WWII and the Holocaust, and those parts of his life form a complex compound here in this book. Many of the chapters of this autobiography are named after elements in the periodic table, and the story in such a chapter (e.g., gold) is centered on the element. Levi’s love of chemistry and science comes through, and his writing is superb. Any field of science would be fortunate to have a such writer represent it.

After reading this, I’ve read more of Levi, and the more I read, the more I’ve appreciated his depth and profundity. This book has that, but with an accessibility that makes me recommend it over his other books. Read this, and if you like this, get his other books next. You won’t be disappointed. Every time I read Levi I take on some of his depth and humanity. 

If you like Levi and are looking for something similar, start with Italo Calvino’s books or Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”.

3. Ficciones (English Translation): Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner: 9780802130303: Amazon.com: Books

I joke that if science fiction is really good writing, then they don’t call it science fiction anymore. Same with fantasy and other genres. If believe that if you love those genres, you will love Borges. Like Kafka, there are few writers that imagine worlds the way he does.  And like Kafka, his writing is superlative. I love science fiction, but I rarely have time to read anymore, and I often feel like I could be reading something better when I am reading it. I think this is a fault of mine, but that’s how I think when I read SF. Borges allows me to feel I am reading great writing and still getting my fill of science fiction and fantasy.

You may think I am entirely wrong and you may have a lengthy list of great SF writers that I have neglected. Read Borges, and if you think there are some that approach him in terms of writing, I will be delighted to hear from you.

If you like this, try Labyrinths next, also by Borges.

Margaret Atwood is another writer who writes SF but it isn’t called SF because she is a great writer. Try her next. And of course, you should go read/reread Kafka.

4. Inferno: First Book of the Divine Comedy (A New Verse Translation) (Illustrated): Dante Alighieri, Allen Mandelbaum, Barry Moser: Amazon.com: Books

There are a multitude of translations of Dante’s Inferno, so why read this one? First off, the translation is very detailed, and the notes in the back are worth reading as much as the translations themselves. More importantly, Mandelbaum aims to get the poetry into the English translation, and the result reads beautifully. If you can read Italian, you are in for a great feast, for the Italian and the English are across from each other on each page. Regardless, it reads beautifully in whatever language you can read.

To top it off, the Moser illustrations are frighteningly good. The superbly horrific illustrations give it feel like a graphic novel. Unlike a graphic novel, though, you get all of Dante’s writing, not just snippets. This book is a feast.  I think everyone should read Dante’s Inferno, and if you agree, this is the one I recommend you try.

5. A Short History of Financial Euphoria (Penguin business): John Kenneth Galbraith: 9780140238563: Amazon.com: Books

With all the interest in bitcoin, it behooves IT people to learn more about economics. J.K. Galbraith has an entire book on money called “Money” that deals with the history of it. “Money” is a great book, but I love this book more. It is a slim volume covering all the manic moments in history regarding money and in particular, financial bubbles. It is written in a very dry and witty style that will make you smile as you read Galbraith eviscerate one historical figure after another who promises: this time it’s different.  After reading it, you will be innoculated against bitcoin and all other future movements that again promise this.

If you like this, then there is alot of Galbraith you can read, including his essays. I find his ideas still fresh and provocative after all these years, and his histories hold up well. Just as importantly, Galbraith writes well and thinks clearly and skeptically.  Even if you can’t imagine yourself reading anything to do with the topic of economics, I recommend you read this.

Of course you can also read Paul Krugman, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, and Joseph Schumpeter. Galbraith is funnier. Under no condition can I recommend that you read Ayn Rand, unless you are trapped somewhere with nothing else to read.

6. How Proust Can Change Your Life-not a Novel: Alain De Botton: Amazon.com: Books

I tried to cover alot of different types of genres, from biography to poetry to history. One genre that gets overlooked or looked down upon is the Self-help genre. While there are lots of terrible self help books — that is true of every genre — there are some exceptional ones, like this one. I also think this book is de Botton at his best. It’s not a “do this, do that” type of self help book. Rather, it is one that says: think about this, and when you have, your life will be improved. Read it that way, if you must. But if you read it with an open mind, you will get so much more, including a love of and a desire to read Proust. I think that is the Inception thing that de Botton has going on here: if you read this book, you WILL want to read Proust, size be damned. But before you do run off and tackle Proust, read this. It’s smart, witty, clever, insightful, and humane. I’ve ready many of de Botton’s other books, but this is the one that I’ve enjoyed the most. If for no other reason, read it for the part when Proust and Joyce get together. After you do, you’ll no longer bother to think “what would it be like for two great people to finally come together”?

This book is smart like an Oscar Wilde play, and just as effortless to read. At the end, you will be thinking long after you stop laughing to yourself.

Another great self-help book is Bertrand Russell’s “The Conquest of Happiness”. Read that next.

7. Designing Freedom: Stafford Beer: 9780471951650: Amazon.com: Books

Every year, the CBC in Canada hosts the Massey Lectures. The lectures are then published in book form like this one. The CBC has been doing this for decades, and the quality AND quantity is amazing. If you had to pick a series of books to buy, you could do no better than getting the complete Massey Lecture series. It is an education in itself.

One of my favorites is by Stafford Beer. He takes clearly about cybernetics and system design, but then uses it to talk about how to redesign establishments and societies. It says here it is from 1990s, but the lecture was given in 1973. Anyone interested in how IT affects society should read this.

Note: you may want to get the Kindle edition: the original looks to be a collector’s items and is over $100! (I have a copy…I didn’t realize how valuable it is.)

If you like this, any of the Massey Lectures are good. (e.g. C.B. Macpherson’s “The Real World of Democracy”).

8. Amazon.com: Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre: Walter Kaufmann: Books

Of course the authors in this anthology are great, but what makes this book particularly great is Kaufmann.  Not only is he superb at selecting works to include in this volume, but he even does the translation (or re translation) necessary to bring the ideas across. You might think: that looks unreadable; trust me, it is anything but.  You could read it just for the fiction included and you would be rewarded. For example, the passage from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is like nothing I’ve read anywhere.  Or one of my favourite parts is Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism paper. (Sartre may have regretted it later, but it is a great lecture.) The entire collection is a masterpiece and a demonstration of the power of a good anthology.

More over, this is a book of philosophy that is highly accessible. Even if existentialism isn’t for you, anyone wanting to read great philosophical writing and thinking should give this a try.

I have other books of philosophy, but nothing approaches this.

9. Herman Hertzberger Lessons for Students in Architecture: Herman Hertzberger: 9789064505621: Amazon.com: Books

I think IT people could benefit from knowing more about architecture. Much of how architects think about spaces and how they relate to people could be borrowed by IT architects as they design systems for people. This isn’t a book about how to build STARchitecture. This is a book about how to make places for people to live, work, and meet. IT people can learn alot from this book. IT people would design better systems after reading this book.

Of course non-IT people can learn alot from this as well. You will see your world and the buildings you inhabit in a fresh and smarter way after reading this book. And anyone who has been in a building and thought: “why is this building this way?” would benefit from this book.

Again, I have other books on architecture, but most of them are historical or technical. The depth and breadth of thought here is what makes Hertzberger worth reading.

10. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941: Amazon.com: Books

IT people should read more history. I am always struck by how little history IT people know. Even the history of their own industry, never mind history in general.

There’s a massive pile of great history to read, but my preference is recent English historians. AJP Taylor, Antony Beevor, and Richard J. Evans all write with a mastery and clarity that makes them accessible and worthwhile to read for non-historians. To that list I would add the name of Ian Kershaw. His “Hitler” is a masterpiece. However, I recommend this book because it shows how history is a volatile thing at the time it is being made and not some dry carved in stone set of events. Kershaw shows the decision to be made, shows how it was discussed, and then looks at what may have happened if an alternative decision was made. It will make you challenge any other history you read after you have finished this book.

If you like this, read the other authors that I mentioned. Taylor is my favourite, but some of his work is more accessible than others. I have reread his “Europe: Grandeur and Decline” so many times it has fallen apart. Beevor’s “Stalingrad” is over 600 pages and I have read it three times, it is so good. Evans is also great. I would add Margaret MacMillan and her “Paris 1919″ to the list.

Thanks for reading this. I hope you find something you find worth reading and thinking about.

It’s a long week. The weather’s crappy. You need something peppy to pick you up. Try this:

Yolanda Be Cool – We No Speak Americano (Video edit by Pink louder) – YouTube

And if you are already cool, it makes you look more so.

…that must read article is this one, The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency by Felix Salmon. Most of the articles I have seen have no understanding of the technology or how money and currency work. They tend to be bamboozled by the technology and bewildered by economics. Salmon understands the technology well enough and understands the economics better than anybody interested in bitcoins.

This article shows the shortcomings of the bitcoin system but talks about how it points the way to the future. There’s much more about the technological shortcomings you can and should read elsewhere, but what’s especially good here is the financial shortcomings of bitcoin. Even if Salmon was bamboozled by the technology (he isn’t), this article is worth reading for the financial analysis. Not surprising, given his role at Reuters. Still, I am heartened to read the thought he put into it.

Don’t get taken by the crazy growth of bitcoin. Read this instead.

For those wondering why people are getting excited about all this, here’s a graph from Salmon’s article on bitcoin’s market cap growth.

Insanity.

Dave Weigel from Slate posted a recent video of Lloyd Cole playing “Are you Ready to Be Heartbroken?” in a very small club, and it was sad to see. Literally heartbreaking. Like athletes, pop stars don’t age well, and by the time they get to 40, most of them should retire. Yet I suspect for many of them it’s all they know and what they love, and that keeps them running and performing well past when they should.

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions were great back in the day, and I prefer to remember them this way, singing Perfect Skin.

Lloyd Cole and The Commotions – Perfect Skin [Live HQ] – YouTube

Nike+ combined with the iPod Nano are not just for running anymore. You can hack them to do other things if you want, too.

Some background. I have used Nike+ with my Apple iPod Nano device for along time. I love it. But the other day, after my run,  I was syncing my iPod with the Nike+ site using the iTunes software, when I had a problem with my computer. Result? The data didn’t upload. Worse, I tried it again on my next run and it still wasn’t working.

Through some searching, I found the answer here: nike+ website temporarily unavailable: Apple Support Communities. Here is the key feedback I needed:

If you go into your Nano and allow “view hidden files,” there is a pathway to both your latest folder and synched folder: E:\iPod_Control\Device\Trainer\Workouts\Empeds\nikeinternal. Take all your runs from the latest folder — these are the ones that aren’t uploaded — and copy them to your desktop. Put one back into the latest folder from your desktop and try to upload it to Nikeplus. Continue until you get one that won’t upload: It’s the one that’s corrupt. Remove it from the latest folder and get Nike to input it manually. You should have no reason to restore your iPod.

(If you know a bit of XML, you can get all the information from your corrupt runs. The distances are in km and the pace and duration are in milliseconds — this is standard for programming).

That’s right! All that data is there in XML format for you to hack! Highly readable and capable of being hacked with. (Even better, it looks like it keeps a seperate folder for each sensor you use. That means you could have one sensor for running and another for hacking. So you don’t have to worry about messing up your time recordings.)

How you can hack it is up to you. Let’s say you were doing an activity and you wanted to see how long it took to do something (e.g., a presentation). You could treat the presentation like a race, but take a snapshot of the time after each slide. This would give you a sense of how long it is taking you to get through it. Or you could turn your chores into a game. Say you have to clean three rooms, but you found it super boring. Why not try and improve your time each time by “racing” through them and recording your time at the end step?

You don’t even have to be moving. After all, the pace isn’t so important, it’s the stop and start times. So you could devote yourself to reading more each week and you could start and stop the Nano every time you do a reading session. All the times would be recorded on the Nano, which you could pull off later.

There’s lots more data in there besides your times. There’s number of steps taken, your weight, even the playlist you used. There is also the difference between when you paused the Nano and when you just do a time check. With some creativity you can record all sorts of information.

For fans of self quantification, there are more and more devices that you can do this with. But a Ipod Nano and the Nike+ additions provide a cool thing to hack around. I recommend it.

P.S. If you can’t see the hidden files, go here and follow these instructions from Microsoft. On Windows 7, you can see Folder Options in your Control Panel without having to go to Appearance and Themes.

This is a great example of just how much green screening is done in the shows and movies that you watch. It’s remarkable.

The video is here: Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009, via kottle.org.

You want to make a dish for St. Patrick’s Day and you don’t know what to pick? Then go here: For the Love of Cooking. They have a wide range of dishes that fill the bill, including this:

There’s a dish for every meal, and there’s vegetarian selections, too. Of course there’s stew, but there’s much more. Cheers!

I am a fan of Braun’s products and design, and if you like Apple products, chances are you would too. Yet if you live in North America, there is also a good chance you don’t even know of Braun products. That’s a shame, because as this Gizmodo article points out (1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future), Apple owes a lot to Dieter Rams and the work he did on the design of Braun products. See this photo from the article to see what I mean:

And this is just a small sample. I think Apple is smart to borrow ideas from Braun. If Braun were smarter, they would capitalize on this by strongly marketing their products in North America. I think they could sell a lot more and become a much larger presence in North American households if they did.

Mostly the amount of labour that goes into it. As this article shows (The $482 Difference Between Two Loafers – The Everything Guide to Shoes — New York Magazine), a shoe that costs under $100 can look like a shoe that costs over $500, but the (price) difference is in the details. I liked this article because it gives you a better sense of what goes into the making of a pair of shoes. I am sure the same could be said for most clothes nowadays.

BIEGERT & FUNK‘s web site, including this

They make a number of watches and clocks like this, and they are all beautiful.

Chances are you will do spring cleaning around your house/apartment/condo in the next few weeks. You should also spring clean your financial house and get everything in order. A great way to do this is to take a day off and tackle everything at once, as this article suggests: Your Money – A Day Off to Tackle the Financial To-Do List – NYTimes.com.

You will be surprised how by the end of it that you are paying less on your overall bills and maybe saving more at the end of the exercise too. Well worth while, both the article and the exercise.

At Urban Outfitters Bike Shop, you can. You don’t have do any fancy welding, just go to their interactive web site and go from there. You start with a pattern like this:

And they help you with designing it yourself. This model, the Plato Dutch Diamond, comes in around $399 for a fixie/1-speed. I have a bike like this (not from them), and I love it. There’s even a random option if the choices overwhelm you. Now you can have that 5 colour bike you always wanted. Or for that matter, a basic black model with a touch of red. Whatever, you have lots of flexibility. And in the end, a bike all of your own.

I love this recipe for pie crust: Stop Being a Wuss: How To Make Pie Crusts the Easy Way | The Awl. Most recipes are dry and detail oriented. Not this one. It has loads of personality, wit and humour. And it is still a valid recipe for how to make pie crust. More than that, you will WANT to try and make a pie when you are done reading it. But wait, you say: what do I do once I have the pie crust? That, my friend, is easy. If you want to be terribly lazy, when you are at the grocer, pick up some pie filling and pour it into this wonderful pie of yours. If you think, “that’s wussy!”, then go all the way and look up apple pie or some berry pie recipes on Google. You will be glad you did.

Now, you are no longer a wuss, and even better, you have pie.

Yes, even new runners training for something less than a marathon can benefit from some speed training. This article, Adding Speed Workouts to Marathon Training – NYTimes.com, is focused on marathon training, but I think anyone running should give it a read. I am a big fan of fartlek training and at a minimum, I’d recommend people that run regularly should add to their training. This article covers that and more. A good read for runners of all types.

I bookmarked this ages ago, but this post, How I Hire Programmers by Aaron Swartz is worth reading. It’s from 2009, but it is timeless.

I am sure it could be applied to anyone, not just programmers. It’s a very humane way of interviewing and hiring people.

That’s more or less what the Congress gave the Secretary of the Treasury (Paulson, under President Bush), in order to save the economy when it was threatening to crash and burn in the fall of 2008. Here’s the Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan (NYTimes.com).

Basically it gives Paulson the ability to buy any mortgate-related asset from anyone for any amount up to $700B. It’s a remarkable document. Read it just to see how much leeway Paulson had. It’s astounding.

I think this article should be printed and referred to by anyone who needs to simplify their lives but still needs to grocery shop and prepare meals for the week. And just what are these ingredients?

Chicken breasts (4 boneless)
Bacon (1/2 pound)
Shrimp (1 pound)
Spinach (1 pound)
Tomatoes (6)
Ginger
Onions
Asparagus (2 pounds)
Button mushrooms (1 pound)
Loaf of good country bread

Sound good? Go to The 10-Ingredient Shopping Trip – NYTimes.com and get the details.

How do I know this? Easy! I went to Data Paradigms – Data, data, data! and looked at this chart.

And yes, it is hard to read: you will need to go to that site or here (Next Pope) to play around with the prediction tool. Let’s see. It says the top five candidates are Scola (Italy), Ouellet (Canada), Scherer (Brazil), Turkson (Ghana) and Bertone (Italy).  I will be surprised if it isn’t one of those.

For those who like looking into data centres, there’s this: Search Me – The New York Times > Magazine > Slide Show. I think data centres are mysterious things for many people, which accounts for the fascination with them. Once you’ve been in as many as I have, though, they seem pretty straightforward, despite the visual complexity.

Of all the photos in that spread, this is my favorite:

You may think this is far fetched, but you’d be surprised how people will randomly hit buttons in data centres.

While Obamacare is the law, there are lots of developments happening there, and the GOP is still battling it in a number of ways. If you want to keep track of that, or many other topics concerning healthcare in the United States, take a look at Kaiser Health News. It has a focus you won’t find at alot of other news sites. Well worth reading.

Sure, you can get a better webcam. But if you spend any time on web conference calls, it pays to read this, too: Strobist: How to Improve Your Cheapo Webcam’s Picture Quality. For example, following the article, the image that the webcam produces goes from the bluish one on the right to the better looking one on the right.

Well worth reading.

This site shows it  from 1983 to 2009.  It’s fun and amazing to see how much cell phones have evolved in a very short period of time. If you are like me, you will go through it and think, “oh, I remember THOSE!” . For example,  I still remember being so impressed when I saw this for the first time:

Anyone wanting to make predictions about the future of mobile technology might want to review this and see just how much changes and how dramatically are the changes.