Author: smartpeopleiknow

Woody Allen and the secret of success

The secret of success, I think, is well summed up by Woody Allen in this quote taken from an interview of Woody Allen on Stardust Memories:

I make so many films, that I don’t care about individual successes and failures. I made Interiors and I made Stardust Memories, and before they came out I was working on something else. The film could be a big hit like Manhattan or Hannah, to me it doesn’t matter. I’ve tried very hard to make my films into a non-event. I just want to work, that’s all. Just put the film out for people to see, just keep grinding them out. I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life, that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, ‘I made fifty movies and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good and some were funny…’ I just don’t want to get into that situation that so many of my contemporaries are in, where they make one film every few years and it’s a Big Event. That’s why I’ve always admired Bergman. He’d be working quietly on the island and would make a little tiny film and put it out, and then he’d be working on the next one. You know, the work was important. Not the eventual success or failure, the money or the critical reception. What’s important is that your work is part of your daily life and you can lice decently. You can , as in my case, do the other things I want to do at the same time. I like to play music, I like to see my children, I like to go to restaurants, I like to take walks and watch sports and things. When you’re working at the same time, you have a nice, integrated life.

This nicely incorporates a number of guidelines to success that I’ve heard in the past, such as:

  • make the journey (in this case, “work”) and not just the destination equal the reward
  • if you create alot, you will have more successes overall, and your failure won’t matter as much
  • success is ultimately about have a rich life, not achieving one particular thing

Thanks to the blog Letter to Jane for this.

On polar and spectral thinking with regards to skills

When it comes to skills that people have, are you a spectral or a polar
thinker? If you agree or lean towards agreement on comments like:
“so-and-so is not a writer”, “he’s not a real
programmer/painter/carpenter/singer/mechanic”, “unless you are in the top
10%/ professiopnal/ graduated from school X, you cannot consider yourself
someone of profession Y”. In each case there is a sense of either-or, of
exclusion. You either are a particular role with a particular set of skills
or you are not.

I can understand that to a certain degree. I can’t say I am a skydiver or a
cook or a manager if I have never practiced any of those skills. But let’s
say that I have. Let’s say that I have made many a meal at home: Am I a
cook?

I would argue that am I, based on the spectrum view of skills. Every role
has skills associated with it. Those skills have varying degrees of
difficulty in acquiring. Some skills can be picked up right away. Others
take years to learn, if one ever learns them at all. You may learn enough
about cooking to feed you and your family. To me, that makes you a cook.
You may not be a professional cook nor one of the best chefs in the world,
but that should not exclude you from thinking you are a cook. Same hold
true for a lot of other roles.

Now you should not think that just because you are a cook or a writer or an
amateur carpenter that you are equivalent to everyone else who calls
themselves a cook. You are on one end of the spectrum, and they are on the
other end. However, with hard work, talent and luck, you can progress along
the dpectrum from one end to the other.

One thing I like about marathon running is that it is very supportive of
this idea. If you are fit enough to finish a marathon and you enter a big
city marathon like New York or London, you will be a) in the same race as
the best runners in the world and b) you will be considered a marathon
runner. People will support you and encourage you to do better. No one will
say: you aren’t in the top finishers so you aren’t a marathon runner.
Runners generally are supportive and inclusive of runners of all types. I
wish all professions were like this.

In the oriental martial arts, it was mostly the case that you were either a
white belt or a black belt. It was polar: you either were a black belt or
you weren’t. This gave way, at least in North America, to coloured belts:
yellow, green, brown, etc. This is more of the spectrum approach to skills,
and encouraged students not to give up by showing their progress as they
made their way from white to black belt.

I think it is important for people when they are starting out in acquiring
skills that they believe that they can acquire skills and that they can be
a carpenter or a cook or a writer or a computer programmer, and that even
if they are not the best in the role that they have chosen, that they still
can consider themselves to have the necessary skills to be that role an
do.worthwhile work. There is a place on the spectrum from the barely
knowledgeable to the elite, and by encouraging more people to think that
way, the overall contribution to society will be much greater than if we
have just a few practioners.

I think the polar approach discourages people from taking up certain
skills. I also believe that people are less supportive of the spectrum
approaches when it is hard to discern one person from another. Why don’t
the best marathon runners worry about being compared to me? It’s because
they can finish a marathon in just over 2 hours and I cannot. But with hard
work and some luck, I could get closer to them.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks very much if you have any comments.
—————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

Kickstarter: how to become a (micro)producer or patron of the arts

Have you ever thought it would be great to produce a film or a play or other work of art? If you thought it would require alot of your own money, think again. Kickstarter provides a way to pool money from various smaller sponsors to fund a bigger project. It’s a great idea, and you can learn more about it here at their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.

We believe that…

• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
Top ↑
All-or-nothing funding?

Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands.

Why?

1. It’s less risk for everyone. If you need $5,000, it’s tough having $2,000 and a bunch of people expecting you to complete a $5,000 project.

2. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don’t receive the support you want, you’re not compelled to follow through. This is huge!

3. It motivates. If people want to see a project come to life, they’re going to spread the word.

For more on it, go to the site.

How you can make any room look great regardless of how little money you have: think monochrome

Simple. See this room:

I think you can make any room give a big impression by sticking with one colour and painting it that. White obviously looks great, but any neutral colour would also work. You could also pick a more vibrant colour, but then it gets trickier.

Most of the things in this room are low cost: shelves, stools, rug, fridge. The overall impression is greater because it is all white.

From 2 or 3 things i know

How to be alone and how to be famous at the same time

This superb video by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis addresses the first point. According to the artists, “Davis wrote the beautiful poem and performed in the video which Dorfman directed, shot, animated by hand and edited. The video was shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was produced by Bravo!FACT http://www.bravofact.com/“

You can see it here:

And find it here on YouTube – How To Be Alone

Not only is it a superb video, but it is also a video with quite alot of views. For the story behind that, see this blog post, Viral solitude – updated  at the always good Contrarian blog.

All in all, some excellent work by fellow Nova Scotians. As much as anything about the video, the N.S. settings, both inside and outl, made me homesick.

A Simple Idea, and an Simple Project = Something Smart

What am I talking about? Mini-goal chalkboards! You can see a number of them here at the always delightful blog, oliveloaf design.

Go to a dollar store, buy some paint, brushes, and small chalkboards with chalk, and soon you can have your own version.
So add that to your list of two things to do today:

  1. buy supplies to make your own mini goal chalkboard
  2. make your own mini goal chalkboard

See? Already you are having a productive day!

More great commentary on Inception at Slate

Jonah Weiner at Slate Magazine has a great review of Inception (How to make sense of all those dreams-within-dreams in Inception) that does a great job of tackling some of the criticisms of the film. If you’ve seen the film, and then read the reviews, I recommend you read his review. He nicely takes them to task.

And then there is this smart comment of his:

If there’s an element in Inception that mitigates the bleakness, it’s the giddy way in which Nolan pilfers from cinema history. The alpine showdown and Mombassa street chase are straight out of James Bond and Jason Bourne. The deathbed set in Robert Fischer’s unconscious recalls the Star Trek holodeck. The zero-gravity fight scenes evoke both The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spectral wife, Mal, haunts our hero like Hari in Solaris. Added up, Inception is something of a love letter to some of Nolan’s favorite films, and his extracting, forging, architecting heroes are not simply culture-bludgeoned victims, but emblems of that liberated Postmodern figure, the remixer, who bends and subverts mass culture to his will.

The more I think about the film, the more I am starting to think that it is a masterpiece that will be talked about and analyzed for time to come.

How Sarah Palin and her team manage her Facebook account

John Dickerson and his team at  Slate Magazine   have done an impressive review of how well Sarah Palin and her team manage her Facebook page in order to present her best side, so to speak. I was impressed not only by the analysis, but by the effort Palin and company put into the managing of comments on the page. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin and her politics, you should look at what her folks are doing. Just like Obama did during the last Presidential campaign, she is serious about social media, and it shows.

On Inception and Privacy

The film Inception has alot of ideas, but one I don’t hear people talking about is the notion of privacy. After all, what the characters are doing is an extreme case of invasion of privacy. There is alot to think about when you watch the film, but when you watch it, think of that, too.

For other thought on How to think about privacy, check out the rough notes I jotted down after reading Mark Zuckerberg say The Age of Privacy is Over, here on this blog, Smart People I Know.

Thanks!

See Inception. Read this. Then see it again.

Over at Slate is a great article — actually, it’s more a great conversation — by people with their own theories Inception. (Brow Beat : Five Ways of Looking at Inception)

While I like what the author, Nina Shen Rastogi, has put together as a list of ways to think about the movie, I highly recommend you also read through the comments. They are insightful, and the debate and discussion going on in that section is really good (unlike the commentary on alot of other sites).

Afterwards you may want to go back and give the film another look. I have seen it twice now and reading this article and the comments makes me want to go back and see it again.

P.S. There is talk about there being alot of material taken out of the movie: if so, that could make for a fantastic DVD when it comes out.

P.S.S. While the film is very intelligent in terms of content, it is a great film in cinematic terms, too. Here’s a trailer.

Why the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is important

Read this: At the Bar – But for the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights might not guarantee very much. – NYTimes.com.

Currently the battle is about preventing foreigners from having their children becoming American citizens. But the 14th Amendment is about much more than that. It is part of the Reconstruction Amendments that were created after the Civil War. They are three of them, and according to Wikipedia: “The Thirteenth Amendment (both proposed and ratified in 1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868) included a redefinition of citizenship, the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Fifteenth Amendment, (proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870) grants voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. 

I find it mindboggling that anyone in the United States, especially anyone who knows the history of these amendments, would think of changing them. But read about them and decide for yourself.

How men can dress for hot weather and not look like a slob/juvenile

How? By following the example set by this man at The Sartorialist.

He is wearing a simple outfit, but his shirt is a very casual dress shirt: white, loose, and rolled up; it makes him more dressed up than someone in a T shirt or a polo/golf shirt. Likewise his shorts are also casual, but they are dressier than cargo pants or swim trunks. Finally, he uses accessories really well and they also dress him up. Not to mention that he is wearing shoes, not sandals or swim shoes. It’s a great outfit that would look great reading in a park or on a patio in terribly hot weather. Smart.

From Inception back to Blade Runner: Final Cut (Trailer)

If you have seen and loved “Inception”, you might want to go back and see Blade Runner: Final Cut.

In many ways, there is not much difference between the “Director’s Cut” and the “Final Cut”. Ridley Scott lengths some scenes slightly, and there are some small additional scenes (like the strippers in the bar). As well, he cleaned up some things (e.g. visible wires). I recommend the Final Cut, especially if you have only seen the original version of the film with the voiceovers.

Here’s the trailer:

Janet Fitch’s 10 rules for writers (good advice)

Most guidance from writers for writers is worse than useless. I am not sure if they are trying to be clever, mystifying, or stupid with the guidance they provide, but the conclusion you are lead to is that it is impossible to give good advice to other writers. That’s simply not true, for if it were impossible to give guidance to writers, there would be no “Elements of Style”.

Fortunately there are writers who show it is possible to provide good advise. You can find it here in the LA Times: Janet Fitch’s 10 rules for writers.

Anyone who writes, be it for fiction or simply email, can benefit from reading this.

(Via kottke.org)

What computers are doing while you are sleeping

You may think that computers are doing little if anything while you are sleeping. While you are dreaming, you might think, if you think of it at all, computers are sitting mostly idle, running the odd screensaver program, waiting for you to return, your faithful servant.
Of course, some computers, like web servers, could be serving different people. Computers could be handling the requests from people around the world who are awake and working and reading and surfing the web. Some computers handle requests 24 hours a day, rarely having any time to themselves, to reboot, to load new software.They process requests until they are shutdown intentionally or fail dramatically.

But just like your body is resting and your brain is dreaming/sorting things out in the wee small hours of the morning, so too do some computers take the night time to get themselves together. While you are sleeping, they are running backups, processing files they don’t get to process in the daytime, defragmenting their disks, cleaning out their caches and buffers. Many computers have utility roles, doing a myriad of tasks you can only imagine. Plus for every set of computers handling your requests, there are entirely different sets of machines that check and make sure that the machines you use are working properly.
If the earth can be said to be automatic, so too can it be said of the many thousands of computers that are running while you are sleeping, running to keep the world running in the 21st century.

And I have thought of all this while I test run batch programs on a set of test computers during the graveyard shift, in order to insure that the real computers that we run can handle the volume of requests that the real (not test) computers will eventually have to handle. For in my case, what computers are doing while you are sleeping are helping me do my job successfully which will help you in ways you don’t even know (not only, but partially, because you are sleeping).

How to recognize if someone is drowning

As you can see from this article, Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. As a parent, these things worry me. The person who wrote this closes with this:

And parents – children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

If you have the slightest doubt, save them first, and let them complain later that they weren’t drowning and you were overreacting.

(via kottke.org)

BBC’s Radio 1 Live Lounge – the great music TV show of our time

What is the great music TV show of our time? I was asking myself this after considering older shows like The Midnight Special and Night Music. Certainly there are great shows, like PBS’s Austin City Limits. And of course, there is alot of music video shows (though I don’t consider them great).

What I do think is great and certainly something that captures our time and our popular music is BBC’s Radio 1 Live Lounge. (Strictly it’s a radio show, but YouTube/the Internet makes that distinction somewhat irrelevant.)  It has great performers doing something unique and worth watching / listening to. I blogged about it before, and I recommend you go to the BBC web site or YouTube and look them up. In the meantime, here Lady GaGa doing a great cover — mistakes and all — of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida.

YouTube – Radio 1 Live Lounge – Lady GaGa – Viva La Vida

Some thoughts on my new Kodak Zi6 camera

What I like about the Zi6 so far is the design of it. It’s a bit think, but it is around the size of an iPhone and fits in your hand nicely. The controls are easy to use and obvious.  I like the fact I can add my own SD cards to it. The screen is nice and big, and the USB interface is simple.

I also liked the videos it takes. It took some videos in HD60 mode and watched them using QT and they looked good. They also looked good on FB. I think it captures the video at 720p at 60 fps in HD 60 mode. Not quite as striking as 1080, but still pretty good and miles better than the videos I was taking with my Blackberry!

You can take stills with it too. So far the quality of those is only fair. I may need to experiment with that.

You need rechargable batteries, but Kodak provided some and a charger. Nice! And they are cheap these days: so much so, it doesn’t make sense to buy anything other than rechargeable.

You can mount it on a tripod, which is nice.

I picked up one of these today at a discount electronic store for a great price ($69) and so far I really like it. My first digital camera that I bought in 2003 was a Kodak, and even at 2 MP I used it for along time because it took great pictures and it was easy to use.

I have a JVC camcorder, but it still uses tape and it is clunky, and as a result I have not been using it at all. That’s a shame, because I felt lots of moments in life were not being recorded because my old cameras were not up to snuff. I hope to get alot more saved with the Zi6.

You can see more about it here at Kodak Online  or you can try Amazon too.

Amy Winehouse – He Can Only Hold Her – Doo Wop (That Thing)

I wrote about this before, but the quality of the video was poor. This version of on YouTube of Amy Winehouse performing He Can Only Hold Her – Doo Wop (That Thing) is Live HD and looks great. Sounds great too. A fantastic version of these two songs:

Sad to say it seems not long ago I was commenting on the new sound of people like Amy Winehouse, and now she already seems like so long ago.

Some thoughts on watching “Minority Report” again

In discussions of Science Fiction (SF) films, Blade Runner stands out. (As does Alien, another SF film by Ripley Scott.) I think Minority Report stands up well next to Blade Runner, and in some ways pays homage to it. Many aspects ofMinority Report reflect Blade Runner. First off, both are based on the work of Philip K Dick. Both have a police officer as the main protagonist, a police officer with alot of personal issues he is dealing with. Both protagonist also have an odd relationship with the main female protagonist. If the male protagonist is an outsider, the female protagonist is also an outsider, but more a freak than a loner. Both works feature what can mildly be described as a mad scientist who provides the police officer with insight into what is happening with the female protagonist. From a storyline, there are alot of similarities, and i haven’t read the story the film is based upon, but i am guessing that Spielberg and company emphasized that. Because visually the film echoes aspects of Blade Runner as well. The congested run down nature of the Sprawl in MR reminded me of Los Angeles in BR. The advanced transportation is similar. The run down buildings seem similar. Even the last scene in the first BR (with the voice over, not the Director’s’Cut) reminded me of the cottage scenes in MR. In BR, the Voight-Kampf machine highlights the eye and uses response time of the eye to separate humans from androids. In MR eyescanners are used to identify who you are. In BR there is an eyemaker and when the androids/replicants go to visit him, they play with the spare eyeballs. In MR spare eyeballs also play a signifigant roll. Lastly, both protagonists look like each other. Oh, and they spend alot of time looking at images for clues.

MR is a great film in it’s’own right, though, and it is visually stunning. In BR, Scott went back 40 years into the past to restore fashions and looks he wanted to project 40 years into the future. Spielberg/Kaminsky (cinematographer) resort to creating an almost black and white future with a washed out palatte that supports CGI better but also gives the film a retro look. The film is flooded with complex lighting. It is worthwhile watching it with the sound off just to see the interplay with light on the characters as they move through the film. The palate might be stark, but the tones and complexity of the lighting is tremendous, right down to the juxtaposition of rainy night, sunny day scenes at the end.

Submersion/drowning is a critical theme of the film. Major and minor characters are submerged or drowning, either literally or figuratively. Indeed the main character is drowning in grief. Even the wife of the protagonist is revealing images by dipping them in pools of liquid (not unlike the precogs and their visions themselves, who reveal images by floating in liquid).

Images are also a major element of the film, but really it comes down to vision: what you can see and what you can’t. The film is about images, sight, blindness, the eye. It is ostensibility a blend of film noir/SF genres, but if Blade Runner was a meditation of what the future of the city is, Minority Report is a meditation on what does it mean to see. The precog Agatha asks the protagonist this, but really, it is what the filmmakers are asking us.

One way of dealing with subway delays in the summer time

There have been alot of delays on the TTC subways recently. Blame the G20 and the heat. It can be frustrating to deal with, not to mention unpleasant. What to do?

Well, if the subway is not going to be going your way for some time, and you have a laptop and a Metropass, consider hoping off, heading for your nearest Starbucks, and grabbing yourself a nice cold drink while you take advantage of their free WiFi. You can tell whomever you were supposed to meet that you were delayed, and that in the meantime you are catching up on your email, work, etc. You can also keep track of the subway — I follow @bradttc and @ttcupdates on twitter — so you will know that it is all clear and you can proceed to work (or wherever you are going).

Hey, when life gives you lemons, go to Starbucks and have a Tazo Black Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade! 🙂

A great source of information on energy rebates in Ontario and BC

Can be found here at http://www.homeperformance.com. They have a complete list of rebates, including advice on what information you need to gather in order to make sure you are eligible for your rebate.

Before you buy anything, make sure the person / company selling you a product or service conforms with the terms of the rebate. Don’t get caught buying an air conditioner, for example, that is not energy efficient enough. Not only will you not get your money, but you will end up with a less energy efficient product, which is doubly bad.  Cavaet emptor.

Are you looking to replace your air conditioner and you live in Ontario and you want to know about rebates?

Then visit this site: everykilowattcounts.ca. It shows you how you can get rebates towards any air conditioner you purchased. Apparently it is retroactive to 2009, which means if you didn’t know about this when you bought your A/C last year, there is a chance you can still apply.

You can use the money to help pay for the new unit. Or you can do some other things around the house to make it even more energy efficient (e.g. replace light bulbs, seal up doors and windows against draughts).

Stay cool.

Phishing/Spam of the Day

Is this. Besides the stilted language and the typographical errors, the reply-to email is an AOL site (highly/extremely unlikely to be the source of such a lucrative prize).

Anyway, here it is:

UK Games Commission
Victoria Square House,
Birmingham B2 4BP. London-UK.
Reference: BOGC/9887-44UK,
Batch: 44/0091-BO1/GC2

This Official Letter of Notification is displayed in the order of the 2012 Olympics Games that will next be held in London 2012. Your Email Address was gotten through United Kingdom Information Network Online and above is enclosed your Reference & Batch Number been for the International Promotions Program that was recently held.

Draws of Email Addresses was selected through a computer system from  Thirty Thousand email addresses across the world as part of the IPP and the winning sum for this draw is Five Million Pounds to be shared amound 5 eligible winners from this promotion and by receiving this notification, this makes you an eligible winner to lay claims.

Send your claimaint details to the below contact for payment processing and data programming and further steps of claim will be related with you.

Sex: | First Name: | Surname:| Occupation: |  Marital Status: |  Date of Birth: |  Residential |  Address: | Country of Origin: | Nationality/Citizenship: | Email: | Alternative Email: | Fax #:
Tel#: | Cell#:.

Fill in the details or write it out as it best suit you to send to the contatct below:

SEND DETAILS TO:
Mr. Perry Lyons
Tel: +44 702 402 7924
Email: bogcservice1@gmail.com

Quote your Reference and Batch numbers and avoid unnecessary delay/complications, all funds that are unclaimed within 2 weeks of notification will be revoke.

Congratulation,
Euro Tele Raff
Copy Right 2010

Three ways (plus one) of dealing with procrastination that you might not have read before

Three ways of dealing with procrastination that you might not have read before — I haven’t — are:

  1. Acknowledge the difficulty of doing it (at first): one of the chief reasons I procrastinate is because I have something difficult to do, but I refuse to acknowledge it is difficult.That’s likely why I am not doing it!  Instead what I end up doing is subconsciously avoiding it by doing other important-but-not-as-important things. But if I acknowledge it is difficult, then I give myself some slack and I take other steps to ease the difficulty and get it done.
  2. Bribe yourself: if what you have to do is difficult, then find rewards for yourself to motivate you to get it done. It can be small things and it doesn’t have to be monetary, but associating the difficult with something rewarding takes the sting out of the task.
  3. Give yourself copious amounts of time to get it done: I find sometime that I have something difficult to do and little time to do it, the little time to do it in is my excuse for not doing it. One way to overcome that is to give yourself lots of time to do something. For example, if there is some unpleasant chore that I have to do that I can do in less than an hour, I will give myself three hours to do it. Even with procrastination, I will eventually get it done in the three hours.

And now a fourth step. After you complete the task, review the difficulty of it. Was it really that hard to do? If the answer is no, or not usually, then make an effort to acknowledge that it wasn’t that hard, then write that done or log it somewhere as a reminder to yourself for the next time you have to deal with a task that you are procrastinating about.

The Midnight Special

If you goto Youtube.com and search on “Midnight Special”, you will find a wealth of music from the late 1970s and you can see the progression of music from folk/disco to New Wave. You might think that the 1970s was only about disco, but there were lots of styles then, and the end of the decade was trending towards edgier music.

A great example of this is The Cars, who, like Cheap Trick, combined band members that embodied different styles of music yet came together to provide an integrated sound.

Here’s “Lets Go”

Some thoughts on old school programming and Why Johnny can’t code

It’s hard to know where to start with what is wrong with this article: Why Johnny can’t code – Education in Salon.com

First off, the author is making a virtue of a necessity we once had as users of computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Back when personal computers first came out, programming them in BASIC was something you did because, well, there wasn’t much else you could do with them! If you wanted your Commodore PET or 64 or TRS-80 to do something, you needed to program it. Later on came wordprocessors and spreadsheets that allowed you to use the computer without having to learn programming. But first, you had to program.

Second, most kids I knew back then did NOT use a computer. Did not program. That was for geeks.  I think that will always be the way it is with new technologies. There are a minority of kids who are tinkerers and changers of things, be it cars, computers, or some other new thing in the future. For the rest of them, they will be just happy to drive the car, or use the mobile phone or play the video game.

Third, young people have access to vastly more free technology and tools than kids of the 70s and 80s did. There is so much open source and free software to program with and use, be in Java or Python or Javascript or Clojure. You name it: there’s something that is easily downloadable with lots of great documentation and examples anyone can use to get coding.

Fourth, personal computers have had more layers of abstraction added to them, true, and you have less control over them than we had back then. But I would argue that as new technology comes along, that kids have that chance again. I am thinking in particular about mobile application development. Also, I look to things like Arduino devices which young people can get, attach to their computers, and program. It’s the same thing as kids from the 70s. In fact, looking at Arduino books and tech, it reminded me of being a kid back in the 70s. There’s still the same opportunities, but instead of programming the PC they are programming something else.

It’s a good article, and I think it is worth a read, but it subscribes to view of that time that I don’t have.

You too can write like Malcolm Gladwell

John Graham-Cumming, in his post, How to write a “Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller”, dissects the essence of Gladwell’s approach to bookwriting very successfully.

At first consideration, there seems to be something signfigant that Gladwell is attempting to say. But there is less there than it seems. It’s very good writing, and it is no worse and arguably much better than alot of business writing centered on case studies. But as this author says, they are a collection of interesting essays, and not a strong argument for some grand new idea.

How to wear brown and blue together

While they don’t go as well together as other colours, this is a superb example of how to pull it off


It works well here because the brown suit is mid tone brown, while the blues are either very dark (shirt stripe, necktie) or very light (handkerchief).  To make it even better, he matches it all with a caramel colour briefcase. Lighter browns with reddish tones can work well with dark blues, and very light blues can work really well with dark browns.

Not surprising, this man is Florentine and was featured on The Sartorialist blog. The link is now gone.

P.S. The quality of the photograph, with the muted lighting, and the soft yellow/green walls and the terra cotta planter in the background, make it look even better. Then again, all the shots on this blog are great.

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