Category: new!

Syria and the utter cluelessness of Vogue

This profile of Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian dictator, is remarkable. In fact, it’s hard to read it and not think it was written with tongue in cheek! I mean, to read things like:

Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote.

Why yes, 97 percent is startling! Except when you are a dictator, of course, which is what the Assads were and are.

After reading that concoction, head back to reality and  read this:  Syria News – Protests (2011) in the NYTimes.com. Here’s a key passage:

The country’s president is Bashar al-Assad, the son of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled with an iron hand for three decades before his death in 2000. The Assads belonged to the Allawite sect, a minority that came to hold most of the top positions in the government and military. Under Hafez al-Assad, Syria was reviled in the West for its support of terrorist groups and generally isolated even from more moderate Arab countries. Bashar al-Assad from time to time made gestures toward greater openness. But it remained one of the region’s most repressive regimes.

If you want to learn more about the Assads, one place you can start is here: Hama massacre

If you want to learn what life is like for the aristocracy, especially what it is like before the revolutions occur, read Vogue.

How to shop for groceries – some unusual but useful tips

Sounds simple, but after seeing this tip, Use a Binder Clip to Hold Your Grocery List in Your Cart, I thought I’d add some more tips:

  1. Shop along the perimeter first. The deals should be at the end of each aisle, for one thing. For another, the essentials tend to be on the
    perimeter of the store: vegetables, meat, dairy, grain all tend to be there. Those are the things you should be buying the most of for healthiest eating. For another, by the time you get through the permeter, you may be too tired to impulse buy.
  2. Take your own music. Musak in grocery stores will rot your brain. Seriously. Get your own earphones and drown it out. If you find grocery shopping stressful, play relaxing music. If you want to get in and out, play fast music. But listening to bad grocery store music just makes the whole experience worse.
  3. Wear sunglasses. This sound ridiculous I know, but most groceries stores are overly lit and if you are in them enough you might get a headache.
  4. If you go with a child, establish a limit of impulse buys. Same goes for yourself. If the limit is one or two, and you now have three, put one back. For you, try this: don’t put it in your basket, but say “I will come back for it later”. If you really want it, you will. If you are too tired or even forget about it, chances are you didn’t need it.
  5. Don’t shop at eye level. The inexpensive and non-impulse buy food will be lower. You’ll be amazed at what you see down on the bottom shelves.
  6. Pick the best times to shop. If you don’t know, ask the store manager and the manager of the check-out clerks. They should know exactly what the busiest time are. Also, ask them things like: when does new food shipment arrive? when do things go on sale and why? Things like that. 
  7. Practice your deep breathing skills. My grocery store is designed to almost always have lineups. When I get to one, I practice things like improving my posture, deep breathing, what have you. If you are going to be stuck in line and you know it, prepare for it so it is productive and not frustrating.

How to interpret the S&P warning on U.S. debt outlook

Andrew Sullivan has rounded up the response of various pundits
here. I think the best response is from Matt Yglesias:

There are two metrics to keep an eye on when assessing American debt. One is the interest rate the Treasury has to offer to get people to buy the debt. Currently that number is low. The other is the “spread” between bonds that are indexed for inflation and bonds that aren’t indexed for inflation which serves, among other things, as a gauge of market assessment of the risk that we’ll have no choice but to inflate the debt away. Currently that number, too, is low.

Why Paul Ryan’s and the GOP’s budget plan is neither serious nor brave

Speaking of Ayn Rand admirers, Paul Ryan has been lauded recently for his budget plan. He and his budget do not deserve it. James Fallows, in the Atlantic, takes it apart dispassionately in this post: The Brave and Serious Mr. Ryan.

I will give Ryan credit for coming up with a much more detailed budget than the GOP had put together previously. And no doubt it will be the starting point for further discussion, not the final material that will result in a budget, and I am sure he put it together with that in mind. That said, it is, as Fallows said, “gimmicky” and “partisan”. Something brave and serious would be neither of those things.

Who is Ayn Rand?

With the release of a new movie based on her book, “Atlas Shrugged”, there’s been alot written  about the film, her book and the author herself. Depending on the beliefs of the author, she was either a genius or a crackpot (or worse). I think this line from Donald L. Luskin, in his article , Remembering the Real Ayn Rand, in the WSJ.com, sums up her appeal:

Rand was not a conservative or a liberal: She was an individualist. “Atlas Shrugged” is, at its heart, a plea for the most fundamental American ideal—the inalienable rights of the individual.

And I think that is why Rand, whatever her faults, is raised up by her admirers: she extols the value of individualism.

What Shakespeare and David Foster Wallace and James Joyce have in common

The way they write excites your brain. In a nutshell:

It is Shakespeare’s inventions–particularly his deliberate syntactic errors like changing the part of speech of a word–that excite us, rather than confuse us.

See This is Your Brain on Shakespeare | How to Think Like Shakespeare at Big Think for more on what great writers do to your brain.

P.S. Anyone looking to excite people with their writing or presentation material would do well to read this. We are not Shakespeare, yet we can tweak the brains of others if we try.

How I get my inbox down to “Inbox Zero” every day

You might think: that’s impossible?! You must not get an email!!

Well, I get a fair amount of email every day. This is how I deal with it.

First off, I go through and delete all the email I don’t need to work on and don’t need to keep a record of.  That helps alot.

Second, I go through all the email I don’t need to work on but DO need to keep a record of. I select that email and then have a Lotus Notes agent file all that information.

Finally, I go though the email I have remaining and write out my todo list for the day. I reply to the email I need to reply to right away, and I file the rest. The point is to work off the Todo list, not use the Inbox as a todo list, for it is a very inefficient one at best.

For people who use Lotus Notes, here are the details:

1) I select all my email and mark it all unread. Now I have an inbox full of Red. I change the setting from View All to View Unread.

2) I go through the list and click Insert on all the email I want to file. As I do this, my Inbox starts to decrease. I can do this very quickly.

3) I select all on the remaining Unread items and then have an agent move them to a temp directory.

4) I change the setting from View Unread to View All. These are all the emails I want to file.

5) I have two folders I file things. One is called File and one is MyCurrentProject. I sort by name and then select all the people from MyCurrentProject. That will be the bulk of my email, and mostly every email from someone on my project will pertain to my project. I have another agent that grabs all the email selected and throws them into the MyCurrentProject folder. Then I select the rest of the files and throw them into File with still another agent.

At this point my Inbox is down to Zero. I have one last agent that takes the files in the temporary folder and puts them back in my inbox. But I also could leave them in my temp folder and work on them from there.

The trick is not to have email hanging around. Treat email like dirt: the way to keep you inbox clean is to regularly sweep it out so the dirt doesn’t accumulate. 🙂

Lincoln’s Beard!

I must admit, when I was younger, I always thought Lincoln’s facial hair was odd. Why no mustache, I thought? I had it in my mind they must go together, and Lincoln must have looked odd to his contemporaries.

Turns out his beard was quite boring compared to some of these 25 Awesome Civil War Facial Hair Styles.

For example:

You can see more at Buzzfeed: just follow the link.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for this)

Great Monday Morning Music: Aloe Blacc – I Need A Dollar (and how it relates to Lauryn Hill)

I’ve heard Aloe Blacc’s “I Need A Dollar” and thought it a great song. It has a feel of some of the great songs of the 60s, which their mixture of protest and their blend of soul, funk and the blues. Now you should give it a listen, but you should also watch the video. It’s really well done, given that it is a split screen. That could be hackneyed, but the director does something interesting around half way through the song. Watch.

What’s fascinating to me is that one of my other favorite videos is Lauryn Hill’s Doo Wop (That Thing). It also uses split screen very well, and it also does a great job of revitalizing classic sounds in a current settings. See here:

What is sparked.com? A great site you should visit!

What is it? As they say on their page:

Sparked is online volunteering for busy people. At Sparked, we’re driven to make volunteering convenient, fun, and full of impact. We call it “microvolunteering” because you can do it whenever and wherever you have time. And now, with Sparked Enterprise, you can get your whole office volunteering together!

I’ve been doing it for a few months now and I love it. I even got a write up on their blog for the work I did with their API! (Taking our API for its first Spin | Sparked Blog). I highly recommend you check them out and start microvolunteering yourself. How? Go here:
Sparked.com – microvolunteering by The Extraordinaries – Team Volunteers

Thinking about Ownership

This article (Shareable: Changing Models of Ownership) and especially this image:

..is a great way to think about ownership. I think this graph, which is symbolic, would change for different items. For some things, like cars, the burden curve might rise higher than a small object that gets stored away.

The article also talks about how digitization changes things. Well worth a read. (H/t to Swiss Miss blog).

TARP WTF!

From time to time in the U.S., people criticize TARP for bailing out the banks. This is stupid. Plain and simple. TARP stopped the Great Recession from becoming the Great Depression II. Not only that, it made money: TARP Bank Programs Turn Profit After Three Financial Institutions Repay $7.4 Billion.

People have all sorts of theoretical reasons for not liking TARP. The conclusion they come to is wrong. TARP delivered.

How to use Facebook if you are well known public figure

If you are well known and you use Facebook, you may want to maintain some degree of seperation from your personal and public life. To do that, you can try different approaches. One of these is to use everyday Facebook for your personal stuff and Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups for your public side. **

To understand the difference, check out this Facebook Tip: What’s the Difference between a Facebook Page and Group?

(** Unless you want 1000s of “friends” to manage. Hint: you don’t.)

The spectacular uselessness of Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold is our Charles Foster Kane and the projects that he takes on are his Marion Davies. Since leaving Microsoft, he has involved himself in activities that are as spectacular as they are useless. His latest work is this epic: five volumes, 1522 recipes, and 2438 pages of scientific cooking. It took 46 people around 5 years to create, costs $1-10 million dollars, and will set you back $625. Impressive, yes?

You can just see yourself running down to the local book store to get it, yes? You can imagine making it THE reference book in your collection of cookbooks, tossing out those old things currently on your shelves, I’ll bet. Actually, I can imagine a very limited audience for this book, and the influence of it being very minimal.

But never mind that, let’s look at Myhrvold’s recent talk at the TED conference. Myhrold and his team have come up with a way of dealing with malaria. How?

Yes, that’s right: use laser beams! Astounding, for sure! Practical? Not so much.

All of this is in keeping with his current job. Since leaving  Microsoft in 1999, he has been the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, “a firm ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing and invest­ing in inven­tions”, and according to this (Green Pioneers: Godfather of nutty inventions – Times Online), they have submitted over 30,000 patents. Sounds like a lot, and it is! How many game changing products have they come out with? Well, none. “Intellectual Ventures has earned about $1 billion in licensing revenues and paid out $350m to inventors. It has first refusal on inventions from more than 100 universities worldwide”. Basically they don’t invent anything. They just lock down ideas and piggyback off other companies that actually do the work.

To me all of this is a shame. It’s easy to slam Myhrvold as an egomaniac or a glorified patent troll. What I don’t understand is why a guy that rich and that intelligent does what he does. He should be making the future. Instead he dives into extreme attention-getting activities that amount to little if anything, while people like Ferran Adrià or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs remake the world. He gets alot of slack from people who interview him and write about him. Perhaps they are impressed by his obvious intelligence or the sheer epic quality of the things he takes on. I wish someone who is really making a difference would have a talk with him and get him to focus less on himself and more on a monumental problem that he could not only overcome, but develop some humility in the process. That would benefit us all: certainly much more than a $600 cookbook does.

P.S. If you must, you can go here (Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking) to learn more about his book. If you really want to learn how to cook well, check out this book, The Way to Cook by Julia Child , or get this magazine, Cooks Illustrated, both of which I think are superb.

If you want to see ex-Microsoft employees taking a much more practical and effective approach to malaria, go here: Our Work in Malaria – Overview & Approach – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Finally, I don’t have to tell you this, but if you want to see people changing the world with technology (and patents), go to Apple or Facebook or Twitter, to name a few.

P.S.S. It’s 2021 and he is still useless. Here he is taking pictures of snowflakes. Read to the bottom and you can see other photographers essentially dismissing his approach. Typical.

Why Miranda Cosgrove is going to be bigger than the rest of the tween stars

The NYTimes.com missed the bigger picture when they did this feature on Miranda Cosgrove (The Good Girl, Miranda Cosgrove – NYTimes.com). It’s true, her recent career trajectory has matched Hillary Duff and Miley Cyrus. What the article glosses over is just how much acting she has been doing for some time now. I know, having kids who grew up over the span of her career, I’ve seen her in TV (Drake and Josh) and movies (School of Rock). I think she is going to be acting in bigger and better things for sometime to come. I think she’d be smart to take some time to transition out of the tween phase and then come back as a young actress, like Jodie Foster or Emma Watson or Natalie Portman. I can’t see Cosgrove going away any time soon.

The next PayPal(s)? Amex and Visa get in the game

American Express Launches Digital Payments…

less than two weeks after Visa’s announcement that it was launching its own peer-to-peer digital payment system…The credit card company today unveiled Serve, its new digital payment and commerce platform.

Users will be able to send or receive money from their Serve accounts, which can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card, or by money from another Serve account. With the new AmEx digital payment system, consumers will be able to make payments via the Serve website, via their mobile phones, and with merchants who accept American Express cards. Accounts will be accessible via Android and iPhone apps and through Facebook.

For people who have complained about the costs of using PayPal, consider this good news:

The lack of fees might be a good way to lure new customers, but AmEx says those fees won’t be high after that initial six month period. Customers will be charged for putting money into their Serve accounts – 2/9% plus a $0.30 per load – and will be charged for ATM cash withdrawals – $2 after one free withdrawal per month.

Why you should donate to Japan and what you should know when you do

You might ask: Japan is a wealthy country, why should we in other parts of the world help? I think there are a number of good answers to that, but you need to know more about how this works. As this article states (Does Japan need your donation?)

The Japanese are world-renowned experts in disaster preparedness, relief and recovery, and Japan is the third largest economy in the world. There should be no mistake that the Japanese government and Japanese organizations are well-equipped to take the lead.

And as this article shows (Charities Rush to Help Japan, With Little Direction – NYTimes.com), some organizations, like

The Japanese Red Cross, for example, has said repeatedly since the day after the earthquake that it does not want or need outside assistance.

So, should you donate? Well, if you just read the headline of this, Don’t donate money to Japan by Felix Salmon at Reuters.com, you might not. But even he recommends donating to organizations who do this work day in, day out. Indeed, if you did donate to the Red Cross, and if they didn’t use the money in Japan, they would use it when the next disaster hits (as it surely will). Same with organizations like Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Indeed, as someone pointed out, just knowing that people care and are donating to help them will likely go along way to help the people of Japan psychologically. Your donation now will not be wasted.

It is going to take time for Japan to rebuild. There may be an opportunity to donate your time or money or efforts later as well. Even a visit once things are stable is something to consider. (I recall the tremendous promotion that NYC did after 9/11 to get people to come back and visit. It may be tourism, but it also helped the New York economy and New Yorkers too. What was true of New York will be true of Japan.)

So the money you donate to good organizations will help, if not Japan now, then some other desperate place later. What you donate now will help improve the morale of the people of Japan. And what you give later will be important too.

Japan may be a wealthy country with plenty of resources available to it, but in terrible times like this, anyone in their position could use help. So help any way you can.

FOMO vs JOB-C (Joy of Being Connected)

FOMO: the Fear of Missing Out, is the topic at Caterina Fake’s blog, Caterina.net.

It’s a thoughtful post, and as I recall, it is a fear that I had when I was younger. However, as I get older (and I believe this is true generally), I think the predominant fear one has becomes the fear of being left out. What’s great about social media, wireless connectivity, mobile devices, and other technology developments is that it gets easier to be connected and stay connected. I was sitting on my couch one Saturday night and I was a) responding to email from the Nova Scotia b) texting my daughter to see what she was doing in Toronto c) listening to music being posted on blip.fm from friends in the U.S. d) looking at photos being posted on Facebook and flickr.com from around the world e) responding to people on twitter from everywhere. What struck me was how interconnected I was with the world. Where once I might have felt isolated being by myself, having all this technology allowed me to be connected, and it made me happy to have it. It was the joy of being connected.

Now I think FOMO is a better acronym that JOY-C. And I have no doubt that people experience FOMO. But I am happy to have all my additional connectivity and JOY-C.

The business case for app development (2011)

Adam Schwabe (@adamschwabe on Twitter and a former colleague at IBM) has a good rundown on the cost of developing an app here: The Race to the Bottom for Native Apps | Teehan+Lax.

Any organization considering developing an app would do well to read this first in order to better understand what they are getting into. Adam is not just passing on what he has read elsewhere: he has strong experience with developing mobile apps, including the successful Rocket Radar. Take a look.

The great Louise Lecavalier is coming to Toronto this April

She’s a great dancer. But here wikipedia entry says it better, with quotes like:

With her mane of platinum dreadlocks, her physical power and her mastery of the full-body barrel jump, which looks like a horizontal pirouette, her image was a signature for the company

and

…she gave heart and soul to her art. She embodied dance on the outer edge, performing with passion and generosity, dazzling audiences worldwide.

Now she will be performing here: Harbourfront Centre – World Stage 2010:11 | Louise Lecavalier

Here’s an old video of her from her days with La La La Human Steps (Infante c’est destroy). She dances great throughout, with an amazing display of her power and virtuosity starting around the 2:15 mark:

You have a new iPad? Now what?

Well, you could do yourself a favour and check out this site: ONE DAY ONE APP | Showcase Of Selective iPad Apps. Not only do they have a ton of interesting apps you could download, but they come out with a new one every day. Plus, I am delighted to say they have my site listed in the footer of their blog. But even if they didn’t, I’d still recommend it. The iPad is great, but what makes it even greater is good apps. Go find some good ones at this site.