Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Unbelievable
Ok, so I get this postcard in the mail today – it’s from the Army Reserve. It’s a form letter, and there is a “personalized” web site, which is also a form letter. This is my favorite quote: “The best part-time job in America – because you’re defending America.” This isn’t a joke. Here is…
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Ask the Hard Questions
I suppose that asking the hard questions is one of those relative things – the hardness of a question being one of those multi-faceted relationships between many different things. Is a question hard because it is difficult to ask? Is it hard because it is difficult to answer? Both of those are relative to the…
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one third of the secret of life
There isn’t anything that I want to do, as work, for someone else that I can’t do as my own boss. (I guess – prove me wrong here) I should be able to do what I want. I want to be respected, to have a voice, to have a place where I have a degree…
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stuff, clutter, and Martha Stewart
Stuff: all the undefined, unnecessary flotsam of our lives that collects in the eddies of our existence. Clutter: said gatherings of flotsam in the eddies. Martha Stewart: a person who has merged OCD and too much time in the craft tent at summer camp into a multi-billion dollar empire dependent upon stuff and clutter. We…
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pace & idleness
The pace of change, the rapidity of a generational adaptation to the effects of change, these are the measures of progress or conservation. These are the markers by which we judge the fitness of a people. Adaptability and the willingness to adapt is, in a dynamic cosmos, the hallmark of civilization while, in contrast, the…
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Spokane in the Paint Factory
In the November, 2004 Harper’s Magazine, writer Mark Slouka writes on the virtues of idleness in his article “Quitting the Paint Factory”. His aim, perhaps, was simply to enunciate his dissatisfaction with the Mr. Bush in the shadow of the November election but his essay has struck a chord that reverberates across many diverse categories…
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Treasure Island
ok, so over on Slashdot there is this story about someone dropping $26K and change for a “Treasure Island” in some MMORPG. Ok, so is this cool? I’m not sure, but here is an idea that if I were the developer of one of these MMORPGs: sell one-of-a-kind items on both e-bay and in-game, so…
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boundaries & categories
Let’s say there are two basic categories of IT in the world – Enterprise IT (EIT) and Consumer IT (CIT). Let’s also say that the size of each of these categories is so large in relation to the rest of the possibilities that they fall into the boundary between EIT and CIT – inside the…
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An idea for distributed project management
Premise: The tools are already out there. The tools for project management are, in large part, already developed and deployed. I say this for two reasons – 1) project management is more art than science and, as such, there is a broad and fuzzy domain in which “Project Management” happens; 2) the suites and monolithic…
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urban fitness
I saw someone running inside a parking garage the other day. They were running for fitness, and the garage was very large and it occurred to me that it would be both easy and cool to paint ‘trails’ on the floor of the garage, post the distances for the trails, and then you could have…