All my blog posts and articles
This is worth looking at: There are two disciplines in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs excel above almost everyone else. The first is making exorbitant amounts of money. The second is pretending they don’t care about that money. Link: Link to original
This is worth looking at: Most people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches.
This is worth looking at: John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. Link: Link to original
This is worth looking at: I’ve always said no, effort shouldn’t count. When students pleaded, “but I worked so hard,” or “I studied so long,” I would respond with the clichéd quip about people with brain tumors not wanting surgeons who try hard. Link: Should Effort Count?
This is worth looking at: President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. Link: http://ift.tt/1A5bEuv My Blog
This is worth looking at: A couple of years ago, I got it into my head that I wanted to roast a whole chicken, just because. I wandered around my local Ralphs for a few minutes looking for poultry that hadn’t already been turned into individually shrink-wrapped meat units before asking for help. Link: http://ift.tt/1hHdpX1 My Blog
“Lift Off! Get me off this Planet has a casual space theme and never takes itself too seriously. My goal was to make an easy to learn, fast-paced game, where everyone feels engaged and “in it” until someone has won or the planet explodes!
The objective of Lift Off! is to be the first player to get their Aliens off the planet using resource cards, action cards‚ and phases of the moon to escape. If the planet explodes before everyone escapes‚ the player with the most saved Aliens wins.”
Fun! I am supporting the Kickstarter campaign. Are you? You should!
This is worth looking at: It was an utterly unexpected rebirth. from the moment Freddie Mercury and the other members of Queen – guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon – took the stage at London’s Wembley Stadium, on July 13th, 1985, at the historic Live Aid concert, the group captured the day. Here’s the full article.
Check out some really cool images: Soviet model makers built this spacecraft based on the designs and notes of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Late in his life, much of Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical work focused on ideas about transporting humans into space on board rockets. Although this model, reflecting the scientist’s ideas, grossly overestimates the living space available on board a rocket, it does convey a sophisticated understanding of the physical constraints of space travel for that time. Among Tsiolkovsky’s concerns were the effects of acceleration and weightlessness on the human body.
This is worth looking at: We’ve reached a bit of a turning point in the world of programming. Ten years ago, programmers were moving into dynamic languages. To many of us, those languages seemed like a bit of a fad, even if they made programming easier. Link: http://ift.tt/1xvv7S4 My Blog
This is worth looking at: “Checked the tax code,” wrote a friend who’s engaged to a woman from a low-tax country. “Unfortunately, marrying [my fiancee] does not entitle me to a tax inversion like the big US companies are getting. Thanks for nothing IRS.” That got me thinking.
This is worth looking at: LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE, N.H. — What do you do when you have a cozy cottage on an island and you need a new couch? If you’re Boxford, Mass.Who lives on those islands in Lake Winnipesaukee?
Here’s a crucial piece of social infrastructure that almost no one considers: the restaurant reservation. That is, until a service like ReservationHop comes along. ReservationHop was a small project to book tables under bogus names and then sell them. Tags: July 26, 2014 at 03:20PM via IFTTT
Check out this article that shows off how visualizations can help you understand how algorithms work. It’s an amazing piece of work: Creatively, he figured out how to illustrate an algorithm so I can better understand how it works; Technically, the code that implements these visualizations is itself very clever and elegant; and Aesthetically, the overall effect on the page itself is quite beautiful. I am jealous!
A very little known feature of Google+ Is the “auto awesome” feature. I want to sing its praises!
On your smartphone. you can download the G+ application and configure it to automatically back up all your photos to Google+, even if you choose to keep them all private. A useful feature, but not unique.
But dig a little deeper and you will find that you can enable something called “auto-awesome”, When you do that the non-evil gnomes at Google will look at all your pictures and from time to time do some crazy fun tweak to it to make it more awesome. And it looks like they add different kinds of awesomeness from time to time.
The beauty here is that this takes literally zero effort on your pa...
Maybe I’ve been out of the corporate world for too long. And I do wish Microsoft well because Google and Facebook and others need competition so they don’t totally ruin our world. So I read with interest Satya Nadella’s email to employees which is available for all to read.
The first thing that caught my eye is this abuse of logic and English: “We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world….” This phrase is all over the place. Do you see the problem? ...
Email I just sent to Amazon.
Dear Amazon: I can’t believe you stoop as low as that and hide the ability to close my account so thoroughly that I now have to engage in a multi-message email discussion with you to convince you to do so. Please CLOSE my account!
If you want to close your Amazon account, good luck, you will be playing hide and seek with them. Kind of lame.
Ok, I sent them that email, and it seems they still won’t let me go! Lame^2. Here’s what their response email says:
Dear Pito,
Here are some things to keep in mind:
— If you use your Amazon.com log-in on other sites (e.g., MYHABIT.com, Audible.com, international Amazon sites except for Amazon.cn/ and Amazon.co.jp, etc.),...
“We’re kickstarting a Super PAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016. We set fundraising goals and then crowdfund those goals.”
Lofty goal but so vague I can’t tell which way is up!
I remember something that sounded similar, a few years ago: It was calledAmericans Elect. They had awesome goals, and they even got Thomas Friedman to endorse them. Like Lawrence Lessig. (See I don’t say “Larry” because we aren’t really on a first name basis 🙂 The problem is that Americans Elect failed miserably, and there was even some buzz that it was some kind of a front for less savory operators who I would not have supported if I had known them. I honestly don’t remember the details anymore but it did make me less willing to jump in an support positive but vague sounding causes.
So I am not ready to jump in with both feet into Mayday.Us.
We all have heard more than once that “VCs will NOT sign NDAs, don’t even ask!”. And we’ve also heard and said many times that “Ideas are cheap” and that many first time entrepreneurs are far too precious about their great ideas. They keep them top top secret, ask prospective customers to sign an NDA, and in general undermine their own ability to get useful real feedback on the thing they want to create. The attached article is interesting in its analysis of those tradeoffs:
“Not everyone agrees. Thom Ruhe, vice president for entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, said the declining use of N.D.A.s “is certainly not in the interests of entrepreneurs. It favors the V.C.” Although it is rare that an investor steals an idea, Mr. Ruhe said, it does happen. “But in the skewed echo chamber of the Valley, and the sycophantical networks that aspire to be just like them,” he said, “they’ve made the easier and less morally defensible position — no N.D.A.s — the coin of the realm.”
Just playing with my new blogging platform to see if it works ok!
