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  • 1 min read

Cool new board game: Kickstarter: “Lift Off! – Get me off this Planet”

"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!

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: Queen’s Tragic Rhapsody

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.

  • 1 min read

Model, Tsiolkovsky Space Craft

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.

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: 5 Programming Languages You’ll Need Next Year (and Beyond)

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

  • 1 min read

Worth reading: Corporations are people. So what if people were corporations?

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.

  • 1 min read

Worth Reading: Where Restaurant Reservations Come From

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

  • 1 min read

Algorithms Visualized: amazing

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!

  • 1 min read

Google+ Awesome Pictures

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 part: it just happens. And sometimes the creations are just downright…. AWESOME! Here's a before and after to whet your appetite:

  • 2 min read

Corporate doublespeak or inspiration?

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? [Maybe I am too nerdy in my parsing of English.

The second thing I caught my eye was that the salutation is "Team," Microsoft has around 130,000 employees. I guess that's a pretty big team. But also, I may be wrong about this. But all the examples (2) of emails from Bill Gates to all employees didn't have any salutation. Hmm. I think the first time I saw that salutation was in emails from Steve Jobs to Apple Employees.

Final annoying nit picking point from the Natella email: "At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more." Hmm, that singular focus looks like a 2×2 matrix, so there are four most important things.

I know that a document like this that will be released to the universe past, present and future, is a heavily choreographed piece with many authors. I always had a hard time with corporate mission statements and such. And if I received this as a way to get me excited and feeling that there was renewed focus in the company. Well, meh.