Anyway, that video is big time good. Pauline Kael is spinning over in her grave. My film technique is clearly too advanced for your small way of looking at it. Someday you will be yelling out to the streets below your windows: “He is the chancellor of all the big ones! I love his genius! I am the most his close personal friend!”
This emphasis on early education in the rules of the road doesn’t simply result in well-mannered and safe bike riders who use the excellent cycling infrastructure on Dutch streets responsibly. It also means that everyone in the society understands what it is to be a cyclist. All the people driving cars have had experience on bikes. They can look at cyclists and think, “That could be me.”
Marco is actually a part of the Apple cult along with Gruber and the rest of them. These guys have no idea what actual software development is actually like. For this you truly need to look beyond the closed box that is Objective-C, Cocoa, and look out into the world of real languages. These guys won’t have the mindset to code natively in C/C++, for widely adopted frameworks such as .NET, utilizing modern languages like C#. They will not be able to write cross platform code using Java, and hence their inherent hate for Android (of course that is just a side reason for hating, we all know what the real reasons are).
“I told my daughter I’m going to buy her kids an outfit for school,” she said. She tried to continue, but she started to cry, and then sob, her whole body shaking. “I wanted to thank you,” she said, struggling to speak. “I’m going to tell her how you helped me.”
“No,” Boyle said. “No, tell her you did it. You did it.”
“Mark and his signature hoodie: He’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much,” Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told Bloomberg TV. “He’s going to be him and he’s going to do what he’s always done.” Mr. Pachter added: “I think that’s a mark of immaturity. I think that he has to realize he’s bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he’s got to show them the respect that they deserve because he’s asking them for their money.”
“As the deal came to a close, Mark and Kevin sat outside and ate steaks and ice cream, while the lawyers all sat inside watching ‘Game of Thrones,’” said a person who was present. It wasn’t lost on those there, this person said, that “two 20-somethings were alone hammering out the terms of the deal.”
Lohse was given the pledge name “Regina,” after the character in Mean Girls, in honor of his aggressive social climbing. During his seven-week pledge term, he and his fellow SAE pledges, known as “whale shits,” were on call to cater to the whims of the brothers. Most of the formal “hazing” was reserved for meetings and challenges: Pledges would be required to perform endless “quick sixes,” recite SAE’s creed, “The True Gentleman,” while lying in a kiddie pool full of ice, or take shots of mystery alcohol while being quizzed on arcane fraternity lore. (This same ritual, with the addition of tying the pledge’s hands and feet with zip ties, led to the death of Cornell sophomore George Desdunes, the SAE pledge who died last February.) There were also “milk meetings,” where pledges were asked to chug a gallon of milk in 20 minutes, which always resulted in plentiful booting. “You get points for how many times you booted on other people,” says Lohse, who adds that the pledge trainers kept count while they sat on large throne-like chairs in a basement room. One brother recalls the night some of the pledges were served a scramble of vomit and eggs, known as a “vomlet.”
This isn’t intended as a defence of the Government’s Budget (I’m not enthused) or some partisan shot across the bows of the Liberal Party or even a real engagement with the content of the paper itself, but rather to suggest that if anyone involved in the production of this front cover looked at it and thought “You know what? This is exactly what a newspaper is meant to be” then they have no business using the title journalist. Just call yourselves propagandists and be done with it, because this thing is closer to the output of a Stalinist regime than anything contained in the 2012 Budget.
To be reminded of Keating’s boldness and certainty is to recall that we have lost more than his trademark arrogant pugnaciousness in the intervening decade. We’ve also lost political leadership, surrendering it to belligerent ignorance at high volume. You get the feeling that the modern politician, seeing that Keating talkback video would be schooled: “see that’s the arrogance that cost him”. And that’s cost us.
Growing up in Australia systematically breeds this instinct out of you. The real winners Down Under are the guys flying below the radar pretending they’d rather drink 15 beers than work on business strategy. And if anyone dares shine above the crowd – and HEAVEN FORBID BE PROUD OF IT – they’ll be cut down like a tall poppy.
The most amazing people I’ve met have all been insanely determined to achieve something great. When you talk to them, you know exactly what they’re about and what they want.
These musicians didn’t just show up and play some tunes. They spent years and years practicing and honing their respective crafts. They weren’t all great at everything, but they were exceptional at their chosen instruments. These days we call it being T-shaped, but I think the point is simple: pick one or two instruments, and become really good at playing them through continuous learning and practice.
It’s like British cyclist Tom Simpson, who took a combination of cognac and amphetamines before a brutally hot stage of the 1967 Tour de France. It enabled him to push past his limits-until he collapsed and died on the slopes of Mount Ventoux. Sometimes it’s best to conserve energy, to play the long game, and not to risk everything for the sake of a short-term win. But once you’re public, the markets start pushing you to hit those numbers every quarter. And the results can be fatal.
The ideal memorial is written from distance, a generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that – Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.
This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world.
What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos – this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos.
The second interesting point is that the word “user,” as in a user of Instagram or Facebook, is dangerous, because it hides all of this.
In a year’s time, the same beer will be $5.20. I’ll still be hungover, killing houseplants with neglect. I still won’t have done enough writing.
After everybody went around and said what their problem was, the person moderating the group said, “Let’s go around the table and people can talk about a solution they’ve found that’s effective.” As they went around the table, every single person’s solution was another piece of technology. Some people used Evernote for better note-taking, some people had new email strategies so they could make their email more efficient.
So we’re in this weird cycle now where we’re being overwhelmed by technology and we’re looking for a technological solution to that. Ultimately the solution for managing technology is going to be human. I don’t think technology can solve its own downside itself.
Google+ is difficult design; it is not difficult engineering.
My point here is that “social” is a point of view from which to design products and not a “layer” that can be easily draped over existing, non-social products. The properties Google has already relaunched with social integration, including Reader and Search + Your World, are almost certainly worse versions of themselves than their predecessors. If you started with the Google+ philosophy and wanted to solve the problem of RSS in a socially-aware way, would you even build a separate product? Maybe. Or maybe not. That’s the point. Evolving Reader into Reader + Social results – at best – in a mediocre experience of both worlds.
What we are doing is sharing – posting, linking and blogging somebody else’s hard work. It is not our content, we didn’t create it, we don’t own it and we certainly don’t have any rights over it just because we think we found it first. We are not 5 year olds in the playground, it’s not finders keepers.
However, I think people would be better off starting to get into it in a more gentle way. Start by running your own server. That could involve a little programming. And you’ll be getting a solid basis in why you would want to program in the first place. Setting up systems that make your life easier. Automating things you do manually that a computer could do for you, perhaps better.