Roadmap for Learning Rails | techiferous
Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar -
Spend more time alone & be a better leader for it.
Great advice.
Prior to YouTube how would you ever have been able to see all the videos by one of the greatest music video directors of all time?
That’s right, you wouldn’t have.
It’s about time!
Some fathers played cricket, baseball, rugby etc with their sons. Living in Hong Kong the football field was an asphalt slab on the top floor of Bradbury School - and the computer revolution was just starting.
So - we played computer games! Both sons contacted me today and went “Dad, guess what? To which I answered - “Starcraft 2 and the graphics are amazing”! YEP!
What’s amazing is that miles and years apart, a game that started 12 years ago unites people.
I doubt there are too many sons who get to re-blog their dads on Tumblr.
I haven’t played a whole lot of video games since I left the industry almost five years ago. Starcraft 2 however is less about a game itself and more so a return to a pastime that was in a lot of ways unique to my family. As my dad says, we didn’t have a lot of grass to run around on, so we played together in other ways.
Out of that playing came a way to spend time with each other that continues today - I spent a few months playing World of Warcraft just to spend time with my younger brother who now lives in the US. Sure it doesn’t make up for spenidng time together in the same physical space, but it taps into a shared connection that has always been there, and beats the hell out of simply sitting on the phone.
Particularly as my younger brother, well, he just doesn’t play much.
Starcraft 2, like most cultural events, is only meaningful to those who were around for the first one. People who never watched Star Wars weren’t the ones queueing up at midnight for the new films. In the same way, the game coming out is an event for a relatively small number of people. For those I played with, some of whom I’ll see online tonight for the first time in a decade, it is like a football team having a reunion match.
For my younger brother and my dad, it’s just the same as it ever was.
Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales - New York Times -
Books are now artwork.
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I was saying to someone recently with the demise of physical media, surely along side that goes the demise of the furniture we’ve needed to store it.
Call me overly optimistic, but I feel like it is a fantastic opportunity for installation art and sculpture to make a long overdue return to our homes instead of existing solely within galleries. There will be a reclaiming of domestic space in the coming years, and a small revolution in how we choose to take it up.
“A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process). But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try things and take risks you can’t have a culture that hides mistakes. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and you don’t want to throw those away. So if you want that kind of culture you have to start with yourself and admit your mistakes. In a business setting a simple “I got this wrong” or a more emphatic “I screwed this up” is so direct and helpful that often it doesn’t even require an apology (unless someone got harmed).
I certainly wish we had more of that in our public/political world as well which seems full of attacking others for their (alleged) mistakes without ever mentioning one’s own. I occasionally struggle getting this right at home (where more emotions tend to be involved) and writing this post will hopefully serve as a good reminder to myself.”
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Continuations: Admitting Mistakes
excellent.
(via bijan)
Mark Cuban announced on his blog yesterday he had invested in a company that had created software able to capture instantly the exact number of people in a scene, and went on to ruminate it heralded the death of location-based services, “checking-in”, and a certain kind of mobile app. His argument is…
So rather than someone checking in to a specific application, we would already know you are there…The reality is that its solves “the path of least resistance” issue with check-ins for location-based software. Individuals never do any of the work.
Technically Mark is correct, but his argument is also predicated on the assumption people don’t actually like checking in. Further, it also makes the assumption anything that can be automated will immediately find a great number of people wanting to do it. Which is fine, except for the following things:
1. He doesn’t consider game mechanics
2. He doesn’t consider the wider the trend in crafting
3. He assumes checking-in is the barrier to location-based services
Game Mechanics
So I used to make games. For EA, Vivendi Universal, Nickelodeon, you get the idea. Games are fun because of what we call feed-back loops. To quote Newton, for every acton there is an equal and opposite reaction. The location-based services he is talking about are really things like FourSquare, which is a game cleverly disguised, and in some cases not so disguised.
People check-in because of the currency it engenders between themselves and the other people playing the games. As I’ve recently been arguing in the office, badges don’t make sense outside of the community that values them, but inside FourSquare it is a source of pride.
Crafting
A trend even the most ignorant forecaster is aware of globally is a shift away form automation, back to doing things simply for the sake of doing them. A tiny example - I’ve recently been making my own pizza from scratch. The base, the sauce, everything. And it’s the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. That statement doesn’t begin to even touch on a wider movement lead by farmer’s markets, Etsy, and the wider trend back to community-based living. To assume automation for the sake of automation is a mistake, the question to answer is actually “How will making this easier make the wider community’s lives easier?”
Checking-In
Inside the echo-chamber of technology and marketing, it is madness to consider FourSquare is still a relative unknown. The reality is playing with Foursquare is like being on Twitter late 2007. I was, and there wasn’t a whole lot going on.
Mark takes a niche behaviour from an adored but relatively unknown platform and seeks to make a grand generalisation about where this space is heading. As if the moment video games came along nobody played board games anymore, or the development of an Xbox controller just lead to the Xbox playing the game for you.
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Mark also likes to make statements that rile people up, and this is no exception. However the post also smacks of someone believing their own press, but after the moves that have happened in the NBA this summer (Mark owns the Dallas Mavericks), I’d want some press I could believe in too.
Just not a fairytale.
How to test your decision-making instincts - McKinsey Quarterly -
Some simple tests to run through when you find yourself facing a crucial decision about your business.
Goollery - A collection of awesome Google-related projects from people around the world -
A case study of what happens when you create an awesome platform and invite others to build on it. Yes the iPhone is the same, but this is open to anyone, and limited only by your imagination.