For some reason Lucy does not recognize the iPhone as a camera. No way to get these moments with the Casio. It is… invigorating… to be in the same room with such distilled, existential joy.
The End of Management
My favorite nuggets from a piece by WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray:
“Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.”
“The big companies failed, not necessarily because they didn’t see the coming innovations, but because they failed to adequately invest in those innovations. To avoid this problem, the people who control large pools of capital need to act more like venture capitalists, and less like corporate finance departments. They need to make lots of bets, not just a few big ones, and they need to be willing to cut their losses.”
“The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband.”
Mr. Murry’s new book is “The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management.”
Rewiring with meditation
“Spending some time meditating may improve the integrity and efficiency of certain connections in the brain, according to a new study. When a group of participants meditated regularly over the course of a month, brain scans showed increased nerve connections in the areas that govern reward processing and decision making. The authors of the study hope this particular kind of meditation can be adapted to help those conditions with manifestations in the same area of the brain, such as ADD, addiction, and dementia.”
Attachments
My pal Keith pinged me this morning to let me know there was a problem with this website. I raised the hood to discover that all content (posts, pages, media, etc) was gone. Eight years of posts. About 5,000. I have a back-up from about 3 weeks ago, but still…
Not so long ago this would have sent me to DEFCON 5. But I’ve been reading about ego and how we become attached to and identify with things and ideas, and I found I was eerily calm. What if all my clever posts and the rest vanished forever?
I spent a few minutes considering this and realized they were/are nothing more than footnotes on a past that no longer exists (except in my head). What’s happening this moment is more important (and real).
What have we learned, grasshopper? That we are not our thoughts, OR our blog posts.
Hattie (10 weeks)
Almost (not quite) house broken. Sleeping through the night. Chewing the shit out of everything. And Lucy (5 year old Golden) is ready to play.
Hattie on front steps
Scott Adams: “Editors are the chefs of the Internet.”
Scott Adams points to Newser to illustrate what he sees as the future of the Internet:
“Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There’s some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That’s why I return so often. It’s a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site.
And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future.”
I don’t think I’ve ever visited Newser but I’m headed there now. Like thousands of others.
I’m back. And I wasn’t impressed by Newser but Mr. Adam’s point is a good one, nonetheless.
Life is good
ColorSplash hours of iPad fun
ColorSplash, originally uploaded by smays.
Readability
I’m sure I’ve posted on Readability before but I keep running into people who don’t know about it and that’s just sad. Here’s an example of a web page:
…and here’s the same page, viewed with Readability…
You just click a little bookmarklet in your browser’s tool bar.