October 2008
45 posts
MediaTemple and the Mélange Grand Challenge
As the server in my apartment has been long-inaccessible and I’m unable to fix it while abroad, I finally decided to pony up the cash to move my personal website and the sites of all my hobby projects to a professional hosting company. Due to previous experience (via the Drexel Smart House) and support for the LAMP + SVN stack, I chose to use MediaTemple despite their higher-than-average...
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
– Alan Kay
Phillies Drown Out The Rays →
I’ve recently co-founded a blog detailing the events that occur on the streets of Philadelphia and in our daily excursions into the city of Brotherly Love. Rather than post duplicate entries here, I’ll simply post a link to my writings on other blogs.
My first posting on Philalog. :-)
5 Minute Management Course
Lesson 1:
A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower, when the doorbell rings. The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs. When she opens the door, there stands Bob , the next-door neighbor. Before she says a word, Bob says, ‘I’ll give you $800 to drop that towel.’ After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her...
XDR-TB →
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, many of today’s earlier pictures were photographed by one James Nachtwey, who is pioneering the fight against extremely disease resistive tuberculosis. Independent of this search, only a few moments ago as I attempt to clean my RSS feeds, I stumbled upon this article on the TED blog with the headline “To stop XDR-TB, cure TB. To stop TB,...
WatchSteven Pinker: Chalking it up to the blank slate Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits. Here, Pinker talks about his thesis, and why some people found it incredibly upsetting.
“As with exercise, improvements beget improvements. If you run every day,...”
– Paul Graham in the Hardest Lessons for Startups
“If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is...”
– Paul Graham in the Hardest Lessons for Startups
“Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a...”
– Kurt Vonnegut (via bbaginsky)
Politics + World Series = Major League Flip-Flops →
Watch McCain at the beginning of the video agreeing with the words he put in Obama’s mouth.
Then watch Palin deliver the exact same line about how great they are to the fans of the White Sox, the Rays, and the Phillies.
At least Obama had the dignity to admit he was switching teams when his favorite lost in the Playoffs.
Footprints in the Sand
Although I was raised Christian and became devout at some point in my youth, I do not claim such faith anymore. Nonetheless, this poem still really gets to me.
Footprints in the Sand
One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, ...
Suicidal Programmers?
Deep in the bowels of Aglobe, I found this code.
protected void killAllandExit() { killAll(); killSelf(); }
I jokingly mentioned it to the researcher sitting beside me, and he replies with “its like the high schoolers in America”. Wow.
“Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.”
– Voltaire
Top 100 universities in world according to QS →
Don't let doing the right thing cramp your...
Thom Mayne doesn’t let doing the right thing cramp his style. The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner, whose Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis has won plaudits for the aesthetic originality, cultural sensitivity and overall sustainability of its buildings, rejects the notion that green buildings have to look a certain way and bristles at overly specific green building standards. A keynoter at...
Research or Plagiarism?
As the old university excuse goes: Copy from one source is plagiarism, copy from two or more is research.
Leadership responsibility : worker engagement →
It is the job of a leader to support, respect, encourag and reward those individuals in your organization who are keen, committed and involved.
We know what most people want: they want to feel valued. They want their contribution to be recognized. One of the consequences of not feeling valued or not being recognized is that people withdraw and do less and less.
This has a major impact on an...
Jottings on the Business in the 21st Century
How do you reconcile conservation and consumption? Focus on the service provided. Americans don’t care about refrigerators or water heaters. They care about cold beer and hot showers. Focus on “What is it you can change and what is it you cannot change.” Design and planning is essential to the shrinking of economic gaps between societal groups. Good frameworks in the law. Ethics...
Palindrone
Today in the letters section of the Philadelphia Inquirer: Robert Gordon of Lansdale coined a new word, palindrone. It is a noun defined as a seemingly interminable, practically insufferable, desultory, ideological philippic laboriously memorized and regurgitated with revolting perkiness that haphazardly strings together a mixed-up grammatically confusing jumble of words, near-words, thoughts,...
“Americans don’t care about refrigerators or water heaters. They care about...”
– Daniel C. Esty of Yale University
“Politics and issues come and go, but in the end, we’ll all be remembered...”
– Morris K. Udall
“It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits:
...”
– Mark Twain
This is great :-P
arcktip:
If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have $49.00 today.
If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in AIG one year ago, you would have $33.00 today.
If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in Lehman Brothers one year ago, you would have $0.00 today.
But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the...
Loic Le Meur is an accomplished entrepreneur...
his advice, when given, is worth listening to…
here are his ten rules for startup success:
Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
Build a community. Use blogging and social...