Amazon link A few weeks ago, somebody on Facebook linked to this great long interview with Brenda Laurel who is one of the original interaction designers, developing game designs based on user research. A representative quote from the interview, of her experience teaching game designers now: once [these game designers] talk to real people about […]
How the Prisoner’s Dilemma applies to my behavior
I have often called myself an amplifier. If I’m on a good team, I make the team better by bridging communication gaps, figuring out what everybody does well and steering that work to them, etc. If I’m in a bad situation, though, I can use those same skills to make things worse by undermining the […]
Corporate culture as illustrated by monkeys
I was talking to a friend tonight about organizational culture. She was wondering about how one can institutionalize or productize culture. And I laughed out loud. And she asked me why I thought it was so funny. So I thought for a second, and told the story of the five monkeys. The story is that […]
The Leadville experience
[This is a long post with my experience in riding the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. If you want to just look at pretty pictures instead, go here.] “You are better than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.” – Ken Chlouber, creator of the Leadville race series […]
My first Death Ride
As I mentioned a couple months ago, I have been training for the Death Ride, a 125 mile bike ride near Tahoe that does 5 mountain passes for a total of 15,000 vertical feet of climbing. Training has taken up most of my weekends doing long training rides, as well as “shorter” (2-4 hour) rides […]
Asynchronous Ask Me Anything
I just got back from the wonderful Up to All of Us conference. The introductory exercise was to write down three things about yourself in a notebook, and then pass the notebook around the room and have everybody write a comment or a question on the page. It was fascinating to get that feedback from […]
Raising money for World Bicycle Relief
As my last post makes clear, I have been getting more into biking over the past couple years, and I now want to share my goal for 2015: finishing the Leadville 100 mountain bike century. I first heard of Leadville through the bike blogger, Elden Nelson (aka Fat Cyclist) as he has finished Leadville 17 […]
I love my bike
I’ve been riding my bike more to start training for the Death Ride in July (and because the weather is ludicrously nice in California – it got into the 80s this week). And I was thinking this morning that I love my bike. From 2011 to 2014, my main bike was a Surly Long Haul […]
Does Amanda Palmer’s model of asking scale?
A friend asked in response to my last post whether I thought Amanda Palmer’s model of asking could scale. Could everybody find success that way? Do you have to be a rock star public figure to make it work? Does the “doing your work for free and then asking people to give you money” model […]
The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer
Amazon link Given my last post was about charity, I thought it was appropriate to follow up with my long overdue review of Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking. The book is an amplification of Palmer’s TED talk with the same title, discussing the connection between an artist and her fans. But it’s also […]
