Over the holidays, I got in a conversation about various social technologies like Twitter and Facebook, and found myself defending them as useful (which is interesting because six months previously, I said I “dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages”). Other people couldn’t understand the point of posting one […]
Tech Dinner Salon
A couple of us in nextNY were discussing the need to have the chance for more in-depth conversations than can be had in the typical environment of meetups and happy hours. And since nextNY is a user-driven organization, we realized it was up to us to make it happen. So Jean Barmash and I are […]
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
[Disclaimer: I received a free advance copy of this book for review, but would happily have bought this book from Amazon.] I have been a fan of Clay Shirky since I first found his work. Several early posts on this blog were commentary on his articles covering topics such as process, situated software, and the […]
Theories of life
I’ve been mentioning several theories to several different people recently and decided it’s time to put them all on my blog so they are easy to reference. Some are prescriptive, some are descriptive, but I find all of them useful in certain situations. The Crusher Theory Michael “Crusher” Ernst once explained this theory to me […]
The 4-Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss
Amazon link The idea that we can work less and free up time to pursue our own dreams is highly attractive for most people and this book is a guidebook on how to do it. The methods that Ferriss recommends to achieve that lifestyle provoked both admiration and disgust from people I know who read […]
Learning from Rock Band
Rock Band is a video game phenomenon. One enthusiast I know calls it the greatest in-person multiplayer game ever. Over the holidays, I played it three times in a week at three different apartments, and played it some more at our company retreat last month. So what makes Rock Band a great game? First of […]
Randy Pausch lecture and feedback
Wax Banks pointed me at this lecture which you can see on Google Video by a CMU professor named Randy Pausch. Dr. Pausch has lived an incredible life, and this lecture is about achieving your childhood dreams – he talks about his dreams, from being in zero gravity to being an Imagineer for Disney to […]
“We are as gods…”
Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, […]
Finishing a product
I used to think that the hard part of creating a product was developing the technology. That’s not a surprising attitude for an MIT graduate, steeped in the lore of plucky inventor heroes who toil in their labs for years before making scientific breakthroughs that bestow great benefits on mankind. I scorned all that “MBA […]
Learning by repetition and memorization
A friend’s 7-year-old son recently challenged me to a game of chess. I’ve never played chess seriously, and had not played a single game since before he was born. I quickly found myself in a struggle – I made a mistake early and he took my queen. I eventually fought back to a mostly equal […]
