Illuminating solar blinds. Great idea. But you’ll need another curtain to cover them when you want to sleep (or do they have an off switch?).
Illuminating solar blinds. Great idea. But you’ll need another curtain to cover them when you want to sleep (or do they have an off switch?).
Not the best pictures I’ve seen, but amazing how fast China reacts. I doubt we’d have a waste dispoal factory up and running six months after floods. Sichuan’s earthquake, six months later.
How could you avoid getting distracted by the view? Just extraordinary that we can construct platforms to do this and take this kind of picture. Science and technology don’t have have a counter to religion, heh?
Pdftk is a free PDF maker, splitter, joiner. There’s a graphical front end for it that is cryptic but functional. CutePDF appears to create good looking PDF files, and is also free in its basic incarnation.
SystemRescueCd seemed to work quite effectively in helping get information off a crashed Vista installation. It took me ages to work out what to do, heaven help anyone who has never heard of mounting a filesystem. Works nicely as a bootable CD.
Adversity, often in early life helps you prepare for success later, according to Gladwell. There’s the nub of something in there – but what about people who come from adversity and are not successes? But I can see that learning to get around problems, or building yourself up from nothing is often more effective training than coming from privilege. But what about Nat Rosthchild? And why are most of the millionaires of my age that I have met people who come from wealthy families?
There’s some useful fuel in Fortune, looking at how people with real talent use a process of deliberate practice to hone their skills (think Jonny Wilkinson kicking at the posts hundreds of times a day). There is linked commentary from Gladwell.
What is the business equivalent of deliberate practice? Especially in management consultancy? I guess in my case it would be to figure out the stuff I’m bad at (OLS would say “getting on the phone”) and practise it. But what about communications, about intellectual thinking? One to let the subconscious think through.
Which leads me to an article in New Scientist that Caroline picked up on: the brain has a “default mode” when you are daydreaming that switches off when you need specific focus. This planning, strategising and reflection mode must be very important for the brain given the amount of time it spends doing it. Caroline sees it as explaining her often trouble-shooting dreams and I see it as explaining why I can leave stuff to my subconscious to sort out.
I hadn´t come across these pay for a bid / seat auctions. The way that MadBid resets the clock on a bid each time a bid is made is maddening. Not for me – all we need is for someone to create a sniping tool and then it will be relatively pointless. Also, it must take a lot of time to sit and watch the bidding, and at a pound a bid, you´ll mostly be losing, I think.
My DataWaz days make me suspicious of any CAGR figures, but there does appear to be some life in the public sector shared services market after all. Just as the programme I used to run moves away from this topic.
A new interface to web history (temporal web content) looks very interesting, although it feels that you’d need a serious system to run it, Video of Zoetrope from Technology Review.