Certain Habits

I think “innovation” is one of the most overused words in our culture today. It’s come to mean so many things to so many people that it may never become a term of art. I think what most people mean when they say that something is “innovative” is that it is a) new and b) cool. If we’re lucky, they substitute “clever” for “cool”. If we’re really lucky, when they say “clever”, what they mean is “profitable”. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Blackberry pre-announced their iPad competitor, the PlayBook. The 7-inch tablet looks slick, with a user-interface similar to IOS4 and Palm’s WebOS.

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I hadn’t heard the story of the “Four Minute Men,” a group of 75,000 volunteers during World War I. What did the Four Minute Men do?

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Location:Whitehall,United States

Kevin Hoffman has an article this month in A List Apart that contains a lot of common sense dos and don’ts for kick-off meetings. Many of his suggestions are simple, and reflect standards that we hold ourselves too.

He provides four sample questions that are well worth remembering for a kick-off meeting:

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There are two ways to achieve simplicity. One is to do without. The other is to simplify a complicated problem until you arrive at a spare, elegant solution.

The first approach achieves the appearance of simplicity by shoving complexity into places where it is unmanaged or poorly managed. It’s a form of denial. That sounds bad, but simplicity by denial is often the most efficient solution. It achieves a good outcome without the cost involved in optimization.

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“Microsoft’s main pitch [for their tablet OS] is that they’ll be IT department-friendly …”, according to Gizmodo today.

How much longer they can continue to rely on the best sales force they never had to pay is open to question. One would think that IT departments would catch on that the priorities Microsoft has educated them to care about entail significant hidden costs. And if IT doesn’t get it on their own, one would think that their increasingly tech-savvy CEO’s would find someone who does.

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How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price.

Ouch. Not only did this traders’ drunken black-out purchase lose $9.7m and lead to a $7.6m loss for the year for his firm, it also moved the global price of oil $1.50 overnight.

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“Amateurs Building Homemade Fusion Reactors“
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Longest match in tennis history, still ongoing as of this writing. Isner and Mahut are on serve, with Isner leading 59–58. That’s games, not points. Fifth set, not for the match.

The match has now past nine hours. The fifth set is longer than any other match played at Wimbledon this year. They’re in danger of being stopped for darkness for the second day in a row.

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