One of the most powerful and underused tools in any manager’s toolkit is “I have no opinion”. In fact, it’s useful for anyone who is asked to provide input on a thing.
Unless you’re contributing real value to a question — don’t answer it. Unless you can really answer “why do you hold this opinion” — […]
I got into a small debate/discussion about direct versus representative democracy. Via Twitter. While drinking. Not really the place for significant exposition. I thought of the founders of the US discussing the Federalist Papers. And I thought, “what if?” Not “what if the founders were drunk?” but “what if they were limited to tweets?”
I went […]
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs gave a talk at TED. In it, he mentions two words that I’ve never heard before, but I do like.
anagnorisis - basically means “discovery”. Aristotle defined anagnorisis as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.
peripeteia […]
I’m finally getting around to reading The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. I opened it this morning on the drive to work (Chas drove, not me), and in the first 20 pages, I read something that I wanted to share before I get started with my day.
In the six years since 9/11, Al Qaeda Central […]
Continue reading about Al Qaeda is to explosions as MTV is to music.
Somebody bought Josh Freese’s $20,000 album package. This is fantastic news for two reasons.
One, people understand the value that we as rock stars* are offering.
Two, Josh now has already made enough money to purchase all of my album packages combined, for the small sum of $11,432.20
Honestly, I think the coolest possible outcome of this would […]
I’m proud to announce the release of promotional packages for my upcoming album. Some of you may have heard of Josh Freese, who has drummed with more groups than I care to list, including NIN, Devo, and A Perfect Circle. He has a line of packages to accompany his album. I figure since I’m (almost) […]
Last night, we had Ignite Orlando. For those of you who don’t know, an Ignite event consists of presentations, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide = 5 minute presentations.
I re-presented some of my AAC09 Oauth talk. It was a lot of fun — the presentation format is cool. Everyone seemed to dig the presentation, the […]
This is related to our new project. Also, HappyJoel is god damned hilarious. Keep an eye out for him in the near future.
“So uh, if you’re still alive, and I’m still alive, we should hang out” lol
Buy American wine. Drink it on your American yacht. Read Forbes for instructions on how to spend your money. Eat American caviar. Stuff hundreds into tip jars when you go get coffee. Read the “Most Expensive” blog for ideas on how to support the economy. We’ve got to keep our economy going, and since […]
Continue reading about A message for rich people: “Spend your money!”
Turns out that Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch wasn’t really groundbreaking. For it’s time, maybe. But it turns out that there’s a similar joke from the 4th century in Greece.
…a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.
“When he was with me, he never did any such thing!” is the […]
Continue reading about “He’s not dead, he’s pining for the fjords”