September 2011
25 posts
“
What makes a great product developer? They are an absolute kick ass programmer that doesn’t budge on their vision. They own the product. Its their baby. Schlocking it up with bells and do dads that are just “hung on” kills them. They believe in the architecture. They are a pain in the ass. They get stuff done ten times faster than anybody else. They don’t tolerate meetings. When somebody wants something changed, they dig in like an Alabama tick.
This is exact opposite of what makes a person great in a services environment. Get something done in a day that could be milked for a month? Literally, you’re killing yourself. You need to find 19 more days of billable hours or your utilization rate is going to hell. Customer asks for changes or better yet doesn’t know what their doing and whirls round and round?? That’s called job stability not a reason to tell them to fuck off.
Again, not saying one is better than the other, just saying different.
” —What Should You Do with Your Crappy Little Services Business?
(wish I had read this a long time ago)
“
“Everyone says the Bay is dead, the result of urban apocalypse and that’s bulls**t,” says Kirk while shoving squid into a little contraption that he’ll use to catch crabs. We are standing on St. Francis Jetty looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge and the sun has not yet overtaken the moon in the sky. Kirk’s an entertainer as well as a fisherman. His grandparents and parents were vaudevillians and actors on Broadway, but Kirk’s shtick — and it is a bit of a shtick — is the ocean.
Specifically, extracting creatures from it without a boat. His signature fishing method involves poking around for fish with a pole that has a six-inch line and a baited hook at the end. A practice that’s aptly named “poke poling.”
“One day I was casting into the water all day and getting nothing. I’d lost 60 bucks of tackle and was utterly defeated when I saw this guy walk by with a pole and bucket overflowing with fish. I thought ‘no freaking way,’ Kirk said. “I asked him what his secret was and he said ‘Everyone fishes out there,’ pointing to the water, ‘but the fish are right here,’ pointing to the rocky coast.”
The guy called himself ‘Cambodian Stan.’ He let Kirk follow him for three days until he got the swing of things. Now the poke pole is a permanent part of Kirk’s repertoire.
The rest of his repertoire revolves around his encyclopedic knowledge of the creatures that live in and around the Bay. The goose barnacles, the mussels, the crabs, the rockfish. The herring, the salmon, the sardines, the eel. Especially the eel. Kirk holds the California state record for catching the largest monkey-faced eel.
We had our backs turned to the city the entire tour. Which was kind of the point. San Francisco’s vast cultural and architectural riches can sometimes reduce the Bay to blue embroidery around the bottom of a window, but the sea-foraging expedition reasserts the water to its rightful place at the center of things.
” —Going wild for food in San Francisco - CNN.com
“I believe people who think “everything happens for a reason” must have never opened a newspaper.”
—http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/fashion/sometimes-its-not-you-or-the-math-modern-love.html?pagewanted=all
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God Bless! [sic] Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
—Elizabeth Warren (via jacobjoaquin)
At some point I’m going to have to catch up and figure out who this Warren chick is
The Cyborg in Us All - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
Schalk dreams of letting people speak with their neurons, issuing silent commands to their machines. You could imagine the word “cat,” say, and it would pop up on your computer screen. The areas involved with imagined speech take up just a few centimeters in the brain. With better implants, Schalk said, he might be able to pick up a word that his volunteer beams at the computer. Even with today’s implants, he and his colleagues are getting closer. One epilepsy patient moved a ball across a computer screen simply by imagining either an “ooh” sound or an “aah” sound. It marked one more step toward telepathy with machines.
“Conrad Jones, an associate wildlife biologist with Fish and Game, says one study, based in Malibu, found that 13.6 percent of coyote scat contained cat remains. (Fox says other studies show a much lower percentage.)”
—Coyotes in city to stay, so protect pets and food
“Asked how the Jameson’s connection came in, he said he felt that any liquor could go into a pickleback, but that in applied experimentation, “Jameson’s is kind of sweet, so with Quino’s brine, it leaves this kind of grilly, meaty, hamburgery thing in your mouth.” On other brine-spirit combinations, however, he was breezily generous. “I’ve had them all over, with all kinds of brines. It’s like sex and pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s good.”
—Case Study | Got Your Pickleback - NYTimes.com
“Coffin is, in fact, a minority shareholder in the corporation that owns “The Temple of Gravity,” with 21.5 percent of the shares. His contribution was not cash but “sweat equity,” based on his actual labor. The corporation’s management team - Keith Helfrich, who runs the business side, and Corbett Griffith, an engineer who has performed structural safety tests - have received less than 10 shares apiece as payment for their efforts. David Decker, the accountant and even the corporation’s Web designer (www.templeofgravity.com) all agreed to be paid in shares of the corporation. The 10 actual investors, all from Georgia, who own the majority of shares, bought in at $1,000 per share with a minimum purchase of five shares. These 10 people - some of whom are collectors of Coffin’s work or fans or friends of the artist or, in one case, the aunt and uncle of Helfrich, all personally contacted by the management team - may expect a 200 percent return on their investment, Coffin said, when the work is sold. “One of the investors had lost a lot of money in the stock market,” he noted. “He knew my work and thought it a better bet than a mutual fund.” As an incentive “goodie,” all of the shareholders received the management team’s prospectus affixed to a 50-pound slab of sculpted granite, suitable for pedestal or coffee table display.”
—Daniel Grant: Seeking Private Support, Artist Incorporates
Play
NYT: 'Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star' - Review →
mobile.nytimes.com
“It occurs to me that “Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star” may have been made for a similar purpose, to console every actor who has ever been in a movie that is a little less bad than this one. Let me put the matter another way: this may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that. If you dare, go on Netflix and test the hypothesis.”
