Yes, I thought so. That is a woman with a mustache on Jobster:
Just for fun, by the way, here’s my profile on Jobster. I don’t quite like the results as much as my resume, but hey – fun to try.
[tags] resume, jobster, john koetsier [/tags]Tag - future
I had lunch with a colleague today. He’s young, smart, and creative … and in a job where he cannot possibly exercise all his talents.
(Kind of the way I like to think of myself!)
But he has a good-paying job. And a mortgage. And 3 kids. And a wife.
So it’s hard. Hard to take the plunge. Hard to take the risk. Hard to not settle. After all, if he has a hard landing, it’s not just him at risk.
And yet, a good-paying job doing often-interesting work is not enough. It’s not enough for him, and it’s not enough for me. There are some people who won’t settle – can’t settle.
Settling means dying, even if just a little. To settle, you have to kill your dreams, or at least shut them off, wall them up.
The colleague I had lunch with is not willing to do that. I’m not willing to do that. Someone, I think Eleanor Roosevelt, said that the biggest risk is not taking any risks at all.
The challenge is risk management.
In other words, if you’re going to take a risk outside the cozy corporate womb, have your ducks in a row. Plan it for some time in advance. Have a fairly large sum of money (12 months worth of living expenses, I think) in reserve. Then go for it.
Why?
You might as well ask why we live. Life is risk. Doing the same thing over and over, always staying within the lines, always doing the safe thing, is not life.
Life is experimentation. Life is change – without change there is no life. Literally, when you stop changing, you’ll be dead.
I want to live.
[ update ]I just saw this article on risk-taking. It gives the following three reasons why people take risks:
- the drive to transform the tension of unresolved emotional conflicts from childhood into individual expression, vindication and mastery,
- the drive of a “lonely crusader” determined to challenge the group’s or the organization’s need to preserve the status quo, and
- the drive of profound self-awareness and alienation: “the person (must) construct a framework of meaning that is personal rather than imposed externally.”
The rumors had been around for some time: PowerSchool was on the auction block. Now it’s official.
But why? Why did Apple sell PowerSchool? It appears that the division was not profitable enough for Apple, and there were always rumors of issues around the development of new versions of PowerSchool.
But I think there are two key reasons.
One: Not selling more Macs
One is that PowerSchool did not actually help Apple sell more Macs.
When Apple bought the company, PowerSchool had about 10,000 school clients, if memory serves. (I did a research project on student information systems (SIS) for my company about 5-6 years ago.)
The theory was that with PowerSchool as the foot in the door, Apple would be able to sell more Macs to education. And the magic of bundling would also make selling PowerSchool easier in schools that already had a significant Mac prescence.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, unfortunately, there is.
Apple’s penetration in education has at best held even over the past 5-6 years. More likely, it’s trended down. In fact, PowerSchool didn’t help Apple sell more Macs.
In retrospect, it’s not too hard to see why.
First of all, schools make buying decisions on SIS systems maybe every 10 years. It’s like buying Oracle. You don’t switch to DB2 next year just because somebody gives you a 10% off coupon.
Secondly, they are purchases made with two significantly different audiences. The people making buying decisions on SIS systems are principals, districts, and states. On the other hand, classroom teachers often have significant input into instruction computer buying practices.
And third, it’s not a works-better-together scenario. Because it’s web-based, PowerSchool will work for anyone with any modern computers: Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. Have web browser, will travel. Same thing for most of the other modern SIS systems on the market. That’s as it should be: back-office and front-office applications are de-coupled and independently upgradable.
Two: Educational content on iPods
But the piece of the deal that’s most intriguing to me is the committment on the part of Pearson to bring their educational content to iPod.
There is no bigger company in educational technology than Pearson. They already have the leading SIS software in the market, SASI xp. But that’s not all they do.
Pearson is a quintessential international megacorp, with businesses all over the world. However, they’re biggest in publishing. In educational publishing, they make textbooks, they publish novels for age-targeted audiences, and more – particularly, curriculum-related products. As they so modestly state:
We are the leading pre K-12 curriculum, testing, and software company in the US, reaching every student and teacher in that country with one or more of our products and services. We offer a wide range of solutions that integrate our instructional, assessment, and reporting capabilities. These instructional offerings include basal and supplemental programmes, and technology-delivered adaptive learning solutions.
Well.
What if you were a company that had a strong historical presence in education with slightly declining market share, but also had an incredibly hot product in the general consumer market that can display text, play audio, and show movies?
You might try to make that incredibly hot product the basis for an educational trojan horse. If so, you’d probably be a well-known fruit-flavored company.
In fact, that’s just what I predicted three weeks ago. After, just for the heck of it, I put one of my company’s courses on my iPod, the lightbulb went on and it became clear to me that the iPod is a perfect vehicle for mobile, personalized course content delivery.
Not so good for interaction, necessarily. And not something that will take the place of discussion, teachers, and all the other needed accoutrements of school. But certainly an excellent way to distributed course text, images, audio, and video.
Education has been looking for e-books for some time now. Maybe the iPod … particularly a next-generation model with a larger screen … is precisely that, but we never realized it until now.
Hmmm. Starts some bells ringing, doesn’t it?
If you were Apple, wouldn’t that be something you wanted? You bet. And how would you get it? You might start by partnering with one of the largest education curriculum and supplemental materials producers out there.
You might start, in other words, with Pearson Education.
Wired has an important article in their June issue on what they’ve dubbed crowdsourcing. What is crowdsourcing?
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.
Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing, gives plenty of examples: it’s people uploading photos to iStockphoto where companies and people who need photos can buy them on the cheap. It’s VH1 sourcing videos that “ordinary” people have uploaded to the internet and building a show around them. It’s Proctor & Gamble finding underemployed brainiacs who solve thorny science and engineering problems at InnoCentive. And it’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk … outsourcing fundamentally simple and repetitive problems that humans still do better than machines.
Other examples that Howe did not give but could have include the recent development of services that enable bloggers to sell their stories to mainstream media companies … newspapers, magazines, etc. … for a fraction of what a staff writer would cost. (For the life of me I cannot find that link back – help!) Or imagine excellent podcasts being paid for retransmission on satellite or terrestrial radio. I could see this happening with Venture Voice easily.
To me, this is incredibly relevant to the discussion on my recent We Are Not Consumers post. I wrote it in quasi-response to Pete Blackshaw’s Consumer-generated media blog … and Pete responded with a lengthy comment explaining why he still prefers the term “consumer.”
However, as the Wired article lists, 57% of 12- to 17-year-olds online are contributing to the web in one way or another:
Late last year the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study revealing that 57 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds online – 12 million individuals – are creating content of some sort and posting it to the Web.
This is literally changing the world. However, if you’re a company that wants to take advantage of these new opportunities to get more work done cheaper, or to get work done that you’ve always wanted to do but could never do affordably, everything that is presented here relies on 4 things:
- Digitization
All parts of the workflow must be digital. Ideally, not just in PDF form but in malleable formats: text is text, images are images, structure is structure. Everything is broken down to its component bits. - Dis-aggregation
It must be possible to route any and every individual piece wherever it is needed to whomever is needed whenever needed. This allows you to break complex tasks down into simple component chunks, which reduces specialized knowledge needed for any individual job. - Re-aggregation
After you’ve spread jobs all over the face of the earth, potentially, you need to be able to assemble all the bits and bytes back together. - Flexible smart project managers
The entire process needs to be managed by smart flexible people who are open to new opportunities and able to adapt quickly to change.
Yahoo! put together a huge presentation for their Analyst Day 2006. One part that’s particularly interesting is Yahoo’s big bets for the next 5 years:
Not being present on the actual conference call or meeting, I’m trying to articulate what they mean by each of the “big bets.” Here’s my best guess.
- Next-generation experience
Web 2.0, everywhere on all devices - Monetization
a) kill AdSense, b) multi-media and multi-channel approach, c) charge for value (e.g., Flickr) - Platforms
a) standards, APIs & “mashability” b) data accessible anywhere - Beyond the browser
a) iTunes-ish applications, b) digital identies, aggregated, c) mobile devices
The presentation is immense, and so are the challenges as Yahoo! charges forward on seemingly all fronts at once.
One thing that is definitely becoming clear is that Yahoo! is determined to not play second fiddle to Google, nor does it want to be part of a Microsoft. Instead, Yahoo! has a very clear vision of itself as a “21st century media company,” and is following its own path.
[tags] yahoo, google, web 2.0, future, analysts [/tags]In Canada about 50% of our gas price is tax, a fact that Toronto Sun columnist Linda Leatherdale is not happy about.
Well, I’m not either. I hate tax – it pulls money out of my pocket and into the bottomless depths of governmental waste. But I don’t think we should reduce the gas tax.
Right now, gas tax revenue goes straight to the Canadian government’s general revenues. That’s what I have a problem with: there’s something else we need that money for.
Instead of going into general revenue, a forward-looking government would divert all gas taxes right into alternative energy research and development.
Gas is about $1.10 a litre right now, approximately 65 cents of which is tax to the federal and provincial governments. Fueled by Canadian’s addiction to suburbs, commutes, and travel, government will collect about $1.8 billion in gas taxes for 2005-2006.
Imagine what $1.8 billion plowed into wind, solar, geothermal, tide, ethanol, hydrogen, and other alternative energy sources would accomplish. Imagine a Canada that produced all its electricity cleanly: no coal, no nuclear, no natural gas generators. Imagine a future in which per-car pollution is reduced 50%, 70%, even 90%.
This is something we need to do for our future health and welfare. It’s something we need to do for the beauty of the country in which we live. But it’s not just a do-gooder project.
Is the world going to need more of its energy from non-carbon sources in the future? Of course!
Will the huge energy industries of the future be oil and gas based? Of course not!
So diverting our gas tax revenue into alternative energy – clean energy – research and development will give Canadian companies a huge boost in the energy industries of the future.
Which is good for us, and good for our world.
Tidbit post: if you want an edge on design that is coming to the mainstream in the next few years, check this out.
Sneek peak: check out these colors. Very web 2.0, no?
A colleaugue forwarded me a PDF of the Information-Age Mindset, by Jason Frand. It’s a couple of years old now, but still very relevant.
Frand’s key points:
- Computers aren’t technology anymore
Technology is only what’s been invented since you were a kid (Alan Kay). For most young people, that means computers aren’t technology … they’re part of the furniture. - Internet is better than TV
TV-viewing is down, slightly, for the first time in decades. Why? The internet. (The way I think of this myself is: which could I do without? The answer is not TV!) - Reality isn’t real
A picture is no longer proof. Reality is sometimes virtual. Everything can be manipulated. - What you do, not what you know
Now, we’re always learning. So the ability to learn is much more important than a static body of acquired knowledge. - Nintendo over logic
Young people just try stuff (like new software). People without an information-age mindset try to read the manual before jumping in. - Typing rather than handwriting
My hand hurts these days when I have to write anything of any length at all. - Staying connected
People expect to be connected all the time, everywhere. - Zero tolerance for delay
If I can can info on the net immediately, why should I have to wait for anything? - Consumer/creator blurring
Frand caught this trend early … now with “web 2.0” it’s obvious to everyone who’s looking.
[tags] information, technology, mindset, kids [/tags]
This past Friday I spent some time publishing a course on my iPod. (Find out how you can, too).
It’s fairly simple to create a course to run on an iPod, but there’s one problem: installing.
Installing the course takes too many steps for the average person … dragging the audio content into iTunes, syncing, then putting the iPod into disk mode, and dragging the course’s text files into the Notes section of their iPod. (More info on installing.)
There has to be a better way – and there’s a couple of forms it could take. One is very simple and immediate. The other is long-term and strategic … and that’s the one that I think Apple will do.
One: iPod Markup Language, zipped course packages
Option A would be for Apple to extend the markup language that iPods already speak, making it just a little more sophisticated. In this scenario, Apple would invent some kind of configuration format that would tell iTunes just what to do with all the course components.
Example:
A course might consist of audio content, text content, some pictures, and perhaps a few videos. The configuration file would simply be used during installation – telling iTunes what’s included, where to put it, and how it’s all linked together.
Then content providers could zip up course packages and distribute them online. People who want to install the courses would just download the file and import it into iTunes. During the next sync with their iPod, iTunes would put the components in the right places on the iPod, and users would find the courses either in the Notes section of their iPod as they currently do, or, preferably, in a dedicated courses/learning section.
Two: iTunes Education Store (and library)
That’d be a great easy solution, but here’s what I think Apple will actually do.
Apple will do for iPod-based e-learning exactly what they did for podcasts: build in the ability for content providers (both professional and amateur) to register their content at the iTunes music store.
They’ve already done this for major universities, in a sense. Currently, it’s only for audio and maybe video content. But eventually, it will be for complex content that is a mix of text, audio, video, images, and even assessment.
Once that’s been done, then Apple will make it discoverable for people browsing the iTunes Music, err everything store. You’ll be able to can “subscribe” to it just like a podcast, and bango-wango, it’ll auto-magically appear on your iPods.
There’ll be a free option for free content (that’s the library part) and, you guessed it, a commercial model for courses people and companies want to sell.
(As an aside, this is why Microsoft is so worried about Apple’s iTunes/iPod empire. It’s not the music, it’s the ecosystem. What Apple has built is a media-delivery monster, and the only limit to what this pipe can carry is the rate at which people can absorb new uses for it without getting information overload and reacting against it.)
This will be completely revolutionary, because now you will not only have an easy way to create and publish courses, you’ve got a popular, common platform on which to do it. Who needs e-books? iPod is already here!
The content is easy to create – it took me about an hour to get from having no clue how to do it to successfully publishing my course on my iPod. And the reach of the platform is unparalleled, with probably 45 million iPods in the wild today.
It’s a content provider’s dream: fairly cheap, extremely portable, good battery life, flexible, easy to publish to, a built-in distribution model, and an ecosystem full of people used to paying for content.
Is this what Duke University had in mind when they did their iPod Duke Digital Initiative? Perhaps. I’m convinced it’s going to happen.
The only question is when.
Friday nights, Friday nights. Friday nights are supposed to be for fun. For long dinners and late movies, and then a little nightcap before going to bed.
Except for geeks.
I’m only a mini-geek, so I only spent about 3 hours fiddling with technology.
But this past week Friday I got my first course up and running on an iPod. And it’s unbelievably simple.
The course consists of a series of text components – which can be basically any text you want – and some audio tracks. You access the course via the Notes menu in your iPod, and when the audio tracks are referenced, you simply click the middle select button on your iPod to play them while you continue reading the note.
How to publish a course on iPod
iPod speaks a subset of HTML – a very small subset, as far as I know. (Oddly enough, the files you transfer to your iPod have to be simple text (.txt) files and not HTML (.html) files.)
The syntax will be very familiar to anyone who has any experience with HTML:
- Page titles: <title>this is the title</title>
- Links: <a href=”link.txt”>this text is a link</a>
- Line breaks: the standard <br>
- Paragraphs: the standard <p>
- Song/audio links: <a href=”song=My Unique Song Name”>Link to song</a>
There’s a few more – check Make Magazine for details.
Here’s a critical one, though, if you want to link audio into your course but do not want users to leave the environment of your course. Use the song/audio link mentioned about, but add the following meta tag to the top of your page: <meta name=”NowPlaying” content=”false”>. That will make the song (or audio track with training content) play while the text content remains on the screen … which is what I wanted for my little app.
All-in-all, very simple, and very cool.
My kingdom for an installer
There is one shortfall, however: no installer app or standard installer procedure. Apple needs to build something in for automatic installation.
Right now, the install procedure is as follows:
- Drag song/audio tracks to iTunes
- Sync
- In iTunes preferences, enable Disk Mode
- Drag notes bundle into iPods Notes area
That probably involves connecting/disconnecting the iPod twice, not to mention futzing with preferences. Dragging the notes bundle into the iPod notes area is dead easy, but I’ve seen way too many dead easy procedures on a computer give … umm … inexperienced users fits to believe this this is not a problem. And I haven’t even listed the part about re-connecting your iPod and disabling Disk Mode so that you can sync your music again.
Realistically, I think Apple sees the potential of iPods as learning devices with both audio and video content. Hopefully that will impell them to create some sort of mechanism that is drag-n-drop friendly for users – for example, download a zipped course, drop it on iTunes, and based on some metadata, iTunes just knows what to do with it.
Probably, however, Apple will create some kind of solution based on the iTunes Music Store.
And this is how I think they’ll do it.
More, more, more
As far as I can find out, however, there is no way of affecting either the font or size of the text you publish on iPod.
That would be a very nice feature, since (as you can see in the screenshot above) the default iPod Notes text is rather thin and spidery. I’d like to be able to beef it up a bit … make it bold or something like that.
In terms of courses, adding assessment is always a nice feature – even if it’s just self-assessment for the learner.
Currently, the only way you can add assessment to an iPod course is via branching: asking a question with a number of answers, each of which is a link. By following the link of the selected answer, the user both selects an option and (by virtue of what you put at the linked file) finds out if he/she is right or wrong.
Summing up
Adding a course to an iPod is incredibly easy … and will probably get even easier.
It would be nice if Apple would publish some specs on what you can or can’t do with Notes (in terms of tags that are supported). I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that in the medium-term future.
But I can already see that iPod could become a very strong e-learning platform over the next 2-4 years.
How do you know it’s 2006?
I received an invite to a marketing webcast from the American Marketing Association today.
Halfway through the first paragraph:
Traditional communication methods such as mail, email and a generic “dot com” website experience are simply not working.
Wow. Innovative to traditional in less than a decade.
I think a lot of small, innovative web companies knew this, and have known it for at least a few years, but I didn’t know that the American Marketing Association knows it.
(Of course, they are pushing customer portals as the cutting-edge replacement solution, so maybe they still don’t know it.)
Tonight Teresa and I said goodnight to our two-year old son for the last time.
I sang the goodnight prayer with Aidan, and then I told him a “Jerry Ant” story – made up on the spur of the moment.
He read me his favorite book du jour, Buenos Noches, Gorila. And we talked, for a while, before he kissed me, and hugged me hard around the neck, like he always does.
The story I told him was of Jerry Ant’s third birthday. When he was two, Jerry Ant was so tiny people could barely see him. And he was so quiet they could barely hear him.
But on his third birthday, Jerry Ant ate not one, not two, not three servings of his ice cream cake. In fact, Jerry Ant ate no less than ten pieces of cake. And the next day, he wasn’t tiny anymore. He was big, and he was visible, and he was audible. He could do more, and be more. (He was also sick, but that’s besides the point.)
Tomorrow Aidan turns three, and a book of our life closes. Or, rather, begins a new chapter. We love our little guy to death and beyond, and will even when he’s bigger and older.
But there’s a sweetness, a newness, a poignancy, and most of all an overwhelming feeling of how brief life is, when your kids are small.
Everything is new. A trip to the grocery store is an adventure. Going to the bank with Daddy is like a voyage to Mars. A candy treat is ample cause for rejoicing.
I hope I never forget how Aidan looked and I felt when I came home from a week-long business trip to San Antonio. I drove home fast from the airport and came in around quarter after eight. He was sleeping but I woke him up.
He smiled. Mouth closed, teeth not showing, but smiling. Smiling big. Saying nothing. Just holding on to me as I held him in my arms, smiling and smiling and smiling.
Stay fun, Aidan. Keep smiling.
You are in our hearts today. You will be in our hearts forever.
I never read newspapers. Well, almost never.
But right now I’m on a flight to Dallas, Texas, on my way to a convention in San Antonio. And I happened to pick up the complimentary newspaper while boarding the flight.
It’s a great paper, by most measures – the Globe & Mail. One of Canada’s two national newspapers.
But it has a horoscope section, just like any tabloid rag. It’s been years since I’ve seen a horoscope. Today I decided to read it, just for fun. And it is a lot of fun. As long as you treat it for what it is: complete and utter nonsense.
Take the advice for Aries:
You feel confident in your abilities – you honestly believe there is nothing you cannot do. However, other aspects warn you would do well to remember that there is always someone who is bigger and better than you.
In other words, you believe can fly in directions other than straight down. But you need to remember that it’s very, very tricky.
Cancer gets the same ambivalent treatment:
You must get things moving today but you must also be cautious …
Sally Brompton, the genius who puts this particular bit of nonsense together, admits the obvious by continuing with “although that might sound contradictory it is simply a matter of getting the balance right.”
Taurus gets something a little different. Instead of the noncommittal it-might-rain-today-but-then-again-it-might-be-sunny nonsense, Taurus gets an ingenious twist: the self-fulfilling prophecy:
You may be thinking of give up on a plan or project that you once had such high hopes for but something will happen to day that makes you think again.
Something like the horoscope that you’re reading right now, perhaps?
Libra follows another well-worn path: completely uncontroversial and always-applicable advice …
You may be a nice guy by nature but every now and then you go right the other way and say or do something that is uncalled for an today’s cosmic alignment warns against annoying individuals you would do well to stay on good terms with.
You can probably count the number of people who don’t think that they’re pretty good guys on one hand, and the number of people who haven’t gone off half-cocked and said something they later regret on the other.
I really can’t believe people read this stuff. Even more, I can’t believe people write this stuff – and pretend that the planets and stars have anything at all to do with a person’s opportunities and choices in life.
I find it dishonest, manipulative, and disgusting in the extreme.
But extremely entertaining if read with a few buckets of salt.
I think I read John Gatto’s Teacher of the Year acceptance speech about 3-4 years ago, but somehow I happened across it again today.
This is subversive, dangerous, powder-keg stuff! It’s also great thinking and writing.
I don’t know how true it is, but it feels true, smells true, and seems to answer a lot of questions that today’s problems in today’s schools raise.
I defy you to read it without changing your opinion of schools.
A couple of excerpts:
The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
And …
Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.
And …
Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.
I googled Gatto’s name, and found he has a website and a foundation.
Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:
- Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and creating the idea of one world market/community
- The dot-com bubble, with all the over-building of investment and infrastructure that resulted
- Common data languages and computer interoperability standards
- Open source software and community projects
- Outsourcing of work (kickstarted by Y2K)
- Offshoring of production (especially China)
- Supply-chaining – the science of coordination
- In-sourcing (hiring companies to perform traditionally internal company processes)
- In-forming (more and better data freely available for all
- “The steroids:” computing technology that is digital, mobile, personal, and virtual
The triple convergence:
- global, web-enabled collaboration: sharing of knowledge and work
- business process reorganization to take advantage of technologies: flattening of hierarchies, consolidating like functions, virtual companies, etc.
- China, India, and Russia joining the world markets at about the same time
On political and economic systems:
“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”
On China:
“China has more than 160 cities with a population of 1 million or more.”
“China is a threat, China is a customer, and China is an opportunity. You have to internalize China to succeed. You cannot ignore it.”
On international job competition:
“When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you [kids] is: ‘Finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”
On change:
“No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”
On staying competitive in the global job market:
“Average Joe has to become special, specialized, or adaptable Joe.”
On being in trouble:
“One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries … when memories exceed dreams, the end is near.”
I watched Allan King’s documentary Memory last night with my daughter. What a heart-wrenching experience.
You are your memory. Lose your memory, and you lose your self. Memory reveals the agony of the dissolution of the identity in residents of a Toronto old age home. I can’t watch this sort of thing without thinking of my parents, who are now 70 and 71 – though they are still in great health.
Parents who no longer remember their kids. People who no longer remember whole swaths of their lives – the ultimate theft. And one resident, Claire, who could not remember the death of her dearest friend, Max, just a few short days ago.
I have to say, watching something like this quickly disabuses you of any notions that the things that matter in life are money, outward success, beauty … any of the litany of things that are must-have components of the lives of the rich and famous.
If you get a chance to see this documentary, don’t miss it. It’s worth the expense of two hours.
It really made me think about maximizing the time I do have with my family. One woman who was being filmed said the familiar “where have all the years gone?” For her, with her tattered memory, that question has a double meaning.
. . .
. . .
Find out more at Allan King’s website. It’s all-Flash, so I can’t link directly to the specific page, but it’s easy to find. There is a concept PDF available.
I previously saw another of Allan King’s documentaries, Dying at Grace, a private look at the dying days of a number of terminally ill patients. Also highly recommended – but very emotional.
Houston police chief Harold Hurrt wants to put surveillance cameras in all kinds of private spaces … including homes.
“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.
That’s the same stupid argument almost all proponents of invasive law enforcement actions state. It puts the burden of proof on the wrong party. It presupposes guilt instead of innocence. It makes the innocent feel guilty for not allowing the state to see whatever the state wants to see.
Most importantly, here’s the critical answer to Hurrt’s question:
Because one day, you might change the definition of what’s wrong!
This BBC story says that “former senior Communist party officials” have written and published a public letter denouncing at least one form of government censorship in China.
The officials include:
. . . Chairman Mao’s former secretary, Li Rui; the former editor of the Communist party’s own mouthpiece, People’s Daily, Hu Jiwei; and ex-propaganda boss, Zhu Houze.
This comes right on the heels of an ongoing controversy over Google’s (and other search engines) decision to allow China to censor web search results within the country.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.
Could there be cracks in the seemingly monolithic Chinese Communist party? That would be a very, very, very good sign … and should be incredibly embarrassing to companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft that have enabled China’s government to censor the truth from its people.
They, by their actions, are de facto on the side of the censors, only to find that people who played major roles in the founding of the current government of China disagree.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say!
Why is Phillip K. Dick so hot in Hollywood?
Well, it’s not because he’s dead. Not just because he was a great writer. And not because he was even weirder than Hollywood.
But Robert Silverberg puts his finger on why Dick, whose stories are the basis for movies such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, is so hot right now.
We live in the twenty-first century. Philip K. Dick helped to invent it.
… and …
And I think we’ll see more and more of Philip K. Dick’s pulp-magazine plot concepts erupting into life all around us as the twenty-first century moves along. Even though his characters would discover, again and again, that the world around them was some sort of cardboard makeshift hiding a deeper level that was likewise unreal, what Dick the writer was actually doing was crying out, Look at all these unscrupulous gadgets: this is what our world really is, and things are only going to get worse. For us moderns it’s Phildickworld all day long. Your computer steals your bank account number and sends it to Nigeria, gaudy advertisements come floating toward us through the air, and now your telephone will flirt with you. It won’t stop there.
OK, I guess I have to be the millionth blogger to post on the Islamic cartoon fiasco.
First off, Mark Steyn is more right than wrong in pointing out that always worrying about other people’s sensibilities is a good way to lose all our freedoms. And my good friend Mike Skovgaard echoes his sentiments.
In a sense, Islamic Cartoongate is a good thing.
It shows all us moderate westerners in Europe and North America that if we keep bending over to be sensitive and kind and inoffensive, eventually we bend so far our backs will break.
And our relatively open, free, and safe society will be dead, burnt in fact and just not in effigy at the stake of Muslim fundamentalism.
There are some encouraging signs that spines are actually being sought and found in Western Europe, just when many of us on the other side of the Atlantic wondered if such a thing was possible.
I have to say, I feel a little bit weird about this one, because I’m a Christian. And it often seems to be open season on the symbols of Christianity in our society. Any flakey no-talent artist who needs to generate controversy because he cannot create (good) art, dunks a crucifix in urine or some such idiotic thing.
This is annoying to most Christians. More than annoying, it’s sacrilegious. Grossly irreverent. However, Christians do not feel a need to riot, burn stuff, and kill people when this happens. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is one of the key teachings of the Bible.
Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
(It’s worth noting that most Muslims consider the Bible a holy book as well. And that the Bible pre-dates the Koran/Qu’uran by some hundreds of years.)
But even though such behavior is annoying, and worse than annoying, it’s impossible to have a society worthy of the name where anytime anyone does anything offensive to another person we start a jihad to kill the infidel oppressor. As much as I dislike it, I’d rather have the irreverence than the police state that would replace it.
Which, is why, coming back to Cartoongate, while I think the cartoons are not a great idea, and not something I would do, I don’t want to see journalists, companies, countries, politicians, and societies lick fascist boots in response to the fundamentalist backlash.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.
It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.
I personally, because I’m a Christian, try to fit that together with the concept of a calling, which is idea that each and every person is called to fill a certain role, maybe meet certain needs, or be in a certain place socially or spiritually.
(I ran across this inventory tool while checking that out. It says I’m good at writing and teaching and administration.)
Here’s the real question: am I, by doing what I’m doing right now, “being the best I can be?”
Paul Graham puts it extremely well in his must-read essay on how to do what you love. Prestige and money can’t compete, when it comes right down to it, with the incredible quality of life that those who love what they do and do what they love enjoy.
Nor, if I might add, with the quality of life that those who know that they are focusing on the maximal inflection point in the cosmos to accomplish the greatest good – for them.
That’s what I want. I think that’s what we all want. And I think that’s what we all need.
Or else little pieces of us start dying, day by day, and before we know it, we’re zombies. Walking, talking, dead people, dying for the weekend.
Which is double plus uncool.
It’s New Year’s Eve, although it’s very early in the morning.
At the end of one year and the beginning of a new we often think of new year’s resolutions: things we will do better, things we will start, things we will stop. I’m thinking of something to start, and I’m going to call it “now-ness.”
I am horrible at living now. At enjoying today, experiencing the present.
I have always lived in the future tense. Working towards something. Looking forward to a coming state. Dreaming of a better tomorrow.
Enough!
I want to live now. I want to love now. I want to see now. I want to touch now. I want to speak now. I want to work now. I want to create now. I want to serve now. I want to learn now. I want to live now. I want to be now.
God has blessed me with a wonderful wife. Three absolutely amazing children. An intriguing job. A home and vehicles. A strong and close family. Super coworkers, and too many more things to count.
It’s time to change.
Resolved: Today before tomorrow.
Resolved: People before things.
Resolved: Mission before margin.