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No Great ThrillNo Great ThrillNo Great Thrill 05/07/2004 04:35 PM Six Flags keeps on producing hair-raising financial results. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)No Great ThrillGrok Headline matches for No Great ThrillAn Author's Little ThrillAn Author's Little Thrill 07/23/2004 06:13 PM At the BlogOn conference today, Cody's Books, Berkeley's excellent independently owned bookstore, had a table featuring books by speakers. One of them was mine -- the first retail sales of We the Media -- and several folks bought it and asked me to sign the title page. Now this feels real. It'll Thrill Ya, It'll Kill YaIt'll Thrill Ya, It'll Kill Ya 10/29/2003 09:09 AM The Old Sow demands respect as she comes roiling to the surface of the Atlantic off the Maine coast. She's the largest tidal whirlpool on earth and you trifle with her at your own peril. Michelle Delio reports from Eastport, Maine. The Thrill of DefeatThe Thrill of Defeat 06/14/2004 05:13 AM  Thrill RideThrill Ride 11/17/2003 05:28 PM "Using Macs wasn't just a design choice -- it was a ruthless business decision. We crunched the numbers, and for evey scenario they spelled out Mac." By David Levy (Apple via MyAppleMenu) The thrill is gone, Google; but it's not
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 Some more 'fun with numbers' today. A while ago I mentioned IdeaChampions' When & Where Do You Get Your Best Ideas? survey. If you haven't taken the survey already, you can still do so. But before you click to post your answers, write them down. Then you can use this article to create your Personal Creativity Profile, as I've done above. The Profile will tell you:
What's more, the last three of these six creativity sources are unusual to me, and not effective for most others, so if I'm in a group creativity setting I should be cautious about suggesting others take breaks or listen to music. I should be sensitive to the fact that happiness is an essential precondition to creativity for most people, though it isn't for me, and also that most others will be more creative if they take a walk, read books, talk with friends, or spend time thinking just before bed, even though those techniques don't work particularly well for me. There are some other interesting differences between my creative places and times, and those of most others. I find flying and commuting very stimulating -- perhaps it's the movement, and the fact that my commutes are off-rush-hour and hence fast-paced and relaxing. I find television stimulates my thinking more than it does for most others, but that's probably because of what I watch -- documentaries, mysteries, in-depth investigative reports and foreign programming. And the least effective three sources for me -- internet surfing, vacationing and exercising, are all fairly intense, focused activities for me, that don't leave many 'cycles of brainpower' for creative thinking, though I can appreciate that others who find these activities more recreational could also find them more creatively stimulating. Next I asked myself how I could find more time and space for the creative activities that work best for me. To answer this I added another column to the spreadsheet, and entered for each of the 36 activities the amount of time each week I currently spent on each. I again used a scale of 1-5 for this:
 What this second chart reveals is what, ideally speaking, you should try to spend more time doing (the activities at the top of the chart, which you've rated as a source of great ideas, but which you spend relatively little time doing) and what you should try to spend less time doing (the activities at the bottom of the chart). In my case, I should 'get out more' -- spend more time brainstorming with others and just moving around, and less time in front of the computer. I also need to use creative thinking techniques more often. My 'catch-all' #36 'other source' answer was spending time in the hot tub, which I suppose must somehow work for me the way showers work for others. What is it about being in the water that gets us thinking creatively? No wonder dolphins are such imaginative creatures! Though to my surprise, others' top 'write-in' answer for question #36 was 'on the toilet', so perhaps we should see whether porcelain has some mysterious power to spark ideation. While others spend their time in airport lounges, airplanes and traffic either bored or fuming, I find these activities 'transport' me and get me thinking very creatively. Because it's dangerous to write while driving, I've learned to use mnemonic devices to capture and remember ideas that occur to me until I can safely write them down (works in the shower, too). If I could find a dictating machine that worked with my voice-recognition software I'd probably use it instead -- maybe even write a whole paper or blog post simply thinking out loud while I drive. It's quite possible, though, that since much of my travel is early-morning, it's actually that time of day that's responsible for the flurry of ideas, rather than the movement. Though since I'm a night-owl, usually miserable in the morning, I'm not sure that my body clock, or the ones around me, could handle it if I tried early-to-bed, early-to-rise. It hurts just thinking about it. What works for you, and why? Are there times and places and techniques that aren't on this list at all that seem to surface great ideas for you? In what ways does your ideal environment for idea generation differ from mine, and from the other survey respondents'? And are there ways you could be spending your time a little differently to allow your right brain to get some more exercise? * How I normalized the 'average' answers to the survey: First of all, I double-counted the '5' scores, the proportion of people who found each time or place a 'sure-fire' source of great ideas, because I think that's just as important as 'average' score. Then, because when you average scores you get most of them clustered around the 3 average, I 'stretched' the results so that the top-scoring source (brainstorming) received a normalized score of 5 and the lowest-scoring source (being sad or depressed) received a normalized score of 2. Finally, I rounded the results to the nearest 0.5. The results then more closely map, in standard deviation and distribution of results, an individual's scoring. Here are the normalized scores in order for the 36 questions (for copying and pasting into your own spreadsheet): 4.0 4.0 3.0 3.5 3.5 4.0 3.0 4.5 3.0 3.5 4.5 4.0 5.0 3.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 3.0 2.5 2.5 3.5 3.0 3.0 4.5 4.0 4.0 2.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 3.5 4.0 |
OK - multi-post sequence - all based upon this post......
See my comments at the end........
Here's Ted Leung.......
Back. Well, I"m finally back in the saddle after a week at OSAF. It was five months since my last visit, which was probably a little too long. Some of the things that I talked about this week included several meetings on Item Clouds, a long clarifying discussion on our Data Model, and several discussions on Item Sharing. Anthony Baxter dropped by to tell us about shtoom, encourage us to think about voice in Chandler and suggest some ways to get more involved with the python community, so I suppose I'll forgive him for greeting me by telling me that I looked like ****. It was also a good time to be around to accelerate the coordination needed for planning the 0.4 release, and since we've hired a number of new folks, it was good to meet all of them, and spend some time developing existing relationships.
This trip I also managed to have an active evening social calendar. I spent one evening with our old family friends David and Katherine Fedor. It's been entirely too long since I saw them -- hopefully we'll be able to get the families together sometime soon. I spent another evening with fellow Brownies David Temkin and Sarah Allen who are both at Laszlo. David and I worked on Newton together, and it was interesting to hear his reflections on the project now that a number of years have passed.
I also ended up spending an evening with Marc Canter, his wife Lisa, and Phil Wolff. Marc is doing a bunch of open source style projects in addition to his consulting with various companies in the social software space. A lot of what he's doing right now centers around FOAF, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results soon. I think that there could be a nice tie in between the PeopleAggregator and Chandler's "sharing circles". One thing that Marc's interested in is being able to build another user interface on top of Chandler functionality. If we do a good job at MVC in CPIA, then this shouldn't be that much labor. Something that struck me as I talked with Marc was the long term view that he's taking of the stuff that he's working on. He's thinking multiple years worth of effort, a point of view that's been in short supply / disfavor since the dot com boom and "internet time".
Phil Wolff has gotten a fair amount of reading in our house -- he's hit both my and Julie's aggregator. In fact, when I told Julie I was meeting Phil too, she exclaimed "the thousand beers guy". You never know what will stick... Phil's been doing a lot of work with the Kerry campaign, and thinking about the issues related to taking the software artifacts created by campaigns and making sure that they have a life so that succeeding elections/campaigns could make use of them. He also asked me some interesting questions about Chandler. How will Chandler compete with a "Google in a box" appliance that includes search, e-mail, etc? How will Chandler do calendar support for events like Muslim prayers which occur a sunrise and sunset in your current location? This requires knowing where you are in the world so that you can compute when sunrise and sunset are. Food for thought, indeed. Phil had two thought provoking posts earlier that day, one on the 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition (which he is judging) and another on social network software.
Lisa, Marc, and Phil got me the last night I was in town, and by then I was slightly draggy (I didn't say that Anthony was wrong), so I hope that I was suitably interesting company. [Ted Leung on the air]
It was great to meet Ted Leung - someone who I have been reading and who's working at one of my favorite entities - OSAF. When Mitch and Andy were on their original road show - showing off version .1 of Chandler - they promised me that we'd be able to build on the APIs and data structures - utilizing what's known as an 'object store'.
Dave Winer had built an object store - it was called the XML storage system - so I knew that the world needed an open source of of those. When I heard Chandler had one - I got excited!
So we all have vested interests in seeing the OSAF succeed.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people all come up with the same conclusions on FOAF, sharing and multiple accounts being aggregated together. This meme is taking off.
This place saved our necks yesterday (at work, not Gadgetopia). If you ever find yourself working with an IIS box and run into this little monkey:
The server failed to load application '/blah'. The error was 'The server process could not be started because the configured identity is incorrect. Check the user name and password'.
The "Synciwam.vbs" script will actually work as advertised. We installed some software that hosed all the user accounts on our IIS box yesterday, and were left scratching our heads as to what the bloody hell happened.
Apparently, this script can cause problems of its own -- so be careful out there.
My apologies if this is a well-known thing, but I hadn't seen it prior to yesterday.
(Credit goes to Ryan for finding this one.)
Exxon Secrets: This is fantastic work with Flash. It reminds me of that tsunami Flash tool of a week ago. This one is just as good and shows how Flash can be used to really let the user explore a "space" of information.
Note: I'm not endorsing or condeming the subject matter here. I'm just commenting on the skill of development and strength of presentation.
My favorite daily email has been, and continues to be, Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User's Guide (MUG). Today, Suisman asks NYC bloggers to share 10 Great Things about NYC. There's some great stuff in there -- some new to me, some just reminders of places I need to revisit and things I need to redo. Tomorrow will bring Part Two of the series, and I hope many more wonderful tips about NYC.
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: