We have a new baby in the house. No.4 is very special just like all the others. I’ve noticed he smiles while he is dreaming but new babies don’t smile while they are awake until older. I wonder what he is seeing and dreaming in his sleep that has him smile given how newly born [...]
I have a very hectic 2 weeks ahead of me. So I scheduled 20 minutes of me time at the park over the road from my office. This is the view from just below my chin watching the early bird autonomous robots on their way to work.
In a world full of variety, knowledge and potential it’s so easy to operate tomorrow how you did today, yesterday and many days before that. For most of us less than 1% of our lives is truly spontaneous or new. Life can become an inevitable future, what I call an IF. So I try to [...]
Automation is more than machines doing work for you. It’s about MACHINES and HUMANS following RULES religiously. Keeping multiple todo lists is very bad. That would then be a list of lists = FAIL. One work list and one personal list is plenty. Coincidental results are when you shift your approach to a task in [...]
iPad non-porn by Bob Parson’s marketing machine at GoDaddy. Tech Zealots and how to spot them in the wild. Megashark infographic. It’s the absolute truth. Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket by Stilgherrian The secret to great work is great play – so that would mean it’s no-longer work, right?
Wikipedia describes Flow as, the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. It’s difficult to achieve this state but if you can it is an amazing feeling. I [...]
I love urban photography almost as much as I love nature photography. Here’s some shots from various Flickr photographers I follow: Sydney Industrial – clearly it doesn’t have to be about skyscrapers. By Mugley Manhattan – so strange without the twins but now balanced with buildings in scale. By paulobar Shinagawa Hilton Tokyo – a [...]
The post title is just some snippets from the comment stream that I thought summed it up nicely. Mesmerizing to watch. Great job by Creative Apps and hat tip to Jake Lodwick. Record Makers Promo from CreativeApplications.Net on Vimeo.
Recently I walked the South Coast Track in Tasmania’s Southwest National Park wilderness with a friend and neighbour, Michael Sainsbury. It is regarded as one of the top bushwalks of the world because of it’s pristine, remote and wildlife rich nature. Having done it I completely agree. In summary the trip is a flight into [...]
One of the joys of being a parent is seeing your kids learn something themselves through the discovery process rather than training. Our son Caleb hasn’t ever had a Piano lesson. Emma and I don’t play the Piano either so he has had to find out for himself how to use it. He generally finds [...]
If you want to know why Newscorp isn’t happy with Google crawling it’s content then here’s a quick graphic to explain. Search engines unlike most other business models have a right to use your content by the permission you give them to allow their robots to crawl your web content. To date News has allowed [...]
People nearly always buy an experience. This could be as simple as a brand, a service experience, a trend. There are many examples of this. One point which indicates this is that people pay different prices for the same object and are happy to do so. People will also transact because they feel loved by [...]
I had quite a stressful day at work yesterday and sometimes the best thing to do when that happens is watch a few videos to help pull me back to the big picture rather than the single moment I’m currently in. Observing humanity is one way to do that. A few years ago I worked [...]
A surreal start to the day with a massive dust storm. The picture left is one of my snaps on the way to Hornsby Station in Sydney. There’s been some great photo’s of the event on Flickr.
Personas is an interesting project by MIT Media Labs that provides you with a visual representation of the use of your full name online. It really is an aggregate of all people by that name so it’s more interesting in an artistic and an infographical sense. I created one for " Marc Lehmann " as [...]
I remember as a child walking out of the movie Tron and thinking "I love anything to do with the future". Movies like Tron, War Games and Star Wars were the seeding inspiration around my life as a product builder in financial markets and more recently in web applications. What’s really interesting is how Apple [...]
Goyte is mesmerising. Animator and film clip director extraordinaire Brendan Cook emerged from his studio with this amazing film clip for Gotye’s Heart’s A Mess (radio edit). Hat tip: Portable Film Festival
Systemic Monopolies are a problem I have long thought exists in our less than ideal form of capitalism. We think of traditional monopolies as being about a business having some unique advantage or forming some sort of cartel to dominate a market. While most economies have mechanisms to prevent this they equally create what I [...]
You try and pass off your less than 1 year old iPhone to your non geek partner so you can get the new 32GB video enabled one. Life looks like a big content opportunity or a chance to have a say on the very obscure but mildly intriguing (that probably will be of zero interest [...]
Making a followback decision is a little easier keeping these indicators in mind… Gaming = Followers / Following Snub = Following / Followers Newbie Status = o_0 Groupie Ratio = Ave # followers of those you follow / Ave # followers of your followers Bankwagon Status = joined Twitter more recently that Ashley Kutcher and [...]
A friend was telling me about the Humboldt Squid which are a large aggressive squid (up to 6ft long) that are thriving of the west coast of USA. I was after video footage and discovered this high quality science website by Northern California Public Broadcasting that has an excellent video on Humboldt Squid. QUEST on [...]
The real James Boag ad is fantastic (1st video) and the followup by Guinness spoofing the success of the “Pure Waters” concept is equally clever (2nd video).
Some tasty link morsels: Superb video depicting the evolution of earth collapsed into 1 minute. Upload and explore data with Swivel. The credit crisis visualised. While technically it’s not accurate the idea and execution is fantastic. Great read by Jason Calacanis on What to do if your startup is about to fail.
Often I find myself sitting next to Emma on the couch working on watching my laptop while she watches the TV. I realised I am only about three TV shows from zero dependence on traditional TV content (House, Boston Legal and NCIS are the TV shows if you are interested to know). If they were [...]
Tired of the same old, same old, perspective of life. Here’s some alternative ways of seeing things that help snap you out of that automaton existence, that is the day to day. Sub orbital flight around earth When catching a plane at altitude turn you head to be horizontal and pretend you are in a [...]
Why no baby tweeps? Teens don’t want mum and dad to see their chat. Tracking = bad idea. No, very, very bad idea. Their personal brand is already promoted on Myspace and Facebook through status updates (also with photo content). Why risk leaving this party for one with less people who are also a lot [...]
Tilt-shift is a very appealing technique to me. I love photography and when I first learned of the technique from Adrian Lynch on his Flickr.com account I had to learn more. I used a de-focus feature to blur the top and bottom of this photo I took in Tokyo. You can see the miniaturization effect. [...]
The easiest way to become environmentally sensitive is to get amongst nature. I always come back from a bushwalk feeling more enthusiastic than ever about saving what I have just seen. This weekend we took the kids and did a walk from Cowan down to Jerusalem bay in the Hawkesbury river (Ku-ring-gai Chase). The valley is [...]
I have had a few discussions with tech savvy customers about avoiding tech during your holiday break. This topic is clearly a divided camp. Personally I can switch off from tech for about a week but that is about as long as I can handle going dark (as Geeks call it). Here’s 7 reasons supporting [...]
Sometimes perfection can have a debilitating effect on execution. Almost disease like, it can arrest your progress. Perfection is actually an unnatural state. Ironically natures imperfections seem to give it a feeling of perfection. I’m as guilty as the next person for wanting all the ducks lined up but this is only in some areas. [...]