I went to my first NASCAR race last weekend. It was cool, but I’m not sure I liked it enough to be an avid fan. It seems like a whole lot of time, money, risk and energy to end up where you started.
I was struck by something while I was there. What if we were that enthusiastic about Space exploration? My father’s generation (he was born in 1950) witnessed his parents generation spend a huge amount of time, money, risk and energy getting into space, to the moon, and sending spacecraft all over the solar system. All with computers and technology many of us have in our homes today.
Somewhere between my fathers childhood and my children’s childhood, the enthusiasm has been replaced completely by other things. NASCAR is cool, but it’s about going in a circle REALLY REALLY fast. Sounds an awful lot like our current space program.
What can we do to channel some of that enthusiasm and energy into getting somewhere? Maybe sometime in my lifetime even…
The lovely @pamslim who does Escape from Cubicle Nation had Gary Schoeniger on the podcast today.
Here’s a real gem from him that stuck with me all day:
“Entrepreneurs look for problems, the don’t run from them”
I had the strangest conversation this morning with some people at a large subscription based software company. They were astounded that a longtime customer found a cheaper solution that did what they needed.
“But we’re the 900 pound gorilla” they seemed to say. “Why would anyone want anything but us?”
The customer left because the “900 pound gorilla” was offering the same product and service as they were 2 years ago and several competitors are coming up with innovative solutions to the same problem for 25% of the cost.
They have the industry clout and funding to do a million innovative things and instead they sit back and complain that they are on the top and they shouldn’t need any reason to be afraid that they wont always be there.
Not sure I’d pay for this one, but not to shabby for my first hand tied fly:
Here’s a great example of using visuals to get a point across, plus it’s an interesting topic to boot!:
And here.
Someone needs to give John Kanzius a medal. And a house. And maybe a “never has to pay taxes again” card.
Those of you who know me well may be scared by this screenshot:
I’m doing some work on testing a SSL vpn solution and need to understand the Vista user experience.
The install was pretty simple and my first impression is that Vista seems fine, not sure what the fuss is all about. Of course, I don’t have things like non-working video drivers or anything like that.
One of those funny things someone created when they were probably in a boring meeting, or drunk, is Naked CSS Day.
Yes, this is the day when you’re supposed to switch off your CSS on your sites and let them roam around in the buff.
Alas, I have missed this day once again (it was yesterday), so I’m off in search of something else to make naked and create my own naked day.
Since we’re using the subversion repository for our Wordpress directories, upgrading to 2.5 was as easy as:
svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
svn up
That was it for 10 different wordpress blogs.
Fingers crossed.