As the Super Bowl rapidly approaches, many of you are undoubtedly putting in your advance orders for pizza. For those of you in Boston, I recommend Beauty’s Pizza. My old college mate, Eric Silberstein, owns the joint, and if he’s as good at making pizza as he is at starting companies, you’d better get in [...]
Today’s Los Angeles Times sports page related a story from Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy about meeting Bill Clinton. Van Gundy said: (I8P) He [Clinton] said, “We should get together some time and talk about leadership.” I said, “That would be great.” He said, “Yeah, I got to go to Asia for an [...]
Jon Cheyer pointed me to his new favorite toy, Squeezebox, from SlimDevices. It’s a small digital music player — comes in wired and wireless versions — that plays a variety of audio formats: MP3, WMA, even Ogg Vorbis and SHOUTcast. Squeezebox gets the music off one of your computers which runs the Squeezebox server software. [...]
My first exposure to programming came in the third grade, when my elementary school got a fresh shipment of Apple IIs. (My only prior experience with computers was from poring over those old Radio Shack TRS-80 comics featuring Superman. Anyone remember those?) My third grade teacher, Mrs. Keltner, introduced us to programming by asking us [...]
Blue Oxen Associates and the good folks at Aspiration are organizing a usability sprint for open source software. The sprint will be held at Jeff Shults‘s fantastic new facility in San Francisco, February 18-20. Those who should apply: (HTW) Developers who want to improve the usability of their Open Source projects. (HTX) Usability [...]
This morning, Gail Taylor told me where she first came across the term, “Group Genius.” From the Tomorrow Makers‘ FAQ: (GIK) In 1976 I stumbled on Lawrence Halprin‘s personal notebooks in the library. He had written the words “group genius” beside one of his stories. At that moment I realized that my work was [...]
Gail Taylor likes to talk about the need for The Red Thread and Yellow Threads in groups. The Red Thread is a concept from filmmaking. It’s the tie that binds, an element found in every aspect of a project that helps create a unified whole. Alicia Bramlett, an artist and filmmaker who often works with [...]
Todd Johnston told me a story about Phish, which he read in Nubar Alexanian‘s book, Where Music Comes From. When the band practices, one member will start riffing, then the other ones will join in one-by-one, all with their eyes closed. When a band member feels like they’re all in sync, he yells, “Hey!” If [...]
