To Chris Landreth on his Oscar for NFB - RYAN
Alias, the company where I work is in the paper today.
TheStar.com - Lumpy, menacing is the video-game look in cars
It's very special to know that almost everything around you has in some way been "touched" by what you do. I can't walk the street without seeing something tthat I know we played some role in how it was designed.
The Star thinks it's a scary concept, but I think it's great that we can take design so much further. Just look at what Renault is doing with it's concept cars for example:
And just think of all the things that don't get built because we can now see what they're going to look like so much earlier in the design cycle.
We bought the last available print this afternoon at the opening reception of Pulp in the Lonsdale Gallery
The New York Times thinks that distractions provided by the computer are keeping people from working. The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention
Computers, of course, are part of a big conspiracy against humanity to keep people from producing anything. But is getting distracted a problem?
My job brings with it that I get distracted all the time. Think you can spend an hour to solve one person's problem? Surprise! there's the next person demanding attention. The problem we're facing is not how avoid distractions, but how to deal with them.
Email is no problem. I read several hundred email messages every day, but I can do that very quickly. It doesn't take me more than an hour to read a day's worth of emails. I've customized my email client to reformat incoming email messages so that I can read them faster, and with a few hotkeys to tag them I can easily build a nicely organized list of things I need to do. My spam filters work, so no time gets wasted on that either. I mean, who -reads- spam, anyway?
There's some work that comes though web forums and CRM systems, but these stay in the background, so they're not really a problem either.
But the phone is almost as bad as real people. If you have someone on the phone, or at your desk, you can't tell the other party to hang up and call back a few minutes later, or just go away, and come back when you're ready to talk to them. But that is exactly the luxury that computer based communication provides, the time between receiving a message a responding that e-mail allows you is crucial, not just for thinking about a solution, but for getting organized, so that the message doesn't become a distraction, but becomes part of the flow instead.
As for the other distractions that the internet offers, there is a very simple cure: just imagine that someone is checking your browser cache. Someone probably is.
Great bedtime reading
Bookpool: Exclusive Excerpt from Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming
Today, I heard an man with Indian roots say:
"Canada is a great country. I can finally have an intelligent conversation with Pakistani. They're all PhDs".
According the the Toronto Star Immigrants are better trained, but worse off than their canadian counterparts.