Something About This Web Site
Found Elsewhere Online:
Angry bored octopus goes wilding - [Boing Boing] > Funniest headline + article I've seen in a long time: A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp.
The Wallet : What A Bear Market Might Teach Us [WSJ] > Two quotes: "The most important lesson that I learned, I believe, is that money is not wealth." & "Life may not always have been easy, but it certainly was good.". Personal and illuminating piece from WSJ writer Jason Zweig.
Election maps 2008 > Mark Newman (cousin) updates his cartogram election maps, insanely fast, to show this year's results.
Unboxed - Design Is More Than Packaging [NYTimes.com] > The only smart thing said or written about in this article: "It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That?s putting it too high on a pedestal," Mr. Kembel says. "Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful."
Another Frightening Show About the Economy [This American Life] > Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson - the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode?are back, and explaining in alarmingly simple terms why shit happened, and how it might have been prevented.
313 - A Handy Map of San Francisco Bay [Strange Maps] > This 'Handy Map of San Francisco' does not say why or whether it is absolutely necessary to paint your right thumbnail black to create the effect of San Francisco.
Making money twice - [37signals] > That's roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business.
World War II Codebreaking Remembered [The Encyclopedia Vulcanica] > And that most importantly, were it not for the works of invention and genius performed at Bletchley Park in contribution to defeating the Nazis, your entire way of life could be markedly different.
Big black holes [Jason kottke] > Put another way, if you had 99 duodecillion dollars, you could buy as many PlayStation 3s as you wanted. Blows your mind, right?
He has got the hustle [Channel 4] > Nice to see a very good mate of ours getting some love: "I'm doing Jude Law next week," Charlie says, before grabbing the phone to negotiate a rate for Hello! syndication. Mr Gray is very well-mannered...it's something he's learnt from hanging around the truly professional and successful of the world.
Important work can be done while daydreaming [The Boston Globe] > The ability to think abstractly that flourishes during daydreams also has important social benefits. Mostly, what we daydream about is each other, as the mind retrieves memories, contemplates "what if" scenarios, and thinks about how it should behave in the future.
Interview with David Simon [The Believer] > My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader.
How to read a movie - Roger Ebert's Journal [Sun Times] > In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom.
Why America is Fucked [You Tube] > Draplin answers the question of why America is fucked, graphically. A teaser for a new project from Draplin Industries.
Axel Peemoeller - Eureka Carpark Melbourne > Peemoeller designs an interesting way-finding system for a parking lot in Melbourne. "In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards."
I’m busy preparing an article for Design In Flight, interviewing (I hope) a bunch of interesting people around the globe, and preparing for an extraordinarily busy New Year. In the mean time, here’s a short post of something I found interesting today.
I’ve often wondered, both in my head and with fellow colleague Mr Zahnd, how much location has to do with an individual’s chance of success in their field. Large and successful design firms typically seem to be located in principle cities like, London, New York, Paris and even San Francisco. So it seems to suggest that if the bigest and the best are in these cities, is there any chance for more provincial and isolated entrepreneurs to succeed?
(I’m obviously discounting many other fields like Biotech, the Movie industry, Farming Research, Defense work or being a London Underground Train driver- for the sake of my thought here.)
Today, with the announcement that Joyent has acquired TextDrive I was reminded of this unanswered thread in my head and happy to see that business really doesn’t care where you might be, if business needs to get done. Joyent, a firm that I can’t quite figure out what it does, is based near me in San Anselmo, buys a San Diego based European-run business, TextDrive which is a hosting company. The inimitable John Gruber works for Joyent, though lives in Philidelphia, and the very tall Dean Allen moved from Vancouver to France and started TextDrive. Phili is, granted, a very large and well-known place on the map, but I’m not sure many people outside France (Quebec and Northern Africa) can pronounce where Allen lives today.
[update: I accidently came across what appears to be TextDrive’s designer who is based in Melborne, Australia - which just adds more dimension to the ‘all-over-the-map’ thing I’m going on about here.]
So living slightly outside of San Francisco, not far enough so as anyone would really notice; like I can look out of a number of windows and see what the weather is like in the city - most days; I consider it both brave and interesting that small companies like Joyent exist, even further outside of San Francisco than I am, and buy companies many miles away from them.
I think if you’re an individual, working from home, you can live pretty much anywhere you like. Whether you’re a writer like Robert R. Cringley who writes about Silicon Valley, while living in South Carolina, or a futurist, entrepreneur, philosopher and all-round mad-project-person, like Stewart Brand living here in Sausalito. Both people seem to tap into fairly well-oiled marketing engines for themselves, or if not, invent them.
But then, in doing my research for my article, I decided to uncover where in the world a weblog, of which I am a great fan of, comes from. As it turns out InfluxInsights is published several times a day, from right here in the usually-sunny Sausalito. I don’t know how many hits Influx gets, I imagine a lot, the quality of their posts are incredibly high even though brief - and frequent, including often on the weekend.
It doesn’t come as a suprise that places on the web like Coudal.com or Speak Up start from a large city like Chicago, even though they’re small, even tiny teams of people making them happen. It often seems like a large metropolis is a major ingredient in making small ideas into very large ones, so I always enjoy hearing or learning about companies like Joyent, or people like Mr Allen, because it reminds me that it shouldn’t and doesn’t really matter where you are, particularly if your work involves the internet and being wirelessly connected to the internet - you should really live where you would most like to. This of course doesn’t really relate to the geological scientists who specialize in underwater volcanoism - where you pretty much have to go to where the action is in that case. But hey, I don’t think they read this weblog.
Mentionables:
1. Design In Flight
2. IDEO
3. Zahnd Industries
4. Joyent lives here on the web.
5. TextDrive lives here on the web.
6. Robert Cringley writes about his move here.
7. Stewart Brand explains himself here.
8. Sausalito is here in Google’s world.
9. InfluxInsights
10. Coudal
11. Speak Up
12. John Gruber writes here.
13. Dean Allen used to write here.