Stewart Butterfield:

The title of the talk was somewhat tongue-in-cheek: ‘How to make a fortune in applied philosophy and other uses of your humanities degree’,” he quipped. “But the message was that entrepreneurism is a good avenue for exercising the kinds of things you learn with a humanities degree.”

Butterfield said the message he wanted to leave the students with was to be ambitious and open to all kinds of opportunities.

“I think if you have a good background in what it is to be human, an understanding of life, culture and society, it gives you a good perspective on starting a business, instead of an education purely in business,” he said. “You can always pick up how to read a balance sheet and how to figure out profit and loss, but it’s harder to pick up the other stuff on the fly.”

(via Sci-fi Hi-fi)

Thomas Friedman: ‘No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”’

Wow. The entire debt of Africa is only around US$350B.

Cringely explains the credit crunch:

It was SO easy. Fill out a few online forms, make some choices, and there I was, about to close that loan. But then I did an odd thing. I carefully read the papers I was about to sign (I’m one of THOSE people). And in that residential loan application, right on line something or other, was a number that didn’t make any sense to me at all. It was labeled “total household income” and was almost twice the pitiful amount I actually earn.

From where did that number come? It certainly never came from me.

Listening to yesterday’s MacBreak Weekly, I couldn’t agree more with Merlin Mann’s comments on the “Only to Me” Outlook feature missing from Mail.app (and everything else).

Below is my little hack to make Mail filterable on this. I’m an architect, and the current construction management practice is to send one line notes from your Blackberry of whatever’s currently on your mind and forget it, assuming that that makes the problem “dealt with” along with the other 60 one-liners from today. People will tend to cluster-bomb everyone on the project with the note, except when it’s genuinely important, when they for some reason send it only to one person. That person is, of course, conditioned to think that there’s no need to forward information on anymore, except in this one case. A week later someone notices that the game of information tennis stopped with that recipient (who is more often than not me).

The script sort of works… stick it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail and it will show up in Mail.app rules. I’ve got it setting the flag, marking it red and attaching a MailTags keyword. Suggestions welcome.

using terms from application "Mail"
  on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
    tell app "Mail"
      set myAddresses to {"my_address@domain.com","my_other_address@domain.com"}
      repeat with eachMessage in theMessages
        set theFlag to true
        set theCCs to cc recipients of eachMessage
        if (length of theCCs) > 0 then
          set theFlag to false -- TODO: fix false positive when I'm BCC'd
        end if
        repeat with eachRecipient in recipients of eachMessage
          if address of eachRecipient is not in myAddresses then
            set theFlag to false
          end if
        end repeat
        -- TODO fix for when people To: me but CC: themselves, which gives a false negative
        if theFlag is true then
            -- the message was in fact only to me
            set background color of eachMessage to red
            set flagged status of eachMessage to true
          using terms from application "MailTagsScriptingSupport"
            set keywords of eachMessage to {"me"}
          end using terms from
        else
          set background color of eachMessage to none
          set flagged status of eachMessage to false
        end if
      end repeat
    end tell
  end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

There’s a great list of how to get going with Git over at Ruby Inside. Git is going to be the model for my blue-sky 2d architectural drawing application with proper version control, working title “Cad Nauseum.” The big design issue will be figuring out how to make the flow of branching and merging visible enough to be understandable to non-command line folk.

We the Robots is just brilliant.

Well, that’s assuming you like humour that is less funny than deep in a shake-your-head, man-I-can’t-break-free-from-being-just-like-everyone-else-so-I-might-as-well-just-enjoy-life sort of tragically amusing way.

A woman walked into the aquatic centre the other day with a seeing-eye dog. The dog somehow managed to clunk himself into the turnstile on the way to the locker rooms.

“Oh, watch where you’re going,” the blind woman says.

Ok, we’ve got the virtual private server running (somewhere in the world), all blog code seems to be holding together, DNS entries are propagating and I’m back from the dark side of the MX record moon as far as email goes. Hopefully I can now shut off the server that’s been sitting in my living room for the last month or two and get some quiet.

So strange. I feel like I’ve seen the New Hampshire primaries already. Substitute Jimmy Smits for Barack Obama, Alan Alda for John McCain, Gary Cole for Hillary Clinton and you’re there. Bill and I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama makes McCain his Secretary of State.

Slate has an article today about how to game the LEED environmental accreditation for buildings.

It’s better to have a world with the LEED system than a world without, and we simply don’t have time to do nothing while we wait for a perfect system to come along (like Kyoto around 2003, before we ignored it until became ridiculously unachievable). I suppose it’s a valid point that the dominance of LEED might crowd out embryonic alternative rating systems.

One problem not mentioned in the article is that the original intent of the system was to be a voluntary performance “floor,” and that builders were encouraged to exceed it. By making LEED mandatory, it becomes psychologically more like the building code and becomes the hard ceiling to all performance, ie. the maximum that anyone will do. For some reason no one treats legislated measures as the absolute bare minimum that you can do without breaking the law.

Still, better a mandatory minimum than nothing…

Go see Juno if you want to see what it’s like when absolutely everyone in a project–from the screenwriter through to the marketers–is flying in formation.

I’ve decided to revive the blog for 2008.

2006 and 2007 were lean years as far as semi-deep thought and ideas were concerned. I’m chalking some part of it up to my low output of non-memorandumese written English lately.

Thus, you see before you two, count ‘em two, resolutions in action:

1. write more,
2. resist all urges to dick about with formatting until there’s something to format.

Good thing this “Stepping Stone” theme is giving me an improbably wonderful leg up in re-creating my old blog’s look.