pdxgene

I go back to "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin once or twice a decade. It has an uncanny combination of page-turner pace and sheer stop-and-savor-it writing beauty that makes it a sheer joy every time.

Swimming laps most mornings. I never had the discipline to learn to swim properly when I was younger, and have always been an avid runner and cycler. Adding swimming into the mix has balanced out my conditioning, and the meditative state you can achieve while in the zone is great for creative problem solving. Highly recommended.

I moved across the US a year ago, and moving with a single suitcase (until the moving truck arrived, months later) re-taught me how little I need in order to live comfortably.

Since then, I've been aggressively paring back my "material footprint", and every thing I shed makes me feel a little lighter.

I severely cut back on notifications -- down to just a few apps (SMS/messaging, home security, calendar), and it's had a remarkable impact on my phone use.

The other major change I made was to disable badge notifications on all apps. No more little red number telling me how many unread emails I have, etc. This has had a much greater positive impact than I had thought it would -- I don't find myself compulsively drawn into apps by the lure of "new stuff", and have cut down on my screen time considerably.

How would neighboring states' follow-on legalization diminish tax returns over time? Washington has posted $280 million in tax revenues so far, and Oregon $85 million. Neither seems to threaten the other -- demand is pretty much ubiquitous.

Say what you want about Uber, but I've never had them refuse to take me to Brooklyn...

That's so 2013...

I do this with business books -- turn on assistive screen reading on my iPhone's Kindle app, and tweak the speaking speed to as fast as I can reasonably understand.

But I'd never do it with a Mark Helprin novel, or anything with sentences so beautiful you want to slow down and read them again.

I imagine I'd feel the same way about video content -- I can't imagine slowing down anything but the most garden-variety-informational videos.

My experience of first reading these books as a disaffected, ornery, insecure teen in late-1980s America seems to support your impression.

Whatever you do, don't try to start a lemonade-sharing service...

"Please don't learn to code" keeps echoing in my head as "Please don't learn to read and write music".

There's intrinsic value in understanding the technology on which our life now fundamentally depends, as well as value in the intellectual rigor and skill development that "learning to code" requires.

I worry that the ultimate end of the "don't learn to code" path looks likely something like Economics -- a sadly esoteric subject on which those ignorant of it are nonetheless dependent, to their detriment.

Thanks for this. Brings back wonderful memories of the biomechanics courses I took way back in college.

I recall with glee the shock of recognition that all creatures live in moving fluids -- and our experiences are delineated merely by relative sizes and viscosities.

Maybe it's nerdy to say so, but it was definitely one of the top ten epiphanies of my life, and definitely helped me feel more connected to the natural world.

I remember reading this in 1997, about a year after I switched from the awful Mac Performa that I had used in college and dragged out west with me to the first in a series of increasingly uninspiring beige WinTel boxes. It would be nine years before I switched back.

It's really easy to engage in hindsight-powered analysis. This article seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

My headshot from age 35? 27. My recent headshot (I'm 40): 42. A photo I took just now with PhotoBooth? 29.

Seems like a slot machine...

I agree with the skeptical comments leveled here, and am certainly cognizant of the (mostly necessary) regulatory overhead that goes along with the creation of medical devices.

Everything is on a spectrum, though, and there are plenty of opportunities for genuine disruption. The e-nable project that's putting prosthetic hands within financial reach (ugh, sorry, no pun intended) by bringing costs down via 3D-print-at-home is pretty impressive.

From a long-view-technology perspective, I can foresee a day when the "replication room" -- that makes parts and supplies on demand using additive manufacturing -- is as common to hospitals as the copy room. That would certainly bring down costs.

Original statement from Google: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/04/announcing-pa...

The label "no user-serviceable parts inside" springs to mind...

I'm in violent agreement with you here -- the notion of a smart home platform, for example, that allows me to customize it via an API, or, if I choose, by tinkering with its basic software, sounds awesome to me.

But I'm a programmer, and a tinkerer.

In order for this to be a viable mainstream reality, some enterprising company will need to establish a platform or system of consumer-grade components that bridges the gap between "general population computer literacy" and "ability to tweak one's electronic things".

In reality, that may be (for now) an unbridgeable gap. Maybe the only route to digital freedom is deeper digital literacy on the part of the average consumer.

But one thing is for sure -- as long as laws like the DMCA are in place, the deck is stacked against evolution towards DIY utopia.

+1. Yes, please.

Not intending to be argumentative -- merely to present a countervailing perspective:

When I was 13, I was incredibly fortunate to land an internship at Marvel Comics in NY. For a teenage boy obsessed with the X-Men, this was like dying and going to heaven. I didn't even care that I was given menial tasks and paid entirely in comic books. I got to meet John Byrne, and that was enough.

The OP sounds like someone with enough interest in programming that an internship would be at least as much about "fun" as it is about "professional development".

I say, if it sounds like fun, go for it. If nothing else, it'll be an opportunity to meet software professionals with as much genuine interest in programming as you have, as well as some who are in the industry for other reasons. Both will be instructive.

Those cuts are typically referred to as "rebates", and yes, they're standard operating procedure.

There's an interesting history behind how this practice got started, that's a good lesson in how multi-party markets work. Back in the good old days, touring acts typically got a modest percentage of gross ticket sales for a given concert, leaving enough for the promoter and venue to cover costs and make a profit.

At some point (the 80s, maybe?), artist percentages started creeping up closer to 100% (in one ridiculous example, Jimmy Buffet got "105% of gross ticket receipts"), so venues and promoters had to make money on something other than tickets.

Since "ticketing fees" weren't calculated into the gross ticket receipts of which a percentage were due to the artist, they were a green field for exploitation and creative deal-making, like the "promoter rebates" referenced above.

In many cases (almost all venues above a certain size), venues sign exclusive ticketing company contracts that come with up-front bonuses or advances on fee rebates, which make ticketing companies kind of like cash machines (or payday loan vendors?) for venues.

The general public perception of "ticketmaster is evil" is, as with most things when you look beneath the surface, much more complicated than it appears.

Scalping itself is a related but different issue that ticketing companies and venues could certainly limit or end if they had the will, but the system works just fine for them, so there's really not much incentive to change.

[sources: various anecdotes from music industry veterans who will likely deny a lot of the above if pressed ;-]

"Argue for your limitations, and they're yours."

+1 for telecaster "shape" -- I grew up on Strats, but play a thin line Tele most of the time now. I concur with your assessment of being able to "feel" where it is.

In the course of working on a mobile app project, I had the opportunity to try out two of Line6's recent modeling input devices:

http://line6.com/mobilein/ http://line6.com/sonicport-audio-interface/

The opportunity to spin through a fairly complete history of electric guitar amps and effects was compelling, but nowhere near as compelling as the simple, reliable combination of a '72 Twin Reverb, RAT, and Tube Screamer. Sometimes, a multiplicity of choices can be paralyzing.

Of course, analog or digital, what's most important is the input :-)

Just came in to say, Golden gave this talk at our conference last fall, and it was very well received. You can watch it here if you like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0AdsVReXi8

The oddest thing about this article is that the author seems to think that the JOBS act is to blame for Kickstarter backers being fleeced, which is just weird.

Unless I'm missing something, JOBS doesn't have anything to say about non-equity crowdfunding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups...

Re: sponsors on stage -- is this a relatively new rule? Wieden+Kennedy sponsored TEDxPortland 2011, and John Jay, their Executive Creative Director, was one of the featured speakers.

Thousands of employees, slim (if any) margins... sounds a bit like Kozmo.com...

About 9 out of 10 workdays, my commute is on a 2010 steel-frame Kona Honky Tonk bicycle.

But every tenth workday or so, and a lot of weekends, I roll the 1990 Carrera 4 cabriolet out of the garage, which totally makes up for not being on a bike ;-)

The last time I was in NY, I emerged from a hotel in midtown, and asked the next cab waiting in line outside the hotel to take me to SoHo. He just shook his head and sat there. I asked the hotel cab-wrangler if the cab was working, and he just shook his head as well. I walked a block and got a cab on Broadway instead.

Only thing I can figure is that he was holding out for an airport fare. Give that it was raining pretty hard, this was kind of annoying.