Posts

Brilliant post dead link on how calendars are really for interruptions, not your real work.

most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

and a call to schedule work and work towards when you need interruptions (meetings, input etc.). And love his point as meetings as something that subtract from working time, and the calendar as something we treat as additive.

Great idea, but how to bake this into your culture, especially one as interruption driven as most modern offices (including my own)?

Tim Jackson has to be the only economist I know with an inspiring vision for economic activity and replacing our roles as novelty consumers with something lasting, world changing and ultimately better.

It’s a story about us - People. Being persuaded to: Spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions > that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.

Tim’s the author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet . (which, ironically, does not have a Kindle edition :-( ).

Absolutely awesome DIY Guardian article by noted pioneer and leader in the field of data journalism Paul Bradshaw from how to source, munge, and report the facts in a coherent form from oceans of available data. Facts are sacred.

I love this article and the Guardian, who does wicked work in this area, for being awesome enough to publish it and to show people how to do it themselves. Very, very cool.

Can’t remember who I need to give props to for pointing me at this, but absolutely love the work on this video and the movement. Serene and amazing. And the music matches it perfectly.

The American Book Review has compiled its take on the 100 best opening lines from novels .

Call me Ishmael

Anybody think they missed any? Or think some of them don’t deserve to be there?

I’m actually chuffed I’ve read more of these books than I haven’t.

via Neatorama .

Second absolutely phenomenal video from The Girl Effect project. Love the work these guys are doing and love their video and online style.

If you’ve never seen the first video they did explaining the idea behind the charity , do so. It’s simpler, but just as inspiring.

I think the only way Australia could be more fun for me is if it actually did still contain 7 foot tall kangaroos and giant wombats (and there’d be something able to take down the roving giant spiders).

NatGeo has the lowdown on the giants of days gone by . Some nice photos too .

via BoingBoing .

By Implication’s Wildfire recently won at the Game Design Category of the 2010 Imagine Cup. Designing a game inspired by volunteerism, they focus on the MDG goals as the basis of what you’re trying to accomplish in your city (and apparently inspired by Filipino volunteerism after the 2009 Typhoon). Sadly, Windows only (boo!), but the video of gameplay mechanics is giving me idears.

Love the mechanics of play, if hard to tell I’d like the game itself. We talked at work once about a game to teach people organizing and campaigning (part of our job helping build a more progressive Australia) and would kinda love applying these mechanics ideas to that. Hmmm…

National Geographic has an amazing 50 year retrospective on the incredible life’s work of Jane Goodall that she’s done with chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve. So impressive and inspiring. Seriously, I saw her speak in Toronto once (one of 8 guys in a huge “wimmins issues” conference) and I want her as my adopted GrandNan. She kicks ass and does fantastic work.

And keep in mind, she started Gombe at a time when women seriously didn’t do this sort of thing. Here’s to passion, courage, progress and pushing forward the boundaries of what people believed was possible.

Euthanasia is a contentious issue in Australia and currently illegal under law. Opinion is divided on it, though even the current federal Labor government has let the statutes stand. A move, for example, by the Northern Territories government here to legalize euthanasia a few years back was overridden by the federal Howard government of the time.

More troubling, Exit International recently tried to air this ad on Free TV but had it yanked at the last minute in what, in my opinion, is a serious violation of free speech.