This was adjacent to the Dali quote item I just posted in my aggregator. Is it a job prerequisite that school administrators have no sense of humor?
High school, sex, the student press, and CNN. A longtime close friend, Mike Mahoney (we were both editors at the Sacramento Bee), penned an opinion piece in today’s Bee. Mike is now a high school English teacher and student paper adviser. Turns out Mike’s paper was at the… [JD’s New Media Musings]
It does make you wonder whether those most eager to wrap protections around ideas lear that they don’t have enough ideas. Reminds me of Linus Pauling’s observation that “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
Dali quote for the open copyright folks.
In London, i went to the Dali exhibit. At the entrance, they had hundreds of “wacky” quotes by Dali about sex, his philosophy (and his belief that philosophy doesn’t exist), art and everything you could imagine. I came across one that made me immediately think of a few of the copyright crusaders that i know, so i thought i’d share:
Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don’t have to actually use them myself.
It’s from an interview where he’s being asked about his art, copies and the public.
If you’re willing to install the preview service pack for OneNote, you can do this now. I’ve been running the preview SP1 for a week or so now with no problems, so I’ll be pusihing this higher on the priority list.
Say what you will about Winer, but from this user’s perspective he shows deep wisdom on the long term competitive value of supporting a small number of formats that are simple and that work. It’s so easy to fall into the lazy trap of trying to build your strategy on creating proprietary formats and trying to “lock in” your customers. If you want to understand why that’s a dumb idea, track down and watch the recent Michael Porter interview on Charlie Rose. Then think about what Porter is saying.
Wow, this is cool. The next release of Microsoft’s OneNote will import OPML outlines. Very good. Of course it should export them too. The old Microsoft would never have done this, in fact there’s an old Microsoft guy running around the syndication community, he’s one of the biggest advocates of reinventing everything just for the sake of revinvention. It takes a lot for a big company like Microsoft to adopt a format developed outside, esp one not developed at another BigCo. Thanks for setting a great example. Google, please pay attention to this. You lose nothing by keeping the number of formats small, by building on other people’s work instead of undermining it, by not being evil. You already knew that, at the top, but perhaps some of the new guys don’t understand what it means. It’s in the company prospectus. So I hope you won’t mind if we hold you to a higher standard. I assume that’s why it’s there. [Scripting News]
More good stuff on connecting OneNote and other outlining tools and concepts.
Filling the outliner gap on Windows.
I was recently reminded of the gap on the Windows platform in really good outlining tools. I am a long-time OmniOutliner user on my Mac, and haven t really found a good, cheap, lightweight tool for managing structured outlines on Windows. According to this thread on Outliners.com, the leading candidates are probably Inspiration and NoteMap. NoteMap knows about hoisting, and Inspiration allows for some unstructured brainstorming in addition to pure outlining. But it s not apparent that either has one of the elegant simple features I would need: the ability to convert an outline into a structured to-do list (which is desperately needed for our house projects).
Enter OneNote. I ve had this app installed since I got Office 2003 but hadn t really played with it until the last few days. It uses a notebook metaphor, automatically saves notes, allows for placement of multiple text and graphics blocks on the page, and has some really good outline features, including quick and intuitive numbering mechanisms and the ability to set to-do checkboxes. No hoisting and no ability to create columns on outline items, but otherwise pretty nice.
Miscellaneous links: Andrew May has a draft MSDN article about new import features in OneNote 1.1; Josh Allen wrote an OPML importer that works with the preview of OneNote 1.1; Omar Shahine writes an RSS to OneNote PowerToy that basically allows you to easily copy items from RSS feeds to an outline for later reading.
This is going to get interesting quickly. Not sure how quickly I can make time to play with this in the next week, but I will get to it.
Very cool, the next version of OneNote will support importing OPML outlines.
Marjolein continues to do great work with her new ActiveWords blog, AWesome. She’s started a webring for those of us who are fans of that productivity tool.
Two-fold Boost. The WebRing and my self-esteem got a boost today. Three experienced ActiveWords users were added to the WebRing. Please take the time to join too. Soliciting and organizing all this does take quite a bit of my time (my cute… [AWesome]
Added to my TIVO to do list for Monday night. A great opportunity to see a first-rate thinker at work.
Way back when I was getting my MBA, Porter’s strategy course was the second year elective of choice. This was when Competitive Strategy was being written. Those of us fortunate enough to get into the class got to read it a chapter at a time. I was also fortunate enough to do a field study with a team of fellow second years under his supervision.
I learned a ton during those two courses. My fundamental reservation about Porter’s approach to strategy is that it is too focused on static equilibrium and doesn’t pay enough attention to technology innovation. Mix in Clay Christensen’s work on innovation however, and you have a powerful set of lenses to apply.
Michael Porter on Charlie Rose. Michael Porter on Charlie Rose — Missed it Friday night, but Harvard Professor and strategic management thinker and author Michael Porter was apparently a full-hour guest on Charlie Rose on PBS. By Porter:
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Amalyzing Industries and Competitors
Competitive Advantage : Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Michael Porter on CompetitionFortunately, in New York, the show is repeated the next day (Monday May 3 in this case) at 1:30 PM. I’m setting my DVR for it. You might want to check your “local listings.” [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
“Crazy old men are essential to society. Otherwise young men have no suitable models.”
– James Broughton quoted by Chris Corrigan, via Andy Borrows
[Seb’s Open Research]
Differentiating between urgent and important is the trick though isn’t it? After the fact, it may be easy but in the moment it can be devilishly hard, especially in a world that treasures action over reflection.
Perhaps one heuristic would be to simply ignore any decision (excepting immediate threat to life and limb) that claimed a need to be made immediately.
If It’s Urgent, Ignore It. If It’s Urgent, Ignore It — From Seth Godin at Fast Comany…
“Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.
“A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. Too often, we use the urgent as an excuse for shoddy work or sloppy decision making. […] Urgent is not an excuse. In fact, urgent is often an indictment–a sure sign that you’ve been putting off the important stuff until it mushrooms out of control.”
Obvious, but worth repeating from time to time. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
An article ran yesterday in the Times about Asperger’s syndrome, what some describe as a form of high-functioning autism. Wired magazine ran a similar piece a few years back under the title, The Geek Syndrome. It makes a case that the social “blindness” that characterizes many of us in technical professions may have a neurological basis.
I could pick out a number of incidents in my past to make my own case for suffering from Asperger’s. One that comes to mind is an early programming job, where I turned into the team debugging specialist. Other team members would leave me candy and core dumps to debug. I finally tracked down one especially tough bug and grabbed the phone to call Glenn, my boss, and tell him the good news. Glen was very kind. He listened to my excited description of my detective process before he gently explained that he and his wife generally thought that 2 o’clock in the morning was a more appropriate time for sleeping than listening to status updates from young programmers.
There is an interesting side dimension to this condition that nicely illustrates one of the key differences between tacit and explicit knowledge. If you do tend to be blind to social cues that most people pick up naturally, one compensating strategy is to develop a series of explicit rules for operating in social situations. You train yourself to pay attention consciously to the clues that most people have forgotten that they use. On the plus side, you develop observational skills you can take advantage of. On the down side, you have to work through the rules to decide how to behave. Your performance is slower and never as expert or fluid as those whose knowledge is tacit.
Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many. Thousands of adults who have never fit in socially are only now stumbling across a neurological explanation for their struggles. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Science][free registration required]