Category: Personal

Mensa wordplay courtesy of John Dvorak

Courtesy of John Dvorak's blog. Some very clever wordplay.

Although I’ve never seen this printed in the Washinton Post it’s
called the The Washington Post Mensa Invitational. And once again it
supposedly asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it
by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new
definition. The University of California Alumni Magazine does
somethihng similar to this every month, by the way, but has failed to
post it on the net for a decade. Maybe I’ll post a few of the better
ones myself.

Here are this year’s winners. None of them get through spellcheck.

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
little sign of breaking down in the near future.

4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11.
Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off these bad vibes,
right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious
bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

And the pick of the literature:

18. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

via B. Delaney

Lego Death Star II Coming Soon

Definitely want one of these. I also have been lusting after the Imperial Star Destroyer.

I did the Millenium Falcon a few years back, but it has been salvaged for parts by my younger son. I'm sure Han Solo would understand.

lego_death_star_1_.jpgIf
you're the type who'd give anything for a Red 5 to complete your Star
Wars Customizable Card Game collection, you might be interested in
Lego's Death Star II set from Episode VI. For $300, you'll finally have
a gigantic, incomplete base of operations for your wayward TIE fighters and bombers.
Of course, if you're anything like I was when I was nine, you'd have
your father spend six hours putting the whole set together just to
smash it into a wall in a tragic “accident” 10 minutes later. Lego says
it'll be available on September 30th this year.

Catalog Page [Lego via GadgetMadness]

Free Software Foundation, Grokster, Strategy, and the MPAA

All of the Copyfight coverage
of the Grokster case is worth following. This one reminds me the
differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough
to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School.

Several years later, I went back to Harvard to get my doctorate at the
Business School. As part of that process I took the basic course in
Industrial Economics from Richard Caves
who was Porter's thesis advisor and learned that Porter was possibly
even more clever than I already thought. Porter's fundamental insight
was to take the academic research field of Industrial Economics and
invert it. Industrial Economics studies the question of market
failures. What conditions lead to markets that don't conform to the
economic ideal of perfect competition? What conditions make monopolies
and oligopolies likely? The economists study this area with an eye
toward what public policies are useful and necessary to maintaining
competition in its close to ideal form.

Porter's genius was to see that an economists' market failure was a
CEO's wet dream. Competitive strategy could be viewed as an effort to
create market failures. This is what executives are trained to do and
rewarded for. Absent the appropriate policy checks and balances, you
end up with the world that the RIAA and MPAA hope to preserve.

Free Software Foundation tears MPAA a new one in Grokster brief. Cory Doctorow:
The Free Software Foundation and New Yorkers for Fair Use have filed a
brief in Grokster, EFF's Supreme Court case to establish the legality
of P2P networks. Eben Moglen, the author of the brief, really lights
into the RIAA and MPAA — he's a fantastic writer:

At the heart of Petitioners'
argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim–even if made to the
legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social
policy–that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their
business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other
concerns, the Internet should be illegal.

Petitioners' view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright
law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of
technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their
financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime.

Despite petitioners' apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a
familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders
have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force
innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.

Blogs as personal knowledge management tool

I'm in the midst of a similar project as a way to learn WordPress as a step toward converting McGee's Musings to WordPress in the not too distant future.

In the opening post, John Hesch quotes an observation from Paul Allen that struck home forcefully:

But like some other good habits I have developed over the years which
are hard to teach and harder yet to convince others to do (like taking
notes at every meeting you attend, and storing all your personal
knowledge in a searchable database), I have a very hard time convincing
anyone to start their own blog. Most think it would be a waste of time
[Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur]

Last weekend I did a seminar at DePaul University's School for New Learning on
the topic of personal knowledge management and I've been thinking on
this odd problem of technologies that need to be experienced to be
understood.

Blogs, wikis, and social software all suffer from this need to
spend time with them on their own terms. In organizational settings,
this makes them hard to introduce. Decision makers want a clear story
about investment and return (and they'd prefer hard numbers). I'm still
working out how to best formulate one. I suspect it will depend on the
unique characteristics of each organization.

The series continues with Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Creating My Personal Information Manager Using WordPress. Creating My Personal Information Manager Using WordPress:
A very interesting step by step series of instructions (in three parts
so far) of creating a PIM using WordPress. John runs Blogging Pro and
is by no means new to WordPress. [Weblog Tools Collection]

Hold on to your sense of humor

What worries me more than anything else about today's public environment is the loss of any sense
of humor by the powers that be. Granted, the powers that be are, by
definition, likely to be humor challenged. But humor and the ability to
laugh at oneself is essential to flexibility and adaptability. More
than anything else, isn't that what we're likely to be most in need of
in today's world?

Oh my, that's good.

The morons at the Tribune and three other papers banned this comic. Not only is it hysterical, it's accurate (and we all know it).

It's also now being viewed by my
10,000 daily readers. Please post the comic on your blog so your
readers can help counteract this obvious political censorship.

-Russ By weblog@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie Notebook]