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January 06, 2006
Poop
I need to have my wife take a look at the article on diapers over on Parent Hacks. The author here elucidates the essence of the diaper business pretty well. Poop bags? Classic. Also see the comments for the discussion of, er, "blowouts". It is hilarious how important the topic of poop becomes after you have a child. Beforehand it is quite disgusting and I recall boldly proclaiming, "I'll never talk about that!". After the baby (Hannah in our case) comes however, the topic is suddenly unavoidable and interesting (at least at first, then it goes back to being disgusting).
Posted by harris at 07:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Cringely on Google
The weekly pulpit articles by Robert X. Cringely of PBS are typically interesting if you care about the blurring of the media and technology industries. His latest piece speculating on Google taking over TV advertising is classic. Not quite as good as his prediction about Google developing portable data centers that would house terabytes of data and massive processing power in the equivalent of a large dumpster (SWEET!), but still very good. His predictions are always out near the edge, but still realistic enough to incite credulity.
Posted by harris at 07:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Procrastination is Bad. Period.
Paul Graham seems to be an intelligent person and I generally enjoy and benefit from his thinking. Nonetheless his latest treaty should be entitled "Effective Time Management", not "Good and Bad Procrasination". Why? Because procrastination inherently implies carelessness, laziness, and needless delay. The piece has merit for its discussion of prioritization, but the concept of positive procrastination is a classic oxymoron.
Why do I care? Well... ultimately I don't. However sometimes it feels like otherwise smart people try a little too hard to be novel and new so that they actually blur reality. There is no such thing as "Type C procrastination" ... that is simply being a good prioritizer. No sane person would call rushing your dying grandmother to the hospital instead of studying for an exam "procrastination"; likewise, the loaf who is chomping on potato chips while playing X-box instead of studying is guilty as charged. There is no need to refactor to English language in this case.
Thank for the article on Time Management Paul! Let me know if you'd like me to review your next essay before it is published! :-)
Posted by harris at 06:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Price of a Pixel
If you haven't seen "The Million Dollar Homepage" yet be sure to check it out. It is classic. $1/pixel of advertising with a minimum of 100 pixels. It has spawned a myriad of copy-cat sites trying to cash in on this idea, but none will likely ever come close to $1M without some kind of innovation. What is really interesting is that the market value of these pixels has now sky rocketed far beyond $1/pixel. The current market value on Friday is ~ $152/pixel. SWEET! I think Alex should have tuition and books covered.
Posted by harris at 06:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack