Watch this video: Their boat gets bashed with two enormous waves, and somehow the crew manages to not only stay afloat but post the footage to YouTube.
The infrequent Volvo Ocean Race features unfamiliar athletes with skills you won’t understand on expensive boats in the middle of nowhere. You won’t be able to look away. Seriously.
Lessons In Winning Fans From The World’s Most Elite, Niche Sport
A nice article from our friends at Fast Company…the Southern Ocean is fierce.
Well put. I know I can never look away :)
{Things: [Learning, Making], Feeling: [Satisfied, Happy]}
Over the past few months I’ve been digging into programming and development - specifically the technologies and codebases I think will help me create on the web and provide me with a half decent foundation for development moving forward.
My learning is split across days, weeks, and months, but tonight things are starting to come together. Tonight I sat down for six hours and just ate through code lessons. Mostly CodeSchool, RubyGuides, and Vagrant. It’s not my job, I have hundreds of distractions that are easy to open, and it’s Friday night. No shortage of parties, movies, TV, and drinking to do. What keeps me coming back to code?
There is nothing quite like working hard on a new skill, and building something with it. Creating something that runs, breathes, and performs where earlier in the day was only grey matter, and knowing that with each lesson it’s sinking in, and you’ve begun to think differently and understand at a deeper level.
It is a huge rush - satisfying in a very deep way - to be able to do that. The most relaxed I’ve been lately is when I crack open a good Spotify playlist and sit down for a few hours to learn code, stand up servers, build things, and know that your ideas can now be made reality. Still a frail, rickety programmatic reality in my case, but I’ll get there. (feel free to debug my post title)
Education on the web has perhaps only just started to really engage its users but the amount of information and training available combined with new and engaging formats being developed (see CodeSchool, Codecademy, TreeHouse, Bloc, and Coursera) provides us all with an unprecedented opportunity (and I would argue, an imperative) to grow ourselves and be able to make our ideas.
It’s exciting as hell, and I can’t wait to see what we create.
Make anything into a touch surface with Touche’. Pretty innovative way to figure out how to do things, but one question kept coming up for me - what if somebody just has really big hands? Doesn’t that touch surface convey the same amount of current at each frequency? In any case, hats off to the Disney folks for this great innovation.
"Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization to hold knowledge and put it into productive use. In a world in which implementing the next generation of ideas will increasingly require pulling resources from different organizations, barriers to collaboration will be a crucial constraint limiting the development of firms. Agility, context, and a strong network are becoming the survival traits where assets, control, and power used to rule."
~ Joi (via brycedotvc)
Well put!
Stupidity Captured at 2500 Frames per Second (1080p). I literally started laughing out loud about halfway through. (via Kottke)
Meant to post this one as well but I’ll reblog 9-bits instead! Favorites include: flour and a candle, wine bottle and a microwave, and and water bed + pinhole.
Aaron Draplin of DDC Design company lays out his 50 axioms for getting it done and living your life. While I can’t say I agree with all of them (especially the list of bad people - web designers you’ll see why!) he lays out some good points and in a very entertaining style. Needless to say his philosophy about speaking as a brand-building opportunity worked because I just picked up my set of FieldNotes for the office. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did - couldn’t click away.
Nothing quite says “I don’t quite get it” like the color purple. It’s the color of royalty. And sweaters on cat people. Just don’t do it.
Note: Keep your headphones on - a good deal of profanity in this.
(via Kottke)
Unlimited Vacation and Productivity
Interesting article on companies that have moved away from accrued vacation to: “Take what you need.” I agree that’s how it should be managed - but it also requires you to do a couple of things as a company that will be better for you in the long term but tough for middle managers to execute in the short term.
1) Embue a sense of responsibility and ownership in every employee so they understand how best to use the vacation policy and make sure their work gets done.
2) Deal with those that insist on not dealing with their responsibilities and dismiss any employees that have proven they can’t handle the responsibility
There’s a glaring hole that’s not really mentioned here - this only makes companies more productive if your measure of productivity is not a result of hours worked. Factory assembly line jobs require hours on the line. Waitresses are not going to be more productive if they take vacation. What’s the equivalent in those industries (if one exists?)
Further, if you’re billing by the hour then where does this start to go South? What conclusions can we draw about the impact billing by the hour has on productivity in creative industries?
(via FastCompany via Summify)
About Me
A strategy consultant with a passion for IT, geopolitics, economics, and the open ocean. Awed by simple, innovative solutions to difficult problems. This represents my favorite slices of the web and serves as networked storage for my brain which is now entirely pointer-based. Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization with which I may or may not be allegedly associated.
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