From Matt Gemmell:
I’m also letting go of second chances. One strike and you’re out. We all make conscious choices, all the time, regarding what to expose ourselves to – and I think we should be doing it for people too. In fact, we already do: we pick our friends, and our partners. We choose who to talk to, or not. I think it’s alright to also approach the problem from the other end, and exclude those who make life a bit less enjoyable.
Derek Lowe on open office designs:
Here’s a useful rule: whenever someone tries to tell you that you don’t understand about this new generation, because they’re so totally different, which makes them act so totally differently than anyone older - you’re being sold something. Marketers absolutely love to pretend that this is how the world works, as do many varieties of consultant, because it gives them a chance to sell their hot, happening expertise that you don’t have, you see, because you’re behind the times.
IFTTT introduced a new set of Slack actions today. Right now it looks like there are no Slack triggers but there are a lot of ideas for automatic posts to Slack channels based on things like location or calendar events. I’d love to see Slack triggers added to do things like record shared URLs or archive uploaded files. But this is a nice start.
From Randal Olson:
Chess games have in fact steadily become longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. Furthermore, if the current trend holds, chess games will only keep getting longer as time goes on.
This is a pretty interesting use of historic data on chess matches.
Great story by Brent Simmons:
How much of this creative period was due to Frontier itself and how much to Dave?
I think it works like this: Dave was creative and productive, and he had built for himself an environment where he could move very quickly and try lots of things. Each layer built on top of other layers, and he was able to work at a very high level.
Patrick describes a relatively simple way to take notes about an audiobook while walking around. But I really like this sentiment:
I know this so-called workflow isn’t for everyone. Serious/professional readers might even shake their head in disbelief. My girlfriend constantly snickers when I tell her that I’ve finished another book, but some people tend to judge and you might even get a little hate. All I can say is, that in my book it doesn’t matter how you engage with literature, as long as you do it.
From Moving Electrons comes a nice tip about executing remote commands over SSH from Pythonista. It’s simple in design:
Connects to the server. Executes the command passed as an argument to the script in Pythonista in the remote server (more info in the following section). Once the command is run, it disconnects from the server. Of course, this requires a remotely accessible Mac. I have some similar things I do with my hosts at Webfaction.
I’m a project manager (among other things). I really dislike most of the PM malarkey that’s sold inside of three ring binders. A lot of what allows me to stay employed as a PM feels like common sense. But the funny thing about common sense is that sometimes it’s not so common.
I rather enjoyed this series about project management. There are solid points and they are summarized succinctly. It has good advice for Project Managers, which is pretty much anyone doing anything for more than 5 minutes.
Derek Lowe points our attention to a Financial Times article about Pfizer and AstraZeneca:
The prevailing wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon world over the past 35 years has been that boards should simply respond to what they perceive their shareholders’ wishes to be. But this is incorrect.
Directors have wider responsibilities on which they should reflect before making any recommendation about a company’s future. Legally, their duties under the Companies Act are not simply to snap to attention when shareholders whistle.
From the Graham Cluley blog:
In one short and entirely innocently designed ad campaign alone, we found that about 5 per cent of hits represented full links to shared files, half of which required no password to download. This amounted to over 300 documents from a small campaign, including several tax returns, a mortgage application, bank information and personal photos. In one case, corporate information including a business plan was uncovered.
