the shoes... the SHOES!

The rap star, 50 Cent, is a lot richer this week, thanks to Twitter. Indeed, he is almost $10m better off just because he sent out a single Tweet. All he did was say that a company in which he has a substantial share investment was worth buying stock in. Over 9m shares were traded in the firm within the next 24 hours. One Tweet, one massive rise in the value of a business from 4 cents a share to a closing price of 39 cents a share. Not bad for less than 140 characters.

The Stages Of Playtesting Acceptance

"When you first encounter using outside playtesters, you go through these stages," Faliszek explained. "They're stages of denial. The first time you go, you see the guy not looking at what you want him to look at, and he's not going to the right place. You're like, 'You're an idiot. We got idiots for playtesters. Who is this, somebody's friend? Let's get somebody who knows how to play games.'"

"Then the second group comes through," he continued, "and you're still saying, 'Alright. Alright. You're stupid. What the hell? Who are these people?' Then by the third or fourth time, all of a sudden you're realizing, 'I'm an idiot. This is pretty obvious this doesn't work. It's not their fault, it's our fault.'"

just bookmarkin' it

(via @jboogie)

5. Clean-up prospects are dismal

The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the "top kill" method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well. 

But here's the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let's be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.

Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.

(emphasis mine)

1. What will I learn this week? Identify what you need to learn, want to learn and how you will learn it. Growth and development rarely happen accidentally.
2. What relationship will I improve? What relationship needs repair or nurture? Think in terms of both who and how.
3. What problem will I address or avoid? Look for a problem that is looming on your horizon and head it off.
4. What opportunity will I seize? Too often we’re fixated on our problems and miss our opportunities. Look for opportunities in the midst of challenges, struggles and difficulties; they’re out there.
5. How will I increase my value? Think in terms of what you can do to increase your value to your employer, your customer, to your family. Providing more value than you consume makes you a producer.

Give up Twitter if you are Creative
Creative people are generally poor at time management. Studies show that the people who are good at managing time tend to be less creative than people who are pretty rubbish at time management. Twitter can eat into your plans easily. As you get hooked into a conversation, as you discover interesting things to read and as you find more fascinating people to Follow, you can spend hours and hours just Twittering away. If you are not a creative type you will be able to more easily manage these kinds of distraction which Twitter provides. But if you are a creative individual, there's a chance you'll while away the hours and not get any work done..!

A FASCINATING lecture by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and fiction writer, on how internet is going a long way in helping avert the collapse of our own civilization.

It isn't explicitly said, but I'd venture his response to Miroslav Radman's diagnosis that the brain isn't ready for the information pollution it's faced with today (anyone have this article in English?), would be that the brain will need to figure this out. In this lecture, it's kind of an understated problem, with a focus on the solutions that this very information proliferation represents. It made me think "for humans to remain, we can't remain human" but that's what evolution is.

It's a little over an hour and a half, but well worth the time, and an easy listen as he's a really captivating speaker.

Edit: some trouble with embedded video, check it out at fora.tv directly: 

http://fora.tv/2010/04/01/Six_Easy_Steps_to_Avert_the_Collapse_of_Civilization

 

via fora.tv

 

Google Docs introduces Drawings and this guy built shareable stencils for wireframing. He tauts the kit as better than Visio or Omnigraffle, but really only for all the reasons you'd choose Google Docs over other non-shareable solutions.

He makes a great point about managing your customers' expectations by leveraging familiar "wireframing" model used in construction --

As you may have experienced, some customers simply don’t understand wireframes. The blue color gives that well-known blueprint feel, and shouldn’t prompt questions like “I like it, doesn’t it need a splash of colour?”

Najbolji online recept za gibos. Detaljno i najbitnije, sa rezonovanjem, pa se lako adaptira po sopstvenom ukusu.

Autor: Bane

Pošto se gibanica često jede, neka bude dobra i originalna. 
Mera je za 1 paket od 500 g kupovnih kora, srednjih, onih što se mogu naći po samoposlugama. Ako ste u belom svetu verovatno mogu da se nađu u prodavnicama koje imaju grčku robu, Grci to na engleskom zovu Phyllo pastry. 

Beli sir može biti svaki seljački (za beli svet pomešajte cottage + feta, jer je feta prejak).

Da se razumemo, ako je sir punomasni masnoće 45% istopiće se, a ako je nemasni masnoće 25% i manje ostaće u komadićima, pa taktizirajte.

 

In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis, Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks, to come up with a metric for creating "the optimum TEDTalk" based on user ratings. How do you rate it? "Jaw-dropping"? "Unconvincing"? Or just plain "Funny"?

It could be argued that discourse surrounding software development methodologies has evolved in recent years from a focus on technology and pure computer science subjects to issues of values, meaning and communication. This shift in the way software development is perceived in the professional world could be further explored through a Foucauldian analysis of the discourses surrounding this particular “discursive practice” (Horton-Salway, 2001).

...

In 1968, it was brought to consideration that a large amount of software projects where failing, resulting in what was deemed a ‘software crisis’ (Naur and Randell, 1968). The issues involved in software development became more and more problematised as new software development methodologies started to appear, as the software development field continued to evolve and professionally diversify. In the same time, multidisciplinary approaches such as human-computer interaction, mixing psychology and computer science, started to gain academic momentum. As the need to consider the interactions between users and the system and of properly eliciting their requirements started to take the central stage, new development methodologies such as agile and user-centric iterative development approaches where designed and applied with success to a growing number of software projects.

My two loves meet --