Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud “a great deal of Shakespeare, several Marlowe speeches, most of Keats’s Odes” as well as “the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge”. This would be related with charming if showy modesty. The immense repertoire had a frivolous side. Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in the Peloponnese, in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani.
In 2001 three young people from Moscow – Arkady Shlykov, student of Moscow theological seminary, Alexander Shumskih, IT manager of Ferrero company (Russia), and Mikhail Skuridin, an employee of Moscow icon-painting workshop, decided to build a new temple in Kolodozero, in the place of the one that burnt down. The archbishop blessed the construction that began in June 2002. In the course of construction the congregation started growing, too. Other people from Moscow and Saint Petersburg started joining it. (via NoGa-Art / Photostories / Kostantin Dyachkov / Regardless Of Circumstances and Common Sense…)
In short, Blackboard sucks. Blackboard supporters might claim that some, or even most, of the criticisms leveled above are false, or that they apply equally to other web software. Maybe. And I certainly don’t mean to downplay the difficulty of creating or assembling a suite of software that does well what Blackboard does poorly. But the argument against spending student money on something like Blackboard goes beyond a simple tally of weaknesses and strengths. As Jim Groom and others have argued for years, shelling out for Blackboard means sending money to a big company with no vested interest in the purposes of the institution, which in the case of CUNY is nothing less than the stewardship of New York City’s future, while the alternative is to divert money away from software licenses and into people who will actually support an environment of learning on our campuses. Frankly, even if Blackboard were a perfect piece of software, and even if its licensing and hosting fees were half of what it costs to hire full-time instructional technologists, programmers, and the like to support local instances of free software; even if these things were true, Blackboard would still be the wrong choice, because it perverts the goals of the university by putting tools and corporations before people. The fact that Blackboard is so expensive and so shitty just makes the case against it that much stronger.
Via either @mattthomas or @betajames on Twitter.
David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. “Well, they’re informants,” Assange replied. “So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange’s disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose “informants” niggled in his mind.
This would be a much stronger critique of Assange if Cohen cut out all the ad hominem crap. That Assange reads blog posts about himself is irrelevant.
Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I found him in the Gemeindeamt, where he filled out a slip of paper. I presented it at the inn: it entitled me to supper and a mug of beer, a bed for the night and bread and a bowl of coffee in the morning; all on the parish. It seems amazing to me now, but so it was, and there was no kind of slur attached to it; nothing, ever, but a friendly welcome. I wonder how many times I took advantage of this generous and, apparently, very old custom? It prevailed all through Germany and Austria, a survival perhaps, of some ancient charity to wandering students and pilgrims, extended now to all poor travellers.
I read this last night, and then went to bed and dreamed that several people I know only from Twitter showed up at my house. We were having a wonderful impromptu party, when I suddenly realized that they were expecting me to put them up for the night. In the dream I took it for granted that if you follow someone on Twitter you are obliged to give them hospitality whenever they need it; my only concern was where to put them all, because I didn’t have nearly enough beds to accommodate the visitors.
When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He did well in boarding school and was admitted to Harvard, but when he got to college, he felt lost, out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s. After two years at Harvard, Randolph left for a year to work in a low-paying manual job, as a carpenter’s helper, trying to find himself. After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has were not built in his years at Harvard or at the boarding schools he attended; they came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net. And it is precisely those kinds of experiences that he worries that his students aren’t having.
Note that the NYT’s exemplary “struggling young person” is someone who just felt uncomfortable at Harvard and tried to find himself by studying opera in Italy. Hard to believe that there really are people in our country who have it so rough… .
This story got me thinking about covers I’ve seen for Lord of the Flies.
You don’t need a sketchbook to make a sketchbook. Any piece of paper that you can play around with will do. Any kind of pen will work. If you’re together enough to put them all in the same box then you will have a sketch book and you can find them later. But if they are lost do not worry. They will manage to keep rolling with or without you.
Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company.
I think this way of thinking about products is a big part of Apple’s secret sauce, and one of the most important things I observed working there. Apple is so good at having a “story” in mind for its products, both in the near term (e.g. “Here are the major “tentpole” marketing features for the next release…”) and the far term (e.g. “Building feature or API X will pave the way for feature Z in the next release.”). This is why Apple is so uncannily good at acting upon new opportunities in adjacent markets (when you really think about it, you can draw a direct line from CD burners in Macs to iTunes to the iPod to the iPhone)—they’re really adept at using every release not only to incrementally improve and market the product, but also to move an entire platform forward just a bit at a time.
In my experience, this is way of thinking that startups have a difficult time with. Some of it may have to do with the nature of web products, which, unlike most of Apple’s products, are updated continuously and not conceived in terms of old-fashioned “releases.” Some of it may also have to do with the somewhat chaotic organizational and market dynamics of a typical startup, which can make long term planning hard. Still, I think most startups could learn a lot from the way Apple always has both a short term and a long term story in mind for its products.
(via buzz)
tedr:laughingsquid:The Relative Sizes of the World’s Largest Photo Librariestedr: I wonder how smugmug, imageshack/yfrog, and twitpic compare?wow.