Left Eye

2012-04-27T14:59:00.003-04:00

Just got back from Share 2012 Atlanta conference. Serious slacking in posts on my blog. I have to get back to regular posting... GTD reboot this weekend.

Need to pen blog posts on:
Share 2012 Takeaways
The InfoPath Not Taken
Braam and the Sleeping Dragon
Class in the Cloud -- New Opportunities for Social Learning

curried lentils and sweet potatoes | smitten kitchen

2012-01-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

Over the Holidays there were many experiments at vegetarian cooking in my kitchen. Some dishes came out better than others. One the best dishes I've made a few times because it's so easy, healthy and delishes is red lentil sweet potato curry with quinoa and spinach -- a recipe I adapted from an another blog's adaptation of a NY Time's Thanksgiving article.

curried lentils and sweet potatoes | smitten kitchen: After all of the holiday buzz this curried lentil and sweet potato dish landed exactly on that bridge, a lazy Sunday after a flurry of a holiday weekend. It’s from the New York Times Thanksgiving coverage two weeks ago, from an article by Melissa Clark about vegetarian dishes fitting the meal. But really, it had my name all over it, because the sweet potatoes were made spicy, not saccharine, and the Indian-spiced lentils and greens were exactly the health kick I needed after this weekend of heavy intake, with the ease of a one-pot meal.

I used about double the ginger, skipped the cilantro, lime and jalapeno and used a single chipotle pepper for smokiness instead. At the end of cooking I combined the curry with cooked spinach and served it over quinoa. The spice of the garam massala and ginger pairs incredibly with the natural sweetness of the potato, while the quinoa and spinach makes the dish feel light and refreshing.

So delicious and healthy!

Upgrading to iPhone 4S with Unlimited Data on AT&T

2011-10-06T15:03:00.001-04:00

I may be in the minority but I am ecstatic about the new iPhone 4S. The new features could be seen as modest tweaks (faster, more memory, better antenna) but I would argue that they add up to a much richer user experience. As an original iPhone 3G (OG) user, I can attest to the significance of similar "modest" upgrades in the iPhone 3GS. Faster isn't just faster, it's an entirely richer, less frustrating experience. So I've decided to get the new iPhone, but I had a big concern: would I be able to keep my unlimited data plan with AT&T? Would Sprint's unlimited data plan lure AT&T customers who can no longer get the data plan I have (which they have eliminated as of last June).

Until recently all we could do was speculate. Even as the official release nears, many details about data plans for each carrier are nebulous. I'm happy to share what I've learned and confirmed: If you currently have an iPhone with AT&T then you can upgrade your phone and keep your existing data plan. In other words, if you're grandfathered into unlimited data like I am, you do not have to give that up to get the iPhone 4S. Great news! I'm still curious to see what the competition offers. how much the Sprint data plans will cost. However unless they are significantly cheaper, I don't think I will leave AT&T.

Here's a snapshot of the confirmation I got from AT&T (which I later confirmed on the phone with customer service).

UPDATE: You can now pre-order the iPhone 4 from Sprint and see the plan options. Although unlimited data and text with 450 min talk time is only $69, the next screen shows a $10/month premium data charge is required for this device. So at about $80/month before taxes, I'd be paying roughly the same as I do now with the only difference being unlimited texting (I have the cheaper 200 txts for $15 from AT&T). Seems like saving a few dollars a month is not worth giving up faster speeds and my 5000 rollover minutes is like having unlimited voice anyway.

You Might Not Ever Have to Leave Facebook Again – but is That a Good Thing? ~ LockerGnome Social Media & Technology

2011-09-26T17:07:00.000-04:00

You Might Not Ever Have to Leave Facebook Again – but is That a Good Thing? ~ LockerGnome Social Media & Technology

No. But I do love Facebook Music, aka Spotify Social.

21 Day ‘No Complaining Challenge’ | Stop Arguing with Reality! : YOGANONYMOUS

2011-09-01T16:19:00.000-04:00

21 Day ‘No Complaining Challenge’ | Stop Arguing with Reality! : YOGANONYMOUS: Imagine getting upset every time the sun went down.

Beatles Remashed

2011-08-08T23:55:00.001-04:00

The Beatles - Baby You're Flying (Rhythm Scholar Mashup / Remix) by Rhythm Scholar

2D Rube Goldberg

2011-08-08T23:24:00.002-04:00

I am such a sucker for Rube Goldberg machines. This one is particularly creative/fun -- set inside a film studio.

You like to eat and have your feet rubbed?

2011-07-29T07:42:00.001-04:00

You like to eat? You like your feet rubbed? C'mon down to:

Via: 10 Hilariously-Bad Local Commercials - Oddee.com
"Not all commercials are made by Mad Men; some are made right in the windowless rooms of your local television station, where the budgets (and standards) can be rather low. Check out these 10 wild examples of local commercial production at its finest."

Video of the day: How much hipster can you pack into a Jazz?

2011-07-25T15:47:00.003-04:00

Funny video of the day:

There is No Work/Life Balance: Just Living the Life You Love

2011-07-25T15:45:00.000-04:00

There is No Work/Life Balance: Just Living the Life You Love

Great article.

Collaboration Lessons from Bees

2011-06-27T22:30:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Tonight I attended a screening of Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us? This astonishing documentary explores both the problems and solutions in restoring our delicate balance with nature. Bees are the ideal collaborators of life. Their importance to humans, plants, and our ecosystem goes beyond biology and genetics. It's evolutionary aesthetics. What's beautiful to bees is also beautiful to humans: sunflowers, roses, cherry blossoms, etc. Compare that, to say varieties of plants that are pollinated by flies: they smell like rotting meat. This is no accident. Bees have co-evolved with plants and flowers to bring us the most nutritious, sustaining and beautiful sources of food and beauty on the Earth. Flowers learned the perfect combinations of colors and scents to attract the bees, and bees learned how to help plants migrate and fly in the air from their solitary roots in the ground.

One of the adorable subjects featured in the film, an elderly French biodynamic farmer, says that yogis make perfect beekepers because they understand that peace comes from balance and connection to nature. After seeing Queen of the Sun, I am inspired to help make some local honey. I found this description of the magical process linked from the film's website:

"Each time a bee lands on a flower, pollen sticks to its fuzzy body. At the next flower, some of this pollen falls off, while still more attaches to the bee, and that is how plants are pollinated. When the honeybees return to the hive, they treat the nectar with enzymes and spread it throughout the wax cells of the honeycomb to thicken into honey. Beekeepers collect some of this honey, leaving behind enough to feed the hive. Considering that each worker bee will produce just a single drop of honey in her entire lifetime, the honey we spread on our toast in the morning is a truly precious food." (source: Yoga Journal - Yoga Food - Honey Love)

Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work | Video on TED.com

2011-06-10T09:31:00.000-04:00

Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work | Video on TED.com

Must see video of the day about office work, collaboration, and how to get things done (GTD). Fried makes a great argument for why the things we think are distractions are not, and things that are supposed to make us work better are doing the opposite.

"If ten people go to an hour meeting, that's not an hour of lost productivity. That's ten hours lost for the organization...what really needed to get done could probably have been accomplished by a few people in 30 minutes." If that resonates, check out this awesome video.

History of CO2 - Does CO2 Cause Warming?

2011-02-02T11:47:00.000-05:00

The Biggest Control knob, CO2 in the Earth's Climate History.

Notable quotes from the speech above...

If higher carbon dioxide warms, earth's climate history makes sense, with carbon dioxide having caused or amplified the main changes.
If carbon dioxide does not warm, we must explain how radiation physicists are so wrong and how a lot of really inexplicable events happened over earth's history.

The argument deniers make is what's called a logical fallacy: If the data shows that temperature does not track CO2, then CO2 must not be responsible for warming the Earth's climate. Correct logic: CO2 is the only validated explanation of trapping warmth on the Earth, yet sometimes there are variability in the correlation between CO2 and temps, therefore other factors must be diminishing the effects. What we're learning now is the release of pollution and particulates into the air has a cooling effect often called "global dimming." As we get better about cleaning up pollution, which is a good thing because of the negative health effects, we're actually going to remove the dimming factors too. In other words, increases in temperature have been artificially muffled...so the warming is going to be a lot worse than we actually thought because of global dimming.

We're running out of time. The Earth is going to be fine. As George Carlin says, it's the people that are fucked.

It's Snowing, So Global Warming Must Be a Lie Meant to Turn America into an Socialistic Devil Worshiping Apocalypse with Government Run Healthcare and Free Abortions for All

2011-02-01T17:47:00.000-05:00

It happens every year and it seems to be getting worse. We get a big snowstorm on a major metropolitan area and all the sudden people start pointing their finger at Al Gore. "It's snowing, so surely global warming must be a farce designed to make Al Gore rich, poison your kids, bankrupt our governments and turn America into a haven for socialistic gay-sex-and-abortions-for-all loving hippies."

The wrong wing loves to gloat when we get a lot of snow. To be fair, for the average layperson (emphasis added) there is a very slightly counter-intuitive notion about having a warming climate yet seeing more snow. So here's a basic lesson that I am sad to have to explain again this year: weather is what happens next weekend in Chicago, climate is what happens over a long period of time covering a large area. Saying that global warming doesn't exist because we get a lot of snow, or even many many bad snow storms, is like saying that diet and exercise doesn't work because I ran for an hour and I still have a fat ass.

But don't take my word for it, listen to what scientists are getting tired of repeating year after year (from Discovery):

I'm not saying anything new here, but the whole idea behind climate change is that it's happening to the entire planet. It takes years, even decades to move the needle on Earth's climate. Meanwhile, heat waves, cold snaps, droughts, and snowstorms come and go. As this piece in Time points out "Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries." Again, old news.

And yet, we routinely conflate current and near-term weather conditions with what's happening to the global climate. It's exactly the wrong thing to do, and yet we do it every day. Why? Because, let's be honest, everyone enjoys complaining about the weather.

That's completely fine: getting frustrated about something that is utterly out of your control and can ruin your day makes sense -- like a mysterious charge on your credit card bill, say.

But statements about fickle weather have little place in the discussion about large-scale climate change. Studies do suggest more stormy weather is possible as the atmosphere becomes supercharged with moisture due to global warming. And if parsed just right, good arguments can be made that explain short-term weather in context of long-term climate records.

So if you want to have a rational fact based conversation about why we're having all this wacky weather, here are a few key points that scientists keep saying again and again:

The past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years (source: More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to this NOAA report)

Analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds 2009 was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record. (source: NASA, and this is despite the crazy weather from El Nino)

Global precipitation in 2010 was well above the 1961–1990 average, ranking as the wettest on record since 1900. (source)
Rising Arctic temperatures have reduced floating ice cover by 20 percent over the last three decades.
December 2010 had the lowest ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records. The linear rate of decline for the month is –3.5% per decade. (source NSIDC)
This past year the arctic had the warmest waters they've had in the past 2000 years, and the scientists who wrote the study add: "On a scale of 2,000 years, it stands out dramatically as something that does not look natural."
See more facts and figures

Beginning to see the big picture? So now back to the wacky weather, most scientists agree that an increase in the amount and severity of storms, snow storms and other bad weather is completely consistent with their climate models and studies...and it's only going to get worse as the earth warms. We're feeling the effects of a 1 degree warming so far, and scientists say that we're looking at 4-5 degrees even if we do nothing because of the greenhouse gases we've already released.

To break it down even further, when we stop complaining about the weather we can begin to explain the wacky weather using science. A warmer global temperature means more water exists on Earth as water vapor, which means more and more severe precipitation. Not that complicated is it? Here's another interesting part which explains why all these wacky effects are compounded even further:

The recent rapid melting of sea ice in the arctic (see facts above) is creating unusually high pressures that are changing the jet streams. Similarly Britain saw one of its worst winters ever, which scientists say is not only consistent with the climate models, it's further proof of global climate change.

Counterintuitive but true, say scientists: a string of freezing European winters scattered over the last decade has been driven in large part by global warming.
The culprit, according to a new study, is the Arctic's receding surface ice, which at current rates of decline could disappear entirely during summer months by century's end.
The mechanism uncovered triples the chances that future winters in Europe and north Asia will be similarly inclement, the study reports.

The only thing finger we should be pointing at Al Gore is that he should not have called it global warming (even though that's what's happening), it should be called climate change. Because so many people don't know that there's a difference between weather and climate.

Some good links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXbI8vnfncc
http://news.discovery.com/earth/what-strange-snowstorms-say-about-global-warming.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/futurepsc.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/13/936031/-2010-wettest-year-on-record,-tied-for-hottest

All the Fuss over Shifting Signs for Naught

2011-01-21T11:41:00.003-05:00

The Daily Show recently parodied the recent widespread concern that our zoadiac signs may have shifted.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Stars War

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Nevermind the question about why this old news is news now. The real question should be: why haven't people figured out yet that there are not twelve or thirteen signs, there's one. Signs may be mystical but truth is in the metadata, which you can see clearly thanks to this awesome visualization and analysis in the link below:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2011/horoscoped/

Porter on Rethinking Business and Society

2011-01-21T10:32:00.002-05:00

Michael Porter is probably the most cited and esteemed philosopher of business and economics. My BU MBA classmates thought of him like a rockstar, and his accolade is known to anyone who has ever read books on business theory. Recently, Porter has been speaking out on the need to rethink the wedge between business and society that people perceive:

“Increasingly companies are being perceived as creating profits at the expense of the community… We need to think differently: what’s good for society is actually good for business.”

In the recently-published paper, Rethinking Capitalism, Professor Porter recommended “creating shared value” for both businesses and society.

This Youtube video offers specific examples of shared value, such as fair trade, corporate social responsibility, and expansion of value. He also addresses the rejection of corporate social responsibility in a way that links personal responsibility to the responsibility of shareholders.

“By actually creating products that are not just dealing with contrived needs or trying to force products onto the customer… If we create products that are actually ‘good’ for the customer – nutritionally good, environmentally good, help them save, help them raise their family in a better way – actually that’s the right way to make economic profit.”

Beat Procrastination With a Stopwatch

2011-01-18T13:45:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Beat Procrastination With a Stopwatch: "I have been experimenting with a new strategy for combatting procrastination and it seems to be working! It’s nothing so genius; it’s actually a very simple idea — which might explain why it has proved effective.
I started using a stopwatch."
Try it, it might just change your life. I've been using the stopwatch on my iPhone and as a result my workdays are off to a more productive start.

Resolved: Stop Blaming the Pancake | 43 Folders

2011-01-17T11:46:00.001-05:00

Making the reservation is the easy part, holding it is the hardest. Here's a great article from 43 Folders:

Resolved: Stop Blaming the Pancake | 43 Folders: "My bet is that most people who are seeing the kind of change and growth and improvement that sticks tend to avoid these sorts of dramatic, geometric attempts to leap blindly toward the mountain of perfection.
I’ll go further and say that the repeated compulsion to resolve and resolve and resolve is actually a terriﬁc marker that you’re not really ready to change anything in a grownup and sustainable way. You probably just want another magic wand.
Otherwise you’d already be doing the things you’ve resolved to do. You’d already be living those changes. And, you’d already be seeing actual improvements rather than repeatedly making lists of all the ways you hope your annual hajj to the self-improvement genie will ﬁx you.
Then, of course, we make things way worse by blaming everything on our pancakes."

"At this point, you have logistical options for both execution and troubleshooting:

Make a modest plan that you can envision actually doing without upending your real life;
Build more sturdy scaffolding for sticking with whatever plan you’ve chosen;
Make a practice of learning to not mind the duds–including those messed-up ﬁrst pancakes;
Or–seriously?–just accept that you never really cared that much about making breakfast in the ﬁrst place.Care is not optional.

Otherwise, really, you’d never need to resolve to do anything. You’d already just be cooking a lot. Instead of being all mad and depressed about not cooking.
But, please. All I really ask of you. Don’t blame the pancake."

Read the whole post here.

Communication Capacity and and Expectations

2011-01-14T14:38:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

We're connected all the time. The internet is usually within our reach, or in some cases our pocket, at all hours of the day. When cellphones first became ubiquitous, it meant that everyone was reachable at any time. But was that really the case, or was that our expectation? When my cell became my only telephony device after I gave up my landline, I would purposefully silence my phone when I needed to "unplug." It's just like when you are in a play or a movie theater -- sometimes it's healthier to be in a "do not disturb" mode than connected all the time. Now that mobile web technology is practically ubiquitous, the various modes of communication conflate our expectations of always being connected: through chat, instant messenger, Facebook and other non-telephony comms.

Does anyone reminisce on the days when we had to leave messages on answering machines? Recorded on cassette tapes??!! There was something nice that happened in between the time it took go to get a message: you could sort your inbox and prioritize the messenger most important to you. Most modern forms of electronic communication carry the expectation of immediate response -- keeping us more connected, but not necessarily helping us communicate better. It's easy to forget that when we text or msg, the expression is so easily lost.

My Best Of Music 2010 Lists a Bit Late

2011-01-11T22:57:00.000-05:00

In the final weeks of every year, I eagerly await the onslaught of "best-of" lists. Pitchfork's top 50 albums inspired me to do my own, so it's time to start the virtual crate digging in the music blogs. Looking back, twenty-ten was a tremendous year for music.

Top 10-Singles:
Ou Est Le Swimming Pool - Dance the Way I Feel
Major Lazer and La Roux -

Excuses - The Morning Benders

Duck Sauce - Barbara Streisand

Lady Gaga Feat. Beyonce - Telephone (guilty pleasure)

Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars
Cold War Kids, "Coffee Spoon"

Matt & Kim - Cameras

Two Door Cinema Club - Something Good Can Work Out

Breakbot - Baby I'm Yours

Other favorites I first heard in '10 although they came out earlier:
Bassnectar's Remix of The Pixies - Where is My Mind (Dec '09)
Bombay Bicycle Club - Always Like This (Jul '09)

Top 5-Albums:

The Morning Benders - Big Echo
Crystal Castles
Jamaica - No Problem
Broken Bells
Two Door Cinema Club - History
THE BLACK KEYS “Brothers’’

Top 5-Videos:

M.I.A. - "Born Free"

Hot Chip - "I Feel Better"

Holy Fuck - "Red Lights"

Duck Sauce - "Barbara Streisand"

Daft Punk - Drezzed

Broken Bells "The Ghost Inside"

Blaqstarr ft. MIA - "Lemme Hump You"

Notable "Best-Of" 2010 Lists:

Rolling Stones Top 30 Albums of 2010

Pitchfork's Top 50

Time's Top Ten of Everything

Pretty Much Amazing's Best Songs of 2010

End of The Analog Film Era

2011-01-02T20:00:00.002-05:00

Image by Getty Images

2010 Marks the end of the use of Kodachrome. I was lucky enough to shoot on Kodachrome while studying film at the University of Michigan. When I look at the images crafted from the chemical film process and compare them to the most advanced digital cameras today, I still prefer the old analog way. It's not about a difference in quality (though one could argue so), rather that film has a majestic, almost magical process which was heightened by the delay of instant gratification -- it requires a process to see what's "in the can." My first New Year's resolution is to shoot more analog film...if I can find any rolls left! Click the text below to lament this beautiful (now) extinct analog photography.

Today is the day that Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome, stops developing the iconic film forever. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, they gave me the last roll. When I finished shooting the final frames, I hand-delivered it to Parsons. Here are a few of those last 36 frames.

via Waxy

Reeling in 2011

2011-01-02T14:25:00.001-05:00

Reeling in the Years with this superb live rendition by Steely Dan.

More on this performance...

Sunny Monkey

2010-12-21T11:25:00.002-05:00

The new Bag Raiders video is out, featuring a live monkey!
"Sunlight" is a a track off their debut album, which also contained "Shooting Star" -- one of my favorite tracks of 2009. Wishing everyone lots of sunlight in 2011!

Bag Raiders - Sunlight
Uploaded by modularpeople. - See the latest featured music videos.

I'm loving this video!

Google Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

2010-12-17T09:01:00.002-05:00

Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

Looking back at 2010 through what we search: iPad on the up, swine flu falling fast...I had never heard of Katy Perry until recently (yes I live under a rock sometimes :-). It's interesting to me that people don't seem interested much anymore in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, US debt, and healthcare reform.

Google Zeitgeist brilliantly captures the highs and lows of 2010 in this YouTube vid.

See the full interactive Zeitgeist 2010 here and reminisce.

There’s never been a safer time to live on the planet (and here’s a thrilling video to prove it) | Anthill Magazine

2010-12-12T22:45:00.000-05:00

There’s never been a safer time to live on the planet (and here’s a thrilling video to prove it) | Anthill Magazine

No one makes data come alive like Hans Rosling.

Left Eye

curried lentils and sweet potatoes | smitten kitchen

Upgrading to iPhone 4S with Unlimited Data on AT&T

You Might Not Ever Have to Leave Facebook Again – but is That a Good Thing? ~ LockerGnome Social Media & Technology

21 Day ‘No Complaining Challenge’ | Stop Arguing with Reality! : YOGANONYMOUS

Beatles Remashed

2D Rube Goldberg

You like to eat and have your feet rubbed?

Video of the day: How much hipster can you pack into a Jazz?

There is No Work/Life Balance: Just Living the Life You Love

Collaboration Lessons from Bees

Related articles

Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work | Video on TED.com

History of CO2 - Does CO2 Cause Warming?

It's Snowing, So Global Warming Must Be a Lie Meant to Turn America into an Socialistic Devil Worshiping Apocalypse with Government Run Healthcare and Free Abortions for All

All the Fuss over Shifting Signs for Naught

Porter on Rethinking Business and Society

Beat Procrastination With a Stopwatch

Resolved: Stop Blaming the Pancake | 43 Folders

Communication Capacity and and Expectations

My Best Of Music 2010 Lists a Bit Late

End of The Analog Film Era

Reeling in 2011

Sunny Monkey

Google Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

There’s never been a safer time to live on the planet (and here’s a thrilling video to prove it) | Anthill Magazine