I don’t use Jaiku or Dodgeball, although there is sure to be a wailing and gnashing of teeth over the closing of Dodgeball. I had been using Google Noteboook, semi-extensively and although it is not being shutdown, development on Notebook is ceasing, which for my purposes anyway, amounts to the same thing.
This just reinforces one of my current productivity goals: to get all of my stuff in one place. Where is that one place? Really nicely solving this problem is 1) hard and 2) lucrative.
Ruby Documentation is terse and difficult to navigate. There are some web based solutions, but I am not always on the web, and there are some solutions for keeping your local documentation up to date, but I haven’t automated them.
Ri is the Ruby solution to this problem but the results are not always what you are expecting.
The combination of “seems impossible” and “strong network effects” is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google.
As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are ready to divert that surplus to something, anything that is participatory.
Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.
Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”
Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.
Update – 28 April 2008Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.
A personal story in the Times talks about the impact of having a severely sick or injured child on parents. There isn’t any data, only personal stories, but startled me into recognition of my own condition. I still sit upright in bed in the middle of the night recalling the five seconds when I turned away from the wee one and she wandered into traffic. That nothing terrible happened in those five seconds has been the difference between a life that would have been very difficult to endure and a more or less constant source of joy in my life.
The days of waiting and worrying about the older girl as she lay ill in intensive care, twice, are also permanently engraved on my memory and stored in my body. I find and feel that concern every time that I get to see her and admire the young woman before me. That it all turned out well in the end was fortunately, but I still feel the toll.
I had two different concrete experiences of problem solving in the past couple of days. I think these examples are interesting because they are so contained, not because they are hard problems. They illustrate how I tackle a problem and provide some generalizable strategies for problem solving. I’ll cover the other problem in a future post and try to extract the strategies.
This post is about the little man’s homework this week. He’s still struggling with this:
Shelley wanted to buy some clothes that were on sale.
Blouses
Pants
Socks
Shoes
$10
$10
$5
$20
$15
$20
$10
$30
$25
$35
$15
$40
Her mother said she could spend $85. List all the different ways that Shelley can buy 1 blouse, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of socks, and 1 pair of shoes that total exactly $85. One way has been done for you.
