Beware of geeks bearing formulas
I always feel more comforted about a situation after hearing Buffet talk about it. He has some great lines in this interview with Charlie Rose
In a bubble there are always three I’s, the innovators, the imitators and the idiots.
That’s so true not just of an economic bubble but everything in life. That’s the visitor pattern of a great nightclub, the crowd for a great band. When he was talking about how mortgage debt was packaged a resold around the world he said.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas
I have to admit that my friends down the hall on Microsoft Excel might bear some of the responsibility for our current economic state. If you include the first dot-com bust this is the second time in a decade that geeks have been to blame for fueling an economic crisis… go nerds!
Finding Music: Girl Talk
For the past few months I have been enjoying the mix tapes on Attacked By Jackets courtesy of the other Ryan. I love that I don’t have to look for new music, between Pete, Ryan, Tyler and my twitter friends I am always being introduced to great tunes. The lastest album I heard about is Feed The Animals from Girl Talk, it’s a wild ride through my entire life of music and I have not heard a record that’s made me smile so much in a long time. This is another artist that’s bypassing the labels and letting fans get music directly, awesome trend.
Every Schoolboys Dream
I think every kid at one point or another has a dream that their school catches on fire, maybe it’s the night before a big test or for me every-time I lit up one of those schoolhouse fireworks on the holidays. This ended up being so much greater than a dream one spring day in Grade 11. Halfway through English class which was beyond painful as it was reading day it started. Reading day was an experiment by our teacher who thought, it would be a great idea to have the class read Shakespeare out loud. Each student would read half a page. He assumed that it would make us more involved but since most of the class were idiots is was just horrible to sit through. I almost always skipped reading day but we had a quiz so I was forced to make it in.
Sound the alarm
The fire alarm kicked off and like usual we just sat there thinking it was a test or a false alarm. The secretary then came on over the loudspeaker and her voice was clearly shaking.
“Teachers please evacuate the students from the school, stay calm and proceed in an orderly fashion to the parking lot”
Desk Workouts from a reliable source: Another McMinn
My brother has a great post on getting exercise at your desk.
So why does working at a computer cause so much stress to our bodies?
Well, the answer is pretty simple. Humans were not made to sit down for long periods of time, staring at a screen, typing and mousing. We have spent much more of our 2 3/4 million year history hunting on foot and moving from place to place following food sources with the seasons
There are three more videos as well:
1-Minute Desk Exercises Video
2-Minute Desk Exercises Video
3-Minute Desk Exercises Video
Seattle is always interesting
My good friend Mark Quail came into town tonight from Toronto for a visit, we had a great dinner and chat at Shiro’s in Belltown. Amazing sushi! On the way out of the restaurant we got stopped by Ed a Seattle homeless guy. He didn’t ask for money he just wanted to know what we thought of the sushi, he then preceded to tell us that while Shiros was good Umi a place down the street had not only had better sushi but the best sake this side of the Mississippi (not an expression often associated with Japanese drink). Ed then gave us a rundown of the best Italian places in Seattle; 3 grubby fingers for a place in Wallingford and two grubby fingers for the place beside Shiro’s…awesome! After that we went across the street to grab some gin at Viceroy and got accosted out front by a chubby drunk white rapper. He was taking a break from recording a rap song based on Easy Rider and was having trouble remembering the characters and lines from the movie. So I whipped out my iphone and thanks to imdb and wikipedia his rap song will now be factually accurate. After a few drinks I walked Mark back to the Ramada and called a cab. The cab driver that picked me out was crazy!! (see attached picture). He drove me to Cap Hill doing almost 60MPH the whole way, I was pretty sure we were going to die at one point. He was obsessed with finding out real estate prices in my hood and kept looking back at me (as opposed to at the road) as I was answering a question. Like most taxi drivers he was also simultaneously having a cell phone conversation with someone in a foreign language.
Everytime I go out in Seattle cool, slightly crazy shit happens which is a big reason why I love this city!
Summer of Change
The first day I met Kurt we went to pick up smokes for bottle-toking hash. When we got up to the counter he pulled out two fistfuls of quarters, slapped them on the counter and asked for a large pack of Players Light (Canadians will know that brand).
No need for ID
Despite the fact that we were 15 the clerk never asked for ID. I think she was so taken aback that we planned to pay in change, everything else was forgotten. I thought it was a little odd! Throughout that week everything Kurt bought (food, magazines etc..) was paid for with a seemingly endless supply of quarters he kept in his knapsack (backpack if your American). Kurt was a pretty intense kid so I didn’t really say much since I hadn’t known him very long.
At his house all is revealed
A week or so later I went to his house for the first time and after walking into his room I noticed 4 payphones lined up in the closet.
Me: “Dude what the fuck?? Why do you have payphones in your house?”
Kurt: “Oh I found them in the woods”
Kurt was the best criminal I have ever met mainly because he would never admit to a crime even when it was blatantly obvious what he had done. You would always end of having to piece it together based on little bits of information discovered independently from all our friends.
Quiet nights in Springbank Park
Turns out one night on his way home (and while quite high) Kurt took a detour through the park. He stumbled across a payphone and figured there might be some free money in there. He went home, got a hammer and headed back to the park. He then spent a few hours busting open the payphone and taking out all the change. After seeing how time consuming the crime was he realized it would be easier the next time to just take the whole phone (after smashing it off the stand), bring it back home and then break into it at his leisure. So the next weekend he stole the 4 remaining pay phones in the park.
Making mother proud
Kurt’s poor mother had to watch her son break apart pay phones in the backyard and I am sure not be satisfied with whatever excuse he must have come up with to explain what he was doing. Like any good mother she was so loyal to Kurt that she always just went along with his schemes. Each phone netted in about $150.00 so it took quite a while for him to work through all that change. I asked him why he didn’t just roll it up and go to the bank, but I think he just liked the looks on peoples faces when he paid for all our dinner with quarters!
Mother becomes clean up expert
About three weeks later a friend of ours that lived just outside of town on a farm came to school with a crazy story. He had almost crashed his truck on the way to school because as he turned a sharp corner he was confronted with 4 pay phones laying in the middle of the road. Turns out Kurt’s mother was scared the police would come and take him off to jail so late one night she carried all the phones to her car, drove just outside of town and dumped them on the road. This would not be the first time she was forced into playing accomplice to Kurt’s endeavors.
The park becomes just a little more dangerous at night
The city’s responses to the thefts was to not replace the phones at all. This meant being in the park late at night was even more scary since you couldn’t even call for help if there was trouble. Kurt was happy since he learned a lot from the experience of busting the phones open. Knowledge that would help him, Tyler and Eddie embark on a spree of robbing vending machines and parking meters across the city. That summer became known as “The Summer of Change”.
My ignite talk video got posted
I had a blast doing the ignite talk and would highly recommend it to anyone else. It’s a lot of fun to get up and do 5 quick min!
Having Clear Objectives
This a topic I have been thinking a lot lately and read this which kinda sums it it much better than I could.
From Up The Organization by Robert Townsend:
Objectives
One of the important functions of a leader is to make the organization concentrate on its objectives. In the case of Avis, it took us six months to define one objective – which turned out to be: “We want to become the fastest growing company with the highest profit margin in the business of renting and leasing vehicles without drivers”
(Ryan Note: I am sure folks can come up with a simple focused objective much quicker than six months…)
That objective was simple enough so that we didn’t have to write it down. We could put it in every speech and talk about it wherever we went. And it had some social significance, because up to that time Hertz had a crushingly large share of the market and was thinking and acting like General Motors.
It also included a definition of our business: “renting and leasing vehicles without drivers”. This let us put the blinders on ourselves and stop considering the acquisition of related businesses like motels, hotels, airlines and travel agencies. It also showed that we had to get rid of some limo and sightseeing companies the we already owned.
Once those objectives have been agreed on the leader must me merciless on himself and his people. If an idea that pops into his head or out of their mouths is outside of the objective of the company, he kills it without a trial.
Peter Drucker was never more right when he wrote: “Concentration is the key to economic results…no other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly as the principal of concentration…Our motto seems to be let’s do a little bit of everything.”
It isn’t easy to concentrate. I used to keep a sign opposite to my desk where I couldn’t miss it if I were on the phone (about to make an appointment) or in a meeting in my office: “Is what I’m doing or about to do getting us closer to our objective?” That sign saved me from a lot of useless trips, lunch dates, conferences, junkets and meetings.
Most of all, work on simplifying and distilling your statement of objectives. Cato boiled his down to three words “Delenda est Carthago”- and by saying them over and over eventually wiped out the competition
