Here’s one of my favorite anecdotes about management. An elder in Renaissance Italy comes up to Michelangelo one day and says, “Congratulations! You’re such a great artist, we’re promoting you! Forget about painting, you’re now in charge of procuring canvases and supervising the other artists.”
It’s absurd, laughable, but for some of us it hits uncomfortably close to home. I’ve been thinking recently about one of the questions it raises: motivating managers.
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My team at work has a few people in New York, and we’re adding more fast, so I went out there last week to work with them in person. My last visit to New York was 12 years ago, and I spent most of that upstate, so I was looking forward to exploring Manhattan and Brooklyn with enough time to appreciate them.
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I started meditating a week or so ago. I took an introductory class, then added a session to my daily routine, and I’ve been keeping up with it pretty faithfully so far. It’s…interesting!
I’m not particularly spiritual, but the health benefits, both mental and physical, are well established. I’m always interested in ways to be more effective at work, play, relationships, etc., and meditation has been on my todo list for a while.
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As a kid, my parents told me to eat my vegetables. My pastor told me to be nice to other kids. The state of California told me I couldn’t drive until I was 16 years old. My teachers told me – and more importantly, my parents – how I should go about learning things.
Some of these things, we accept without a second thought. Others, like education, we’ve debated for as long as we can remember. Regardless, they all have one thing in common: someone else was making my decisions for me.
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The documentary film Re:Generation teams up dance music DJs with musicians in traditional genres – classical, rock, R&B, jazz, and country – to combine the best of each. We noticed it on Hulu the other night and idly pressed play, not expecting much. Boy, were we wrong.
Re:Generation grabbed us and didn’t let go. It’s one of the best “behind the scenes” depictions I’ve ever seen of the creative process of composing music. The camera gets in close and follows every step of the way, putting you inside the artists heads’ as they struggle to communicate, build rapport, and ultimately write songs together.
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I just finished playing Journey. It was amazing, as I’d hoped. thatgamecompany is so damn good at their craft.
Sadly though, the automatic, drop-in multiplayer actually detracted from my experience. I thought they’d only use it sparingly, which could have worked, but instead they paired me with other players for most of the game.
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I’ve just published activitystreams-unofficial, a stand-in ActivityStreams server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:
This complements the unofficial
WebFinger and
PortableContacts
providers I published recently. I’ve updated the
WebFinger provider to include
Link elements pointing to these new ActivityStreams endpoints.
They’re all just little side projects, and may not be hugely useful on their own, but together they’re another step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.
Feedback and pull requests are welcome!
I’m about to finish and post my next side project, activitystreams-unofficial. My last post was a side project too, though, so I’m reluctant to post another right away, since I want this blog to be more about other things.
Unfortunately, I don’t have anything special to say right now. Life is good, friends and family are good, work and side projects are good. I have a couple future posts brewing, but they’re still too early to write up just yet.
So, uh…hey look, is that a cat rolling a watermelon out of a lake?
I’ve just published portablecontacts-unofficial, a stand-in PortableContacts server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:
They complement the
unofficial WebFinger providers
I published last month, which I’ve updated to include Link elements pointing
to the new PortableContacts endpoints.
Both are just little side projects, and they may not be hugely useful on their own, but together they’re another step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.
Feedback and pull requests are welcome!
For a long time, I thought economic inequality was basically OK. Sorry, I should rephrase: I thought it was bad, of course, but not inherently harmful. I changed my mind recently, and I’ve been reflecting on why and what I can learn from it.
The complaints about inequality always seemed to boil down to the same thing: fairness. Inequality is unfair, so it’s wrong. I’m human, so I’m naturally sensitive to fairness, but it still didn’t sit right with me. I just didn’t see the concrete harm. A rising tide lifts all boats, so if poor people still have a good quality of life, what’s wrong with rich people being rich? Plus, incentives are important, so we want to reward people who work hard and create value, right? Not to mention that we’ve never found a reasonable, effective way to prevent inequality. Socialism and its cousins clearly aren’t it.
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