On purchasing happiness

David Horvitz will mail you a picture of the sky for $10. Or if you give him $250, he will sit in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and read The Little Prince. For $1000, he will buy as many copies of the Little Prince as possible, and give them away to employees leaving the stock exchange that evening. If you give him $2,443 he will rent a car in Iceland and find you three things. He will find you a lava rock and send it to you. He will find the Aurora Borealis for you and send you a photograph of it. He will find you the best hot spring, and he will sit in it for you. He will send you a photograph of him sitting in it. 

When I first read his web page, I thought, what a scam. Who is this cheap bastard who wants you to send him to Iceland?

But then, I thought, this is a pretty interesting experiment that is only enabled today by the Internet. Only on the Internet do you have the audacity to ask people for these things. But then, because it's a form of media, this somehow becomes an act of participatory art. If you send him money, you are a part of this project.

One of his bestselling "ifs" involves him buying any meal up to $30 for a homeless person, if you give him $30. He's done this dozens of times now. In reality, what he's doing is simply expanding on something we already are used to: buying things online. But instead of a pair of slacks or a contribution to our friend's walkathon, we're buying a touch of whimsy, a hot meal for a person we'll never meet, or just a part of someone else's dream.

Amy Winehouse

Crazy and addicted, or not... she is still one talented lady on the mic. She conjures the classic soul of a bygone era, yet makes it all her own.

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Me & Mr Jones by Amy Winehouse(download)

 

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Grand Theft Auto 4

Thanks Mark, for suddenly robbing me of 40+ hours of my life, possibly. Grand Theft Auto 4 is out, and it is bloody amazing.

The IGN review -- they give it a very rare 10 out of 10.

Apple Safari for Windows - It kind of rules!

So in the course of working on posterous, I've had to fix a fair share of bugs where JS works in Firefox but not in Safari. At first I grumbled... but actually, now that I have it installed on my Windows machine... I am dang impressed.

It is FAST. The fonts look beautiful. Things don't pause unnecessarily. It doesn't crash as much. Handles lots of tabs well. I love the treatments on buttons and clickable items.

If it had plugin support for my bookmark syncing, I'd consider using it 100% all the time. Who would have thunk it? But Safari is giving everyone else a serious run for their money. It's got the superior user experience right now. Tell everyone!

15 ideas from the author of the "No Asshole Rule"

  1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all -- first do no harm!
  2. Indifference is as important as passion.
  3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time.
  4. Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.
  5. Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
  6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.
  7. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.
  8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.
  9. The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.
  10. The best single question for testing an organization's character is: What happens when people make mistakes?
  11. The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.
  12. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated.
  13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.
  14. It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?
  15. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity

(from the sidebar at Bob Sutton's blog)

Robot unboxes a Roomba

Monty is a busy robot and can't always find the time to vacuum. So he ordered a Roomba. Monty is actually a robot that is controlled using VR glasses and body movement sensors. In the video you'll see an operator sitting in a chair controlling Monty. It's really quite a sight to see in person.

This is one of the more postmodern product unboxing videos you could watch.