Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, lists seven strategies for making people sound stupid:
If you are new to the Internet, allow me to explain how to debate in this medium. When one person makes any kind of statement, all you need to do is apply one of these methods to make it sound stupid. Then go on the offensive.
As someone who used to spend lots of time lurking on Slashdot and Usenet, I’ve got to say that Scott’s nailed it.
I’ve been using FeedBurner to manage my feeds on Startup Fever since I started it. I really like. It helps me understand how people are reading the blog in ways I can’t see just by looking in the server logs.
I’ve found it so useful, that I’m going to start using a FeedBurner feed as the main one for this blog. So starting today, there’s a new feed for this blog.
If you’d like to switch to it, you can find the new feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/kendyck.
Here are a few buttons that may help ease your transition:
If you’d rather not change anything, that’s fine, too. The old atom feed will continue to be available and will be updated with all the latest content.
Your choice: switch or stay. You shouldn’t notice any difference either way.
Louisette Lanteigne, the Waterloo stay-at-home mother of three who is being sued for libel by Activa Holdings Inc. to the tune of $2 million for comments she made on her watchdog site (covered here), has set up a website to gather contributions for her legal defense. There she writes,
Currently I am in the process of aquiring a certificate from a lawyer to open up a Legal Trust Fund to assist in covering the legal fees in regards to this lawsuit from Activa Holdings.
If anyone is interested in contributing, I have opened this paypal account. All funds in this account as of November 14th will go directly into the Legal Trust Fund.
My paypal user id is butterflybluelu@rogers.com or you can just click the button below.
This was built in response many inquiries from folks who have emailed me wanting to help. Thank you.
Just a little reminder…
If you are looking for links to entrepreneurial stuff, you are looking in the wrong place. It’s not hear anymore. It’s all moved to Startup Fever.
Of Steve Barth‘s recent talk at the KMWorld & Intranets conferences, Dave Pollard wrote:
Millions of people voluntarily spend 20 hours per week or more playing multiplayer online games that are essentially complex collaborative role-playing activities. In doing this they do many of the same things that are essential to effective business collaboration: set goals, select roles, identify appropriate teammates, accumulate capabilities (i.e. learn) and experience, and engage in strategic social interaction. So why is it so hard to cajole employees, when they are paid to do these things, to do them as enthusiastically and with as much engagement as gamers do them for free?
Dave attributes much of the appeal of video games to their complexity. Video games offer a rich, complex environment, where business, on the other hand, is merely complicated. The entire article is well worth the read, if you have the time.
While I agree with Dave, I’d say there are additional reasons that people love to play video games more than go to work. One of them is dependency on their work. Folks don’t enjoy their work as much because they depend on it for their livelihood. They don’t depend on video games in the same way. If everybody depended on playing video games to live, many would find it as exciting as responding to email.
And that, in fact, is the case. Every office worker is forced to play a video game, and its name is Microsoft Office.
The Blue Ball Machine: simply wonderful.
Back in May, I blogged about Louisette Lanteigne, a local stay-at-home mom who out of concern for the safety of her children was posting to her website what she understood to be safety and environmental violations at a nearby constuction site. At that time she was being threatened by the builder, Activa Holdings Inc, with legal action if she didn’t remove the photos from her site.
Well, she didn’t. So they filed suit. For $2 million dollars.
The story has since been picked up by the national press, Slashdot, and a growing number of bloggers.
From the Canoe story:
Her efforts led to letters and kudos from various government officials for reporting alleged violations. Then-environment minister Leona Dombrowsky wrote her to say, “Your advocacy on behalf of your neighbourhood is commendable and I encourage you to contact the ministry . . .to report any further incidents.”
Environment Ministry spokesman John Steele said work by people like Lanteigne is of great value because there aren’t enough ministry workers available to spot every infraction.
Also…
Murdoch [Activa’s lawyer] said Activa realizes it’s risking negative PR but the company thinks the lawsuit is the only way to defend its reputation.
“Ultimately, they’re confident it will be resolved in their favour,” Murdoch said. “They’re confident the right public perception will come about.”
Until now, there were two blog posts about this. Mine and Michael Hiemstra’s, along with a couple of articles in some local papers. Since launching their lawsuit, 20 new blog posts have been written, along with national and international press coverage. It is hard to imagine a worse PR situation for Activa than the one they have just created for themselves.
At the very best, Activa will win the suit and be remembered as the company who sues safety-minded folks into bankrupcy for criticizing them. At worse, they will be remembered as the company who, when found to be violating safety and environmental regulations, preferred to sue the messenger instead of clean up their act.
If you would like to share your thoughts with the folks at Activa, you can reach them at the following address (thanks, Martin):
Address: 735 Bridge St W , Waterloo N2V 2H1
Telephone: (519) 886-9400 , Fax: (519) 886-8955
Contact Peter Armbruster
Position Vice President, Operations
Product and Service Home Builders
Web Page: www.activagroup.ca (nothing there yet)
Dear Lazyweb,
While I wait to get a registration confirmation email from the palmOne support forum, perhaps you can help solve this problem.
I’ve been trying to install version 4.1.4 of Palm Desktop on my Windows XP (Home Edition) machine without much success.
Here’s the problem…
It requires Administrator privileges to install. So I switch to my Adminstrator account and install it. So far, so good. It runs fine for the adminstrator account.
When I switch back to my ‘Limited’ user account, the account that use for my day-to-day computing, there are a few problems:
1. All of the shortcuts have been installed to the Adminstrator’s start menu. This is easy enough to fix. I just move them to ‘All Users’ start menu manually.
2. When I launch the Palm Desktop program as a limited user, I get the following error message, “Error: Invalid Configuration. Terminating the Palm Desktop.”
Right. Thanks for the helpful message. What am I supposed to do now?
Update (2005-11-16): I solved the problem by temporarily granting adminstrator privileges to my limited account and installing the software under that account. When I was done, I switch the account back to limited. Seems to work now.
Update (2006-01-29): R Burgos offers the following solution in the comments:
Although I work in the tech field, I’m actually a rather slow adopter of technology. So when my wife announced to some friends last night that I had purchased a PDA, their response was, “Welcome to the new millenium!”
This, of course, was an overestimation of the leap I’d taken. Considering that my purchase was of a Palm VIIx the more appropriate response would have been, “Welcome to the 1990s!”.
Anyways, a local liquidator, XS Cargo was selling them for $49.99CAN. I’ve been thinking of buying a PDA since I finished reading Getting Things Done. As I was just looking for something that I could store and transport my todo lists around on, the Palm VIIx seemed like the perfect fit. And the price was right.
I’ve played around with it a bit, and it looks like it will do the trick. I just need to get a holster so I can carry it around with me.
When I was young, I played piano.
For the longest time this was a forced activity. My parents wanted me to have some musical training as a child, so from the age of 7 that’s what I got. And hated it. They always justified it by saying that I’d thank them when I was older.
And you know what? Now I do.
When I got to high school, I came to enjoy it. I’ll always remember the day that Rob Brown and Brett Humber, having heard that I’d already spent years of my life practicing piano, approached me in 9th grade to ask if I’d be interested in getting together for a jam session. So began my career as a high-school rocker.
Fuelled by wild dreams of fame and fortune, we jammed constantly. We spent every lunch hour in the high school music room. We’d get together on evenings and weekends. Any opportunity we had to play, we’d take it.
Of course, I needed equipment if I was going to become famous. This was the argument that I used to convince my parents to buy me my first keyboard, anyway. Mind you, they were so delighted that I was finally taking an interest in music, that they were practically racing to the store to buy me a Yamaha PSR-6 the moment I mentioned it. It was a nice little unit, but hardly professional grade. That would have to wait another year, when I bought a Yamaha DX11, followed up a couple years later with the purchase of a Korg M1.
At the same time, I continued to study classical piano. I even achieved some level of recognized competence with it, receiving my Grade 8 certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music. I continued to take lessons afterwards, but never worked towards any kind of certificate.
I gave after-school lessons to neighbourhood children, a nice little side business that provided some spending cash for whatever adolescent adventures in which I found myself engaging.
I gave up piano when I graduated from high school and left for university. The keyboards were simply too bulky to keep in my dorm room. Besides, in the course of my years of jamming, I had picked up guitar and was slowly considering myself to be a guitarist rather than a keyboard player. And a guitar could fit in a dorm room. So just like that, I gave up what until then had been an fundamental part of my life.
Now it has been years since I played anything. In the past decade, I’ve spent maybe 15 minutes at a keyboard, and all of these have been at the houses of friends and family. I sit down at their pianos just long enough to punch out a few chords and confirm that I’ve completely lost all my skills.
Somehow, I’m starting to feel the itch to play again. I don’t know what triggered it, but I find myself missing the feel of ivory beneath my fingers. I miss the challenge of learning that comes with playing an instrument. I miss the feeling of gradual, but steady improvement that I’ve only ever felt with music. Most of all, I miss the ability to express myself in music, the medium to which I’ve always felt most attuned.
Which brings me to the point of this post: I’ve decided that I’m going get back into playing piano. Though I no longer have dreams of becoming famous or wealthy by it, I’d like to get competent again, at least enough to play some music that moves and interests me.
As much as I can, I’m planning to keep a record of my journey back to the piano here. Stay tuned for more posts on the topic, the first of which will probably be about shopping for a piano.
Ken Dyck 