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Si te gustan los refranes la mitad de lo que a mi me gustan no te pierdas la version en linea del Refranero Mexicano de Herón Pérez Martínez. Es una joya. (La version impresa tambien es muy buena y la consigues a unos 130 pesos en la Jose Luisa o directamente en fce.com.mx.)
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. ”Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass
Impossible Ideas Before BreakfastReading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
Doug Engelbart, ITConversations: Large-Scale Collective IQ
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,   and spacing (pdf),   What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
A tiny example of context wealth creation.
A couple of months ago a prim little supermarket called Merkabastos opened 2 minutes away from my house. The store has been deservedly a hit around the neighborhood and now it battles with the oh-so-common problem of finding parking space for its customers. Enter a pretty much vacant lot right across the street. Thru the years I’d seen it remain unused until some years ago it began to store construction machinery, and some years later they put a billboard on it (whose first customer, I might add, was the table dance on the other side of the beltway). Anyway, what was bound to happen, happened: the Merkabastos management are renting the place as a parking lot for their customers and I find it amusing to think that the owner of the lot didn’t need to lift a finger to start earning a rent for her barren property.
Local Red Cross ads1 (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year: 
They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.” 1 Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.
I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it. 
I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this: But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints: But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.
Ha tanto que no leia un cumplido de esta altura!
Reyes, la indescifrable providencia
Que administra lo pródigo y lo parco, Nos dio a los unos el sector o el arco, Pero a ti la total circunferencia.
Jorge Luis Borges, In Memoriam
Here’s a quick stab of a translation, though it makes it absolutely no justice:
Reyes, the indecipherable providence,
That doles out the prodigal and the scant, Gave to some the sector or the arc, But to you the total circumference.
I should tattoo myself these words. Somewhere prominent and unforgettable. 
In my lifetime, I’ve had more than a dozen managers. It’s safe to say that many of them were forgettable, and some were awful. But the few that I admired or wanted to emulate took time to earn my trust. They wanted me to do my best work, and they knew that this was possible only if I could rely on them on a daily basis. This didn’t mean they’d do whatever I asked or yield to my opinions by default. But it did mean that their behavior was predictable. More often than not they were up front with me about their commitments, motivations, and expectations. I knew where I stood, what my and their roles were, and how much support was available from them for what I needed to do. As a leader or significant contributor to a team, everything depends on what assumptions people can make of you. When you say “I will get this done by tomorrow” or “I will talk to Sally and get her to agree with this,” the other people in the room will make silent calculations, perhaps subconsciously, about the probability that what you say will turn out to be true. Over time, if you serve your team well, those odds should be very high. They will take you at your word and place their trust in you. Although movies and television shows often portray leadership as a high-drama activity with heroes running into burning buildings or bravely fighting alone against hordes of enemies, real leadership is about very simple, practical things. Do what you say and say what you mean. Admit when you’re wrong. Enlist the opinions and ideas of others in decisions that impact them. If you can do these things more often than not, you will earn the trust of the people you work with. When a time comes where you must ask them to do something unpleasant or that they don’t agree with, their trust in you will make your leadership possible. This implies that to be a good leader, you do not need to be the best programmer, planner, architect, communicator, joke teller, designer, or anything else. All that is required is that you make trust an important thing to cultivate, and go out of your way to share it with the people around you.% Therefore, to be a good leader, (pink)you must learn how to find, build, earn, and grant trust to others as well as learn how to cultivate trust in yourself.*
Scott Berkun, The Art of Project Management
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice. “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass
Impossible Ideas Before BreakfastSeries Blenders With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender.
Quote Novel (or Movie)
I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.)
Internet in a box
What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web
What does “boygirlparty” mean? A boygirlparty is the first party you go to as an adolescent that has all sorts of kids at it (girls and boys) that you’re not used to playing with, It’s exciting and strange. Maybe you play spin-the-bottle. The term, to me, is loaded with all different kinds of child-like wonderment and energy. Also, boygirlparty is one word. It just is.
I’ve been looking for cool art lately (yup, there is a girl :) and I’m happily surprised to find there are lots of great stuff on the web. There are hundreds of web shops of amateur and independent artists out there (here’s one: boygirlsparty). DeviantArt was a first stop, of course; later followed by Etsy, a big place to find craftsy stuff which has some nice things going on and thru which I found Poketo, an artsy store specializing in wallets and apparel, where I finally found the gift (which will be perfect for her, I swear—had I had it custom-made it wouldn’t be this good). And ogling through artist’s websites I found the perfect gift for, well, me: Io: Art of the Wired. I don’t know, I can simply feel it: this is a great book. Look at the rave reviews and the great art included: 
But what really blew me away was Poketo’s flat worldwide shipping rate and Guu Media’s even bolder FREE global shipping. Nothing says one world louder than free shipping anyplace. |
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