nehrlich

09:55 am: Dr. Horrible!
I posted about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog a couple weeks ago, but Act 1 is up now. So watch it.

Also, I posted about it on my "real" blog this time. And linked to The Guild because it's pretty funny if you're a gaming geek or just know one.

08:10 am: Abstruse Goose
Somebody on my flist pointed me at the webcomic Abstruse Goose, and the one they linked to was pretty funny so I read through the archives. I eventually got to the first one, which has a panel that says "THERE... ARE... FOUR... LIGHTS!". Therefore, I conclude the author must be somebody I know, because that would only be funny to people who hung out at the MIT Coffee Haus in the vicinity of 1993/1994. I know this, because I occasionally yell "There... are... four... lights!" and other people don't think it's funny.

The comic doesn't have an about page, the domain name was registered privately, so I'm not quite sure who this might be. Any ideas?

Edited: Oh, never mind. Apparently it's a Star Trek reference. I'm just not geeky enough. Pretty rare I get to say that.

11:33 am: Personality
My friend Charlie's startup, Path101, has a personality test available to try to match people with possible careers. It takes a while (10-20 minutes), but the results are kind of interesting, at least to me.
( Results behind the cut )

11:28 am: A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink
My review of A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink.

04:30 pm: Vision, decisions and constraints
Thoughts about the importance of vision in constraining decisions, applied to both companies and my life.

10:20 am: Living in the future
Thoughts on what it means to live in the future in the Gibson-esque sense. It may be total crap - I can't tell (Jofish is skeptical). So tell me!

07:03 am: Dr. Horrible
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Sounds crazy, no? Almost like...a fiddler on the roof. No, wait, that's something else.

I'd heard about this project a few months ago, but Xemu linked to the trailer a few days ago, and now I'll all fanboy again. Dude, a musical written by Joss Whedon, following in the tradition of the Buffy musical, starring Neil Patrick Harris, who I've been a huge fan of since singing with him in Sweeney Todd, and adore in the TV show How I Met Your Mother. I don't think I can take more awesome.

Also awesome - they did this project in six days during the writer's strike, basically because Joss was bored and couldn't work on any real projects without breaking the strike. So this will be distributed via Internet only, starting on July 15th. Yay actual positive consequence of the strike!

The first review is out, and is very positive. I'm soooo looking forward to this. More fanboy-ing when it's actually released. For now, go watch the trailer on the website.

11:10 pm: Intelligent Organizations for the Rest of Us
After a couple comments by dr_tectonic and helava on yesterday's post, I follow up with a post expanding on how the idea of intelligent organizations can be applied to the rest of us.

09:28 pm: Intelligent Organizations
Thoughts on what intelligent organizations might look like, inspired by a couple things seen recently on teh Intarweb.

11:27 am: Good quote
"The ultimate success of any organization requires consistently excellent performance at every level. Vibrant and successful organizations are not built on a feeling of detachment by employees. Rather, they are built on a culture of engagement, in which employees believe in the mission they are trying to accomplish and know that they are contributing to its success. People who are given the room to succeed usually will."

From the book "Do the Right Thing", by James F. Parker, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, seen in the email business book club.

I just like that succinct summary of management. Make sure employees believe in the company's mission, and how they are contributing to that mission. If managers do that, the company will be successful (assuming its mission isn't crazy or evil or something).

11:42 am: Social Meaning
Thoughts on social meaning, answering a comment from my last post questioning why everything had to be done in a group to have meaning.

11:01 pm: Social objects
Continuing my recent "Social X" kick, I dig out a many-months-old draft on social objects and finish it off for posting.

09:58 pm: Wedding #3
Just got back from the wedding in Tahoe. Good stuff - outdoor wedding at a beautiful house near South Lake Tahoe yesterday, with a chill reception afterwards (the caterers just kept on putting out finger food until we stopped eating, so there was no formal seating, which was nice). Today was brunch, and then a cruise around Lake Tahoe.

During the cruise, the wedding continued as the wedding license was only good in California, not in Nevada where the house was. So once the ship passed into California waters, they did a much abbreviated version of the vows.

Best part was when the officiant asked the groom if he'd like to share a few words, he stood up, turned to the bride, and reading off his cell phone said: "Never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never gonna run around and desert you". A few of us caught on by the second line, everybody else got it by the fourth, but he kept on going - yes, he RickRolled the wedding.

Back to New York in the morning. Boo! On the plus side, glad to have made it through three weddings in a month. I even did a surprisingly good job at talking to people at this last one despite knowing nobody there except the bride and groom when I arrived.

08:42 am: Social Technologies
A long post musing about social technologies, including a review of existing organization technologies, and some speculation on the direction things might go in the future.

09:17 pm: Social Capitalist
I neologize the term Social Capitalist and then describe what I mean by that and the world that entails.

Also, everybody that wasn't at the wedding of AWESOME should read spectralbovine's recap of the event in all its awesomeness.

09:51 am: Intelligence in Google world
Spurred by one of helava's comments, I speculate on what it means to be intelligent in a world where Google makes us practically omniscient?

10:18 am: Playing the Lost Sport
I played Jane McGonigal's new game, the "Lost Sport", yesterday, and it was fun!

11:55 am: I'm just saying...
I think the consensus is that my new title is "Master master".

09:33 am: Strategic Intuition and Expertise
I went to a talk on Monday by a Columbia professor named William Duggan on strategic intuition, which got me thinking about expertise, intuition, genius, and the value of a generalist.

09:31 am: World-Systems Analysis, by Immanuel Wallerstein
My review of World-Systems Analysis, by Immanuel Wallerstein. One of several book reviews I need to write since I've read, um, five books in the past month since classes ended. This is the most hard-core one, though - the others are much lighter weight.