monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
david evans.
more specific outlets are linked as tabs above.
need i say more? wikipedia rocks… today i learned about coulrophobia, the fear of clowns…
dork!
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encountered a drum corps practicing in an underpass tonight. what a great place to meet, they could bang away at full volume. lord i hope they had ear plugs, even at a good distance it was hard on my ears. such fun though to watch.
everyone needs a marching band. companies should have them. cities should have them. they kind of get everyone going. it’s no wonder that armies would lead with them. hard not to get moving when they’re full force.
summary:
i have opinions about the device itself and the ecosystem play they’re attempting. i think they got a couple things right but it needs some real work before it will be a mass market success. but i think they may get some good sell through to the older demographic even breaking out of the early adopter group a little. could be a success from that point of view. my guess is they rushed it to market for christmas though and their development goals were behind schedule; i’d expect an improved version for it in march probably, or april/may for back-to-school cycles. same thoughts on the ecosystem business development, it was rushed… or we would be seeing more associate marketing from magazines and newspapers. or they don’t know how to court those channels well enough yet.
not too surprising given tiger’s calm on the fairway, but i was surprised to hear this quote from mr. woods, “Buddhism has been a major role in my life. It has given me an inner peace and calmness that I think I wouldn’t have achieved at such an early age.” other notable’s i didn’t realize shared my faith: tina turner, leonard cohen, orlando bloom, and herbie hancock who started to practice after seeing the effect it had on the performing abilities of a fellow musician. (Bodhipaksa 2007)
sixty minutes recently (on nov 11th) ran a segment on the current twenty-somethings, that they’re calling millenials, that they claim possess a quality of narcissism that employers are now forced to deal with. other scholars are calling that generation the echo boom. i’m curious what is your experience of this age range and do you agree with their proposed causality - that mr. rogers and lack of competition are to blame - or if you have other ideas.
i’m guessing the post cold war situation is at least part of the causality. as i grew up, the threat of nuclear war created a constant sense of anxiety and need to be on guard. but this next generation did not have that. they were born into a post-war period of peace and were born into tremendous prosperity. why is it surprising then that they feel on top of the world?
i’m sure there are many secret languages, but i just read about a chinese secret language used with embroidery called nu shu. for upper class women during the foot binding era, embroidery was one way that women could communicate to each other, stitching messages and poems and expressions directly into their clothing and drawing them onto fans and art work. the language was phonetic instead of pictographic, was closely guarded and kept from men, and has largely been lost because of the cultural revolution and lack of modern relevance. there’s an effort to find and reconstruct the language now and preserve it, but it may be too late.
i’m an opera geek, though i haven’t been to a performance in a while. this rendition of nessun dorma has me nostalgic.
he went on to win the contest. since then he’s released a single and gone on tour.
i’m not a huge fan of turandot. i think i get too into the story. the princess is a serious head case. and why would turandot or any man in his right mind 1) want to pursue such a person; and 2) pursue her at the complete risk of his life? it’s completely nuts. she embodies an archetypal bitchiness that men find irresistible. she’s the proverbial ice princess - the femme fatale. but why are we fascinated and then applaud as the poor fool and triumphant hero throws himself at such a person. if a friend of mine did this, i’d slap him sideways. seriously twisted… and what is this really saying about the strong feminine?
for comparison, here is pavarotti singing the same aria.
ok, i read RSS feeds in the safari web browser for the most part. and here is my feature request for the safari team, all open letter style:
dear team,
please provide a preference option, where i can load a feed and ONLY display NEW feed entries if so desired. some of my feeds have tons of entries with lots of pictures. when a new entry arrives, i generally only want to see that one new entry and not have the browser get sluggish as it loads all the old entries i’ve already seen. in that mode, you’ll want a link at the bottom to ‘display the older entries (17)’ and show how many that is parenthetically, to alleviate modality errors. but filtering only the new entries would be my preferred working style.
love what you’ve done so far. thank you.
-davee
i may switch to reading these feeds in the new mail application in 10.5 to more approximate this behavior i want.
the folks making the one-laptop-per-child are making a really interesting offer for fans in north america, if you buy one during a limited sales period for $399 then the foundation will give another for free to a child in the third world. but order soon, the first 20,000 units will be available by christmas but that’s about as fast as they can ramp.
if you’d just like to try out the OLPC software without the clever laptop, you can run it in a “virtual machine” simulator by downloading the moka5 engine. (disclosure: i do some consulting for moka5.)
not sure what they’ll do with this site, but 19.20,21 has some sweeeeet informational graphics showing population growth in cities over the last 1000 years. serious eye candy.