How to goodbye loved ones at the gate: 1) buy refundable first class ticket 2) go through security 3) request a refund right after step 2
— Joel Monegro (@jmonegro) December 22, 2014
John Naughton in The Guardian:
Some years ago, I had a conversation with a senior minister in which he revealed that he thought the web was the internet.
While I was still reeling from the shock of finding a powerful figure labouring under such a staggering misconception, I ran into Sir Tim Berners-Lee at a Royal Society symposium.
Over coffee, I told him about my conversation with the minister.
“It’s actually much worse than that,” he said, ruefully.
“Hundreds of millions of people now think that Facebook is the internet.”
Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:
In 600 years, scholars translating books from before the 21st century will know that “noon” needs to be “1 p.m.”
And the opportunity cost for ignoring Leap Seconds…
Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp all suffered issues related to the last leap second in 2012. And, more seriously, computer booking systems used by Qantas Airlines all struggled, delaying flights by hours.
In some cases, it is impossible to update systems before the next leap second arrives. Matsakis spoke of a Switzerland power company whose backup systems only turn on when needed—otherwise, they sit disconnected from the network. When they were activated in a test after the last leap second, they crashed.
Had they been needed at the time, Matsakis said, parts of the country would have suffered a blackout.
Jess Kimball Leslie in TechCrunch:
The great story of Silicon Valley: A company, once ahead of its time, ceases to innovate for almost a decade while continuing to make billions off its legacy business model — ad sales. Then that once-great company dies.
In the proud American tradition of AOL, Yahoo, and GeoCities, I present YouTube. Ever notice how its homepage looks almost the same as it did in 2008? No, really…
Via Jason Kottke,
Tim Urban’s mind blowing timeline infographic truly, truly Puts Time in Perspective like nothing else.
Carol Ross writing in Forbes explains Four Phases necessary to Bounce Back From Burnout…
Phase 3 is about rewiring your brain, so new neural pathways are formed to replace old habits of thinking. This step is critical, because thoughts lead to emotions, which lead to behavior.
…
Changing your thought pattern to more positive, constructive thoughts is like upgrading your “operating system.” And just like a computer, when you do that, everything runs more smoothly.
Furthermore, Ross gives five How-To helpers for Phase 3. Number four:
4. Choose your beliefs and then test them in the world daily. In the video, Celebrate What’s Right With the World, a photographer for National Geographic gives examples of how his beliefs influenced what he was able to see, and thus capture in photos. He calls this: “Believing is seeing.”
That more than anything else, is the best articulation of the nagging feeling of why I need to return to photoblogging properly on a daily basis.
Manuela Brand writes in depth about abandoning Facebook.
Fred Wilson asked What Just Happened in 2014 and shared ten insights.
Here are the first two:
1/ the social media phase of the Internet ended. this may have happened a few years ago actually but i felt it strongly this year. entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications. we still use them. but there isn’t much innovation here anymore. the big platforms are mature. their place is secure.
2/ messaging is the new social media. this may be part of what is going on in 1/. families use whatsapp groups instead of facebook. kids use snapchat instead of instagram. facebook’s acquisition of whatsapp in february of this year was the transaction that defined this trend.
This morning, Martin Weigert looks back and explains How everybody was wrong about the future of Social Networking.
This is just anecdotal but I know people who have completely abandoned Facebook and use now a combination of Instagram and WhatsApp (or other messengers) to satisfy their social networking needs. I do not rule out that this becomes a widespread phenomenon.
That will resonate with any number of diehard BBM addicts I know.
Everyone delays.
Including me in wanting to save a rough draft of this simple linkblog post until a later time when I could write/re-edit/insert-excuse-here.
In doing so it reminded me of how I used to handle Procrastination.
I’d Procrastinate… Later.
How?
When facing ANY moment where making a decision to start to do and complete something, I immediately made a best-guess of how long the doing would take.
With that length of doing time now estimated, I allowed myself, at most, an equal amount of delaying time.
Hence, if a task took 5 minutes to do, I could at most delay for an additional 5 minutes beforehand. And then I made it a Personal Law that I must get started and then finish the task.
Time cost for the task? Altogether, 10 minutes. Tops.
This was derived from my habit of writing down the estimated time commitment beside each item on my daily To Do List, and then re-prioritizing the entire list’s contents from that point of view.
Here’s the link to the Guardian Article, Breaking up is hard to do. But procrastinating doesn’t make it easier which kicked off this blog post, some 28 minutes ago