Rough…
and refined…
Today’s quote is from Merlin Mann:
Don’t let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants should be in the parade.
(Because he has a very limited idea of what an elephant means)
Later in the podcast he had another good quote:
You can judge a person’s power, anywhere in the world, but particularly in an organisation, not based on what they say no to, but what they have the power to say yes to.
For many years I’ve been a fan of TextExpander on the Mac, a utility which converts a short sequence of keystrokes into a much longer one. For example, most of my email messages end with
All the best,
Quentin
which appears when I type ‘atb’ and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it’s a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn’t too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.
But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad’s. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there’s no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can’t find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)
Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I’ve realised that I’m using that all the time too.
Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my ‘All the best’ trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: ‘qqsf’ expands into ‘Quentin Stafford-Fraser’, complete with capitals and punctuation.
But the thing I’ve found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I’m always having to type, say, ‘quentin@mycompany.com’ on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with ‘qmc’ and a space.
One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type ‘qmc<space><backspace>’, but that’s still a great deal easier than the whole address.
Anyone who’s starting to tire of my holiday snaps will be pleased to know that I’m back in the UK, and, while I may yet post the odd picture over the next few days, they should decline to a respectable level before long! On Monday, I need to get back to work.
Various friends have been asking just what ‘back to work’ entails for me at present, since my situation has been decidedly vague for a while. So here’s a quick personal update for those interested…
After leaving Camvine in the autumn, I had a bit of a break, and then started a new company, Telemarq Ltd. (Hans Rosling once told me that he had worked out my model: whenever I run out of money, I start a new company! That’s not the intention, but it does sometimes look like that…)
Telemarq was initially formed as a vehicle for the exploration of a new invention. I think I have a good and viable idea, but I don’t have the resources to get it very far on my own (and I haven’t yet filed the patent, which is why I’m not broadcasting the details!)
Anyway, as I was debating whether to go out looking for investors for another startup, I was approached by several different companies who wanted some consultancy work, and I thought they would all would be rather interesting/enjoyable clients. Besides which, my bank account had dwindled to a level where it needed some topping-up!
So, for the moment, Telemarq is a consultancy business through which Rose and I do our work (which means it already has a rather broad remit, since our fields are very different). I’m delighted that Richard Morrison is going to be working part-time under the Telemarq banner too, since he’s one of the nicest and smartest chaps I’ve run into in a long time.
A big part of Telemarq will be software development, but there’s some teaching, some publishing, some intellectual property stuff in the mix already, and we’re only just starting.
May need some more people soon, or some more days in the week…!
To the extent I’ve formulated a coherent plan, it’s this:
To do really good work, on interesting projects, for, and with, people we like.
Not exactly a conventional business mission statement, but I’ve seen a lot worse. It’ll do as a placeholder!
Giambologna’s splendid sculpture of The Rape of the Sabine Women, carved from a single block of marble.
(The Wikipedia article points out that ‘rape’ here chiefly means abduction, rather than its more modern emphasis, and suggests that it might actually have been quite a good deal for the women concerned…)
We used to think Venice was crowded until we spent a week in Florence. The great thing about Venice, especially at this time of year, is that you can step off the main thoroughfares and get lost in peaceful (and often pretty) backwaters. In Florence, the areas that aren’t crowded are often empty for a good reason.
The best way to see the popular spots in Florence, we discovered this morning, is to do it before about 8 a.m.
In the last week I’ve walked and cycled many miles around Florence, on the ubiquitous slate-grey stone with which its streets are paved. They cut nice textures into it to make sure it doesn’t become too slippery in adverse weather conditions.
But I have walked on this stone before, in many cities around the world, and in a finely-polished form, because it is used as the flooring material in Apple’s retail stores.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs describes how this came about:
In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian — a concern that it’s hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic.
The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence. “We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity,” said Johnson. “Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity.” So designers in Florence picked out just the right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its companion tiles. “Knowing that it’s the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time,” said Johnson.
The Italians certainly know how to transport people efficiently in and out of cities.
I must have a mischievous turn of mind, though, because I keep thinking about dominoes…
If I read that someone is
…working on debates within inter-disciplinary urbanism around notions of ‘Darwinistic individual selfishness’ – or ‘Who Dares Wins Urbanism’ attempting to make apparent the predictable, though overlooked failures of individualism within and apparent across the ‘leadership’ of the centre, left and right.
and is preoccupied with
…how social relations (dissolving of nation states and rise of cities) might change on earth with the colonisation of other planets
but has now created a non-profit that intends to
inject a criticality into discussions about cities via creating a platform for existing, though overlooked multi-disciplinary critical actors and provocateurs
then I can’t help feeling that he must find it difficult to get people to take him seriously, and that wrecking the Boat Race must have been a last desperate attempt to get himself noticed.
The above quotes come from the culprit’s RSA profile page. (You shouldn’t read anything into the fact that he’s an RSA Fellow, by the way, even though it sounds good. The RSA is a pleasant-enough club in London, of which anyone can become a ‘Fellow’ by stumping up 150 quid a year.)
But as I read about what he does, the very worrying thought occurs to me that someone, presumably, is paying for him to create this kind of mumbo-jumbo, and I really hope it’s not the taxpayer (i.e. you and me).
The broadcaster Richard Madeley put it nicely: ‘God, the monumental ego and selfishness of the swimmer who screwed the Boat Race. Imagine sharing living space with someone like that.’
But wait a minute… that’s much too obvious an explanation. I’m off to apply for a grant to do some interdisciplinary research which will explore the creation of a forum to inject a criticality into the suggestion that such actions are simply the predictable, though overlooked failure of individualism.
Thought for the day:
A human is a YouTube video’s way of making more YouTube videos.
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