Think about this for a second.

“Now...Apple has literally removed the ”Mac“ from its online counterpart in an effort to make the Apple user experience a platform-agnostic one. Take a look at the MobileMe Guided Tour video on Apple’s site. You may notice that every bit of the demo of MobileMe’s browser-based application is shown from the Safari browser on the Windows Vista platform. The video shows...navigation through a hierarchical file structure in the new iDisk with fluid graphics and beautiful buttons that look unlike the Aqua buttons of the Mac OS and it takes a moment to realize that the demo you’re watching is not being done on a Mac. Think about this for a second. Apple is removing the Mac from the Apple computer experience and laying the foundation for a browser-based OS, the thing that Google has been threatening all this time. Of course, it’s not a new idea; for a while, everyone has assumed that this is where the trend is taking us. But it’s never been clearer how we’re getting there.”

from Adam Lisagor’s lonelysandwich - Why Me?

Simplistic Relentlessness

People underestimate the importance of diligence as a virtue. No doubt this has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.” There is a flavor of simplistic relentlessness to it. And if it were an individual’s primary goal in life, that life would indeed seem narrow and unambitious.

Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

from Atul Gawande’s book Better

Julie’s favorite passage from the book also nicely explains an attribute she has in abundance.

Command-and-Control Capitalism

“The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.”
from Rolling Stone

Sometimes I Just Don’t Feel Focused

Tears from a Rock

Walt Brooksbank is a throwback. A rock-solid man, husband, father. If we had grown up to be him, none of us would have been upset.
Yesterday, I saw him lean over the casket of his dead son, Kevin. One final kiss on the forehead.
Ultimate suffering.

My God is Better than Your God.

from benmurphyonline

Most religious thinkers might agree that their god is better than my god, Quetzalcoatl, but I’m not so sure.

Barriers

There will always be achievers, whether they go to public schools, private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, or no schools at all. While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what’s more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that’s not what we are about.
Robert Cringely