Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

So very true.

… Doing all that stuff when you really got to focus on the product first and keep it as small as you can and if you’re going to open a bakery, open it out of your house first. Just make – I mean, that’s probably technically illegal in some place, but make some… if you want to open a cupcake bakery, make some cupcakes and sell them at the Farmer’s market for six months, for a year first, on the weekends. See if it works. If it works, okay, now you have some people who like your cupcakes, you’re selling out every weekend. Now maybe you can move into something else. Instead of saying, “I’m going to open a bakery” and go buy a storefront and some expensive machinery and stuff like that. So I think people kind of start a little bit too quickly sometimes too and they should just make their time and starts something on the side and see where it goes.

From Here.

In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

From here. This is probably some of the best reading I have had in a while. Great site.

Hilarious. Click around on the site and if you have spent any time in the last 20 years inside your standard nondenom mega church wannabe, a ton of this is too true.

And then I stumbled across this and I was sure that I was going to bother my coworkers with my loud barks of laughter.

What really gets me about the last link, is just how bad design permeates church media materials. Bad logos, bad colors, bad layout, horrific type (comic sans shows up too), and just the piss poor decisions made on marketing. A church is a business deep down. Perhaps not to make money, but regardless if you are saving souls or teaching others, you have to be solvent. That means paying your staff and your mortgage.

Faith is one thing, and even if god shows up with a suitcase full of money, he will probably only do it once.

Dear fledgling pastor: Hire a marketing grad. Jesus may save their soul, but the grad will save you from yourself. Plus they are cheap. They work for peanuts.

• UltraVNC, the best remote app
• CDBurnerXP, the best free cd/dvd burner
• RocketDock, the best free dock.
• DisplayFusion, multimonitor best friend
• WinDirStat, the best folder/file audit tool
• Gimp, better than Photoshop?
• Restoration, quick fix for bad deletes.
• Notepad++, best syntax checker I have used.
• VLC, seriously plays everything.
• FastStone Capture, handy for screencaps
• Process Explorer (and all sysinternal tools), free, from MS (now).
• QDir, file/folder explorer replacement
• XDN Tweaker, like a tweakui powertoy, but for Vista
• DDWRT, replacement OS for WRT54 series Linksys routers
• BackTrack, linux OS with all the security apps I could ever need/want
• KeePass, password file… encryption, mgmt, etc.
• PuTTY, PSCP, ssl tools.
• PeaZip, best unzip, opens everything.
• DarkRoom, handy for focusing on writing something.

You have to see this picture. Talk about ca-rp-ing your pants!

Via Gizmodo.

Life at the Media Lab has reminded me once again that technology is most exciting when it upsets the status quo. Big-screen TVs and downloadable episodes of Late Night with Conan O’Brien are merely more attempts to control the means of distribution, something GE has been doing since the invention of the light bulb. But exploding GPS backpacks represent an alien mind-set; they are part of the growing media insurgency that is redefining news, journalism, and civic life. This technological insurgency shouldn’t surprise us: after all, it’s wrapped up in language itself, which has long defied any attempt to commodify it. Technology, as it has done through the ages, is freeing communication, and this is good news for the news. A little empathy couldn’t hurt.

Good read about how major network television (like other “Big Media”) have totally missed the bus on the relationship of society and technology.

Thanks, Mike!

That was an awesomeness burrito, with hot sauce of freaking coolness.

Chris Nolan – Batman fans everywhere applaud your efforts.

Sweetness.

Then I started poking around on the net about Ron Paul. There are his websites (well done by the way), his campaign’s efforts all around the net (youtube, etc, also well done), and the real grassroots efforts everywhere.

Then I ran across this on Digg today.

“Google Ron Paul!” a sign said. It was somewhere on a side street in MD. I passed it as I drove home one day. Because of you [old media], I remembered that name. I wanted to see what it was about this person that made you so sure he could not be in the running. So I went home and looked up the name. I do not even have to tell you what happened then. Almost any American that does it for themselves already knows what I’m talking about.

Word. I know what he is talking about.

Surreal.

Whether this guy likes it or not, iPods have become synonymous with music – and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It’s the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

Already is the key word, because it didn’t have to be this way, and that’s become the main source of my utter lack of sympathy for the dying record industry: They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers – and they didn’t. Instead, they panicked – they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades