Seen this morning during my bike ride to work: a fox! It was in this little park near a very busy street that it tried to cross a couple times. I hope it made it across because this side of the street is basically nothing but the CU campus, houses and small parks. The other side eventually leads to the mountains.
As usual, Paul Graham says something most entrepreneurs have heard before, and yet somehow it’s new:
So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.
More here
The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.
That would be Colin Powell .
I’ve been wondering about this myself, then Dave supplied the answer:
Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what — they’re exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.)
Fans of Waking Life will recognize the technique, though I’m sure it had been done before that movie.
Memories of Fantasies Forgotten from Dovely on Vimeo.
I’m watching the last 15 minutes of the US vs. North Korea in the Women’s World Cup am reminded once again that soccer is the best women’s team sport. Why? Because there is essentially no difference between the men’s and women’s game. In basketball, for example, it’s very obvious that you’re watching a very different game from the men’s version: the almost complete absence of dunks being the obvious differences.
Though women’s soccer is a bit slower than men’s, that’s not really noticeable on television. And the tactics and ball skills are all exactly the same. There is even similarity within countries: Brazilian women’s soccer mirrors the men’s beautiful game – amazing ball skills and a flair for the dramatic offensive push.
The game ended in a tie, but from what I saw the North Koreans were better. Terrific ball skills and excellent passing. It was raining like hell and the ball was slippery. The USA was very lucky to get away with a tie.
One of my favorite memories from childhood is of a rainy overtime match I was in. We lost the game (we got screwed by the refs. No, seriously…), but it was a great game.
Seen in China’s western frontier at a Silk Road market where the craftsmen specialize in handmade rugs:
Seen in Gmail web snippets today:
[Sorry to bore you all with this, but I had such an awful experience that I want to make sure the whole world knows NOT to go to Comfort Dental on McCaslin Blvd. in Louisville. This is review is also posted at that link.]
First of all, when my wife scheduled the appointment, she specifically asked for a checkup and cleaning, which the receptionist said would be fine.
So. We went there, went through the typical new patient bureaucracy of filling out forms, insurance paperwork etc, then waited our turn. We were then led back to a small consultation room where we had to wait for our dentist. We waited for a while, then he showed up and introduced himself. He was friendly enough, but he just kept talking and talking and talking, during which we found out that we couldn’t get our teeth cleaned during that visit. They would only do a checkup and, if they found cavities, they would insist on doing that work first before doing a cleaning. We didn’t like this policy at all — I’ve been going to various dentists for over 30 years and have never heard of such a thing. They gave us all kinds of BS justifications, but the reason why was obvious — they wanted to force us to pay for the more expensive procedure first, and if we didn’t like it, well, they would just deny us the cleaning we asked for from the outset.
And BTW because of all this mindless back & forth, we had spent 50 minutes there already and STILL not had anyone actually look at our teeth. It was late in the day, I was tired from work, I wanted to go home and relax. But instead I have to sit here and argue with these guys. (Note that I’m not the argumentative type. I probably have overpaid for a lot of things over the years because of that, but this was just too bogus to allow through my radar.)
It was ridiculous. If they hadn’t attracted so much attention to their misdirection in the first place, I would gladly have had my cleaning today and come back for a filling if I needed it.
Anyway, after all that crap they finally put us in our chairs. I wasn’t surprised when they found a cavity, but they wanted me to get it filled right then & there. They said it would take 30-40 minutes. As I said, it was late & I was tired, so I wanted to reschedule. They said fine. Then I asked if I could get a cleaning while I was there. Sorry, no, that’s too much work, it would take too long, blah blah blah. I later asked one of the assistants how long a cleaning takes. Shes said 30-45 minutes. So I asked why they were so eager for me stay & get my cavity filled but didn’t seem to have time for a cleaning. She didn’t have a good answer.
I won’t bore you with any more details, but suffice it to say this is the most contentious encounter I’ve ever had with the health care system. The dentist realized pretty quickly that he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with me and kept apologizing. I tried to along with it for a while, but their incredibly stubborn unwillingness to JUST. CLEAN. MY. TEETH! spoiled it.
I don’t know if they’re any good at dentistry or not. They were too busy trying to do a bait & switch on us for me to find out. I can’t believe I wasted over an hour & a half on this.
Great comment at Slashdot that suggests an update to Godwin’s Law:
As a discussion addressing the topic of the Bush administration grows in size, the probability of comparing the Clinton administration activities to excuse Bush administration activities grows to one.