Ready for the New Year? Me either. Here’s a wallpaper of a Vancouver icon, shrouded in low clouds to start your year off fresh and… gloomy. (Right click here to download)
Want something a little more colourful for your desktop? Take a look at some past wallpapers.
Just in time for Christmas… Right-click here to save to your computer.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
— Alan Kay
A very interesting article from the ever-interesting GOOD magazine.
It covers the chicken/egg problem of which is better for the developing world: laptops or cell phones? I’ve witnessed the dramatic proliferation of cell phones across Africa and, along with the mobility of Toyota “matatu” van taxis, the accompanying economic activity.
…voice communications do not require literacy, and are thus more egalitarian and more inclusive.
— Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameenphone
But Negroponte argues that while cell phones connect, laptops are a window to literacy:
Asynchronous and high latency communications is very inexpensive… When we ship 100 laptops into a village, each can have 100 different books. That means 10,000 in the village, without any connectivity other than to each other.
— Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT
An interesting anecdote from Negroponte:
Ten years ago, most students are MIT and Harvard wanted to start companies and make money. Today, those students want to be social entrepreneurs. They are more interested in changing the world and doing good.
h/t Kara
Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of [the] target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the [storyteller] must first display his own open heart.
— Peter Guber, The Four Truths of the Storyteller
But feelings are pesky critters, cropping up inconveniently, and then disappearing just when you want them. And the thing both terrible and wonderful about feelings is that they change… In fact the more you let yourself feel whatever you are actually feeling, the more available you are to a new feeling.
The director is in a position to do violence to [these] delicate emotional mechanisms.
— Judith Weston, Directing Actors
A few behind-the-scenes changes… I’ve updated my blog to the fantastic new WordPress 2.7. This release vastly improves the experience for me as a blogger, as well as enabling me to write this post on my iPhone :)
