This weekend I’ll be giving Monodraw a test drive. It’s an ASCII-art drawing program for Mac OS X. If it’s as good as advertised I may use it to draw images for my new book.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 211)
If I had a garden, I might buy these cat and dog “Buddha” garden statues from Plow & Hearth.
A few weeks ago I learned about a text called “Fukan zazengi,” which contains instructions for Zen meditation (Zazen) practice. The image shown comes from this stanford.edu page. If you’re interested in learning how to meditate without the background material or Buddha references, just skip down to the fourth paragraph.
I had never heard of the term “energy words” before, so this was interesting. The images comes from this espn.com page, which is about the Chicago Cubs player Munenori Kawasaki. The things he says, including “Number 1” and “Fighting Spirit” remind me of another phrase I heard a long time ago, where people would yell “Certain Victory!” before entering into battle.
I have a 2015 Subaru Outback, and while the basic “car” is good, the software in the car is often comical, as in comically-bad, including bugs and poor design decisions. This image shows that my car has gotten 76.2 MPG over its lifetime, which is off by about 50 MPG.
It may be that this piece of data is trying to convey something else, so in that case it would just be poor design and not wrong data, I don’t know. But I shouldn’t have to dig through the car’s manual while driving 75 MPH on I-70 to figure out what this is trying to show. (And this is just one example of the Outback’s poor software quality.)
As a final post on Jeff Bezos and Amazon this morning, here’s a quote on something called the narrative fallacy. That term comes from the book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
This image (and quote) comes from the book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
This is a good quote from Jeff Bezos on what makes Amazon different from other companies. I would add (a) they have a smart leader, (b) they seem less interested in corporate bureacracy and CYA than in getting things done, and (c) somehow Mr. Bezos has gotten away with rarely generating a profit in all the years Amazon has been in business.
Not many people can get away with the third item, and that’s a powerful weapon for him. As an example of this, Yahoo has generated a profit for years, but they’re currently talking about selling off Yahoo in parts because it has no growth potential. So as a part of Item C, it may be that Mr. Bezos gets away without generating a profit because Amazon is growing and is always future-looking, which is a part of his quote.
This image comes from the book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
I just learned about the book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, while reading this article, The Next Amazon is Probably Failing Right Now. I’ve only read the Kindle Preview and a few random pages so far, but it looks very good, and it’s highly rated, with 889 reviews. From what I’ve read so far, it’s safe to say that it tells the story of Amazon’s history, and the author really seems to know Mr. Bezos and Amazon.
I was just about to call it a night, and then I saw that Typesafe has been renamed to Lightbend. You can read about the mutable name change here on the Lightbend website.
I stopped in line at an ATM this afternoon, looked to my right, and saw this little group of prairie dogs in between the bank and those other businesses. That’s pretty much how Colorado rolls.
The car that Jonathan Ive drives is ... a Bentley Mulsanne. You can learn more about it on the Bentley Motors website. Car & Driver says the Mulsanne costs well over $300,000, and there eight reasons for that. I learned that Ive drives a Mulsanne when reading this New Yorker article. I thought it would be interesting to keep this in mind for whenever Apple reveals their first automobile.
If you’re ever interested in learning about visual programming, check out the Scratch project on mit.edu.
