Month: July 2022

“I Call Bullshit!” Jon Stewart on the PACT Act Being Blocked in the Senate – YouTube

“I Call Bullshit!” Jon Stewart on the PACT Act Being Blocked in the Senate – YouTube:

Jon Stewart joined an impassioned press conference on Thursday, calling out Republican Senators who are blocking passage of the PACT Act in the Senate. The bill will expand healthcare and benefits for the more than three million veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service. The Senate originally passed the legislation in June with extraordinary bipartisan support. The House passed it shortly thereafter, and it arrived back to the Senate on Wednesday for final passage. But a group of Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Pat Toomey, decided to block the measure for purely political reasons, costing sick veterans time they do not have.

[“This is an embarrassment – to the Senate, to the country, to the founders, and all that they profess to hold dear. If this is America first, then America is fucked.” It’s heartbreaking that politics and power has diverged so greatly from what it right.]

Binaries over priorities

Binaries over priorities:

Be definitive, know what you’re getting yourself into, control scope by deciding yes or no. Maybe is a scope expander, a deadline wrecker, and an appeaser that ends up being a displeaser in the end.

[My wife and I use a binary system about all household spending (which for us is pretty broad category of purchases). We decided early on that only one no “wins”. The revisit period is indeterminate, but any agenda item can be brought up again if circumstances change. There are certain revisitation exceptions like fabric patterns. It’s easy to get talked into something, but you’re never really going to like it. It’s not as formal as it sounds and it works for us. YMMV]

A Tale of Two Pools

A Tale of Two Pools – Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design:

we’d have returned to the hotel for a long day’s lounging in and around the pool. We made up imaginary and ridiculous Disney movies, describing the trailers to each other. (In “The Dog Who Shit Nickels,” when the suburban neighbor, pointing to a pile of coins, complains to dog owner Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Look what your dog did on my lawn!”, Arnold says, “Keep ze change.”) We splashed, we swam, we paddled.

[Excellence in summer vaca.]

Teach

Teach Woodworking – or Else – Lost Art Press:

Finally, I try to learn from my students. Even a first-day woodworker can teach me something because they are coming at it with fresh eyes. Or without preconceived notions.

[Lots of truths in that list no matter what you are teaching. And while I know everyone categorizes certain types of knowledge I believe this applies to everything. You can always teach what you know, regardless of topic, but I do make one request. Only teach what you know by doing. If you can’t practice the thing you’re teaching (lots of topics leap to mind) then maybe it requires some level of certification. If you’re not a surgeon, maybe trying to teach surgery is a, er, um, less good idea.]

CnC Episode 3: Being perfect is unobtainium

3: Being perfect is unobtainium

There’s a difference between the useless “be perfect” and the journey to always improve. Reaching for perfection contains greatness. Being perfect is, atmo, unobtanium. Clips from Michael Brauer, Grammy award winning mix engineer and Julian Lage, a brilliant guitar player. We start to discuss how change can be hard.

21. Prototyping to learn

21. Prototyping to learn:

There are a lots of decision-making steps along the product-development path. Those of us in the software industry who were influenced by Kent Beck et al talk about “spiking.” It means trying to build just enough of something to expose the unknowns that we would have missed otherwise. It’s not unusual to spike two different approaches to the same problem to see the difference in their characteristics.

[snip]

These examples only scratch the surface. The big idea is to think of prototyping not as a single costly effort to build and verify a single guess, but as a way to learn, to uncover what we don’t know — to find the best way forward for the unanswered question at hand.

[Public prototyping also takes place… like with Constraints and Creativity. I did some prototyping privately, but there’s so much more to learn about the choices that sometimes it makes sense to do them publicly.]

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