Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.

d: Personal events

For a long time now I’ve been interested in “eventing” systems. This system needs to tell another (or many) what’s going on (“Hey, I’m done processing that data”). It’s a a way of decoupling the systems so that one system isn’t “waiting” for another system.

Now think about twitter in its best case (from this perspective). A bunch of people listen to me. I send a message. And those folks can act on the message or not.

What if that sort of eventing were built into everything? What if we agreed about expected actions triggered by an event? (You event “go” and I event “where” every time I care to.)

Other folks are working on and thinking about this. I don’t always agree with the model because I think the basic interaction is far simpler. If I need a delivery service I don’t send out a bid, because it probably doesn’t matter enough to save a few cents on a single transaction. Most likely, simplicity (excellent delivery record, easy to drop off, and then reasonable cost are more likely, until I’m shipping many items.) But that’s a nit. And a lot of this can happens today, all that’s not the way the systems are thought about. And that changes everything.

Intent Doesn’t Matter

Intent Doesn’t Matter:

I don’t think Apple plans to restrict anything but its own .ibooks format. But that doesn’t matter because, as Mike Ash puts it, “Unless we’re friends, your intentions don’t matter to me at all, only your actions.” Apple isn’t anyone’s friend but Apple’s, and its actions so far are to reserve a broad swath of rights pertaining to everything iBooks Author is capable of “generating” (whatever that means).

Even if we’re right and Apple doesn’t care about PDFs or plain text files, that’s still the Apple of today. The Apple of 20 years from now might turn out to be a completely different company, and this EULA has no expiration date. That’s a dangerous situation for authors and publishers who care about long-term distribution rights. It would be best for Apple to clarify the terms now — and, I hope, loosen them — rather than prolong the uncertainty.

[Lawyers.]

Source: venomous porridge

“Goldfish Salvation” Riusuke Fukahori 深堀隆介

“Goldfish Salvation” Riusuke Fukahori 深堀隆介:

Artist Riusuke Fukahori’s London debut exhibition “Goldfish Salvation” transforms ICN gallery into the world of goldfish. When struggling with artistic vision, Fukahori’s pet goldfish became his inspiration and ever since his passion and lifelong theme. His unique style of painting uses acrylic on clear resin which is poured into containers, resulting in a three-dimensional appearance and lifelike vitality.

This video gives you a glimpse of his amazing painting process.

[Awesome.]

Daniel’s Great Annual Birthday Ride

Daniel’s Great Annual Birthday Ride:

We set out on an intentionally short, but vertically-challenging ride. Daniel learned from last year that if he didn’t set my expectations properly about the verticality of the ride, I would curse his name peppering my expletives with promises of great bodily hard. I’m ok to ride hills, I just like to KNOW that I’m going to be multidimensionally (sure, it’s a word) suffering.

[That’s not the only thing I learned. I also learned that that I should not have Jenni ambush me with video. Had I known that was going to happen, I would have reengaged my brain. You see we were standing in a spot with a great view of the valley from the Hudson River from the top of the first eastern wave of Ramapo hills. Having just climbed it, I wasn’t thinking about anything but “It’s cold (now that I’ve stopped)”, and “it’s only get colder on the trip down.” I hadn’t engaged any higher order thinking a that point. Naturally, that is when she points a camera at me, and suggests that I should have something to say. Oy. Next time. This new bit of climbing (who knew it was there?) will add a nice bit to my climbing ride, and is quiet enough for hill repeats when necessary. As a bonus, it is closer to me than any other climb with some length to it. I also haven’t tried it in the other direction which could be less steep, but longer. Fun.

I also learned that there is entirely too much bike gear in the entrance to our play room, even if ignore Jenni sprawled on the floor.]

Source: JenniBlog™ 2.0

That’s what Author does

That’s what Author does:

So if Apple, like Amazon, has their sites on moving from being a channel to being a publisher what do they need to do?

They need to provide authors with the tools for easily providing properly formatted books for their brand.

That’s what Author does.

[Another view.]

Thoughts on iBooks

Thoughts on iBooks:

Commercial iBooks textbooks are a marketing head fake. They’re the equivalent of carbon fibre buggy whips. iTunes U is the game changer. Put iBooks Author and iTunes U into the hands of great teachers, put iPads in their students hands, put them all in a room together then step back and see what happens. That’s the ballgame.

[Agreed.]

Source: Fraser Speirs

Also, this from the Macworld piece:

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

I understand why Apple is pushing on this: the textbook is culturally and politically embedded in the American education system. It’s also an obvious and easily understood way to sell the benefits of the iPad to the people who control educational spending. Such people are often not ready to hear a pitch about teachers and pupils creating their own materials, using the Internet for learning, and communicating with peers and experts around the world.

The enemy of my enemy

The enemy of my enemy:

People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and any publisher is far better off working on ways to make sure that customers can legally get what they want as easily as possible with the fewest restrictions. That should be the lesson that media moguls take away from iTunes

[Which was the lesson of iTunes from my perspective.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Don’t mess with The Dodd

Don’t mess with The Dodd:

What’s amazing is the notion that we may actually be doing something about it. As Matt Yglesias wrote, public engagement matters: “SOPA/PIPA opponents actually got in the arena and did politics instead of complaining about how this showed that politics is corrupt and stupid.” The problem with our political system isn’t that it’s unresponsive—it’s that it’s usually responding to the wrong things. But if we let that be a rationale to just write the whole thing off as a lost cause, then we’re doing what the real cynics in the system—like, for example, former senator Chris Dodd—want us to: nothing.

[He does seem to have completely lost his way, assuming I ever knew about him to think that he was useful in the first place.]