when penguins fly...

gotta know when to fold 'em

In case you missed (as I did) last month's New York Times homage to Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee ...

the music is not in the piano . . .

I am not here to compete with Warner Music (NYSE:WMG). I am not here to sign 300 bands because 2 will pay for the other 298. By the end of the year, we hope to have signed 6 acts. We are just utilizing our real estate to further develop artists. We sign and introduce bands through games and make them available to people globally. Young people want to take music from the game and buy it for their phone or iPod. I am in the music 2.0 business.
— Steve Schnur | Worldwide Executive of Music and Marketing, Electronic Arts | Fast Company | July 2007 | page 26

Buckminster Fuller told Mike Vance: "You never change anything by fighting it; you change things by making them obsolete through superior technology." ( Mike Vance + Diane Deacon | Think Out of the Box | Career Press | 1997 | page 138)

Jesus told this parable:

No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’” — Luke 5.36 - 39

When I think about it for a moment I see how much this has to say about yesterday's post on Emerging Grace.

[The title of this post is widely attributed to Clement Mok though, for the life of me, I can't find the source.]

Misheard Lyrics Guy | Pearl Jam

Thanks to Nashville's own Chris Hauser.

iPhone | Design

Far be it from me to pimp a product line but it's worth noting that Walter Mossberg long considered Apple no more than an interesting technology footnote. He's changed his tune the last couple of years, even suggesting at one point that Apple had become a viable enterprise technology solution — which indeed it has. Among other good news for Apple this week, the iTunes store took the third spot in music retailing for the first time, moving ahead of Target — another company I like a lot — and Apple became the fourth leading seller of laptop computers, reaching something over 14 percent of total sales, behind Hewlett Packard, Dell and Gateway if memory serves me. In any event, after two weeks of daily use, here's Walter Mossberg's review of the iPhone:



[Updated 06.27 with a YouTube embed that fits the Blogger template (the video I embedded last night from the Wall Street Journal was too wide for this template — once again, the variety of video standards poses a challenge to presentation). Out of the box, iPhone reportedly plays only QuickTime movies (no Windows Media Video or Flash). YouTube — which is to say Google is delivering something on the order of 10,000 videos as the new device lands this Friday and, according to some reports, will make its entire inventory available by Fall 08.]

jim hancock | the tiny company called me

BOOKS | DIGITAL MOVIES | SCRIPTS | LEARNING DESIGNS

There's a new space on the www called thetinycompanycalledme.com. It's a home — or at least a small apartment — for the work I've done since quitting my day job to become the tiny company called me on January 1, 1999.

What's not there — because they're not collectible — are the live events, creative services and design work I do for clients like Youth Specialties and InsideWork.

What is there is easy access to my books, digital movies, comedic and dramatic scripts and published group learning designs.

All that and a brief manifesto on why I do the things I do. Here's an excerpt; if you find it engaging, you can click through to more . . .

I design resources for youth workers, teachers and parents who think that teaching is interesting but learning is fascinating.

That means no short cuts, no easy answers to hard questions, no moralizing, no quick fixes. So if you're looking for those kinds of benefits . . . sorry.

Of course there are plenty of folks selling short cuts and simple answers. And why not? Because really, who has the time?

Who has the time? I'm sorry; I just think that's the wrong question.

I think there are better questions:

Do you think kids learn better when we tell them what to believe and how to behave or when we skillfully engage them in their own learning?

Do you really think kids learn at their best in environments where listening to an adult is twice — or three or four of five times — as important as talking while an adult listens?

more

post-it!

Post-it Stop Motion
Uploaded by coolz0r

broken by design | Seth Godin

Seth Godin counted seven kind of broken — ranging from irritating to downright dangerous.

In no particular order, an experience, artifact or thing may be broken because:

It's not my job to fix it
It was designed by selfish jerks
The world changed
I didn't know
I'm not a fish
There are significant contradictions
Some things are broken on purpose

What's broken where you work? If it wasn't broken on purpose, whose job is it to fix it?

Bono | i think this is remarkable

I think this — from Bono + The One Campaign — is remarkable in content and form.

designed to work

Entering Free Agent Nation this month, my good friend Toben bought a MacBook to replace the one his former company provided:

I am now officially a Mac fan for life. I turned on the new Mac, it asked if I wanted to migrate data from my old Mac. I did. I plugged in the firewire, hit transfer and 30 minutes later my new Mac looks just like my old Mac. And everything works perfectly. Very impressive.

The genius of the transaction is in the last sentence of Toben's email: I feel like such a techie!

Turn on new computer.
Click Yes button.
Connect to old computer with one cable.
Run errand.
Come back in 30 minutes.
Feel like a techie.

Brilliant.