Interrobang

Reply All… Hilarity.

December 13, 2011

A recent email exchange at work left me laughing and wondering if people lacked a basic understanding of how “Reply All” works. Occasionally, those of us who work a little too much get nastygrams from HR informing us that we’ve hit the limit on vacation accrual and will begin losing time if we don’t take [...]

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Neil Gaiman’s Kicking My Ass (On Twitter) [infographic]

July 15, 2011

I decided to check out Visual.ly to see what kind of job it did creating infographics automatically.  I decided to compare myself to @neilhimself, Neil Gaiman…  I probably should have picked on someone my own size.

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Social Media: Your Peripheral Nervous System

March 8, 2011
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Remember when you were in school and sat there confused while the teacher continued teaching something you didn’t quite grasp? Then, after the first student raised their hand and said, “I don’t get it,” a number of other students raised their hand and said, “We don’t get it, either.” Remember how much better you felt [...]

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Our Bad Choices: Similar But Not Equal

March 4, 2011
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I’m re-reading Dan Ariely‘s Predictably Irrational right now. It’s still amazing to me how completely manipulable we are. I just finished the first chapter, which deals with the phenomenon of how our decision-making processes are so predictably skewed by changes to the choice pool.
The example Dan brings up in the book is an experiment where [...]

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An Anthropology of Our Own

February 1, 2011
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I just went back and read the Playboy Interview with Marshall McLuhan from 1969.  It’s always fun to go back and re-read some of the ideas that played a role in shaping my thinking.  As a nice surprise, two ideas seemed to jump out at me as particularly relevant today.
The Phonetic Alphabet Was Our Ticket [...]

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Bad Javascript Humor

January 28, 2011

I’m a sucker for bad jokes in the form of code.  Here’s my contribution to the genre:
<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
<!–

function tellBadJoke() {
fence = new Object();
fence.sittingOn = new Array(“Pete”, “Repeat”);

var fallsOff = fence.sittingOn.indexOf(“Pete”);
if(fallsOff!=-1) fence.sittingOn.splice(fallsOff, 1);

if (fence.sittingOn.length == 1 && fence.sittingOn[0] == “Repeat”){
[...]

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What could possibly go wrong?

January 16, 2011

Slashdot reported today that Microsoft is filing a patent to cover using “altered parasitic organisms” as a delivery mechanism for disease-fighting substances.  It seems like a good idea…  And there’s no real potential for things to go horribly wrong, right?  And Microsoft products always work so well…

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The Shape of a Social Enterprise

November 11, 2010
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Much has been made of the idea of a Social Enterprise. The idea of increased transparency both within and without the organization. Internally, tacit knowledge is given a new degree of latitude. Externally, the line between inside and outside the organization begins to blur. I think we’ve done a lot of thinking about how social media [...]

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Taxonomy of Rap Names

September 30, 2010
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I’m a sucker for data visualizations; especially ones that have a sense of humor.  I found a pointer to a chart that presents a taxonomy of rap names.  I find it funny that you need a nom de microphone to be a rapper, but I guess James Todd Smith or Calvin Broadus don’t sound all [...]

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When You Assume…

August 5, 2010
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Recently, there was a post over at DiscoBlog on the Discover Magazine site that mentioned a study that claims that women who wax have better sex.  It reminded me how quickly we can be led astray by settling on the first assumption.  At first blush, one would assume that if you are a woman and [...]

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