Posts tagged more
“ Pre-bid discussions with potential clients are crucial to a project’s success and they should accomplish some critical things and answer some critical questions. Surely these discussions are largely about defining the project scope, but they must reveal other things too, like if the timeline constraints fit your availability or if you have the required capabilities to successfully complete the work; and if so, can this actually be a successful project. Perhaps most importantly, you need to discover if you should accept or decline the project.”
“ Your online self … is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people “to friend,” which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar’s parents; there’s no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn’t relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.”
“ It shows that [New Zealand] is, at heart, an uncultured beast, if there is no respect for culture in some of its many forms. America, as much as we may mock its arrogance and power and blind allegiance to monster V8 trucks, at least has the ability to commission poetry and music and to take its architecture very seriously.”
Lest We Forget: Ferrell Keeps W. Onstage
- JS: Former presidents have worked on their memoirs; have you thought about how you’re going to tell your story, when you’re going to begin writing it?
- GWB: I actually finished mine, Jon. They will be sold only as a book on tape narrated by Vin Scully and Joe Morgan. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but let’s just say, Osama gets what’s coming to him.
- JS: Sir, you wrote your memoirs, and they’re fiction? It’s a work of fiction?
- GWB: Yes, yes, it’s fiction, Jon. If people want to read what actually happened, they can go to the library and read the micro-fish.
- JS: Uh, I believe, sir, fiche. Microfiche.
- GWB: Are you cursing at me in Jewish? Listen, Jon, just shut up. This book is going to make a great movie. It’s like a cross between ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Forrest Gump’ — only with e-mails being deleted, and torture.
“ Not so long ago the public sector officials would have scoffed at the suggestion that designers could do more than fuss over glossy brochures, but that’s changing. There is now a growing realization that many public services are no longer fit for purpose and a willingness to experiment with new approaches when reinventing them - including service design.”
“ I want to make clear that “work on stuff that matters” does not mean focusing on non-profit work, “causes, or any other form of “do-goodism.” It’s essential to get beyond that narrow box. We need to build an economy in which the important things are paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts.”
“ When did the technological menace that stalks popular culture shift from being carbon-based to entirely silicon? When did we evolve the perception that fictional computers could receive human-type personalities?”
“ Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.”
