Archive for Life

The World’s Most Livable Cities

Auckland tied with Düsseldorf for 5th in the Mercer Human Resource Consulting World’s Top 100 Most Livable Cities. Wellington also gets in the top 20 at 12th. Vienna another city I’ll probably spend time in, is tied for 3th.

From Digg.

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Rands In Repose: Trickle Theory

I use this method when I faced with a pile of paper on my desk to file:

My advice is: START. Iterate. Mix-it-Up.

Combined with this short story on how to get things done:

It went like this: one guy would cut and drag brush into the fire, another would cut trees down, and the third would trim fallen trees. This went on for a while and then they’d all switch. Now, drag guy was cut guy, cut guy was hauling wood guy and trim guy was stack guy. During lunch, I sat down and asked, “When do you guys switch jobs?””When we’re bored.”

Beautiful, beautiful Trickle Theory. How cool is this? If you’re working on an impossibly hard or impossibly dull task and you find yourself mentally blocked by boredom or confusion, stop and do something else. The benefits of stopping are stunning.

The absence of fear to failure is often the requirement for success when faced with impossible tasks. Becoming stuck is purely a signal that is time to stop and gather your experience with some reflection, maybe internally while you do something else.

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Yum!

We’ll be visiting here next time I’m in Vienna: Zanoni & Zanoni.

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Been busy

I haven’t posted much recently as we’ve been busy with the sale of our house and the hunt for our new house. Our new home will be 600m from work, 500m from a nice park, swimming pool and gym, and 300m from the Onehunga cafe area. Even though I usually work from home, being able to walk down to grab some paperwork is going to be much nicer than having to drive for 25 minutes.
Yesterday, I got a good deal on an old Sun Ray 1 via Trademe. I’ll be doing some testing with these in the next couple months and will be comparing SRSS with NX.

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Progressive but with economics

An article by The Angry Economist.

You can’t help poor people until you understand why they’re poor. To those who don’t know: poor people aren’t poor because they have no money. They’re poor because all their choices in life suck. Giving them money doesn’t automatically solve this problem for them.

This is basically my opinion as well, although I might prefer to say: “You can’t help people until you understand why they need help.” That said I believe a fair and happy community should provide itself insurance against certain risks, this reduces the overall psychologically cost of life. Of course things then start getting complicated again.

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SoftFlexâ„¢ Computer Gloves

softFLEXâ„¢ Computer Gloves come in three attractive colors

SoftFlexâ„¢ Computer Gloves look very interesting. Time to find a piece of string to measure my wrist and then see if they can ship to New Zealand.

Other than supporting the wrist they probably do a good job getting it warm and the blood flowing. Which is an added benefit over mouse gell pads.
From.

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Some guys are just crazy!

Prepare for Liftoff:

Walker’s idea of fun? Stretch a carbon-fiber bowstring 24 feet along a rail, fire up a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, hit a trigger, and pull 10 gs as his craft, modeled on spaceships from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, shoots to the stratosphere.

Originally from digg.

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Politics for Sale

Politics for Sale in the Land of the Free:

In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen’s predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud — that is, it wasn’t what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen’s prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being “on the high side of reality.”

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Flood the World!

In the future I will have to check these maps before making real estate decisions.

From O’Reilly Radar.

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Sweet-Sour Fruit

One pink-colored tablet is made of three miracle fruit berries, Shimamura said. When people eat or lick the fruit’s red berries, any sour thing they eat or drink a minute later tastes sweet for about two hours. This is because the protein miraculin firmly binds to sweet receptor cells in a person’s tongue when sour substances are present. The protein then transmits a false message to the brain, resulting in a strong, sweet taste. Information on the tablets is available at http://www.miracle-fruit.net/.

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