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The expert in battle seeks his victory from strategic advantage and does not demand it from his men. -Sun Tzu
Come Over To the Dark Side – Lifehacker.com Evil (One Week Only)
I love Lifehacker.com, and have followed their site ever since I read “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Lifehacker comes from the same people that bring us gizmodo. Lifehacker focuses on the simple things that help tweak our lives to help things go a bit more productively (hacks in computer terms).
I follow their posts regularly and find the tips very worthwhile, e.g. How to improve your presentation skills, or the reasons why we procrastinate.
It was odd though when I started seeing a series of posts yesterday that, though informative, seemed… Well out of place. The first one was “How to crack an encrypted wi-fi network,” followed by “How to manipulate people.”
Then I went over to the site to look at their landing page (I usually read their stories on a news reader so I occasionally miss a post). And this week is “Evil Week” in tribute to Halloween this Sunday.
The interesting part of the idea of evil week, is that many of the ideas in the posts are the exact reasons I got in to the information security and assurance business.
I’d encourage you to go over to their site and take a look, not to find out how to defraud others, but rather to recognize it for yourself and help to prevent it from happening to you. Who knows you might even learn how to thumb your nose at Steve Jobs and build your own “Hackintosh.”
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What would you do, what could you accomplish, if you KNEW you would not fail? So what is YOUR wildly audacious goal?
FailCon Celebrates Failures
On the surface this seems like one of the most bizarre events in the business sector. But Tom Peters wrote in The Little Big Things, about celebrating failure and not chastising it, when failure results from attempts at innovation and not apathy. Someone once told me early in my career to 'hurry up and get your failures out of the way, because that's the only way you're going to make progress.'
We learn from our mistakes, a trite comment, but true nonetheless, and more often than not, success stems from perseverance in the face of failure.
So I ask this question of all of you, what would you do if you KNEW you would not fail?
FailCon Fails to Fail, Returns for 2010 http://pulsene.ws/bOoc
Xerox PARC Turns 40 and the MIT Media Lab Turns 25
I've been a follower of two institutions most of my career, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the people that brought you the concept of Windows and the laser printer; and the MIT Media Lab, much of the computing ideas behind networking your TV, mobile phone, and other devices in your home.
Well, the PARC turns 40 this year and the MIT Media Lab is now 25 years old, and the thought of the ideas to be born from the media lab over the next 25 years, and what is coming out the the PARC just excites me.
Building The Next Big Thing: 25 Years of MIT's Media Lab http://pulsene.ws/c27g
Xerox PARC Turns 40: http://www.parc.com