Greece says "No more!"

The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has quit, despite the country’s decisive rejection of the eurozone’s terms for the country remaining in the single currency. Announcing his resignation in a blog post entitled “Minister No More!” on Monday, he wrote: “Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants and assorted ‘partners’ for my … ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the prime minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
– Robert A. Heinlein.

Did you win?

w2007 - 1Km - 4:16

A much better question to ask (the student, the athlete, the salesperson, the film director, the programmer...) is, "What did you learn?"

Learning  compounds. Usually more reliably than winning does!

-as I well know from experience:

Perfect? -not me!

It's possible you work in an industry built on perfect. That you're a surgeon or nurse or an air traffic controller or even in charge of compliance at a nuclear power plant.

The rest of us, though, are rewarded for breaking things. Our job, the reason we have time to read blogs at work or go to conferences or write memos is that our company believes that just maybe, we'll find and share a new idea, or perhaps we'll invent something important or connect with a key customer in a way that matters.

So, if that's your job, are you focused on being perfect?

Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield's Resistance, the lazy part of your brain looking for a way out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (-or anything important).

You're not in the perfect business. Stop pretending that's what the world wants from you. Truly perfect is becoming friendly with your imperfections on the way to doing something remarkable.

Amazon AWS weiterhin führend

Im Magic Quadrant von 2015, der die wichtigsten öffentlichen Anbieter von Cloud Infrastructur as a Service bewertet, wird Amazon Web Services von Gartner als das Unternehmen mit der vollständigsten Vision und der höchsten Fähigkeit zu deren Umsetzung genannt.

B.B. King RIP

B.B. King died last Thursday at the age of 89. He was just magical on tour with U2 in 1989. In 1988, B.B. reached a new generation of fans with the single "When Love Comes to Town", a collaborative effort between King and U2 on their Rattle and Hum album.




"I'm no good at chords!" -must be one of the best understatements of the 20th century!

"I'm one of those rebel kind of guys. They kinda, look at me kinda wierd, they say, here he is a 62 year old and look what he's try'n to do!"

I'm more than glad to say I saw him after Rattle and Hum at the Hohentwielfestival (near Singen) in 2004. Thank you for all those many years of music B.B.

And luckily enough his life story is here, filmed in 2012.

IKEA and Shakespeare

I saw this yesterday on irish television. IKEA quoting Shakespeare to sell furniture but it sure is impressive. One of the better ads.



The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1, Prospero

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
.....
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

There is this however:
"Shakespeare selling mattresses is probably what might have been expected as the logical outcome of society becoming a market where everything, and everyone, is treated as though they had a price label attached. People’s most intimate personal lives are the stuff of daytime commercial television, and journalists claim freedom to intrude into the private lives of people who have endured tragedies, but it seems that a point has come where thoughts on our very existence are no more than the stuff that advertisements are made on."
-Rev. Ian Poulton.

What went wrong with Windows 8

All of us now know that Windows 8 requires the user to learn quite a few new features, most of which, once learned, are handy. But why are they puzzling in the first place?

Well: Microsoft assumed all Windows 8 users would be familiar with Apple or Android smartphones or tablets.

But if you're not used to smartphones, a lot of things in Windows 8 are puzzling. It's as if someone built a car whose controls were designed with the assumption that the driver knew how to ride a motorcycle.

But a PC is not a smartphone and does not benefit from acting like one. Windows 8.1 backtracked a little, toward normal PC behavior; Windows 10 will move back even more, thank goodness.