Jorah's 80% Fat-Free Blog

(from IdeaMatt.Blogspot.com)

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Some David Allen "twos" - two reasons we procrastinate, and two kinds of problems

Here is a pair of related thoughts that I picked up from David Allen's Getting Things Done. Paraphrasing him:

• There are only two reasons for procrastination: The task is either a) overwhelming (too big), or b) not motivating (unpleasant).
  
  


• There are only two problems in life: a) You know what your want, and you don't know how to get it, and/or b) you don't know what you want.

As you might have guessed, Allen's solution (typically clear and powerful) is to apply his two big focusing questions, respectively:

1. What's the next action?
   


2. What's the desired outcome?

http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/10/some-david-allen-twos-two-reasons-we.html

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(I've been reading IdeaMatt all morning... great site)

I admit it, a lot of the things I post here, I first read on GMSV. I can highly recommend this newsletter for anyone with an interest in the culture of American technology. Read More...

Good sleeping and sweet dream... ... ...Let's see with "boyfriend arm pillow and girlfriend arm pillow"

This..... it is held and a feeling is unbearable.
Nap,While he watches television.Usage is you the order.
The design which carried out the form in the left half of the male upper half of the body.
When making it inside-out,of course,it is a right half.
They are the usual pillow which puts the head ,and the pillow of it cures which puts the body and which has held and has the comfort a pillow.
Moreover,a shirt can be removed ordinarily and can be washed.
Read More...

Things that make me go "hmmmmm"

aliensandchildren.org::Alien Drawings by Children

This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids.

The drawings show different aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon and include:

cruel medical procedures performed on children,

children boarding alien spacecraft with other aliens,

children playing with alien/hybrid children so the alien/hybrids can learn how to be human,

children being taken by aliens against their will, and

the types of aliens encountered by the abducted children.


The pictures were drawn by children who successfully resisted the aliens by using a "thought screen helmet" which blocks the telepathic control aliens have over humans.

The helmet is a leather hat lined with eight sheets of Velostat, an electrically conductive plastic used to prevent static electricity damage to electronic components. The girl in this photo has two other cloth hats lined with Velostat which she wears to school.

Seattle Weekly
The Super Flood
by Frank Parchman

Some 5,600 years ago, the body of water we call Puget Sound had an arm that extended 30 miles inland from present-day Elliott Bay in Seattle to a point halfway between Auburn and Sumner. Today, of course, that is the Green River Valley?the narrow, flat suburban land of Kent and Renton and the industrial lowlands of South Seattle. It would be reasonable to think that this change happened gradually, but scientists have determined that most of the long-gone stretch of inland sea was transformed by a single event that created 200 square miles of land in a matter of hours, with waves of mud 20 feet to 600 feet high. Imagine a wall the consistency of wet concrete traveling up to 60 mph. This mudflow destroyed everything in its path, uprooting entire old-growth forests. It hit Puget Sound with such force and with so much material that it flowed underwater for 15 miles, maybe farther. An area of hundreds of square miles was covered with mud and debris up to 350 feet deep.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0542/051019_news_mountrainier.php

Note: this is part of an article written by "The Crabby Office Lady," a
Microsoft columnist.

<b>"Say it, don't spray it."</b> <i>I've used this little saying before,
and it apparently made an impression on some of my readers (who, of
course, wrote to tell me about it). But some of you are still not getting
the message. When I wrote that line, I was talking about using the Bcc box
to prevent all your e-mail recipients from seeing each others' e-mail
addresses. It's the courteous thing to do (and I'm nothing if not an
e-mail etiquette advocate, even though not the perfect practitioner).</i>

<i>So, why an entire column about it? Well, this column is not just about
the Bcc box, per se. It's more about how to deal with keeping all those
jokes (rarely funny), rumors (rarely true), and spam e-mail (rarely funny
or true) from soiling your pristine Inbox when your senders are clueless
about the Bcc box.</i>

Read more...
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA012309041033.aspx
(This may be a first... I don't think I've ever pointed at a Microsoft
site before!)

All God, all the time
By James Carroll | October 17, 2005

Who is this ''God" in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take
place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one's faith in such an
entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most
striking about so much talk of ''God," both to affirm and to deny, is the
way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what
and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or
the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the
clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the
wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon.
God is all of these things.

Read more:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/17/all_god_all_the_time/

What is JotSpot?
JotSpot is a venture-backed company started two years ago. It is what most people would consider a hosted Wiki, but we like to think about JotSpot in the long-term as a pioneer of do-it-yourself applications.
The industry has spent the last 10 years on do-it-yourself-publishing on the net, making it easier for a non-technical person to put words on a page that someone else can read. On the other hand, very little, if any, time has been spent trying to make it easier for an end-user to build an application online.
JotSpot is starting out in the do-it-yourself publishing arena with Wikis, but what we're really trying to accomplish over the long-term is to enable end-users to build simple, lightweight, web-based applications.
Read More...

Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth.

TV's MythBusters were not able to replicate the feat and ?busted? the myth.

Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, MIT's 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development ?sketch or soft modeling? process to the problem.

Our goal was not to make a decision on the myth?we just wanted to assess if it was at least possible, and have some fun in the process. Jumping ahead, you can see the result? but let?s start at the beginning of the process.

Read More...

Using google maps to track ufo sightings.
http://www.ufomaps.com/

--
-M.J. Lavin,
Indian Land, SC
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My Blog: http://madstone.net/weblog/
Google Talk IM: same as my gmail address

THRIFTY ALTERNATIVE PRICED AT $299 FOR WORLDWIDE MARKET

By Dean Takahashi

Mercury News

Radio Shack plans to start selling a low-cost alternative to the personal computer starting Sunday.

The $299 machine, dubbed the Personal Internet Communicator, was designed by Advanced Micro Devices to access the Internet and perform basic computing tasks.

Read More...

THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY
by Carlo M. Cipolla
illustrations by James Donnelly

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:

a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.

b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol å.
Read More

An attempt at a cross-platform communication and calendar system.
Read More...