essays & ephemera

Just to remind you who's watching: CISPA desktop wallpaper

via www.isights.org

If Big Brother is going to be watching you might as well have a look back

The Dirty Work

If you're not getting dirty, you're not doing biz dev. We recently called out to theHacker News crowd with a job opening for a non-hacker “hustler type.” We got a load of resumés, thank you.  While we were pleased with the applicant pool, we were also surprised at the general attitude of many of the job seekers.

image and text via Forbes

Christopher Steiner does a nice write up of the true nature of "biz dev." It reminds me of one of my own posts from the archives: Death to bizdev! Long live bizdev! where I argue that the entire concept of biz dev is a fallacy. It's an amalgamation of so many different kinds of dirty work or, as Steiner, says, "the kind of tasks that founders do." Business Development is many things, and all of those things involve getting your hands very, very dirty. The tasks are varied, valuable and oftentimes very tactical. I think they're both good reads for those in the consumer technology space, especially in startupland and would love to hear your thoughts both on the Fortune piece and my own.

Kindling

    via The Penguin Blog via DF

Gruber decided to send us to Penguin's blog yesterday to take another gander at these absolutely delightful and sexy  James Bond hardcover book covers. Seeing this art and the archived post from the good people of Penguin reminded me of a thought that's been rumbling around in my head for some time:

Wither the bookcase?

The compact disc has already almost fully migrated to the MP3 and is heading; thanks to Rdio, Spotify and the like; towards "the cloud." And that'll be great when it's really real. All the music in world at your fingertips wherever, whenever. Death to the 30 second sample and all that. But it has ruined one lovely artifact of the days of music as physical object: The Record Collection as well as the accompanying Display of The Record Collection and the subsequent Discussion of the Record Collection with visitors... And now the same thing is happening to our collective bookshelf. The books are all leaving, so much Kindling. 

I know I can see my friends mucial tastes in Rdio or Facebook and literary tastes at Library Thing. But what the hell are we supposed to do with all these empty shelves? The photos already left for the web. The music's gone. Ikea is getting ahead of the game by redesigning its bookcases for knick-knacks. Fortunately for us, I suppose, etsy has no shortage of birds to display upon our now vacant shelves.

We used to use the bookshelf to both decorate and display our tastes (and therefore ourselves)  in our homes. Those days are numbered. Now we fill them with completely non functional, expressive tschotskes. 

Maybe Amazon can just ship me some hardcover spines? I'll tape them to the wall.

Nice

"I love you so much that my heart is filled with flowers."

via www.dadcentric.com

Maybe it's the lack of sleep from having a newborn at home.
Maybe it's just having the newborn at home.
Maybe it's because I'm an emotional sap.

Or maybe, just maybe, this was just the most goddamn touching post.

Either way. I just choked back a tear. After one managed to escape onto my keyboard.

Go ahead. Have yourself a little cry.

Hot Hot Hot Problems

 

     via Fashion Copious

Sad Jeff is Sad Sad Sad.