Is it a Job, Career or Your True Calling?:

What is it that you love doing the most? What are you passionate about and what brings you alive? What work would you engage in if you had no other considerations? How could you use your talents to make a difference to society? Stepping back and deliberating on these thoughts can provide you the stimulus towards discovering your deeper purpose and true calling.

(Via workawesome.com)

Still very much an ongoing challenge for me.

We watched it last night and really enjoyed it. We have been talking about it on and off all day today which is the sign of a movie that has gotten under our skin. I particularly liked the understated direction that let the landscape and the story unfold without joining all the dots for the viewer. Fascinating also to see the homesteading life depicted. I was scanning each frame for those small details that give authenticity and was not dissapointed. We already had the Taos region on our destination list as we love native american jewellery, so now we have another motive to visit.

(Via Cage Free Family)

Reviews

Tina Ferguson

Film Critic.com

Some notes from the director Campbell Scott

Man Up:

Banners and Cartoons are not going to create the change most internet users want. I know it’s not something I care to waste time on. Instead, I’m gathering links and writing this post. Here’s some things that will actually make a difference.

1. Donate to EFF
2. Donate to Wikipedia (Wikipedia is down today in protest)
3. Stop giving money to companies that support SOPA or PIPA
4. Talk to people about what’s going on
5. Call a representative. A lot.
6. Support representatives that oppose this garbage
7. Campaign against representatives that support SOPA and PIPA

(Via Macdrifter)

Crisis of Faith in the Financial System:

From Bernie Madoff to derivatives to the housing bubble to dubious AAA credit ratings, we continue to find new ways to encourage people to make financial leaps of faith. Have we reached a breaking point where the abstraction has gone too far, and is too complicated for 99% of people to understand what they’re signing up for, that we must backtrack to more conventional methods? And has the level of trust in private and state financial institutions sunk so low that most people now feel there is no accountability or responsibility for the promises made, or that sound decisions will be made to guarantee “circulation forever”?

(Via HBR.org)

It turns out that if you practice finding the meanings of proverbs, you can get better at finding the same kind of essential definitions of problems you are trying to solve. Describing problems in this way will help you retrieve the knowledge you have that is most likely to lead to innovative problem solutions.

Ultimately, the key to innovation is not to “think different,” but rather, to think about different things.

(Via HBR.org)

Beyond business innovation, paying attention to the meaning of the words we use and the cultural stories we retell is also a tool for deepening our understanding of the world around us. Many of us go though our daily routine in a somewhat robotic state with our actions being driven by habitual routines. This lack of attention is sometimes seen in the way we use words and proverbs without considering their original and often insightful deeper meanings.

Numerous esoteric disciplines feature exercises to help people look below the surface veneer of life by paying attention to multiple meanings of culturally common words, phrases and stories. For example – the Sufi’s have a practise that aims to find seven levels of meaning inside traditional teaching stories. These are a somewhat like extended proverbs in the sense that they are usually involve folk lore characters and common situational contexts e.g. the Mulla Nasrudin stories. These stories are constructed to prompt the mind to seek the underlying message which is indirectly pointed to by the characters and plot.

Solar Sinter

Markus Kayser – Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

via CreativeApplications.Net

Check out the other Best of 2011 Projects on the site as well.

I love books, i enjoy being given them at this time of the year and I enjoy buying them at any time. Unfortunately I sometimes fall behind with reading them.

The to read pile has grown to the point where I decided I needed to create a list to keep track of them – Omnifocus to the rescue. Listing them like this should discourage me from acquiring any more until I have reduced this backlog.

The Tufte and Alexander books were acquired as sets and are works I have been keen to have in my library for years. Christopher Alexanders’ A Pattern Language is one of my favourite books. I’ll take my time with these and expect to revisit them often.

Dark Mountain and eaarth share themes of coming to terms with a changed world and looking to the future.

The Adventures of Jack De Crow will appeal to anyone who has sailed dinghy’s especially Mirror’s. We built on of these in our garage during the 70′s.

And a smattering of IT books the most interesting of which is hopefully the Design of Design by Fred Brooks of Mythical Man Month fame. Still a relevant book although not everyone thinks so.

Now all I need to do is polish up my speed reading skills…and then there are the numerous magazines…

» Exporting Entries from Day One to Scrivener Verbum Breviatum: “”

(Via .)

Facebook and Ads:

ReadWriteWeb:

If you pay for a product, you’re a customer. If you don’t, you’re the product. On Facebook, you are the product. The difference between content and advertising continues to slip.

(Via inessential.com)