Some people base your perceived “Brain Power” by your time in college and then above that, what college you went to. I on the other hand have found the opposite to be true.

The people that I find the most brilliant are the ones who did not go to college, or if they did, it was a college without a big name. Rarely have I met an individual, who graduated from a prominent institution of higher learning, that wielded a more than average intellect or emotional intelligence.

What I have found is that employers and collegues use this “Higher Education” footnote as a vetting process by which they can suspend personal judgement and instinct about peoples abilities.

Phrases such as the following are becoming commonplace in corporate America.

“We thought he knew what he was doing, I mean he graduated Harvard.” Or “He came with all the right credentials, it’s not my fault that he ran the company into the ground, I was just doing what he told us to.”

My judgment has always been “Prove it to me”. Make me believe that you are smart, I don’t care whether you are a mechanic or a CEO, there are no free passes as to who I deem intelligent.

[Right On Alanna]  [Great Essay]  [Salon Article] 

I am very saddened today by the death of Elliiot Smith. Probable one of the greatest american songwriters to come along in a twenty years. Fan Site

Paul sent me a link to this CSS tutorial site. Great stuff
Listomatic

At a recent Gartner summit Steve Ballmer from Microsoft made the following comments about Open Source VS closed source software programming.

“Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people, unknown from around the world, should be somehow of higher quality than that from people who get paid to do it professionally?”

“There’s no reason to believe it would be of higher quality. I’m not necessarily claiming it should be of worse quality, but why should code submitted randomly by some hacker in China and distributed by some open source project, why is that, by definition, better?”

I think I would like to ask Steve what makes him think that paying people to make closed source code will give him good software?

Granted, guys who go out and play football on sunday in the park are not in the same league as guys who play for the NFL. And the guy who tricks out his 1996 Honda Civic is not Michael Schumacher. But software programming is an art that requires brain power and it does not need a billion dollar company behind it to make a good product. Lord knows it helps, but it is not a requirement.

Open source does not discriminate. It does not care if you went to college for this or not. Or if you have 20 years experience or not. It does not care if you are a bad programmer that has weaseled his way up to lead developer. It does not care if you are warming your seat until your options mature. Your bad ideas and purposeless features do not get included because you have senoirity. The best code and ideas wins and your fellow developers are the ones who judge, not the brain dead Senoir VP of Buttcrack analysis who can’t even work his own email program.

I think Steve should ask his army of programmers to work for the love of the software and the community, not money, and see how many of them still think building another bloated feature into Word is a good idea.

The first new source of electricity in 100 years has just been unleashed onto the world. Waste water treatment plants could soon be generating electricity too.[Read More]

Todays word of the day is “Wommy”.

You can make up your own definition. I think mine has something to do with an article of clothing that is very close to you.

I think I have an easy way to deal with all the bullshit that cities put up with in naming ball fields after companies. I say call it whatever you want on the outside. But if everybody in print and in reference to it simple calls it “The Park” or “The Ballfield” you can never go wrong.

If people would stop refering to places by the corporate sponsors than maybe corporate sponsors would stop attaching their names to things.

I personally will refer to it as “The Ballpark” its not like we have more than one.

My girlfriend is crazy and I love her very much.

So here I am sick at home. It is incredibly nice outside and I am curled up with grapefruit juice, a blanket and a roll of toilet paper. Yeah this is lots of fun.

Paul is sick today also. I hope he is having an easier time than I did on the first day.

I think I will name this cold “The cranky Pants Cold”

We started out a saturday with a nice breakfast at “The Pork Store”. We then cruised around the city and found some more great artists showing their art.

I think the weekend would have turned out even better if I had not gotten sick. I had a little sore throat ealy in the day on saturday and by the time I went to sleep it was a brutal cold. I slept most of the day on sunday and then we went to pick up art we bought and others goodies including my new (totally insanely great) MAC 17″ monitor. My throat even at this point is still pretty fucked up.

Also I took a little time to clean up my computer setup. Take out my old PC, clean up the wires for my MAC. I wish I could create a better way to do cords and connections for computers and stereos. I wonder if someone ever will.

This could be a starting point, but it looks a little complex.