Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

Showoff

Say you have a captive audience. Say you love what you do. Say you can't help but talk until you've sucked the oxygen out of the room. That would be me, today, right now.

iDon't

iType isn't living up to it's name. Postings aren't consistent. The quality is mediocre. And the only real topic of interest is myself. And, as Meg Hourihan told The New York Times for a blogging article, becoming "too personal or too technical or too complainy" probably isn't the best way to capture or keep interest. Time to ask, "So what?" If I have an answer, I'll put it here. Okay, I'm done flogging my blog for today.

Picky

How best to conduct myself when affairs at hand distressful, distasteful, or distracting? I want "keen awareness, sound judgment, and ... resourcefulness, especially in practical matters." Some contestants, from the American Heritage Dictionary:

• Shrewd suggests a sharp intelligence, hardheadness, and often an intuitive grasp of practical considerations: "He was too shrewd to go along with them upon a road which could lead only to their overthrow?" (J.A. Froude).
• Sagacious connotes prudence, discernment, and farsightedness: "He was observant and thoughtful, and given to asking sagacious questions?" (John Galt).
• Astute suggests shrewdness, especially with regard to one's own interests: An astute tenant always reads the small print in a lease.
• Perspicacious implies penetration and clear-sightedness: She is much too perspicacious to be taken in by such a spurious argument.

I like the last the best, but damn if I can't pronounce it in conversation.

Clarity

From The New York Times comes as clear and concise a paragraph about Oracle's products and ambitions as I've read:

Mr. Ellison sees his company's mainstay product, the Oracle database, as the corporate computing equivalent of the Windows operating system. On top of the database run a series of what are known as enterprise applications, which corporations use to automate business tasks like accounting and procurement as well as customer relations and human resources programs.

Warms my heart, for some sad reason, to read well-explained technology stories.

Spiked

I have found little reason to turn on any one of my 500 cable channels. I doubt a re-tooled TNN will pique my interest. This, however, made me laugh out loud:

The women's network Lifetime is one of cable's great success stories, largely on the strength of an endless succession of movies that portray women as rape and abuse victims. Its rival Oxygen launched in 2000 with an idealistic plan to target ambitious, educated feminists — then found out that only about four of them felt the need to be empowered by a cable channel.

Vroom

After one month of incompetent customer service, Comcrust Comcast came through this week.

Fortune

Just renewed my subscription to Fortune magazine last week, specifically because of the fun I had with the June 9 edition. Some quotes:

From "Taking on Viagra" — "Men in the U.S., it turns out, aren't so big on foreplay. A clinical study of Levitra revealed that the average time between taking the pill and the first attempt at vaginal insertion was about four minutes. (By contrast, the average Argentinean waited 22 minutes.)"

From "Can Sallie save Citi, restore Sandy's reputation, and earn her $30 Million pacheck?" — "Krawcheck has a simple answer for such cherished pieces of collective wisdom. 'In general, the consensus is just wrong,' she says."

From "How Big Blue is turning geeks into gold" — "IBM Can boast having the world's most preeminent corporate research organizatino. But in an industry that some believe has, thanks to the commoditization of technology, matured into something more akin to the automobile industry, the question is, So what?"

From "Stupid-journal alert: why HBR's view of tech is dangerous" — "My company is drowning in data but starved for information."

Simplify

“Make things as simple as possible,” Albert Einstein told me through a familiar quotations book, “not simpler.” To comply, I will be:

• Removing the left-hand navigation of this site and distributing it’s contents among sub-indices.
• Consolidating links into slightly expanded top navigation.
• Redesigning the masthead for clarity, concision, and wit.
• Moving thumbnails to the right.
• Linking said thumbnails to larger images within photo albums similar to Textism’s “index thereof.”
• Re-coding, reorganizing, and making sortable the archives.
• Moving the search box to the bottom, and linking with an anchor from the top navbar.
• Expanding outside links into review capsules.
• Obviating the maddening differences in appearance between IE for Windows and everything.

Thank you for your patience. I know this was bothering you.

Karma

How to earn free Karma Points when traveling:

1. Correct, politely, airport staffers who tell bewildered passengers, “You need that Intel Centro [sic] thing to get online wirelessly, sir.”
2. Pay, quietly, $6.95 for internet access so His Eminence Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche -- thirty-third holder of the Dzogchen lineage, Head Lama of Dzogchen Monastery, Tibetan Buddhist Mediation Master, and owner of no credit cards -- can check email on the world’s largest laptop screen.
3. Answer, humbly, questions from onlookers about Apple, Wi-Fi, Vern Troyer and Yao Ming.
4. Quote, faithfully, the Dzogchen Lama's thanks: "Blessings on you for this help. ... Apple has good karma. ... May bear us many fruit."