Letters Remain

Month: June 2008

  • Three of the Best Movie Reviews. Ever.

    Peter Bradshaw on The Hulk (in Hulk-speak, no less) “Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk…

  • My Ideal Parenting Model

    When Mom and Dad Share It All is a New York Times cover story on gender and parenting. A great story with greater insights, this paragraph sums up how I hope my future would be: They would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal…

  • Don’t Follow Your Passion – Fix Your Lifestyle

    Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there. A novel take on the typical inspirational graduation speech. It’s not about following your passion or not taking yourself too seriously. They’re important, but this is different. The idea is to not think of your ideal job, but to think of your ideal lifestyle. To…

  • Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees (and My Start-Up Life Excerpts)

    Personally and professionally I always thrive to learn. Nine months ago I moved from programming into systems/business analysis: I knew what the job entailed and knew I could do it well. I still asked for a mentor. Specifically, I asked that my mentor be the person in our organisation who is always lauded as being…

  • The Third Place – Joel ‘on Software’ Spolsky

    Building Communities with Software is an old article of Joel ‘on Software’ Spolsky’s that deals with social ‘third places‘: The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. These…

  • The Big Picture – Again!

    Boston.com’s The Big Picture (“News Stories in Photographs”) must be the most linked-to current affairs/photography ‘blog’ in the past week. There’s a reason for this – it’s amazing.

  • Something Different: BA Flight 5390

    In the summer of 1990 British Airways Flight 539 took off from Birmingham, UK for Málaga, Spain. You could say that the flight didn’t exactly go according to plan. At 17,300 feet a cockpit window suffered a ‘failure’, and by ‘failure’ I mean the window departed the aircraft and the unstrapped captain headed towards the…

  • The Final Salute: A Touching Story

    They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. Final Salute is a double Pulitzer Prize winning article (writing and photography) from The Rocky Mountain News profiling the work of Major Steve Beck – a US…

  • The Warren Buffett Guide to Investing

    In Picking Warren Buffett’s Brain: Notes from a Novice, Tim Ferriss shares the notes he took at a recent convention for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. It’s an interesting read and here’s the crux of it all: How would you invest your first million dollars? “I’d put it all in a low-cost index fund that tracks the…

  • Bananas: An Atheist’s Nightmare, and the Scourge of United Fruit

    The Banana: An Atheist’s Nightmare is a video I’ve seen linked in numerous places. I think this video nicely sums up Intelligent Design’s ignorance arguments. God exists because bananas fit well in the human hand and peel easily. First: Hahahahaha! Second: Peels easily? Are we ignoring the fact that – if anything – the banana…