An Atlanta teenager is accused of stealing luggage from airport carousels, then pilfering through the bags in nearby restrooms. When he was done, he allegedly left the suitcases in stalls.
A police officer caught Devonte Lightning, 18, with someone else’s bag in a restroom at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Surveillance cameras also captured Lightning in the act, grabbing numerous bags, police said.
Go and grab a software engineer. There’s plenty of them around, so it should be easy to find one. Tell her that she’ll have to design a social MMO for a brand new console. This should make her eyes light up, because, as a rule, engineers prefer new technology over stuff that actually works, since new technology is cool and sexy, and old technology makes money.
Leo over at Zen Habits (which is a great and calming blog if you’ve never read it) put a post up recently celebrating the 38 lessons he’s learned in his 38 years of life.
I’m not a huge fan of all 38, but here were my favorite 5 that hopefully you can get something out of as well.
1. Always swallow your pride to say you’re sorry. Being too proud to apologize is never worth it — your relationship suffers for no good benefit.
3. Slow down. Rushing is rarely worth it. Life is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace.
15. Failures are the stepping stones to success. Without failure, we’ll never learn how to succeed. So try to fail, instead of trying to avoid failure through fear.
23. Competition is very rarely as useful as cooperation. Our society is geared toward competition — rip each other’s throats out, survival of the fittest, yada yada. But humans are meant to work together for the survival of the tribe, and cooperation pools our resources and allows everyone to contribute what they can. It requires a whole other set of people skills to work cooperatively, but it’s well worth the effort.
5. The moment is all there is. All our worries and plans about the future, all our replaying of things that happened in the past — it’s all in our heads, and it just distracts us from fully living right now. Let go of all that, and just focus on what you’re doing, right at this moment. In this way, any activity can be meditation.
Lifehacker is a pretty cool blog to begin with, but they’ve had an extra good series lately called Night School where they go over the basics of some form of computer wizardry in a few posts. If you’ve ever been interested in learning some of the following then click through to check them out, and stay tuned in over there for future courses.
Roommate Pete has never seen The Wire before and used the recent ice storm that stranded us as an excuse to start watching all the DVDs I have. He’s fully hooked and I get a reason to watch the greatest TV series ever again.
Plus it appears I’m getting sick, so a few nights of hot tea and The Wire are pretty much the perfect prescription.
Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope that you were able to enjoy a little break from work and spending some quality time with close family and friends.
I have a present for you now, courtesy of Chester Grant. I’m going to let him explain to you why you procrastinate.
You will observe that if you have a high skill level the emotional states are pretty much great, but take a look at what happens when your skill level is low. Â These are states that are apt for procrastinating.
His analysis is pretty spot on. I would also argue that “Boredom” is a state pretty primed for procrastination as well.
So what should you do? Work on fun-but-hard problems and learn as much as you can. And when you can’t, just get through the work as quickly as possible so that you’re back to being able to do things that excite you.
An interesting exchange between Ted Leonsis (owner of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards, former big shot at AOL, and active blogger) and ESPN’s Bill Simmons.
You can listen to the whole interview here, the exchange below starts at around the 36:45 mark.
Ted Leonsis: Certainly when I came into the league, a lot of the things I thought were intuitive ended up being counter-intuitive. Bill Simmons: Is there an example? Ted Leonsis: Ummm, yeah. I think that there was one, “Get people into the building, give tickets away, let them sample and then they’ll come back. And when they’re in the building they’ll buy merchandise and the like.” Just like AOL gave away discs. Bill Simmons: Right. Not true I guess. Ted Leonsis: And so then you soon come to realize the exact opposite is true. When you give a ticket away, you suck the value out of currency for all of the ticket holders. Two, when you give someone a ticket, you forget that it’s their time and their money that a fan is giving you. So there’s no vested interest. When you give a ticket away, less than 40% of the people that get a free ticket actually show. They actually walk through. And because they were given the ticket for free, when they come to the game they don’t spend any money here! So, you know, very quickly when you meet like a new owner and they go “Oh, well there’s nobody there and I don’t like seeing empty seats so I’m giving tickets away” you know, I could tell them “That’s like the worst thing you can do. Suffer through it, build value, build a really good team and then people will create the demand for you.” That’s just one that I could give as an example.
