Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

StephenTColbert: Washington State is dangerously positioned between two Canadas, Canada Canada and California's Canada, Oregon.

BigA888 posted a photo:

A list of what CameraPorn considers to be some of the best photo-related content out there. Read on for more photo link porn than you can shake a stick at including 25 blogs, 20 AMAZING photographers, and some other fun stuff that will make those days you feel stuck at your desk wishing you were shooting go a bit smoother…

al3x: Wearing my WHEN OBAMA WINS pin. When Obama wins, I'll take it off.

nep: Good news: Obama picked up another 5 supermodels today.

[This was also posted to Global Nerdy.]

Local tech evangelist David Crow points to The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. Unlike What Color is Your Parachute? or Who Moved My Cheese?, Johnny Bunko is in manga form — that’s right, it’s a Japanese-style comic book.

An unusual book needs an unusual promo, and Johnny Bunko is no exception — it’s got a trailer!

In a review at Amazon, Donald Mitchell provides a quick summary of the book:

Most career writers when they want to simplify a message use a fable, with a few illustrations that show the key perspectives. The fable is clearly secondary to the details.

In The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the story is more interesting than the advice. Having read a lot of Mr. Pink’s writing, I thought I knew what he would probably advise. But I didn’t realize that he would make the story so interesting, and that the manga format would add so much power to the story telling. Nice work!

What’s the advice? Let me rephrase to make it clearer to you:

1. Don’t be rigid about planning out each step well in advance . . . it’s not possible to do.
2. Build on what you’re good at (Peter Drucker originated that one) and avoid relying on what you aren’t good at.
3. Focus on what you can do for others (start with the boss) rather than what’s in it for you (you can read more about this in How to Be a Star at Work).
4. Keep at it. Practice makes perfect.
5. Take on big challenges and learn from them.
6. Make a difference.

I think I’ll pick up this book — it’s pretty cheap, and I’d like to see how Daniel Pink uses the manga format to advantage.

More Advice from Daniel Pink

Here are some video clips featuring Daniel Pink some pretty interesting giving career advice…

Abundance, Asia and Automation

Pink says that the really useful skills are those that are hard to outsource, hard to automate and that serves a need that goes beyond functional. And those skills are the right-brain ones — the ones often derided as “soft skills”.

Help! My Resume Has Too Many Jobs!

Don’t worry if your resume looks like it has too many jobs on it — the world of work today doesn’t give out prizes for lifetime service. These days, it’s about whether you can solve their problems.

Exercise Creativity at Your Job

The old adage applies: “It’s often better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” And from my own experience, I can tell you that he’s right.

Choosing a Major

Follow your interests — don’t choose a major based on what kind of job you think you’ll get after you graduate. The job market is likely to change! Follow your passion instead. You should also work on your “high concept” and “high touch” skills.

mathowie: 10 PRINT "complaint about PR people spamming your inbox." 20 GOTO 10 30 http://xrl.us/bkc2g

al3x: You do not want to get an email with the opening sentence "put on your patience pants".

Vancouver remains the most liveable city; Harare is still intolerable.

al3x: OH: "A libertarian is just a Republican who smokes dope."

vanmega:

I don’t care how lame this makes me look… I LOVED this album back in the day (hey, things were different 6 years ago), it was the most polite form of “dance music” going*.  There was nothing not to like about it.

I found a I torrent of the album here. Finding this made my day, because it’s been a super rare one until now.

* Craig David, not the entire 2Step genre.

I’m going to feel the same way about electro house in 6 years as I did about garage 6 years ago.

rtanglao: david vogt paraphrased badly by myself!: on a bicycle your travel time is slower but predictable, in a bus or car it is not!

Not for nothing, but I’ve had my share of bad reviews in my professional career. Some I’ve taken well, and some I’ve taken… poorly. Some were my fault and others honestly weren’t. There isn’t a manager on Earth who hasn’t had to give a bad review to somebody, sometime. It’s always awkward and it’s never fun and in the end you’re left with a low score on a piece of paper and a sinking feeling in your chest.

And yet, if you rounded up all the managers in the world and shot them… no wait, that’s not where I was going with this. If you rounded up all the managers in the world and got them drunk — yes, I think that would work — you got them drunk and you asked them one question, they’d all tell you the same thing: the score that they give and you get doesn’t mean a damn thing. Oh, you’ll fixate on the score, since it means no salary bump or no bonus or no promotion or — jackpot! — all three at the same time, but it truly, truly, truly doesn’t mean a damn thing. The only thing that truly matters is the conversation that follows.

And it is in this context that I am somewhat embarrassed on behalf of the Mozilla Corporation. They certainly didn’t ask for my opinion or my guilt-by-proxy, but they apparently haven’t noticed that they ought to be embarrassed, so by God somebody needs to step up. I refer, of course, to the Acid 3 test cooked up by the inimitable Ian Hickson and his motley crew of meddling minions. The test gives a numerical score that purports to rank a browser’s compatibility with a potpourri of well-established web standards. Of course any such test is guaranteed to be unfair to somebody, but this one was especially unfair to everybody since the makers intentionally sought out bugs in major browsers to highlight their incompatibilities.

That, by itself, is not the story. First there was the Acid test, then there was the Acid 2 test, and there will no doubt be an Acid 4 test and so on. The fact that the testmakers had to work so damn hard to find compatibility bugs to highlight speaks volumes by itself, but that is not the story either. The story is that two browser vendors — Opera and Apple — somehow got into a bit of a race over who could reach a perfect score first. This, on top of their already insane release schedules (Safari 3.1, Opera 9.5), shocked and awed the web standards community, who for the first time in recent memory were put in the enviable position of arguing about which browser had increased its standards compliance the most and the fastest.

The funny thing is, I don’t even know who won. There were some inconsistencies about which builds passed what, and then they found some last-minute bugs in the tests themselves, and despite minute-by-minute updates on programming.reddit.com, I don’t really know or care who “won” the race. But I’ll tell you one thing: it sure as hell wasn’t Mozilla, because they were too busy complaining that the tests were just designed to highlight bugs (duh)… and they didn’t see any real worth in the feature tests (like downloadable web fonts, which is a five-digit Bugzilla bug that has been open since 2001)… and they felt they should get partial credit for still being ahead of Internet Explorer (new working slogan: “Firefox: We’re Not Dead Last”)… and anyway, they’re really busy right now — unlike the fine young minds at Apple and Opera, who, unbeknownst to their managers, have outsourced all their browser development to summer interns and are spending their newfound free time reenacting Roman toga parties. And oh, by the way, didn’t you hear that the other guys cheated? Also, their toga parties are, like, totally inaccurate when viewed from a psycho-historical perspective.

C’mon, guys. It’s not the score that matters, it’s the followup. It’s the conversation you have, the promises you make, the progress you show the next day and the day after that and the day after that. And bitching about an openly developed test suite whose ultimate goal was just to get people excited about web standards for a few minutes — man, you should all be embarrassed with yourselves. But you’re not, so here I am stepping up, publicly being embarrassed on your behalf. No need to thank me.

Update: once again, I explain myself better the next morning.

And so we awake to another Groundhog Day. Or as I said on twitter back in March, “It’s Weasel Day: the weasel came out of his hole this morning, saw his shadow, and predicted seven more weeks of Democratic primary inanity.” The weasel now says he’s not coming out of his damn hole ever again. Like Round 15 in a Rocky movie, it would appear this could go on forever.

But there’s another way. I first suggested the possibility over a year ago. And now my Mom has made it real:

The only campaign promise I have is that I will do my very best to steal enough votes from somebody so that we might end this electoral Hell more swiftly.

Vote for them, and we’ll keep doing this again. Vote for me, and I’ll set you free.

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"Vancouver rechercheuse Karen Fung has completed her honour’s thesis into Toronto Transit Camp as an example of unconventional social change." (author unknown)

RobCottingham: Thinking of launching a Twitter feed reporting on how often I have to restart Firefox. Warning: high-traffic feed.

al3x: Which do you think is bigger: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE screen_name LIKE '%420'; or [...] LIKE '%666'? Either way, it's depressing.

Why do Catholic countries--nearly all of South America, France, Spain, Italy and so forth--uniformly have a low age of consent? In all of these regions, the age of consent is 12 to 15, lower than comparable Protestant regions.