Hipster Fort Win?
Posted: May 21st, 2011
at 4:01pm by mnp
Categories: hood status,myninjaplease,life,home,weaponry,fo' real?,boredom killer,"ninja",development,internets,philosophy,ethics,win
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Most of Your Work Sucks
In the ten or so years I’ve been shooting photos, I cannot tell you how many I’ve taken. Not because the number is so staggeringly large (it’s probably under 100,000) but because I’ve deleted so many I have no way to keep an accurate tally anymore. If you were to look through the ones that I’ve deemed "good enough" to keep, you’d probably say that most of them sucked. This culling process is one of the reasons there are only 85 photographs on my website, spread across 5 different categories. Still, looking at that site now, with nearly a year between today and my last significant photography project, I could easily cut half the shots featured there.
But, that’s the nature of creative work. Nobody produces all masterpieces. In a medium like photography, creating great work means producing a lot of work. When Ansel Adams was still a full time professional landscape photographer, he used to say he was doing great if he got 12 significant images per year. In a medium like writing, creating great work means not only producing a lot of work, but doing even more editing. Honing ideas, stories, scenes, and phrases until they are as good as they can reasonably be. Even though most of your output may suck, with enough refinement, you can eventually produce something fantastic.
Posted: May 21st, 2011
at 10:55am by mnp
Categories: myninjaplease,life,art,too good to be true,weaponry,photo,development,blogs
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Adaptation Fail
In 1982, the management consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, a colossally popular business title. The book aimed to learn lessons from the world’s best companies, and Peters and Waterman produced a list of 43. But just a couple of years after In Search of Excellence had been published, BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the simple title: "Oops! Who’s Excellent Now?" Almost a third of the companies singled out for praise by Peters and Waterman were in financial trouble.
My aim isn’t to mock Peters and Waterman, but to point out that the rise and fall of business models is an unavoidable part of economic growth. In a complex world, things fail - a lot. According to the economist Paul Ormerod, 10 percent of U.S. firms go bankrupt every year. Ormerod - an iconoclastic figure who enjoys beating fellow economists at their own game, mathematics - has studied the statistical patterns that emerge from these bankruptcies. He thinks they suggest that failure and success in business are far more random than our culture of CEO-worship would have us believe.
Posted: May 13th, 2011
at 9:24pm by mnp
Categories: business,weaponry,development,entrepreneurship,fail,innovation
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The Tech Community’s Diversity Problem
Take gender diversity, for one thing. By most counts, the average open source project has 49 male participants for every female participant. Women at conferences - rare enough already! - are assumed to be significant others, designers or visitors from planet marketing, with disastrous consequences for all involved.
This is a problem, for lots of reasons. The worst is that it’s self-perpetuating - women will (wisely!) avoid hostile environments, and through some broken-window-like mechanism, environments without women will quickly become environments that are hostile to women. (The same holds for other visible minorities.)
In discussions about "how to fix this", community leaders often appear to be at a loss, unsure how to progress. Their early efforts are often met by criticism on both sides - techies have a strong libertarian streak that tilts at all sorts of windmills, and the women who do "blaze trails" aren’t always much better than the men. (In fields like physics, chemistry and finance - fields dominated by men for ages - which are, these days, however, beating our numbers by a wide margin - the first generation of women to brave the hostilities and pierce the glass ceiling are often later generations’ harshest critics. "What? You want to have a career and a family? I didn’t have that option. Why should you? You’ll need to learn to drink scotch and smoke cigars like I did, or you’re through.")
Posted: May 13th, 2011
at 5:14pm by mnp
Categories: hood status,computers,life,business,mnp is for the children,weaponry,"ninja",development,blogs,internets,philosophy,ethics,entrepreneurship,open source,jobs,innovation
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Eating Healthily for $3 a Day
Eat a variety of fresh, unprocessed foods. Focus mostly on produce and, if you’re an omnivore, choose high-quality meats.
Posted: April 28th, 2011
at 8:35am by mnp
Categories: business,weaponry,grub,development,health
Comments: No comments
The Antarctic Time Zones
This ninja writes about the end of time zones, which may be a bit drastic- I believe a better way is for the Antarctic time zones! Time needs to be changed! For more information contact info@myninjaplease.com
Posted: April 26th, 2011
at 9:02am by mnp
Categories: myninjaplease,web,weaponry,2 hours on the internet,"ninja",travel,development,ir
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Innovation : Baking a Cake for America
David Muchow, the President and CEO of SkyBuilt Power, shared an article of his with me in which he lays out his vision of how the U.S. can foster green innovation.
Entitled "How to Bake the Green Technology Cake: The Missing Key to Technology Innovation," the article analogizes the process of getting an invention from conception to marketplace to that of baking a cake.
For small inventors, in particular, Muchow observes that the necessary ingredients are scattered, the cook takes too long, and oftentimes there’s no oven. So he lays out three steps for baking the "innovation cake."
The Ingredients: According to the article, the necessary ingredients - funding, legal advice, business advice, industry knowledge, customers - have to be collected from many different sources.
: Continue reading the article :
Posted: April 25th, 2011
at 1:01pm by mnp
Categories: green,business,mnp is for the children,weaponry,development,blogs,internets,entrepreneurship,innovation
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Beard Championship Update
In 2006, we learned of a competition of beards in a land far away. This is that update.
Posted: April 24th, 2011
at 11:58am by mnp
Categories: myninjaplease,mnp is for the children,weaponry,"ninja",competitions,events
Comments: 1 comment