Here are some cool pieces of art around the web:

Kasy McMahon has found a great use for all those CAT 5 cables nobody needs now that we're all wireless. We are all wireless now, right? In her self-portrait "Connected," she implies that we're all more connected than we think.

From the same source comes "Pants Optional - A Relatively Civilized Fashion Primer for the Well Clad." I'm not sure that much explanation is necessary.

Not satisfied with just drinking coffee (maybe it's Starbucks?) these intrepid artists decided to draw the Mona Lisa using nothing but their imagination and cups of coffee and cream.

And last, but not least, DJ Rana Sobhany was able to fix herself up with an impressive, high-tech system for under $1300. She's got two iPads and a microphone?

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You may not have realized it but I wasn't always as cool as I am now.

When I was a kid, I had a small group of friends who didn't always fit in with the rest of the school. We were the nerds. We used computers, played video games, and brought calculators to class. We owned digital watches and used email.

Today, not only does that describe pretty much every schoolkid, but it describes pretty much everybody, period.

Almost everything I did as a kid that got me labeled as a nerd is a common thing today. Everyone I know has a calculator in their pocket. Don't believe me? Check your cellphone. Do you know anyone without an email address? Anyone who doesn't use a computer at least once a day? Anyone who doesn't play video-games (yes, bejeweled counts.)

The big difference between us nerds and the rest of the technology users out there is that they think about the activity, while we also think about the tool. Did you buy the wrong phone or computer? You wouldn't have if you were one of us because LEDs, terrabytes, and capacitive touch-screens are always on our minds. Is facebook slow or is it your ISP? We already know (it's facebook.)

You are the consumers of the Internet and of gadgets and video games just like we are. We just happen to be the ones that make them work in the first place.

Now if I could just figure out why it was all the non-nerds who went into technology management...

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I'm all for the US having an advantage on the battlefield, but this technology has too many illegal (currently) civilian and police applications to make me really comfortable.

It definitely makes me want to harden my office against RF and EMP so that no broadcasts can get out.

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I spent the better part of my day yesterday listening to well-paid people talk about effective leadership. There was some good information:

Management and leadership are different things. Management is concerned with keeping the trains running on time; Leadership is concerned with where the trains are going. I would add, though it was not mentioned, that people in management positions can be leaders and that people in leadership positions need to be able to manage. Their trains might have new destinations, but they have to be able to get to them in order to get to them on time.

To effectively lead people somewhere, they have to want to go there. The trick is identifying and explaining the problems with the current system so that people will see that it needs to change. How many leaders ignore this step? From what I've seen, most of them make changes without mentioning why they're doing it. The followers end up seeing the problem with the current system as 'it changes too often and never improves.'

There was also a lack of one critical piece of information:

Effective leadership is not always good leadership. I heard a lot of talk about how to get your way and about constantly evaluating if your way is the right way. I heard nothing about figuring out what your way is or why it's better (not just different) from the current way. It's one thing to keep checking the GPS to make sure you're heading toward your destination, it's another thing entirely to make sure you're heading in the right direction to begin with.

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I've been looking forward to Apple's entry into the netbook market. They've said in the past that they'll enter the market if they can make a unique contribution to the field and I think the iPad pretty much fits the bill. If you haven't seen it yet, there's a video over at Apple's website. It's much more impressive than any words or simple pictures can describe. I have a few thoughts:

• The name is extremely unfortunate and spawned a slew of Max iPad and 'heavy flow...of data' jokes on twitter. Would iSlate or iTile or iThingy have been better? Probably not. Slate is already considered a form-factor, so they'd lose brand recognition with that.
• The screen feels like the wrong shape to me. I'm a photographer and 35mm (2x3) is what feels right to me. Widescreens are too wide and 4x3 just reminds me of outdated technology.
• The bezel is super wide. It reminds me of netbooks where they skimped on screen size but couldn't fit the innards into a matching package. This could be for technical reasons though; maybe it was too hard to hold if the screen went all the way to the edge.
• It's basically a giant iPod Touch. This isn't exactly a bad thing, but I already have an iPod touch. Actually...it's really not a bad thing and it's a big improvement on the iPod. The interface is amazing, and it runs smooth as butter...but I already have an iPod touch.
• It would be great for taking notes in meetings. My laptop gets way too embedded on my desk with peripherals and extra monitors to unplug and take to meetings for notes; an iPad would be perfect.
• It would make a great monitor for a tethered photoshoot. I can already shoot tethered with my laptop but the iPad is really sleek, so it would look great sitting on its stand so my client could see exactly what I shot. It would also be doing only and exactly what it needed to do; a laptop is overkill.
• $500 is not a bad price, but a little higher than I'd want to go for a 16GB device right now. I can fill 16GB with photos very, very quickly.
• I want one.

That's more or less what I was thinking during the keynote.

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I'm not one to keep a large number of coins in my pocket so that I can have exact change when I buy something. In fact, I like to have empty pockets whenever I can. This is, oddly, not in conflict with my desire to see the $1 bill be completely replaced by the $1 coin. I'll have to consider why that is at some other time.

For more years than I can count, I've been emptying my pockets of change every day and putting the coins into a quart jar that sits in my bedroom. I remember my father used to do the same thing; I don't know if that's related. At some point, I decided to save this change to spend on things that I wanted to buy but didn't have the money for. It started with camera gear and, when I started to buy that gear out of the business fund, it moved on to whatever about $100 can buy me.

It's worked out well and I get a nice bonus every once in a while, but recently I realized that it has a fatal flaw. This method of "saving" money actually encourrages me to make cash purchases. Cash purchases are impossible to track from a budgeting standpoint and even if you track cash as a budget item, saving the change like this still means that spending more now means getting more later.

In November, I pretty much stopped spending cash and at the same time, my change jar pretty much stopped growing. Actually saving money meant not "saving" any money.

I still have the jar. I'll still put my change into it every day. I still won't really think about it until I need quarters for parking meters or I take it to the bank to cash it out. But I'm going to think more about actually saving money and knowing where my money is going.

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This weekend, we're treating two teenaged girls who have never seen the original Star Wars to a screening of the original Star Wars. Coincidentally, Gizmodo reminded me of these Star Wars / Television mashups.

The A Team:

MacGyver:

Han Solo, P.I:

Bonus Magnum P.I. Side-by-side:

Have fun with that.

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This holiday season, I'm hoping some of you got Macs instead of PCs. Either way, check out this video parody of "I'm On A Boat" [NSFW:Language]

And, if you did get a Mac, here's Gizmodo's list of 10 things you must do to get the most out of it.

If you were unfortunate enough to get a PC, then here's Gizmodo's list of 10 things that Windows 7 really needs in order to be usable.

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I recently had the opportunity to take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment and I thought I'd share my experience with people through the immense audience of my blog. My day job offered a free book to anyone who wanted one along with a group followup to discuss and learn from the assessment. The basic premise of StrengthsFinder 2.0 is that they have...let me just quote them:

Based on Gallup's 40-year study of human strengths, we created a language of the 34 most common talents and developed the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment to help people discover and describe these talents.

Which basically means that they did a lot of interviews and compiled their results into a simplified list of categories (they call them 'themes') that describe people. The StrengtshFinder 2.0 assessment asks you a long series of questions and uses your responses to find the top 5 of the 34 themes that fit you. For reference, my themes and their descriptions were:

Relator: People who are especially talented in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Futuristic: People who are especially talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.

Empathy: People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations.

Adaptability: People who are especially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to “go with the flow.” They tend to be “now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.

My first thought was that these were pretty much no-brainers as far as describing me. I have a small group of close friends. When I get an idea in my head that really appeals to me, I can keep coming back to it over and over for weeks. I love to think about what the future could hold for us and I'm concerned about how the actions we take now could affect the future. I don't like to see my friends, or anyone really, sad because I want to help, though often don't know how. My whole life outlook is based on going with the flow and not worrying about the things I have no control over.

In addition to these short descriptions, there is a long list of maybes and perhapses that are supposed to more specifically describe how each theme fits me. This section, unlike the descriptions above, will be different for everyone who takes the assessment. I thought these were pretty hit-and-miss as far as accuracy.

One of the things that we were asked to do before attending our followup meeting was to send our assessment to a few friends and ask them when they'd seen us exhibit the behavior described by our themes. I talked to my wife about it and she said that the first thing she thought of was cold readings, so lets talk about that. According to Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, illusionists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

So basically they ask a bunch of questions and, based on the mark's responses and the reader's past experience, make statements that they think are likely to be correct. They also don't make those statements specific or conclusive, they leave them vague and tentative, allowing the subject to fill in the missing details that they couldn't possibly know because they're not really psychic; if they were, they'd already have won the lottery and collected James Randi's prize.

I took a longer look at the other 34 themes that the StrengthsFinder 2.0 offers and tried to decide, on my own and from the short description of each theme, how well each of the other themes fit me. Of the 34 themes, 5 were picked by the assessment that I mostly agreed with. I also picked out 9 that I'd have agreed with just as much. I could make an additional 13 fit me if I stretched a bit. Only seven of them would have been completely off the mark for me. For example, my world is not "best described by the order I create." This tells me that out of the 34 possible themes, there was a 79% chance that I would agree with any one theme. Maybe my Adaptability is just way way off the charts, but that seems like a stacked deck to me.

The StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment and a cold reading both ask a lot of questions and they both give a lot of vague responses. On the other hand, what does a psychologist do? All three of these things seem to have the same potential of making the subject think more about their situation than they have in the past and gain a better understanding of themselves and their personality.

The problem I see with this approach (and talk therapy for that matter) is that it depends on self-assessment. Any time you're asked to come up with information about yourself, regardless of the method, it will be information that you already have. This information is also of questionable merit given that the information you have is generally information you believe to be true, rather than information that is verifiably true. For example, one person I know to be a poor communicator had the 'communication' theme in their top five. This person might communicate frequently, but never seems to communicate accurately.

My conclusions about the StrengthsFinder 2.0 can be summed up thusly: It could be useful, but take it with a grain of salt. If you're going to try to apply it to your life, talk to others about the results and see if they agree with your assessment. Other people probably know more about your behavior than you do and can provide more insight than a book written by people you've never met.

--Photo courtesy Ben Zvan Photography

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Today is blog action day from what I'm told and the topic is global warming. I wanted to address the issue of return on investment (ROI) from green practices.

People say you can't make money from green technology like lower gas mileage and renewable energy. What they're really saying is that you can't make a quick buck from any of those things. They're not counting in any ROI outside of 2-5 years and they're not counting the potential cost of global warming. That's all a bunch of hooey because we're all going to be here much longer than 5 years.

From an anecdotal and personal standpoint, I can definitely say that I am saving money through green living: I invested in new windows, a handful of insulation and a high-efficiency boiler for my home last fall. My savings just in heating costs is around $140 per month. Now, I'm not going to pay off the upgrades to my house for many years but I raised the resale value of my property and I am using the savings to pay my mortgage down faster, which is compounding my savings by reducing my total interest paid.

Four years ago, I chose to take a job that was within walking distance of my home. As a result, I drive around 30,000 miles less each year than I used to. At my average of about 24 MPG, that's a $3,000 per year savings. Just take a moment and imagine being able to give yourself a $3,000 raise. I know the job market is tight right now and that may not be a good option, but it may be again soon.

All my electric power, which I mostly use for computers, is from WindSource. In my area, it's an extra few cents per KWh. I know I'm not making money off that deal, but I also know that less natural gas and coal are being used as a result. This is an even greener move than converting all my light bulbs to CF which, by the way, is a significant and immediate savings.

So, when you look at the cost of doing something green, don't think about the quick returns, think about the long-term savings.

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