I think these images speak for themselves.
Something about this folder layout doesn’t exactly scream “GTD”…
I’ve heard of wanting to be “in control” but Firefox appears to have taken this concept a little too seriously judging by my current browser menu(s)
If I was Juno Cho, LG’s President of Mobile Products I would not be a happy man this evening. In fact I would be pissed. No. I’d want a crossbow with a picture of Michael Bay’s face tacked to the target. [YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmgbbGJW6ZE&autoplay=0 420,420]
Michael Bay should be mortified but, in spite of his considerable directorial talent, I’m not so sure he’s that bright. Or perhaps, like some others with creative genius, he has a bright headlight with a narrow focus. If he was anyone else, this would be a cautionary tale.
Here’s what went down:
Today at CTIA, LG was showing off their global promotion in conjunction with Dreamworks SKG and Michael Bay of their collaboration around the new Transformers Revenge Movie. This included the world premier of the trailer for the movie just at the end of the day. After the trailer which had delivered quite a crowd, Juno delivered a few words culminating with a very warm welcome for their surprise guest, Michael Bay, who just happened to be in town for an awards show in the next day or two.
Michael was warmly applauded. Casually dressed, he seemed at ease as he took the mic, said hello, then said, “I have some big news: I’ve just been named the next CEO of LGE…” The crowd laughed.
Michael smiled again and then delivered a nice turd for his partners by saying “No. Seriously – I don’t know anything about mobile phones. In fact, look at my phone (which he held up) – it’s a Thirty-Nine dollar Samsung”
You could feel Mr Cho’s anger from across the room. LG people ran to get phones, Mr. Cho went up to Michael (who seemed oblivious to the enormous slap he’d just delivered to every LG employee’s face) and said, “Here now you have an LG phone” and gave him his own personal device. He took the mic back and quickly wrapped up the disastrous press conference. But not before Micheal could dish out a little more pain…”but all my contacts are in the other one” he said in a petulant voice.
Juno said “we’ll take care of that.” I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of care he was imagining taking and of whom.
Way to go Michael, that was classy as hell. I don’t think you could have insulted them more thouroughly if you’d planned it for months.
Making matters even worse, I later heard that they’d even scripted all Michael’s remarks but for whatever reason, maybe because he’s retarded or perhaps he’s just a total jerk, he elected to trash LG instead.
Samsung must be delighted – they’ll still be talking about this next time I’m back in Korea, just you watch.
This just in from Zurich. Reports indicate that there has been a “minor incident” at the recently restarted Hadron Large Collider/CERN Lab. Apparently efforts to contact the lab itself have so far been unsuccessful and a spreading “zone of EM failure” has resulted in communcation failure across the region including news media, police, fire and even radio operators.
We have been able to obtain several real time sattellite images from the scene and these pictures are disturbing to say the least.
Labels have been applied to help you understand the visuals below:
Pre-Event
CERN at Time + 15 Post Initial Report
CERN at
Considering that it may be the end of life as we know it, Google’s announcement of CADIE is surprisingly low key. The world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE), according to Google, has done what many thought was impossible and what even the most optimistic among us predicted would take twenty years or more: passed the Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil was unavailable for comment, however anyone that has read his seminal work,
The Singularity is Near”, has an appreciation for both the significance and the peril that this event portends.
Long the fear of certain scientists, among them Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, the birth of true AI will have massive ramifications for every human on the planet. In a nutshell the concern is that the incredible speed with which an autonomous AI can learn will virtually instantly render such a creation the most intelligent “being” on the planet and frighteningly, one that may be able to defend itself from attack (such as being shut down) and which may not necessarily determine that humans are either friendly to itself or (more likely) friendly to the environment.
It is plausible, perhaps even predictable that such a state of affairs will cause a device like CADIE to determine that the best course of action is the systematic elimination of humans from either positions in which decisions impacting the planet can be made or potentially even elimination of humans altogether.
In fact, CADIE has already created a YouTube Video that has some disturbing suggestions that this thought process has already begun.
I can’t help but wonder, given that the Google Engineers believe that CADIE has bugs but CADIE herself (it prefers to be thought of as female) believes that she is already flawless and incapable of making mistakes.
A reference on CADIE’s own home page that “all our webpages belong to CADIE” may be a prelude of things to come. This may just be the all time Darwin Award Winner, however no one is likely to be around to collect the prize if CADIE gets out of control a situation that may have already occurred.
As you may know if you’ve read this site previously, I work for the David Allen Company as the Editor of GTDtimes, the community hub for all things GTD. David, the author of both “Getting Things Done: the art of stress free productivity” and “Making it All Work: winning at the game of work and the business of life” and the rest of the David Allen Company team have been hard at work putting together what may well be one of the most important and valuable conferences you could possibly attend, particularly given the current economic environment and the resulting need to take your productivity and capabilities to a new level not merely to excel but possibly simply to survive.
Here’s why David thinks people should attend the conference in his own words:
[YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU5rfamXaww&autoplay=0, 460]
Incidentally, much of the original impetus for this even was generated by my late friend Marc Orchant who had spoken passionately of the need for a convocation of GTD practitioners where we could meet, exchange ideas, share stories, educate one another, learn, develop new best practices and help ourselves get closer to that effortless state of truly having a mind like water. I will be there and hope to see many of you there too.
Just came across this image and I simply couldn’t pass it by without sharing. I just wonder how tall you have to be to ride this ride?
Want Fries with That?
Anyone that has followed the technology scene the past couple of years has probably read about the doings of Sam Sethi. His reputation as well of the swath of destruction he’s carved through the online mediasphere has been nearly unparalleled.
Beginning with his noisome divorce from Techcrunch UK, subsequently his remarks where he actually threatened a former business associate with grevious bodily injury, followed by his incredible Blognation charade where he basically stole between four and six months of full time blogging efforts by more than a dozen top bloggers (none of whom have ever received so much as a heartfelt apology from Sam, let alone payment as promised in multiple forums).
Recently when speaking with another blogger at an event Sam was asked what the deal was in regards to what happened with Blognation. It just so happened that a friend of mine was in the vicinity and heard the question and Sam’s response. He looked the other gentleman in the eye and said: “It’s simple, really. I lied.” Incredible. The man has no conscience, shows no remorse, cares not what he did to the people who made some big sacrifices on his behalf. There’s a word for people like this: sociopath.
You’d think that after a debacle like what he did at Blognation he’d have the decency to stay out of tech for a while – like permanently – but some folks have no shame and instead of staying well away from the community that by all rights should treat him like the pariah he truly is, he heard an idea he liked, Twitwall, tried to glom onto it by weaseling his way into someone else’s company, got denied when his track record came to light, and subsequently started a rip-off company, Twitblogs.
This slimy behavior was brought to the fore thanks to Techcrunch but Sam has no shame and he keeps on keeping on.
One of the things that Techcrunch pointed out in its post on the topic is that Twitblogs had no formal privacy policy. As they pointed out – would you trust your data, let alone your credentials to a guy with Sethi’s track record? Me neither.
Anyway, earlier today a friend of mine pointed me to Twitblogs new privacy policy:
Yeah…right…they care about privacy and security so much that they can’t be bothered to borrow some boilerplate that’s been vetted by a company like Yahoo, put their name in there and adhere to that policy at least until Sam gets around to trying to play lawyer and draw up something of his own.
As funny as that is, though, I’ve saved the best for last. Here’s Sam’s current description of his role at Twitblogs:
Sam’s role is to manage the product/features road map and manage our growing list of partners. Twitblogs already has a number of high-level relationships agreements with companies such as Amazon and Sun Microsystems.
It would be interesting to call Sun or Amazon and see if they really have such “high-level” agreements. Sam said the same thing about Sun and other companies during the blognation disaster and to a one they hadn’t heard of blognation nor Scam Sethi…
This of course begs the question: what is fact, what is fiction. From what I can see no one knows. not even Sam…
Caveat: I am not a developer so what I am about to reveal may or may not be news to the developer community. Nevertheless, this is not something that I was aware of previously and I have not seen any mention of this in the media that I subscribe to (which is a fairly broad cross section of the online press).
Further, to my knowledge this is not something that has been specifically authorized by me in the course of my use of either my computer or the software on it or my iPhone and the software running there. I did not grant permission for this information to be transferred anywhere and I did not ever to my knowledge see any request to allow this information to be collected much less shared and shared without my knowledge.
Here’s the deal. Today I was going through the console on my Mac Book Pro trying to see if I can figure out why it suddenly won’t display anything on the screen (I was doing this using LogMeIn since I could not work on the computer locally since the display has apparently died.
During the process of digging through the console to see if there was any obvious cause for the completely unexpected display failure I came across something that I found as unexpected as the aforementioned problem and which I (and possibly other iPhone owners) will find very disturbing.
As you can see, this is a snapshot of my console log file. It shows some surprising information – at least from my perspective. Unless I am completely misinterpreting this information it looks as if the iPhone is logging everything that happens to it and I mean everything, from usage stats on the baseband to which applications are installed, when they are used and when they malfunction, and then, when you connect your iPhone to iTunes the phone downloads all this information to your console where it is logged. Further, judging from the text adjacent to the baseband logging details this information has been “submitted”.
This begs the question: SUBMITTED WHERE???
Again, I wasn’t asked if I wanted this information collected and I sure as hell wasn’t asked if I wanted it submitted either. If I am correct and what is going on here is that without my prior knowledge let alone my consent this data is being transmitted back to Apple for their own purposes (after all with literally hundreds of crashes of the mobile Safari browser on this iPhone alone, if the data were being used for my benefit someone would have contacted me don’t you think?) using my computer to collect the data and my Internet connection to transport it.
When a Microsoft application crashes and the crash reporter wants to send information back to Microsoft they have the courtesy to ask your permission. They also take time to explain in writing what is being sent to them and what is being done with it. They make certain guarantees at this time as well about personally identifying information and how that data is to be used.
I fail to see where such courtesies are being extended to me by Apple. I fail to see an explanation as to what is being collected, whether or not it is personally identifying or what Apple intends to do with this information once they’ve managed to snoop it from my phone and computer.
Frankly I think this is outrageous. The fact that this data is being collected at all without requesting permission to do so is bad enough. The fact that it appears to be sent via clandestine transmission to Apple without any prior disclosure seems to be a criminal trespass based upon my understanding of the privacy laws in this country.
This strikes me as a grotesque abuse of my trust. What if I had personal medical information stored on my phone? At this point how would i know who at Apple had accessed this information or with whom it had been shared – again all without my knowledge or consent.
Since when did owning a mobile phone void one’s right to privacy or exempt a company from the need to disclose their data collection policy? When did Apple wake up and decide that it was okay to spy on their customers in this truly repulsive fashion?
Now, as I said at the outset of this post, I am not a developer so it is possible that either this is something that has previously been discussed and I am late to the party – it is also possible that I am misunderstanding something about these console log statements and that what I think is going on really isn’t.
However, on the off chance that I am neither late to the party nor misunderstanding these log files then this is a real issue that deserves some real attention. I sincerely doubt that I am alone in feeling completely raped by Apple’s data collection policies and the fact that I don’t appear to have been included in the decision making process about which data will be logged, collected and reported regarding my use of a device that I bought and paid for and for which I have not in any obvious way been notified of zero privacy nor authorized anyone to keep tabs on my beyond my approval for AT$T to track my usage of their network for billing purposes.
Is this grounds for a class action? I’ll let the lawyers tell me the answer. Is this grounds for a consumer-company smackdown. I think it is. If what I think is going on is really going on then it’s time to put Apple in its place. The back door was bad enough but this latest is simply egregious.
marc_and_sue_by_scoble
I can hardly believe that it’s been a year since the world lost the irreplacable soul, friend, father, coach, mentor, husband and so much more wrapped up in the being of a man I knew as Marc Orchant.
My time knowing Marc was much too brief – barely two years, yet in that short time he had a profound influence on my life- an influence that carries on without him in so many ways both big and small.
Marc and I had a regular routine consisting of Skype, phone, twitter and email that carried on throughout the say comprising multiple cross threaded dialogs – we were very present in one anothers lives even though I lived in California while Marc had no intention of moving from his beloved New Mexico.
Anyone that knew Marc, even a little, knows that he was the consummate educator/geek. He loved technology and he loved helping people discover how useful it was for themselves. He was very much the Zen Master of technology – giving people just enough help that they could sort things out themselves and thus own the knowledge rather than fixing whatever it was and creating another dependent tech user.
Marc had an almost childlike love of things shiny – much like my own – however while one might see me as a person who refuses to grow up Marc’s delight was more sage – wiser somehow – he was wiser in so many ways.
A short time after meeting Marc and beginning to work with him at Foldera I knew that we’d be friends for life. I had no idea that in this case that meant such a short, short time.
In any case I am rambling incoherently because I’m still not ready to accept that he’s gone and that in this lifetime I won’t have the gift of his friendship, the benefit of his counsel or the pleasure of his intellect in my own life. The world seemed darker the day Marc left us and there are still so many shadows were he used to light things up.
Later today I’ll be flying back from London to LA and hopefully will be able to share a few of my experiences with Marc from the prior couple of years. If anyone reading this has anything they’d like to share please comment or send me an email (oliver at owstarr dot com) and I will post it for you. If you are interested in sharing anything productivity or GTD related that originated with or relates to Marc, including content he published previously – I’ll be posting that sort of material to GTDtimes.
Apple’s Unreasonable Censorship
I guess that the folks at Apple don’t really believe in the first ammendment. If they did I simply cannot understand why they would refuse to post the following review to the iPhone App Store. I have looked and cannot see how anything written in the review posted below violates any of their terms for posting reviews yet they have clearly removed it from the store.
This is not nice and should give everyone pause when considering where we should spend our technology dollars. I am really disappointed in the company – a company that has received a fair bit of my money, too – and would really like a representative from Apple to explain just what it is about this review that is so objectionable that they would remove it from the store:
Please spread this around. Company’s that censor their customer’s shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.