Ben Shoemate's Notebook

"Sport"

via http://thinkingforaliving.org/blog/entry/did-you-ever-imagine

(author unknown) via Lifehacker shared by 6 people

Editor: Welcome guest author Jason Womack who's got some advice on how to get back to work on a slow day.
You just don’t want to do it anymore. No more task folders, no more email labeling, no more index cards in your back pocket. You just don’t have the energy today; the power of your productivity is at a low ebb. What do you do now? How do you flip that switch to get going again? Photo by Stewf.

Here are five simple things you can do, not related to making lists or reworking your system (again), which will inspire you to get back on the right track.

• Walk around. Anywhere will do. You can walk around your office. Visit a floor you haven’t been to before. Or maybe you have time to go around the block or visit that park down the street. It’s all about looking for something positive you have never seen. Taking time is smell the roses may be just a cliché, but those roses could be anything. A restaurant you’ve never seen. A friend’s cubicle. Some kids playing ball. Life is going on in the world around you. You just need to notice.
• Set an alarm and work on just one thing for that period of time. Maybe it’s just 5, 10 or 20 minutes. Maybe it’s two minutes. But at the end of the time, you will notice what’s it’s like to experience real focus. And if you complete the task, you have something to anchor your day around. You’ve gotten at least one thing really done.
• Open up a best-selling business book to a random page and read for five minutes. Let you mind apply whatever your reading to whatever you are working on. There is bound to be inspiration for a great idea or a new way of doing things.
• Contact someone you admire. If the internet has done anything, it has flattened the world and enabled us to contact people we respect in many different areas—your business, entertainment, politics or writing. Like an author? Find their web site and drop them an email. Make a list of all the people you want to meet someday and see how many of them you can find on the web. You’d be surprised how many respond.
• Send postcards to two friends you know you live out-of-state. It will make you appreciate where you live more than ever.

In short, here are some things that will get you going again:

• Appreciation of your surroundings.
• The accomplishment of a job done well.
• Connection with others.

That formula may not take a long time to finish, but at the end, you’ll feel brand new and be able to tackle the toughest tasks you have around you with more energy.

What are the switches that flip your energy back on on an unproductive day? Let us know in the comments.

Jason W. Womack, MEd, MA shares productivity tips that make it possible to do more without the added stress of working harder. For more productivity ideas and up-to-date posts, visit www.JasonWomackBlog.com.

Michael Arrington via TechCrunch shared by 12 people

A controversy is brewing over a popular Facebook application called PackRat, where users collect sets of illustrated cards for points and levels. The company behind the application, Alamofire, says that users generate up to 500 daily page views per day on the application trying to hunt down the right card to complete a collection.

A big part of the game is “stealing” cards from friends, and so a lot of users add other users as friends so that their cards can be obtained. The application’s popularity has also led some users to create Facebook accounts for the sole purpose of playing the game.

Some of those accounts are now being disabled by Facebook, according to this discussion forum on the application site.

What’s curious is the email sent from Facebook to one deleted user, which states that Facebook isn’t a social network (it’s a “social utility”) and isn’t meant to build large groups of new friends. Instead, Facebook is meant to reinforce “pre-existing” social connections:

Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”. It is meant to help reinforce pre-existing social connections, not build large groups of new ones. If this is in direct contrast to what you expected as legitimate Facebook usage, I apologize for any confusion. This is simply the intention behind the site.

Accounts that are used solely for the purpose of applications are in violation of our Terms of Use. Unfortunately, I will not be able to reactivate your account. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Lauren
User Operations
Facebook

It’s true that Facebook has stated clearly that their intention is to be a sort of mirror to the real world social graph. But it’s unavoidably true that new friendships are made on the site, too. Even friendships forged for the sole purpose of playing a game made by a third party developer.

Even former Facebook President Sean Parker (and current stockholder) said recently at TechCrunch50 that he had far more Facebook friends than real world friends.

Facebook’s real message here may be “please don’t make fake accounts just to play this game,” but that isn’t what they’re saying. I’ve emailed them for clarification.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Jason Fitzpatrick via Lifehacker shared by 8 people

Many people adore the look of photographs taken with older cameras. The millions of plastic bodied cheap lens bearing cameras that flooded the consumer photography market starting around the mid-20th century had flaws that have come to be a hallmark of their time. The dark vignettes, over saturated colors, and often blown highlights have a certain undeniably flawed appeal to many. Why scrounge the flea markets looking for a camera or waste the money on trendy new (but just as poorly constructed) expensive knockoffs?

Frank Lazaro, a member of the Digital Photography School community, has put together a fantastic tutorial on taking your digital photographs and giving them the vintage feel of older photos. He uses Photoshop and the tutorial and steps are geared towards Photoshop users, but none of the steps are extremely specific to using Photoshop. The effects could easily be recreated with a bit of tweaking to the process in another photo editing program like GIMP. If you're in the mood to tinker with some of your photos but aren't interested in being really hands on with the process check out previously reviewed Wanokoto, a web based image editor that helps you create vintage effects.

MG Siegler via ParisLemon shared by 5 people

Normally I hate it when actors, musicians or any kind of celebrity attempt to talk about politics. It's not that I necessarily think they don't know what they're talking about (that's only true most of the time), but it's more that they have so much power in what they say because they are famous and millions of idiots are greatly influenced by what they say.

That said, I could not agree more with Matt Damon's assessment of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. (The video is below.) It is absurd. And I too don't understand why more people aren't at the very least dumbfounded, and more appropriately, pissed off about it.

While at first I was completely dumbfounded because it made no sense to me. Now, each day it's clearer and clearer that this was a purely political pick made to rally Christian conservatives to vote for a man who they likely wouldn't vote for otherwise. And without that vote, Obama beats McCain.

The term "winning at all costs" I'm afraid is hitting a new low. This is someone who has a very good chance of running our country. She might be competent, but who the hell knows? Certainly not us, the voting public in the next few weeks before the election. The future is being left to chance. It's sad.

It's like the movie King Ralph. But the President of the United States isn't a figurehead like a King. Oh yeah, and this is real. So it's not funny. At all.

via http://www.artgraphics.ru/best/winners.html

9/12/08 will be remembered as the day we finally caught one of the bad guys -- a 4th grader with a broken pencil sharpener.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

...

The boy -- a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student -- cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school's assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff's report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

Fourth grader suspended for using broken pencil sharpener

Michael Masnick via Techdirt shared by 5 people

Want to know how not to respond to criticism? By deleting it. Yet, it appears that's what Amazon has done. Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM. Things then got worse when people realized that EA had misled customers about the fact that they could only have one user account on Spore.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly. When you try to shut down a large group of people who feel wronged, you're not just whacking the bees' nest with a stick, you're setting it on fire with a flame thrower. The folks who were complaining are only going to complain louder, and louder. Remember what happened when Digg tried to takedown the AACS crack? Whoever was responsible for removing the comments -- whether it was Amazon or EA -- they may find that the reaction to trying to shut down the angry mob is only going to make folks that much angrier, and alert that many more people to the problems they have with EA's use of DRM.

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