inspiration
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Girl Geek Dinner Sydney: Pixels, Post-its, and Unicorns
→: Girl Geek Dinner Sydney: Pixels, Post-its, and UnicornsI’ve known Tammy a long time (we worked together in Minnesota!) so I know how amazing she is – and I was really happy she agreed to speak at the Girl Geek Dinner we hosted. I thought it was a really interesting talk, about how to support and create innovation. Tammy’s been in UX for…
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Book: Sonia Sotomayer, My Beloved World
→: Book: Sonia Sotomayer, My Beloved WorldI absolutely adored Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography, My Beloved World (Amazon). She came from an underprivileged immigrent background, with an alcoholic father and a major health issue (diabetes) and is now on the Supreme Court. It’s an incredible story, really honest – she clearly worked incredibly hard, but there’s stories of failure (like her marriage, and an early internship) and insecurity…
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Need to be Dull to be Creative
→: Need to be Dull to be CreativeFor ages, I’ve been worrying about why I was feeling really low on creativity. It’s hard to pin point what changed – was work more demanding? Social life fuller? Too tired at the end of the day because I just do so much more physically (in Canada even with a pretty intense gym regime I…
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It’s Not a Disaster
→: It’s Not a DisasterTravel gives me a lot of time to think, the planes, the airports, the queues. And the jetlag – there’s no lonelier time than four in the morning, wherever you happen to be. Probably clear from my last post that I’ve had a lot to think about, lately. Still going to have to be enigmatic and elusive…
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I Cannot Die Washing a Teacup
→: I Cannot Die Washing a TeacupI wanted to see this since it came out, but I finally got round to watching The Iron Lady on the plane to Australia. At first I thought I was going to hate it, because it starts with Maggie really old, and clearly losing her grip on reality somewhat. Actually I spent almost the entire…
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On Having Adventures
→: On Having AdventuresThere are a zillion things to do in New York City, but my favorite thing to do is walk across it. Every kind of person, demographic. See people out shopping, walking home after a marathon, out with their kids. Overhear people speaking Spanish, Italian, Farsi, French, Chinese, Japanese, and, yes, English – American, and English-English,…
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From Hard Focus, to Flow, to Stop
→: From Hard Focus, to Flow, to StopInteresting project the past few weeks. Basically I was swapping out a large and central component to what my team is building. It was really tough, to do that and keep everything functional. Normally I ask – what is the least amount I can do to make an improvement? This time, I had to ask,…
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Engineering an Interesting Life
→: Engineering an Interesting LifeAbstract: In a world where computing power doubles roughly every two years, the goal is no longer efficiency, but effectiveness. The education system prepares students for efficiency, but to be successful when we go out into the world (or before!) we need rather to learn to be effective. In this workshop, we’ll discuss more useful things…
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Keep Telling Me to “Say No” Until I Learn
→: Keep Telling Me to “Say No” Until I LearnOn the way to Toronto my friend is telling me I need to give up bagels, and I say, there’s enough change in my life right now without introducing more. But that I think it will be better next month. She says, “you always think that; you said that in August, too”. She’s right. This…