Category: miscellaneous

  • Excellence

    We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

  • Vinyl memories

    In 1985, at the age of 12, I left the US for the first time and travelled with my family to Germany and Austria.  I was a member of the Cincinnati BoyChoir (yes, 2nd soprano and everything…) and we were “competing” against the still world famous Vienna Boys Choir on their home turf.  In the…

  • Should have remembered my HDT…

    It may have saved me a little bit (or maybe a lot) of wasted time – the worst thing to waste.  (HT to Hamlet’s Blackberry for bringing these back to me): As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil…

  • Evolving ourselves out of existence

    Still reading quite a bit. Just finished “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (it was OK – not sure I reccomend it though) and then finally started and finished “The Lean Startup” which if you have tough projects to get done is a must read IMHO. Now I am on to “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” which describes the…

  • IDPA Matches this year

    As some of you may know, I am the match director at a local IDPA match that I helped to get started a few years back at the shooting club that is a few miles from home.  It’s something that I really do enjoy doing although it is a lot of work.  Finding stages, working…

  • To the three old guys arguing in Starbuck's this morning

    I’m on a business trip this week and have made a habit of stopping at the local Starbucks for a coffee each morning before I head into the office.  Every morning the same group of 3 “old guys” (in reality they are probably only a few decades my senior) sets up shop in 3 of…

  • A valuable dialectic

    Dialectic is often used in the Hegelian sense to drive people to a pre-determined synthesis.  I heard this on a podcast the other day and thought it was a really good explanation of a valuable form of dialectic.  From Tao Te Ching: When the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness arises When it knows good…

  • Stoic ponderings

    I finished The Guns of August over the weekend (which, BTW, is a great book that actually spans July, August and September of 1914) and so was looking for something to bring with me to read on the plane and in the evenings this week when I was out of town on business.  I ended…

  • When Androids build the roads who will be able to afford a car to drive on them?

    Two articles showed up in my feed this week both dealing with the impact that automation is having and will have into the future on the workforce and humanity as a whole.  Almost everyone can point to a gadget in their house, car or workplace that automates something they would rather not do. From the…