Dilettante's Daybook

I just looked up “distractable” in the dictionary and was chagrined to find my picture next to the definition. I NEED Getting Things Done and have recently adopted Omnifocus as my GTD tool.

Reading Kourosh Dini, MD’s excellent Creating Flow With Omnifocus right now and learning a lot about how to use the features of the tool better. Highly recommended.

It is not weak to be distractable. This is simply how the mind works.
— Creating Flow with Omnifocus, p. 56

I feel a lot better now.

“… In much the same way that Africa’s lack of significant telecom capacity was a boon rather than a hindrance to the emergence of mobile telephony, its lack of legacy infrastructure for everything ranging from waste management to energy utilities could provide the appetite — non-existent in the West — for genuinely transformative, future-friendly reconceptualization of the very notion of infrastructure.

Technology and new concepts of living, as well as progressive notions of urbanization, industrial capitalism, consumerism, ecotourism, and renewable systems, could meld to fashion a new shared-growth paradigm. Such a paradigm, proponents argue, can easily bypass the clunky, wasteful, inequitable, and socially non-scalable physical infrastructure legacy of the West, propelling Africa, uniquely among continents, into a true 21st Century style of civilization….”

Car shows had been growing in size and public interest since 1900. The 1925 Automobile Show in New York drew record crowds.

Early show cars had been expensively hand painted. While Ford’s Model Ts did in fact come in other colors than black, choices were limited and all were somber.

General Motors and Du Pont worked together in the early 20s to develop Duco automotive paint, a quick-drying enamel that was durable, cheap, and easy to apply. And it could be made in brilliant colors. Du Pont hired a man named H. Ledyard Towle, who had worked with the camouflage experts in the French Army during World War I to direct its color-planning division.

By 1925, the new, brilliantly colored cars were all the rage. An important step on the road to mass consumerization had been taken.

“…I use the word API, Dave refers to it as platform, either way you’re looking at companies that leverage the ecosystem around them hard in all aspects of their development, from investment to mentoring to market expansion….”

How they build their custom-designed and manufactured dog wheelchairs right here in Shelburne Falls, MA, USA.

If you’ve never visited their wonderful Facebook Fan Page, you have a treat in store for you.

“…Despite the bliss this ignorance provides, this selective blindness isolates me from other people I care about by extending the difference between the way we see the world. In other words, I often don’t see the subtle (and sometimes loud) purple hues of gender….”

More women entrepreneurs, please. I’m getting way more testosterone than I need right now hanging around with a lot of entrepreneurs.

This is a really interesting piece about studying the dynamics of how pedestrians behave. Turns out there are major cultural differences in whether you step to the right or to the left when you’re in danger of bumping into somebody, for example.

We had a ball in Easthampton yesterday…

At the Apollo Grill in Eastworks this Thursday. Meet some of Western Massachusetts’s most intriguing people.

My monthly social media roundup for February 2012. Please have a look & share.