Tag: ideas

The World Is Flat

This video is off a smart guy talking to MIT crowd about globalization. The speech is titled after the book he wrote – “The World Is Flat“. This is the most interesting speech on the subject of globalization that I’ve ever heard. It’s very widely scoped too – it touches on everything from Berlin wall and Netscape browser to 9/11 and open source. I’ll be ordering the book shortly too.

The speech is in Real Media format and is about one hour long, so you might want to install Real Player and find a large piece of time, if you plan on watching it.

After I saw it, I was somewhat tired. The speech is very thought provoking and it made my brains work hard. Packing it all into my head felt like dealing with a wardrobe of clothes and a tiny bag. Things were falling out of it all the time and I couldn’t manage the zipper to close.

Rarely I feel like this.

Cubicles and dress code

Somehow I came to realize that cubicles and dress code contradict. I can’t exactly prove this point. Yet. But this thought in my head makes all the sense there is.

Dress code is needed where people have proper offices. If you have an office, please, do weare a shirt and, possibly, a tie. But if the company is too cheap to give you your personal space, demanding proper clothing from you is, well, too much.

Of course, this can be argued backward – if you are hidden in the office why on Earth would you need to wear a tie? That’s why I said that I can’t prove it. Yet.

The cheapest way of finding the domain name

I came across this post at Blogging Pro. It is about this other guy – Darren Rowse – who is looking for a good (and available) domain name for his new project.

Instead of spending hours upon hours (or was it after doing so?), Darren started a contest for the best domain name suggestion. The prize is $100 USD. He claims that only after 8 hours, with majority of his readership being a sleep (time zone issue), he received a whole bunch of suggestions that will be difficult to choose from.

It struck me as a very efficient way of finding a domain name. If you’ve ever looked for one, you know what I mean. For those of you who haven’t – it involves numerous itterations across the dictionary, thesaurus, and some sort of “check domain availability” tool. Often there is also a good mix of scripts that generate suggestions. The procedure can go on for hours, days, and even weeks. That is, of course, unless you don’t get enlightened, which also happens, albeit rarely.

Many people enjoy looking for domain names. Just for the sport of it. Give them a subject and they’ll occupy themselves for a good half of their corporate time. Throw in a few bucks and you’ve got yourself the best place ticket for a bloody battle.

In this particular example, the prize is $100 USD. It’s a nice number, though people would certainly participate for less. If you are still doubtful, try it. And consider for a moment, what is a $100 USD. In terms of your time.

Three gender race

Olga was watching one of those cheap sci-fi space movies on TV. It took me only about twenty seconds of looking at before I started joking about it – immitating voices, using quotes from other movies, and doing all sorts of other fooling around.

When I satisfied myself with all the mind crap that I could produce, I took a two minute break by thinking seriously about space stuff. The choice of topic this time was – other races.

In just under two minutes I managed to come up with a three gender choice – Triorids. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well, in this race, they would have your regular Male and Female, and they would also have a Catalyzer.

The thing is that a Triorid Male cannot have sex with Triorid Female. Their genitals just doesn’t match. So they need a Catalyzer. It’s like a converter. It connects to both Male and Female and helps them to have proper sex.

There are good and bad things about Catalyzers. The good thing is that they are more normalized. If you think of Males as plus, and Females as minuses (you can safely reverse, if that’ll change your attitude), than you Catalyzes would be about zero – somewhere in between. They also help a mating couple to stay together by finding compromises in conflicts and complimenting both other sides all the time.

The bad thing is that Catalyzers have the character, soul, and spirit of their own. They live their own lives. In turms of sex, that means that if Male Triorid wants to have sex, he has to convince not only a Female, but a Catalyzer too. Even if both Male and Female want to have sex, they still have to make Catalyzer agree.

I’m writing this idea down, because it occupied the whole two minutes of my two minute break, but I liked it enough to want to think it over next time.

Now I am back to my usual crap of impersonating cheap movie characters and using qutoes from other films…