Skip to content

Archive for January, 2007

Jan 27

The G.I. Joe Strategy

There is a hilarious article on cracked.com about 80′s cartoons and how they’ve effected a generation of adults. Apparently the guys at the Pentagon watched as children because “we’re pretty certain that our strategy for the Iraq War was conceived after a two day long G.I. Joe marathon in the Pentagon. They just implicitly trusted that the good guys were going to win, that firing off our guns would make the bad guys run for the caves and that giving everyone cute nicknames was somehow endearing. When things didn’t turn out the way they’d planned, the administration placed the blame on faulty intelligence.” (more)

Jan 26

3 Comments

The Silly Simplicity of Future ECM

My interest in ECM (enterprise content management) is purely based on the value it can deliver to the business. I think much progress has been made, but the focus is still very much on technology. I would start with your users and ask them what would make their lives easier – that would be my feature set. Some of the things business users often ask for seems impossible, but the basic theme I usually get is this: they want the system to handle the difficult, time consuming stuff and shift the complexity away from the human and put it onto the machine. To most users, this was the point of buying the system in the first place.
Read more

Jan 22

Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena

“Though science can explain many strange phenomena, some mysteries remain to be solved—often because there is simply not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion. Some of these phenomena may one day be fully understood, as many things that were once mysterious or unexplained (such as the causes of disease) are now common knowledge.” —Benjamin Radford

Find out more about: the Body/Mind Connection, Psychic powers and ESP, Near-Death Experiences and Life After Death, UFOs, deja vu, Ghosts, Mysterious Disappearances, Intuition, Bigfoot, and the Taos Hum, here.

Jan 22

Top 20 Science Myths

Can a chicken live without its head? Is a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a humans? Does water drain backwards in the Southern Hemisphere due to the Earth’s rotation? Do hair and fingernails continue growing after death? Is there gravity in space? Does a falling cat always land on its feet? Do humans use only 10 percent of their brains? Do men think about sex every seven seconds? Does eating a poppy seed bagel mimics opium use? Do we get less wet by running in the rain? Would a penny dropped from the top of a tall building kill a pedestrian? Is there really a five second rule? Do adults don’t grow new brain cells? Can animals can predict natural disasters? Can chicken soup can cure the common cold? Are seasons are caused by the Earth’s proximity to the sun? Is yawning contagious? Is the Great Wall of China the only man made structure visible from space? Is it true that lightning never strikes the same place twice? Does it really take seven years to digest bubble gum?

Well, find out here.

Jan 17

2 Comments

The Love We Give

I gave all I had and it wasn’t enough. All I wanted would be considered small stuff. She smashed my heart, yes it’s true. But now I don’t seem quite as blue. What has happened, where am I? I could have swore, I thought I’d die. But yesterday is over, today is new. The future looks bright, lots to do.
Simple, sweet kisses are all I wanted. I continue my quest, quite undaunted. A few months are gone, they’ll never come back. I have some time now to mentally unpack. Give me some time and perhaps I might, find a sweet kiss for next Christmas night. For now, I will avoid another heart break, because the love we give is equal to the love we make.

Jan 11

Waking Up In Wonderland

“You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” I started off 2006 by swallowing the blue pill. The blue pill isn’t very exciting. It’s all about the red pill. The unexpected, the adventurous and the daring. 2007 is a year of life changing potential. It’s about implementing all the lessons I learned in 2006. Not that I’ll hear Cypher whispering in my ear, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.” Nothing quite that drastic, but it does mean something different.

I usually wrap up the year by bundling up my enteries from the previous year into a single PDF file to download. If you’re interested here the last 3 years of Maybe Matthew …

Jan 10

Rupert Gets All Paranormal

I know you’re curious what Rupert has been up to. Here’s a special report from Roy Stemman of the Paranormal Review. Stemman says, “Do try this at home: The good news is that anyone, anywhere in the world, can also try many of them, without needing to attend a workshop. It’s a case, says Sheldrake, of “Do try this at home”. He has even devised telepathy tests involving the telephone, e-mails, and mobile phone texting. The details of these can be found on Rupert Sheldrake’s website.

Gotta read the rest…

Jan 9

hist_us_20_civil_rights_pic_mlk_dream_color
2 Comments

Words That Changed the World

When I really started to understand what had gone on 30 years before me – during the 50′s and 60′s and how divided the country was about the color of someone’s skin – was in high school. Racism was a little confusing to suburban GenXer’s who never experienced that America. Today, America is better because a new generation, a generation that grew up believing in equal opportunities, is now taking up leadership positions around the country. I grew up with kids from all over the world. Different races, ethnicities, from many different countries. How could I think that I was any better than the kid sitting next to me who went to the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, and and drank from the same water fountain? Unfortunately, this was not the experience of my parents or their parents. They lived in a world where if you were black you had to sit in a certain place on the bus, go to a different school, live in a different neighborhood … drink from a different water fountain. We recognize the utter stupidity of this now.
Read more

Jan 7

1 Comment

Musicmatch Still Blows

Musicmatch has been out for a few years and it’s always been a memory hogging, slow loading, mp3 player that isn’t sure what it is. With the release of the new Musicmatch version 10, I decided I would give it another try. You would think after 10 releases they would have gotten right. Nope. The market these guys are in is dominated by iTunes and the iPod. That means thousands of music lovers with hard drives packed full of AAC (m4a and m4p) files. Not only does Musicmatch have no support for AAC but neither do most of the other competitors out there. Who plans the strategy for these guys? Elmer Fudd? You can’t even rip CDs in lossless format from Musicmatch – a feature which Apple has had in iTunes since their first Windows release.

Well, it looks like I will continue using iTunes for at least a little while longer. I’m not a huge fan of iTunes but like Democracy, it’s the best we’ve got.

Jan 3

1 Comment

Do We Have Free Will?

From the New York Times, “Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about. The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.”

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t