Author: ttoh
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Thinking about mathematics
I found an amazing Quora answer on “What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?” in my RSS at both Boingboing.net and Kottke.org: [blockquote] You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is…
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MG Seigler: Commenting is a facade
MG Seigler writes: Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any. I’m Starting to feel more comfortable leaving…
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Ownership of what you write
I had the opportunity to read more blogs and listen to a few podcasts this past holiday. In particular I started listening to the B & B Podcast by Benjamin Brooks and Shawn Blanc and Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann. When you start consuming one media form (e.g., a blog) you…
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Happy New Year
To the handful of readers out there who actually read this cubbyhole of a website, Happy New Year and best wishes to you, your family and the people (or pets) you love. In the past, I’ve struggled with the end-of-year post. Is it a year-in-review post? Should I create a top 10 list? In the…
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Finding time to write
I’ve been thinking of the Writer’s Process and I’ve been wondering how to best optimize my time so that I can write more. Aside: It occurs to me that I really should just concentrate on writing rather than wasting time focused on things that don’t actually contribute to the content authored in this blog. I…
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Siri, where are you?
When I was on the plane from San Fran to Toronto, I managed to watch a Nova episode called “The Smartest Machine on Earth” about the development of Watson, IBM’s computer that bested Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the 3-day Jeopardy challenge. It documented the challenges of computationally interpreting the English language. For those…
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Flying
On globetrotting I don’t know how Mike does it, or any of the executives that I know. Travelling across the world on a plane, even in business class just ruins the body. I suppose you get use to it after a time. Anyways, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris (with about 24-hours notice),…
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Going public
One of the cool things with Octopress is that it has a built-in integration with GitHub. I’m not too familiar with distributed versioning systems, but this is cool. I used to do this with my other sites HTML templates using Subversion (I had a remote Gentoo server at one point). GitHub has a free account…
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First post in a long time
I spent about 30 minutes talking to my wife about how excited I was to do this. It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited to write online again. When I first started writing online, it was 2002. I was between jobs (what was the beginning of a 6-month hiatus from the employed world)…
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The shift to delighting the customer
In “The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” Steve Denning writes about Roger Martin’s new book “Fixing the Game“: “We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Martin. “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory…