- Jeet Kune Do and Running
Bruce Lee: “Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.”
I am looking forward to my 50 km race this weekend. Running is going to be awesome. Wishing for the heat to subside a bit, ’cause running in 30C is really not ideal!
- IxDA Toronto Presentation
So I Married a Designer… Relationship Advice for Designers and Non-Designers Alike. This IxDA presentation could end up being pretty hilarious. Ah I am totally familiar with the push and pull between designers and developers (in a tech startup). So I am curious to hear what Casey McKinnon has learned! I have war stories to share!
Event date: April 20, 2010 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Registration and additional details here. And IxDA has a its own Toronto website now. Get involved!
- HackTO
The first time I attended a hackathon it was in Silicon Valley and I totally fell in love with the idea of getting together with a group of people with limited resources (a laptop, skills and an internet connection), an API and the desire to create an application. Felt pretty similar to what any startup does in its startup days! So when Corey and I talked about a hackathon being held in Toronto, for local developers to work with local APIs, well you know what happened next: HackTO was born.I am very excited to announce HackTO. The idea behind HackTO is to have a series of APIs made available by local startups. And connect these APIs with local developers to build – in a day – amazing applications.
We are still working out all the details – much planning ahead – but here are the basics:
- DATE: Saturday May 15. This is an all day hackhaton. We will be providing breakfast and lunch.
- LOCATION: TBD. We are still working out the location details. It will be downtown.
- AVAILABLE APIs: Freshbooks, Idée, PostRank, CanPages + more. We will be announcing additions to these APIs in the coming days.
- SIGNUP: Sign up is currently open, there is a $10 fee for registration.
- JUDGING AND PRIZES: We are working on awesome prizes for the best applications developed during the hackhaton. Stay tuned for details.
If you’re with a technology company or startup you think ought to be involved, get in touch lboujnane (at) ideeinc.com or just say hi or ask questions.
- Chris Dixon on the next big thing
As a startup founder you need to understand that:
Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve [...]
and [..] look at products as processes.
- The Ron Conway Way
Ben Horowitz on Ron Conway:
“If Ron’s awake, he’s working. He can be at a party, in his pajamas, or at the Super Bowl. Ron is always on the job and the network is always on.”
- Venture beyond the possible
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Sicko
I love Runner’s World: runner’s porn really. And this evening catching up on my reading I found this little nugget:
It appears that merely looking at people who look sick does help your immune system prevent you from getting sick yourself.
Really? Turns out the writers at Runner’s World have not gone mad. Runner’s World is quoting a British Columbia study published in Psychology Today:
The researchers asked young adults to watch a 10-minute slide show containing a series of unpleasant photographs. Some of these participants looked at pictures of people who looked obviously sick in some way (people with pox and rashes, people coughing and sneezing and blowing mucus out of their noses).The participants gave blood samples both before and after each slideshow. Next the researchers exposed these blood samples to a bacterial infection, and measured the extent to which white blood cells produced interleukin-6 (IL-6). IL-6 is a proinflammatory cytokine that white blood cells make when they detect microbial intruders. More IL-6 indicates a more aggressive immune response to infection. So, by measuring IL-6 before and after the slide show, the researchers were able to determine whether seeing pictures of disease-y people actually stimulated the immune system to fight infection more aggressively. And it did.
(Photo Copyright Placbo)
- Playing with legos
I am a big fan of Swedish professor Hans Rosling. Here he is playing with legos and explaining population growth:
You can catch most of his videos here, of particular interest:
Asia’s rise, how and when
TED and Reddit’s 10 questions. Most of Hans Rosling’s videos are archived on the new GapMinder website.
- Time burglars eat excuses for lunch (Merlin Mann)
Making Time to Make: [...] I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You’ll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place. Making Time to Make.
You can count on Merlin Mann to hit the nail on the head.
I am having a real hard time focusing on my running. I love running when I do, but it sometimes takes a back seat to everything else. My life is better for running. Yet, I have a hard time heading out for a run *regularly*. The moment I wake up, I start racing to get to work, to cross of items from my to do list and relegate running to the end of the day – which of course never rarely happens.
Something has changed two weeks ago: I started running in the morning with the boys, before heading to work. And it was an eye opener. Yes, I am slow. I should have guessed that getting the run out of the way in the morning would be a winner! On that note, here is my race schedule for the next few months:
- Seaton Trail: 26 KM – April 17, 2010
- Sulphur Springs: 50 KM – May 29, 2010
- Creemore Vertical Challenge: 25 KM – July 3, 2010
- The Limberlost Challenge: 28 km – July 17, 2010
- Iroquoia Trail Test: 32 Km – August 21, 2010
- Haliburton Forest: 50 KM – September 11, 2010
- Vulture Bait: 25 km – October 16, 2010
I would love it for the stars to align so that I can do the Pacifica Trail Run this year and perhaps run into my friend Mark Dowds who has an insane running schedule this year.
Work: CEO of