Wizardly wisdom

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

[...] Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

I snagged this text from a post at Boing Boing. As far as commencement speeches go, JK Rowling’s is one that resonates with me the most: failure is something that once prevented me from pursuing the thing I wanted to. It’s hard to be courageous, especially when you feel the weight of expectation upon you. And while I didn’t need to hit rock bottom, as Rowling did, to pull up my boots, I’ve had my share of pitfalls in this short lifetime. Everyone does.

Rowling also speaks of the power of imagination, and not just of the kind that conjure best-seller fiction novels. She talks of her experiences working with Amnesty International, and how it helped to shape her:

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

Read the whole speech here.

 

 

The Next Generation…

Rap, sex & Star Trek: together at last.

(via Geekologie)

 

When ‘creativity’ = bad

I work with a lot of accounting-types in my day job, and a lot of them are up in arms with CMA’s new advertising campaign. They’re rebranding the designation, which is “Certified Management Accountants” to “Creative Accountants.”

Now, many people mistrust accoutants. At the very least, they consider these people to be loveless number-crunching robots. But for some reason, these people are eyed with as much suspicion (at times) as lawyers. So calling them Creative Accountants is going to have some negative image consequences. When I read “Creative Accountant,” I think of cooked books and pseudo-legal tax evasion. Whether that’s the intention or not (I’ll assume it isn’t) is irrelevant.

The people at CMA need to think long and hard about what a marketing campaign like this can do to their good name. And just so you have a taste of what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube post below…

 

On self-employment

Working for oneself is an incredible, exhausting, and rewarding experience. And it’s little gems like the one below, courtesy one of my partners, that makes the experience often gut-busting. Just when levity is needed, it arrives:

Unless a huge show-stopper crops up, I want [the software] to be released by the end of the day. It’s going to suck, so we’ll have to really stress the alphaness of the software, and tell them that they’re seeing software when most people shouldn’t.

I’m still working on retrieving contacts so it doesn’t hammer the server. That’ll be done shortly, then I need to really lock down the sign up process to avoid confusion.

Also, I just took a fantastic poo. It was magnificent.

Thanks for that, Jeffu.

 

Clang, clang, clang

I usually think Edmonton Journal writer Scott McKeen is a goofy blowhard. He’s like a peacock: all showy and whatnot, but when it comes to actually flying? Foggedabadit!

However, McKeen wrote a great column this morning derided what he anticipates Edmonton City Council will do about ETS trolley buses: keep them. His point is that they should be scrapped. I agree with him. From the article:

Yet when [University of Alberta professor David] Checkel looked at all the data, he concluded the city would be wise to scrap its trolley program and invest in either hybrid or diesel buses.

Checkel’s financial projections are striking. He compared the costs of purchasing and operating the three types of buses on a downtown Edmonton route. While the clean diesel and hybrids were similar in cost, at about $2.50 per kilometre, trolleys were $10.26 per kilometre. 

>>read more…

 

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.

>> read more…

(via Boing Boing)