Richard for real

My first ever post typed up on my beloved HTC Hero. So it will hopefully be more reading friendly than they normally are.

Like so many times before this post describes an obvious conclusion I arrived at when talking to a good friend. She was complaining about her inability to make decision and stick to them. In some extreme cases she has even tried deciding “yes” for a day, to evaluate the feeling of it. Then the she would wake up the next day and be all like “no” to see what that felt like.

This seemed very tiring and ineffective to me so I suggested she should use some technique to make decisions and stick with them. We were talking about cooking at the time so this model, or principle, I invented can be described as a chicken-beef model. Or tofu-beans model if you prefer that.

Suppose it’s Tuesday and you’re thinking about whether to make chicken or beef when your friends come over on Friday. Instead of making a preliminary decision for beef and then reconsidering it for the rest of the week I suggest that you take immediate and decisive action once the decision is made. In this case it would mean stopping by the store on Wednesday, or even sooner, and picking up the beef. What you need to do is follow up your decision with an action, which indicates what direction you chose and maybe even eliminates other options. The action could be no more than a token thing like writing “beef” on your list of groceries needed, as long as it firmly tells you that the decision is made and is not allowed to take up any more mental energy.

Another related method for choosing what to eat is to buy groceries in loosely measured amounts. If you follow the recipe when cooking you will hopefully end up with a few leftovers. You then feed these leftovers into an online cookbook and repeat the whole process with the recipe you selected based on the leftovers.

And here’s my soundtrack writing this post. Happy cooking!

Is it a good idea to ask questions on twitter? Can I expect answers?

What percentage of my tweets should include links to the interwebs?

If I say I use facebook (mainly) for pleasure and twitter for more serious suff, am I making sense?

How many people is it reasonable to follow? (@williamheath suggested 40-200 when I asked him)

What’s the best twitter client for my android phone?

How often do you tweet on average?

Please fill up with your Qs and As in the comments!

This is just a little sidetrack from a discussion on sustainable global development that I had with one of my best friends a little while ago.

We were talking about the impact of new technology on sustainability and came to argue about whether new technology alone is enough to create a sustainable global community. Being more skeptical than my friend, I argued that even with huge technological advances some behavioral change is also necessary (in addition to the change in behavior that comes with new technological solutions of course) to achieve sustainability. To cut a long story short the conclusion we finally came to was that there might be some sort of scale between the two extremes of great technologicaladvance and largely keeping with today’s behavior at one end and significant behavior in change and sticking with today’s technology level at the other. If this model is correct, I believe that our challenge is to find a reasonable combination of the two end-points of the scale. Technological progress in inevitable, and does good, but at the same it would be stupid not to strive for a more sustainable lifestyle per se. What we need to do is to find the optimum division between energy spent on developing greener technology and establishing greener lifestyles. In my personal opinion, this would mean shifting part of our present technological focus towards lifestyles.

Finally some spontaneous and inspired writing, as it’s supposed to be. And again it’s a retake of some dialog with some friend. I really should have an audio blog, or would that be a podcast?

1. Buy a 747, redo the interior: two dancefloors, a few bars, chill-out and a VIP area next to the cockpit. Make sure the oxygen masks can be appropriately when need be. Then fly this baby around the globe and set up the most awesome parties at airports of major cities. Get a few resident DJs aboard and fill up with local acts from wherever you’ve landed.

2. Pick the 15 most bustling spots on the globe for a year to come. Send out clever correspondents to each of these spots and make them really get under the skin of the place and produce unmatched content. Content that brings understanding, fascination and inspiration. Batch it all up on a pay for access or ad financed website. It will be marvelous, all kinds of media, all kinds of people, all kinds of ideas.

3. Make a 24 hr agency that does everything by coupling 10 really creative, connect-and-make-it-happen kind of people in 5 teams and let them set up bases in suitable time zones. This way, there will always be someone on duty to take calls and cross culture global issues will not be a problem. Global, small-scale and efficiency can all come together. What could these people do then? Well, anything really, investigations, advertising, entrepreneurial projects, videos, events, etc and so on.

I don’t care anymore.

In the Swedish language there are more words than necessary for dried plums.

Don’t stack your ADSL modem on top of your wireless router, it could cause the latter to overheat.

Wearing a cosy hat indoors allows you to comfortably survive lower temperatures and hence you can save some energy.

People become more friendly toward you when you show interest in their job.