Interview with millionaire Marc Allen. Self-improvement blogger Steve Pavlina does a great interview with entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Marc Allen. Allen describes himself as lazy, running his publishing company on less than 30 hours a week. He sleeps until 11AM, takes Mondays off, spends Sundays with his family, completely disconnected from the internet and work. He [...]

Microsoft Vista's Endless Security Warnings. Paul Thurrott has posted an excellent essay on the problems with Windows Vista. Most interesting to me is how they implement UAP (User Account Protection): Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don't get full access to certain features [...]

Google's Mini Slims Down, Speeds Up. The search engine company claims that the newest version of its small business appliance is half the size and weight of its predecessor. The new Mini also boasts a 25x speed increase and offers a real-time crawl feature. [Datamation Product News]

Are We Short of Engineers?. This morning's Wall Street Journal carried a short opinion piece by Robert J. Stevens, CEO of Lockheed Martin, complaining how the US is short of engineers and therefore falling behind the rest of the world in technological innovation. His list of remedies is all the usual: Spend more on education, [...]

Appetite. Dan's recent post about software got me thinking. Maybe you're like me, where you love trying out cool new apps. “Wow, this is great! It'll save me time and I'll be far more productive”. But after a day or so the excitement wears off and you're back to pencil and paper, or storing things [...]

IA Summit summaries. So, summaries from the IA Summit have been coming out – the most recent at Boxes and Arrows, now in its 5th year of Summit coverage. See session-by-session descriptions and reflection for – Overview and Preconferences – Saturday – Sunday – Monday UXMatters also has a summary posted, a reflective take from [...]

Why Law Firm Innovation is so Hard. Last November I reported on a Richard Susskind article explaining the lack of innovation in US law firms. The situation may be even worse according to a new article by professional services guru David Maister. In Are Law Firms Manageable?, Maister paints a grim picture of large law [...]

Intuit “Reboots” TurboTax. By tim I can't imagine a more potent “news from the future” story that underlines how the web is becoming the new software platform than today's New York Times report that Intuit compared the temporary shutdown of TurboTax yesterday to a software reboot: Some TurboTax users encountered a brief filing delay Monday [...]

Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain. Everyone's favorite A-list target, Robert Scoble, announced the unthinkable a few days ago: he will be moderating his comments. But what some people found far more disturbing was Robert's wish to make a change in his life that includes steering clear of “people who were deeply unhappy” [...]

Investigating the Bush presidency. Carl Bernstein (who forever is linked to Dustin Hoffman in my mind) has an essay on the Vanity Fair site calling for, Senate Hearings on Bush, Now. After Nixon's resignation, it was often said that the system had worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and balances on the executive [...]