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November 30, 2005
artist statement III
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contextual analysis
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November 29, 2005
Agile Software Development
Agile software development - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Getting Things Done
Getting started with “Getting Things Done” | 43 Folders
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10 rules for web startups
evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups
Ten Rules for Web Startups
Sunday, November 27, 2005
#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.
#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.
#3: Be Casual
We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.
#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.
#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.
#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4.
#7: Be Greedy
It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.
#8: Be Tiny
It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.
#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.
#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.
#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.
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November 27, 2005
into to action research with diagrams
An Introduction to Action Research
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Action Research organization
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action research
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misosoup - figure configure
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November 26, 2005
Meyers Ornament - public domain ornament images
Category:Meyer's Ornament - Wikimedia Commons
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size and scale
The size is nothing; what matters is the scale. --Barnett Newman, in Pierre Schneider. "Through the Louvre with Barnett Newman" (1969)
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opportunity to communicate
Tom Sachs
ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli
Unless you're a real genius, like Louis Armstrong, it's hard to have a new idea and a new way of expressing it. The most the rest of us can hope for is to either tell a new story with old tools and words, or an old story with new tools and new words. Once you've solidly established your own language, you can improvise and build new ideas. The power of using brands--in my case, from fashion--and mixing it up with violent iconography lies in merging two things together to form a third. What's important to me about Pop is that using brands and other identifiable, everyday things gives you the opportunity to communicate. You're speaking a common language. I think part of the reason my work with fashion brands in the nineties really took off was because of an anxiety between the rich and everyone else. Another reason was that regardless of whether the work was critical of fashion itself, it still traded on the value of the brand. Like Prada. It's a death camp, but it's a Prada death camp.
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find articles
FindArticles - News, Magazines, Reference - On Health, Fitness, Business, Home, Arts, Computers
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November 25, 2005
mathworld
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November 24, 2005
bucky homepage
The Buckminster Fuller Institute |
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replacement ipod battery
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new bedford real estate 1
Southeastern Massachusetts Real Estate Listings For Sale
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November 22, 2005
wicked flash animations
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November 21, 2005
Sun path chart
UO SRML: Polar coordinate sun path chart program
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reflections hotel bangkok
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November 20, 2005
Metaphysical Art
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Weather Project: Turbine Hall
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | G2's human logo project at Tate Modern
The desire to draw ourselves into Eliasson's picture is like the urge to skim pebbles on the sea. The sea is vast, it dwarfs us, it is unknowable; by throwing a stone into the waves you feel part of it, even its author, as if you are reshaping, for a second, this timeless spectacle. Making shapes in the giant mirrored sky of Eliasson's artificial weather system is just as ephemeral and harmless as throwing stones into the water - and as natural.
Art, it seems, is turning increasingly into this kind of spiritual mass event. Something really is happening here. Art in the 90s was aggressively individual and iconic - its intent was to communicate something about the maker's life and feelings. Tracey Emin's My Bed is the supreme example. Perhaps art at the beginning of the 21st century is more about the public than the artist.
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November 18, 2005
NYFA
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yoshii gallery
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vertigo 3 degrees 2
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November 16, 2005
vertigo 3 degrees
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Woodclub Procard Account
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Woodclub PO account
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November 11, 2005
Business logos
A Website about Corporate Identity
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November 09, 2005
Funeral Procession of Roses
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Google Local
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November 04, 2005
resume
andrew zientek resume 11-04-2005
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November 02, 2005
stephen antonakos
Stephen Antonakos - Official Home Page
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Spirituality in Art
Five Artists * Five Faiths: Spirituality in Contemporary Art
"Putting oneself in quietness and in meditative space leads to a certain awareness, perception, awakening. We don't have that many opportunities to do it in our daily life."
--Kimsooja
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Wassily Kandinsky
Amazon.com: Books: Concerning the Spiritual in Art
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church art and meditative space
From the Floor: The Church and Contemporary Art
quotes Danilo Eccher, director of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art on the applicability of figuration for today’s religious art. “Medieval man needed frescoed churches because at home he had nothing, but we are bombarded daily by images. Contemporary man therefore has need of a space for secret emotion, in silence more than in image.” What better way to create a meditative space suitable for worship than to remove all reference to the stresses of the everyday world?
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spiritual labyrinth
.:::rejesus - spirituality - labyrinth:::.
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Meditative Space Panel
Tobi Kahn - Artist
Jeffrey Ring - Psychologist
Michael Rotondi - Architect
Moderated by Sasha Anawalt
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Tobi Kahn
hether in his mysterious paintings, reminiscent of biological and geographical formations, or in his sculptures of sanctuaries and sacred monumental pieces, or in the design of furniture and ambient space for a hospital meditation room, Kahn's work draws us into meditation. As Ted Prescott puts it, Kahn's art causes us to dip into the "deep wells within us where longing and memory intermingle." The Philadelphia Inquirer calls his work "perfectly balanced between extremes of abstract and representational.... having an uneasy mixture of authority and idiosyncrasy—and sometimes just a bit beyond human reach."
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James Jack
The Portland Art Center presents Natura Naturans, an ephemeral installation and print study by James Jack. Utilizing natural
materials from our environment, Jack draws singular elements from nature, precisely arranging them into circles. The artist explores humans’ relationship with the environment and its universal awe. Themes of humanities fascination with manipulating nature, and the meditative state created by the wonder of nature’s power and beauty, dominate Jack’s work.
For Natura Naturans, James Jack has created a work of profound beauty with a luminescence and quiet hue that evokes a sense of harmony with the nature of the Northwest. Resting on a black surface, a mesmerizing circular form, 20 feet in diameter, made entirely of a single ochre pigment, dominates the gallery. The pigment was collected from Beverly Beach, where the Mooloch Creek meets the Pacific Ocean, on the Oregon Coast. This, like all of Jack's work, is entirely handmade; the pigment has been ground and filtered directly onto the floor of the gallery in a meditative and labor-intensive process. His works on paper use handmade inks derived from fresh Seder bark, aged Butternut and Black Walnut husks, as well as mountain sediments. Seven of these prints are on display in the small gallery.
Natura Naturans, which can be translated to mean "naturing" or "nature creating," grows from that place in the landscape where an artist can internalize and discover the aesthetics that call to him. James Jack is such an artist: one who is a traveler, wandering and searching with all of his being and intuition to bring together his own vocabulary of abstract form, reality and spirituality. Gathering materials from a specific site, Jack seeks to express himself directly with the substances from the environment. He is interested in expressing the relationship between nature and people in the simplest way.
The entire process between the site and the final work is meditative for Jack. The circular form is a harmonious shape, a meditative space that is free from adornment. Building on the art of prehistory, Jack draws inspiration from Eastern aesthetic traditions - both Tibetan Sand Mandalas and Japanese Calligraphy. Educated at Sarah Lawrence, Jack spent several years studying in Japan. But Jack is able to transcend the conventions of both East and West and build on the conceptual work of other artists like Wolfgang Laib and Richard Long.
Artist Biography:
James Jack received a B.A. with a concentration in Fine Art from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001. He studied Japanese Calligraphy and Zen Buddhism in Kyoto for one year, exerting a profound influence on his art practices to this day. His paintings have been included at numerous exhibitions in New York City including “Ink & Essence” at Tama Gallery, “Fresh Paint” at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, and “Butternut Ink” at the Asian-American Arts Center. He was a staff artist in the Painting department at the Vermont Studio Center from 2003-2004. Five of Jack’s paintings are featured in the most recent issue of Kyoto Journal: Perspectives on Asia #59. Jack recently completed a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology where he conceived of the work for the exhibit “Natura Naturans.” This is James’ first exhibition in Portland, OR. He will be showing again in Portland in a group show at Beppu Wiarda Gallery in The Pearl District this fall.
Artist Statement:
“Ars enim operatur materia, quam natura ministrat.”[1]
Relying on the fecundity of the wilderness I express myself directly with substances of the environment. Working with materials available in nature I utilize simple means to communicate profound relationships between people and our habitat. Recurrent in the work Natura Naturans is the circular form serving as a harmonious shape in which to establish a meditative space free from adornment. Utilizing this circular form I am building upon the art of prehistory while rooting modern earth works with a vital understanding of “self.” From a contemplative space where the nature within is just as important as the nature outside I create work that evinces harmony between form and content. Drawing inspiration from Eastern aesthetic traditions such as Tibetan Sand Mandalas and Japanese Calligraphy my work exists because of our contemporary global culture. Building upon the conceptual work of Western artists such as Wolfgang Laib and Richard Long I am conveying insight that transcends the conventions of both East and West.
This work was conceived during a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology where I was immersed in the daily life of a coastal nature preserve. Absorbing the aesthetic surroundings of this site and others as diverse as Northern Vermont and the Colorado Rockies I’m distilling experience via particular elements of the landscape. For the installation Natura Naturans I collected a striking ochre pigment from Beverly Beach where the Mooloch Creek meets the Pacific Ocean. Establishing a dialectic relationship with this pigment in the studio I became enthralled by its subtle luminescence and quiet hue. After grinding the pigment to a fine powder I made circular arrangements using the spatial awareness I’d gained from the pieces I’d been making out of wood splinters, pine needles, and other local materials. Arranging pigments is meditation in action—the activity of preparing, installing, and reclaiming the material is a mindfulness practice aligned with Zen training. Works on paper range from handmade inks derived with fresh Alder bark, aged Butternut and Black Walnut husks, and mountain sediments among others. The organic medium with which a painting is created is tantamount to its representational ability to serve as a vehicle for literal or metaphorical meaning.
James Jack ã2005
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deconstruction presentation
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sullivan outline
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sullivan bibliography
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November 01, 2005
50 things
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Prefab
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