Room to Think

Guess what? It's TUESDAY. And I'm here. Granted, it has taken me twenty days since my last post, and I'm about to go to volleyball, but I have managed to make time for this, and all of you. So, I watched a couple TEDtalks in my quest to find one to bring to you today. One was "Why Google Glass?" by Sergey Brin. He's a Google co-founder, and now the leader of their Special Projects. The other was "How do you get your ideas to spread?" by Seth Godin. Personally, I don't think Sergey's talk was all that spectacular--not really something I would originally consider as "worthy" of the TEDtalk title. Many other people agreed with me that his talk was somewhat lacking...It was really just a commercial that introduced Google Glass, which then launched an interesting philosophical discussion in the comments. I wasn't originally going to post this as my blog topic, but then I found myself asking all sorts of questions...about...

Happy Tuesday! I'm certainly happy. It was a good day at the new internship, and I only had to sit in traffic for an hour in trade for 3 glorious hours of hardcore volleyball. I haven't played at that level in a long time. I'm positive the endorphins are still flowing. It's also been a long time since I've hurt as much as I know I will in the morning. So in favor of stretching and sleep, I'm going to make this a two-part TEDtalk Tuesday/Wednesday-- just give you the TEDtalk tonight, and continue the discussion tomorrow. Hope you're all right with that. I'm going to go do yoga now before the tendon in my knee decides it's never going to stretch back out again. See you in the morning! P.S. This guy's name is Tim Leberecht. He's a marketing guy. I'm trying something new this week and posting a business talk, instead of my usual technology-psychology-design-video game topics. It's less than 7 minutes long, and full of pictures.  =...

It's midnight. Here's the video. It's about the benefits of listening first.   About why the locals might just have a better idea of their situation than you do.  About how respect one way usually comes back.  And about why following passion is the fastest path to growth. Also, this man says "Forget about it!" in exactly the same way that my favorite volleyball coach used to. (That's you, Aio.) I had a lot of mind-wander connections to share with you tonight--about the million other things this talk could apply to-- but I'm wondering if I should just shut up first and ask you what you think? =) Happy TEDtalk Tuesday!

First off, if you're reading this and you haven't voted yet: CLOSE THE INTERNET AND GO VOTE.  (actually, the internet was a fairly useful tool to me for my voting research this year. I learned what I couldn't learn from the widely distributed voter's pamphlets.) But I don't know how many people you need to tell you to go vote. They're important choices, and we  all  help make them. You can see the rest of the post by clicking the "Read more" below, AFTER you've turned in your ballot. >.>

Boy, I think I need to come up with a new schedule. I got a new job last week! I'm coaching my old high school volleyball team.  =D  Yeah, I play volleyball...apparently well enough to coach too, since my girls haven't lost yet with me as a coach (Shhh, that's only two games, but hey, it's something!) The reason I think I need to come up with a new blogging schedule is because we have games on Tuesdays and Thursdays--so I don't get home until 9:30 or 10 some nights. Those nights make for rambly, rushed, half-assed blogs, or me not wanting to roll out of bed the next morning because I didn't get to do yoga or get enough sleep. Like tonight. Here is tonight's TEDtalk.  It's given by a woman named Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist. Since I'm currently looking for another job to supplement my meager school district income, I thought her talk was particularly relevant to the interviews I'm bound to have in the future. She claims that she can ma...

I've been out of the house on a scavenger hunt for men's jeans today, but when I got home and checked my email, guess what I had in my inbox???? a priority invite to TEDxVancouver!!! Okay, so I did  sign up for priority registration notifications....and everyone who clicked that button gets one of these...but...but...it's exciting anyway. I sent a request to be an intern for TEDxVancouver back when I lived in Bellingham, and I'm kinda wondering if they'll contact me for volunteers now. Either way, this is almost as good as getting an email from Chris Anderson himself, although he won't be present at this one. I also don't know if I"ll be attending.  It's very soon, and this ticket reservation I got expires in three days, and $100 is a lot of money for an unemployed potential technical writer, especially when gas is over $4 again.  =( But if any of you are interested in driving up to Vancouver to check out the whole day, just clic...

Hello everyone, I've had a busy day and my legs are aching with that not-enough-sleep feeling. Lately, I've been having nightmares with spiders infesting my room.  At least when I dream, no one is chasing me down a street calling me a failure (That would mean you have Nightmare disorder). I originally wanted to find a TEDtalk for one of my best friends, Donelyn, who is starting her own blog about engineering and design and activism. She's a wonderful writer, and she's starting to figure out what she's doing in life and I'm all for it. Originally I had wanted to do today's post on a TEDtalk relating to her. That TEDtalk will have to wait for next week. I have several in mind, but I don't have the time to write and reflect on them right now, given that I forgot it was Tuesday and spent 4 hours at a Starbucks caught up in conversation with a fellow writer. Now it's after midnight and it's not even Tuesday anymore. You know my rules, tho...

Quite frankly, I feel like I'm making a miracle right now just by starting this post. Blogging has dropped out of my life in the past couple months, and I have to apologize. Just so you know, about 30% of that apology goes out to you guys, my few and faithful readers.  The other 70% is an apology to the academic, driven part of myself that has been neglected in favor of lazing around playing Skyrim, not finding a job, not updating my resume, and generally enjoying not having to go back to school.  That said, I'm not a fan of my brain turning to mush, and with all this free time, I can either start writing again, or continue doing craft projects until my graduation money runs out. I'll do another post just for the reading and crafting I've been up to. (I promise.) For now, I think it's appropriate, that since it's Tuesday, that I should reintroduce TEDtalk Tuesdays.  So...this is where my brain is at. I'm learning about my favorite animal--the ...

Hello again...finally. I apologize in advance for my text-heaviness and rambling.  Someday I'll edit my thoughts. I thought I'd come back into the blogosphere with a video to share with you all, given that I finally have time to enjoy my video games after such a hectic quarter .  --Also...I'm on a video game binge, I realize.  I do have other TEDtalks in my queue. promise. =P This TEDtalk is a long one, so I'll split it into two parts (because I'm feeling lazy tonight and actually don't feel like thinking at all). Essentially, David Perry started out life learning how to program computers. And he didn't program them to help kids with their homework--he made video games. In his talk, he essentially covers the past and future of video games...he has a cool timeline video that he updated from a previous TED conference that tracks the audio and video quality over time (only until about 2007...it's a bit outdated).   W...

OH GOD. Chipp Kidd is HI-lay-ri-ous. Click the video to watch him wiggle. This was the first video I clicked on in my explorations today, and I think it has just jumped to the top of my "Favorite talks of all time" list. Mr. Chipp started off his talk telling me that he is a book designer for...wait for it... ALFRED A. KNOPF. That's where my love of this man and his talk began. I said before that I'm taking Kate Trueblood's Editing and Publishing class this quarter, and she's kicking my butt with all kinds of overwhelming information about all the steps necessary to publish a book.  It's as if the second she steps into the classroom, she brings with her a history and alternate reality that is the publishing sphere. 5 weeks ago I was a creative writing senior with only a few ideas of the kinds of jobs I could secure with my English degree.  I had a general statement prepared for those who asked me what I was going to do with my creative ...

Sorry for the lack of posts everyone--I've been sick lately, and every time I go to blog, I can't seem to look at the screen long enough to finish a post I'm happy with...until today. Lately I've been listening to a lot of TEDtalks, since I haven't been able to watch them.  It's been hard to filter out which ones I want to talk about the most!  Chris Anderson, TED curator, has been up to a lot of things since the TED conference in Cali ended a little while ago. Not only have they posted a ton of new videos from TED 2012 for me to catch up on, but Chris has begun this new project called TED Ed.  So far, I've only seen animated webcasts narrated by Chris, and short TEDtalks given by children and teens on their accomplishments.  As far as I can tell, Chris is trying to reach out to kids and inspire them to learn and become our future.  How sneaky.  He's trying to save the future by educating our youth.  He seems to be in the perfect position to do s...

So...I'm not done with my finals yet.  As a result, I'll let you all know my thoughts on this TEDtalk on Thursday--when I'm done with finals.  =) Until then, aren't you curious about what Susan Cain has in her suitcase? Susan Cain on "The Power of Introverts"

Not an actual video.  They haven't posted it on youtube yet. Click  here  to watch it on TED.com This guy. His name is Andrew Stanton, and even though sometimes he sounds like he's reading off of a script, he's a storyteller from Pixar, and he uses this TEDtalk to share what the essential parts of a good story are. Since most of you in the class are creative writers, I feel like this is a good one for all of you.  Mr. Stanton here outlined some of the techniques we've learned in the last couple years and condensed them into a way that's easy to remember.  I'm not saying that I learned much more from him than I have from 4 years of learning to write, but I am saying that he connected some dots that gave me a nice "aha!" moment this morning as I watched this over my breakfast. I don't have much time to go into detail, but the title of the TEDtalk is "The Clues to a Great Story", and he uses a swear word in the first 3 minut...

Happy Tuesday everyone! The 2012 Bi-annual TED conference started today! My facebook news feed and blogger reel have exploded with updates from TED, and it's great.  It also means I've spent close to three hours watching TEDtalks today.  It was wonderful and awful at the same time, because I know how much homework I'm putting off right now.  It's even worse that I can write off watching so many TED videos as "doing homework" for this blog. Most of the TEDtalks I've watched tonight pertained to dance, or music, or the arts.  They were brilliant, interesting, and captivating.  I even found that if there was a speaker involved with the dancing, or with the music-making, I was more prone to remembering what they were saying, even if the talks themselves were over 30min long. I guess there's an element of hybridity that's encouraged in TEDtalks.  We've moved beyond that phase of Orator + Powerpoint = presentation.  (thank god) TED en...

This week's TEDtalk is short, and it's about sleep. For now, I'll just post the video and hope you watch it because it's short, and it's also given by Arianna Huffington at a TEDwomen event. I'm a fan of this video because we're getting to that point in the quarter where sleep becomes less important than better grades. Where we've lost control of our new year's resolutions to do yoga every night before bed, or are stumbling around the internet until the wee hours of the morning as our dogs call to us from our beds. This video is about the value of sleep.  The idea is a simple one.

Good morning! Today's TEDtalk Tuesday is by that hipster man up there, Joe Sabia.  He's known for things like videos like " Tupac in Kazakhastan " and " A History of Lyrics that Aren't Lyrics ". He's a technological storyteller...which means that he tells a story about the evolution of stories in under 4 minutes . And, he uses his iPad. So I'll keep my summary short so you can actually watch the video. He begins with the book. "The book was the king of storytelling. It was venerable. It was ubiquitous. But it was a little bit boring...In its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device."  (about 10 secs in) Then he shows how a man named Lothar Meggendorfer   started the revolution that led to the evolution of how we tell a story. "But the way that humans tell a story has always evolved with pure, consistent, novelty." (3:15) And that's what I'm going to ...

A week ago (practically), I suggested you all watch Shawn Achor's TEDtalk on Changing the way we achieve happiness .  I also said I was going to put up a Part 2. Due to an etiquette dinner, a volleyball game, a career fair, a group project, two days of dressing up professionally, and an incredible amount of lazy time laying in bed, I could not effectively finish this post until now.  I sincerely apologize for having a life.  =) But upon refreshing my memory on my last post, it occurred to me that I didn't really do his talk much justice.  Here's a better summary, written at a more sensible hour: Shawn Achor is CEO of Good Think, Inc. where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.  Shawn's work concerning positive psychology questions why there are those positive outliers in his psychological research. For Shawn, that dot off in the upper left-hand corner of your graph is an above-average person, not a measurement error.   ...

You know, I really seem to be on a happiness binge with these TEDtalks--or maybe that's just TED. Either way, here is your TEDtalk for today (I started this at 11pm on Tuesday, it still counts!) This guy's name is Shawn Achor, and he "accidentally" broke his sister's arm when she was five in order to save her from being in the path of an imaginary sniper bullet. He still has yet to be thanked.  =) He also applied to Harvard on a dare...and he got in.  O_O In all seriousness though (kinda?), he has some hugely important messages to share with all of us: "...if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average."--on research it's possible to be a male medical student at Yale named Bobo who has leprosy AND menopause.  (5:54) and most importantly: The formula for success is wrong. (9:11) "If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier....

This post was supposed to be finished shortly after I posted Part 1...but obviously that didn't happen, and I apologize for making you all check back repeatedly to see if I had written more. (don't try to hide it, my page views have been going up! I see you lurking.) So without further ado, I give you, Part 2: ******************** In Part 1 , I *strongly* suggested that you all watch Diana Nyad talk about her world-record-breaking swim that she attempted (and failed) last summer at age 60. I envy that woman's motivation.  I doubt I'd even consider a swim like that plausible for myself at that age. If I were her, I'd be thinking, "Oh, that's too bad, I failed my "life's dream", but that's that.  I'm 60 years old, and I gave it my best. The sea gods just hate me is all.  Perhaps I'll try skydiving.  It seems less intimidating..." But because I envy her motivation, I want to uncover what it is about her mindset t...

********UPDATE*********** This article  by CNN tells the story of the current state of ACTA, and what the rest of the world is doing about it.  President Obama already signed the pact, so it's up to the rest of the world to do something about it.  The European Parliament is the last to review the treaty, in June, 2012--and our last hope against ACTA.  Do you think we can make enough noise to make them hear us? These guys tell it best, I think: *************************** So, I know this blog post is a bit late, considering the Web Blackout of 2012 protesting the SOPA/PIPA bills was last Wednesday...but, I still think it's important, and still relevant. Personally, I learned about SOPA and PIPA a few months ago when this video  from the American Censorship Organization appeared in my facebook feed. I watched it, signed the petition...and forgot about it. Then my world we...