Although I’ve not been writing much, here’s some things I’ve been reading in Instapaper recently. 

A man with his back to the camera washes the outside glass of the restaurant’s door. As he turns, we see he is dressed in black except for the white apron. It is Nicolas at work. He seems stoned again. He stumbles on the sidewalk. He sways back and forth. As the camera pulls back, it reveals that this is — the Figaro Café? That is right down the freakin’ street from me! I must have passed him dozens of times without even knowing it. This is too much. Maybe he is there now. Maybe he is writing out the menu on the outdoor chalkboard. What would I say to him? I look at the teapot clock — which used to be his. It reads 9:05 a.m. The café opens at 8:30. I race into the bathroom, splash some cold water on my face and jump into a pair of jeans and sneakers.

Box of Broken Dreams: In Search of a Soul Lost and Found in L.A.

They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient.

The Checklist

Of course, as Brooks notes, that time in traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred working women in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day.

Communiting

In the 1980s, a few entrepreneurs came up with a great business. They bought some name-brand stereo speakers (last year’s model) and packed them into a U-Haul truck. Then they parked the truck behind a dorm at Harvard and started whispering. “Pssst … Hey! You wanna buy some speakers?” While they never actually said that the speakers were stolen, it seemed to passersby that they were—and so had to be a great bargain. Harvard students shouldn’t have fallen for this. Of course, they did. In droves

Be a better liar

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

Groopware Bad

You can also add my starred items on Instapaper by adding the user tom@devart.org