1987 and all that: lessons for today
116180
The 1987 stock market crash, whose anniversary fell this week, still features more prominently in the popular memory than any financial disaster since 1929. No doubt the speed of the fall, which knocked 22 per cent off the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the single day of Black Monday, helps explain that fact.
476061
Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today? It's worth thinking about -- with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it's not a good feeling.  I keep arguing with myself, even though I'm losing money at a huge rate, I'm still in good shape financially, I have a nice house, I can pay the bills. But it doesn't help. Inside I feel unsettled, poor, I'm having trouble concentrating. Does it help that I've been through this before? The crash of 1987 was much worse than this downturn, and then I had no cushion, nothing to fall back on, I wasn't even employed when it happened. I was a lot closer to being broke around the turn of the century, even though the market was doing very well. But it doesn't help. No matter how many times I've been through it, I've always known that it's cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn't the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can't be counteracted with logic. I can't reason with the feeling, you might say it's un-reasonable. Then I heard that a friend of mine, much younger, with a lot less at stake in the market, is having trouble sleeping because of this feeling. I realize I'm not alone, probably millions of people have a heightened sense of insecurity right now. Does that make it better? Not really... Anyway, I thought, let's post something and find out how others feel about the economy and how much of an impact is it having on our state of mind.
372576
A few years ago, in my early twenties, I was set to graduate from university. At the time, I lived with my parents and had an easy job as the network administrator of a local fishing company. A few months before convocation, my parents divorced, my boss fired me (incidentally, for this article), and I had stopped school because I thought my life of free room and board was over. I spammed my address book crying for work. An acquaintance called me to do some contract work for a startup board game company. What followed was a lesson in something that I would have never learned in university: reality.
754031
Don't miss the big picture when examining this crucial decade.
273958
Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver." I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement. Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.  It&#185;s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you&#185;re following. The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news would be printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story would come in it would push all the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We&#185;ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard. The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in. And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003. I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.  Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I&#185;ve known him." Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you&#185;d want it to be."
342159
Grand lessons from grand larceny: An inspiring tale for today's youth.
157912
One of my favorite philosophers, Yogi Berra, once said you can observe a lot by just watching. Between now and Election Day there is some important polling information to watch for to track how the race between
586482
Finally, some investing advice you can use today.
415659
By Lindee, Susan  REBECCA M. HERZIG, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. ?+194. ISBN: 0-8135-3662-6.
418792
I'll be covering the eTech conference in San Diego in early March. It's been a few years, last time I went was just before my surgery in 2002. I'll be going as a blogger, not presenting. Many thanks to O'Reilly for approving the press pass, and I look forward to catching up with many old friends.
343807
The EU Commission could fine Microsoft up to 5 percent of its daily turnover if things don't change. Also: Ford recalls almost 800,000 cars that spontaneously burst into flames & hellip;.  The money is rolling in on cell sales & hellip;. and more.
686432
By Mike Dougherty, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.  Jun. 22--thingsthatwere.blogspot.com   I love old stuff, and this blog has scads of pix of old stuff that once was. Some of it is still around. Lots of it isn't or is in a serious state of disrepair. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out.
169427
Lessons from two world-traveling retirees.
130465
Revisiting the lessons of Garry Kasparov's historic loss to an IBM computer.
682659
More than a decade after the internet went mainstream, it hasn't necessarily made its users more informed. A new Pew Research shows that most Americans are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.
521208
By Kevin Maney  Sometimes, it's worth pausing to appreciate how vastly things have changed in technology since 10 or 15 years ago.    The other day, I started pulling out my columns from the 1990s. I've been writing weekly columns about tech for USA TODAY since 1991.
725024
The knowledgeable amateur wields a lot of clout these days, thanks to the internet. Is that necessarily a good thing? Commentary by Tony Long.