So at 5:08am I’m precariously setting up some chairs, the perils of having beautiful high ceilings, trying to reach the smoke alarms. I have three in my apartment. I found out two out of three had no batteries in them to begin with, a safety lesson learned. I took the batteries out of the other and went back to bed. 15 minutes later, the beeping went again. ugh!?

Was it a cellphone, timer, alarm clock, watch. Nope. Nope. Nope. While searching the beeping went off again, I finally determined it to be a conference telephone unit I had in my bag, since I was transporting it our SF office.

Now, why did the engineers at Polycom think that their conference phone was that important, that the battery dying on it required a very loud incessant beeping. Is that really that critical?

The same goes for my microwave, the engineers at Samsung gave my microwave the personality of total jerk. Heaven forbid you forget an item in there for a minute or two; he’ll let you know, beep. beep. “Hey asshole, you left something in here!” beep. beep.

My coffee maker can’t turn on without letting the world know with three loud beeps, “Stand back people! I’M about to make some coffee. Don’t worry, I’ll beep to let you know when I’m done.” Plus, the coffee maker can’t help but shout out a couple of extra beeps when you turn it off, beep. beep. “good-bye for now, but tomorrow morning I’ll be ready again.”

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all.

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?

Late Bloomers by Malcom Gladwell
Why do we equate genius with precocity?

From: The Neuroscience of Meditation and Attention [MindHacks.com]

• Decorate with Energy-Saving LED Christmas Lights – The time for large glass Christmas light bulbs to decorate with is over. Switch those older lights over to energy-efficient LED Christmas lights.
• Run Your Lights on a Timer – Don’t run Christmas lights during the day or through all hours of the night. Have a timer turn them on and off for you.
• Buy a Potted Christmas Tree – Instead of going to a lot to pick up an already-chopped-down Christmas tree, you can get a live pine tree in a pot. This allows you to keep the living tree after Christmas. If taken care of properly, you can use the same tree for many Christmases to come. Living Christmas Tree
• Avoid Fake Plastic Trees – Unless you have allergies or a good reason to not have a real tree, it is best to avoid plastic trees. Cutting down a natural tree is far better for the environment. Ninety eight percent of natural Christmas trees come from tree farms, which are sustainable since growing trees is a renewable source. Plastic is derived from oil, which is not renewable.

  The National Christmas Tree Association states that 500,000 acres of Christmas trees are grown and harvested in the United States and each acre produces enough oxygen for 18 people.

• Recycle Your Christmas Tree – After the holidays, be sure to recycle your tree. You can enter your zipcode at Earth 911 and find where to recycle your Christmas tree.

A few more gift giving ideas that were left off the first list:

• Donate to a Charity – I’m not sure how I managed to leave this one off the first post. Donating to a charity is a great way to help people in need. My friend’s family pools their gift money each year and instead of buying each other gifts they donate it to Heifer.org, which buys a farm animal for a needy family in a developing country.
• Teas or Coffee – Another gift along the lines of giving consumable gifts: nice teas or coffee. This is appreciated especially when recipients may not splurge on these items themselves. Of course, this is assuming they like tea or coffee.

Related Links

• Picking up Poo for Christmas, and Other Sustainable Gifts [no impact man]
• 10 Little and Big Things You Can Do [The Story of Stuff]
• How to Green Your Gifts [Tree Hugger]

Here are a few tips to have a Green Christmas, one with less environmental impact.

• Buy nothing. A little hardcore and bah humbug, but the best possible way to contribute nothing to our landfills is to buy nothing. This also reduces all energy requirements to build and deliver items to the store, plus your energy consumed to purchase.

However, we do want to keep our economy going. If everyone bought nothing, the economy would be in a bit of a pickle. So here are a few other suggestions:

• Food, Candy, Chocolate. Food is one of the best possible gifts. Everyone loves a box of chocolates, as it is something to be opened up and shared together. And though your waistline might find itself an inch thicker, you’ll add no excess inches of waste to the landfill.
• Buy Small Gifts. This is a especially true for younger kids. Don’t get the gigantic playhouse made of 20 pounds of plastic that takes up half your living room. Huge items like these will be played with for a brief period time and then they’ll be off to the landfills.
• Order Online. Save time and gas by not driving to the mall and circling around endlessly looking for parking. Besides, it will make your Christmas a little happier too when you save yourself from flipping the bird to your fellow holiday shopper who just stole your spot.
• Give Green Gifts. Give gifts that encourage your recipients to be more environmentally conscious. For example, give a book on how to live a more earth-friendly existence or a compact florescent light bulb. A light bulb probably might work best as a stocking stuffer and not the entire gift.
• Make Your Own Gifts. This is a risky one, since we’ve been conditioned to appreciate people’s altruism relative to the amount of money they spend. But if you are crafty, make your own cards or gifts.
• Choose Simple Over Complex. When looking for gifts for kids, choose simple blocks or basic toys over highly electronic and complex toys. This will reduce energy and materials used to build the toy, as well as eliminate the need for batteries and their toxic chemicals. Be sure to be age appropriate, however, as giving a teenager blocks instead of a Wii may cause a revolt.
• Give Action/Activity Gifts. Gifts to concerts, shows, sporting events or something similar gives someone an experience gift they can enjoy without requiring any additional product to be built. Plus who knows they may take you with them.
• Use a Gift Bag Instead of Gift Wrap. A gift bag is reusable and won’t contribute to the 25 million tons of additional waste generated each holiday season. Save bows, gift boxes, and wrapping paper to reuse next year.

This list may not be as crazy as it sounds. A 2005 survey by the Center for a New American Dream found that 78 percent of respondents wished the holidays were less materialistic. Eighty seven percent said the holidays should be more about family and caring for others, not giving and receiving gifts.

Suggested Gifts

• Book: It’s Easy Being Green: A handbook for earth-friendly living. Chrissy Trask. [amazon.com]
• Green Dimes Membership Stop Junk Mail. Save Trees.
• Kill-a-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor [amazon.com]

Related Links:

• Buy Nothing Day
• Brian Ulrich Photographs
• Simplify the Holidays [newdream.org]

Each of us discussed the different tracks the companies took to get started; from just playing with software at home, to starting with a little cash and stretching it as far as it can go, to using (and abusing) all your friends bandwidth that you can scrounge up. :) The panel was lead by Guy Kawasaki, who posted the full length video of the talk on his blog.

Full Video: No Plan, No Capital, No Model… No Problem

Thanks, I don’t need a bag.

How many times are you buying one or two things at the store and they put it in a plastic bag? I just bought a pack of batteries today and it was put in a plastic bag. How hard is it to carry a pack of batteries? So next time you can carry all your items, go bag less.

Full article is here: Start-ups share a vision – and garage.

Tags: mayasmom, mozes, flock, garage, start up

When I got to work I saw the Chronicle had an article about the landslide, listed as their breaking news at 8:34am.

But Flickr was the only one who could show me actual photos from the landslide, posted at 9:13am.

When everyone has a digital camera + internet access, everyone becomes one right-place right-time event away from being a photo journalist.

How do newspapers respond to this new breed of photo journalism? It is not possible for newspapers to dispatch photographers faster, an amateur will always be their first. Do they purchase their images from amateurs? Or do they slowly get replaced by sites such as Flickr?

This is not the first time I’ve been interested in an event I heard on the radio and wanted to see a photo of it. The next time I’m interested, I might just go to Flickr first instead of hoping The Chronicle has a photo online of it.

Tags: photo, journalism