As a number of perturbed status updates I’d posted to my Facebook profile in the wee hours of Friday morning suggested to my friends this AM, the health of my Mac Mini, Cylon.local, took a bit of a nose dive last night. Now, it’s probably just a hard drive failure, which is actually not so bad1, but I won’t know for sure until I take the little fella down to Tekserve’s “ER” this weekend and get it properly diagnosed.
So one of the thoughts that naturally occurred to me is that there’s at least some small chance that Cylon.local won’t be coming back; perhaps the resurrection ship was simply too far away when the dreadful moment arrived.
I’d just bought a Mac Mini for my parents this past Christmas, so I already know the value proposition of replacing it with the latest model.
But, while I’m entertaining the notion of replacement hardware, it occurs to me that Dell rolled out a competitor a few months ago, called the Inspiron Zino HD. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m quite happy with the Mini’s performance over the last four years, and I’d be happy to keep it for as long as it’ll stick around with me, but any sensible man would think to check in on his options. Read more…
Footnotes
Thanks to the trusty Time Capsule I managed to snag with a friend’s NYC teacher’s discount — thanks, Jenny! ↩
A post from earlier today on the White House blog by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced the release of two new documents related to the Administration’s “open government” initiatives:
The Open Government Directive (download as pdf, txt, doc or view on Slideshare)
The Open Government Progress Report to the American People (download as pdf or view on Slideshare)
The post also includes a video of the live online chat in which federal CIO Vivek Kundra and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra announce the Open Government Plan, during which they fielded some questions in realtime from Facebook and Twitter.
Speaking of the value proposition of the initiative, Chopra explains:
So it’s having the conversation with each of our leaders to find out what are the big objectives that they wish to tackle on behalf of the President’s agenda, and in support of the American people. And how can the principles of Open Government, and in particular the datasets, allow others in the ecosystem to support — and advance on — those activities. We just can’t afford to have a federal government solution for every issue. By relying on the ingenuity of the American people we can advance these policy priorities in new and more creative ways.
I also particularly appreciate their speaking to an attempt to raise the quality of published data, particularly after it was discovered that some folks had provided shoddy data to Recovery.gov earlier this year.
Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, Inc., discussing the idea of government as a platform vs. government as a vending machine at OSCON 2009 (20 mins):
Tim’s thoughts here echo, add flesh around, and enhance some concepts that will be discussed in the piece that I’d been writing throughout parts of my recent vacation to Greece.
A more concise summary of these ideas is also available for those with time constraints (4 mins):
Comedian Louis C. K.’s piss-take at human behavior when our expectations are not met.
Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.
Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.
