Flashing signals

11:20: Full stop seconds after leaving 34th St Herald Square on a Brooklyn bound B.

Engineer to center: “The signals ahead of me turned to green back to red, back to green.”

“All the signals now are clear.”

“Number 5092 proceeding with caution.”

We start rolling again, slowly.

11:22: See flashlight ahead. We pull up to a lone MTA guy on the service platform along the track. Engineer stops to talk to him. Can’t hear their conversation but engineer mentions he reported the incident.

Engineer radios: “I passed some signal maintainers by the automatic signal… All clear.”

We are still proceeding with caution. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of a horriffic beast.

11:25 Back to full speed.

The order of importance of features in a coworking space

Features	Importance (out of 5)
Atmosphere	4.5
Community Feeling	4.3
Collaborative Environment	4.1
Location	4.0
Networking Opportunities	3.9
Excellent Coworkers	3.7
Meeting Spaces	3.7
Quiet Spaces	3.4
Security	3.2
24 hr Access	3.1
Event spaces	2.9
Privacy	2.8
Personalized Space (own desk)	2.6

From http://blog.coworking.info/2007/04/21/the-results-of-the-coworking-survey/

Emergency Brake

8:54am - Leave 42nd St station on a Brooklyn-bound V train. I’m running a bit late today. Just barely caught the train; lucky me!
8:58am - Leave 28th St station
8:58am - Grind to a halt just seconds after leaving station. It was immediately clear that this was not a typical stop; I could hear the hissing of what must be the emergency brakes being applied and the stop was much more abrupt than one you’d typically get when the signals unexpectedly change.
8:59am - Conductor announces emergency brake was engaged, they’re investigating, and we should be moving shortly.
9:00am - Anticipating that we will, in fact, not be moving shortly, I begin an epic gaming session of TowerBloxx 3D.
9:16am - MTA guy walks past doors in service aisle along the track, with flashlight pointed toward bottom of train.
Internal monologue: I always sit in the front car, but today ran to barely catch this train so I didn’t get to the front. Really wish I was in the front car today so I could overhear the engineer’s communications.
9:20am - Train begins moving, incredibly slowly
9:22am - Train pulls into 14th St Station
9:23am - Train stops again, this time gradually.
9:24am - Train in the station ahead of us, will be moving shortly. How is there a train ahead of us? We were stopped for 20 minutes! Did they reroute the local trains to express to bypass us?
9:25am - Train moving again, slowly.
9:27am - Pull into W. 4th St. I’m outta here.
9:27am - Bump into Matt Van Horn, who by complete coincidence is entering the train as I’m getting out. I catch up with him for a few minutes and warn him about the train problems.
9:29am - F train pulls in, Matt gets on it, doors close. Train is being held at the station.
9:30am - I ask the engineer what’s going on. He says train ahead of him (my train) had a BIE. I wonder what a BIE is, and he starts shouting questions about the signals to the command center located at the south end of the W. 4th St station. He closes the window and the F train starts moving.
9:31am - Start walking upstairs, wondering what a BIE is in MTA lingo. I assume it’s has something to do with Brake and Emergency, but hold out hope that this abbreviation might give me something more specific.
9:32am - I’m outside now, and Googling for “bie mta.” The first search result tells me something I didn’t expect: there’s a person named Bie Mta, and they’re on Facebook.
9:33am - I tweet out what BIE stands for. @amanda_nan and @dr_ballon respond with Brakes In Emergency. I respond that I was kind of hoping for something more interesting, like Bobcat Inside Engine. Oh well.
9:37am - Seriously tempted to treat myself to a McGriddle.

SXSW Panel Topics That Will Totally Be Relevant in 2010

Today’s June 1st, and that means applications are now open for panels at SXSW 2010!

The event takes place from March 12-21, which puts it about nine and a half months from now.

So, this begs the question: what topics do you think will still be relevant between now (application time) and the event?

Perhaps we will need to make some predictions in anticipation of what’s going to happen in the next nine months.

Here, I think, are some rock solid bets:

Bing is King
How Microsoft shocked the world by suddenly dominating search with the now massive hit Bing.com.

Spymaster: Game of the decade
What started out as an insanely annoying viral Twitter game has grown into a genre-defining gaming revolution.

Google Waves Goodbye to Wave
A look back at what, despite the efforts of dozens of top engineers and years of research and development, ended up becoming Google’s lamest and most not cool new product ever.

Antisocial is the New Social: Why We Decided to Forsake All Social Media
This panel discussion, including Chris Heuer, Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble, and Sarah Lacey will outline the sudden and precipitous deserting of all social media by everyone.

Why User Experience Doesn’t Matter
Who cares what the users think? What’s really important is what the CEO thinks is hot.
Speaker: Whitney Hess

Why I Love AT&T
After a long bout with the telecom giant over terrible service, dropped calls, straight-to-voicemail calls, freezeups and more, AT&T finally heard my lamentations and overhauled their entire program to become the most rock-solid wireless provider.
by Frederic Guarino

Robot Apocalypse: Who would have thought?
As society lies in ruin, this panel discussion will examine how we missed our impending doom and compare and contrast with the Terminator film series.

Markus Albers Skypecast

In the office, we can concentrate on one task for about eleven minutes at a time.

If you ask someone how often they check their email, they will say “once every half hour.” But if you use a hidden camera, you will see they check every five minutes. Bad habits.

People in Germany don’t like their jobs. So what do you do? You start surfing the internet, checking your email… you encounter what’s called bore-out. Not burn-out, but bore-out.

Also, we have to get to the office… we have to commute for a long time. This is a problem for many people. This is bad for the environment, and bad for us.

Someone researched what people like to do. Sex was at the top of the list, and commuting was at the bottom.

We had to go to the office in the past because the office was where the infrastructure was.

We started to go mobile in the 90’s but it was difficult. You had to carry everything. One article described those people not as digital nomads but as digital astronauts, because they had to carry everything.

It’s becoming less and less attractive for companies to invest in steel and concrete. IBM for example reduced their office space by 50%.

You have younger people joining the workforce, digital natives. If you ask them what they expect from a good job, they don’t say they want a big office, they want a good work/life balance. They want to travel.

It’s much easier to raise a family and have children if you work in a flexible way.

Scientists say the one thing that’s most important is to look at the results. The outcome, and whether people meet their goals.

“The future is already here, it just isn’t distributed.”

Best Buy: Visited them in Minneapolis.

A few years ago, everybody hated their jobs. They had to be in at 8am, stay all day, and people were leaving. They wanted to change things. Enter Cali & Jody, and ROWE.

Employees could do anything, and were encouraged to. Go to the cinema during the day. Play with the kids, just be happy and do your work.

There were less voluntary redundancies. People couldn’t pretend to be busy. By looking at the results, managers could find who was doing actual work, and the people who weren’t working were fired.

If you work at SAP, you wonder where are the people?

A New Album

This is so important.

On a rare occasion nowadays, an artist I listened to as an adolescent releases a new album.

When they do, it’s a rare insight into the past— when an album actually meant something. When we got excited about a new release and bought the disc and listened to the whole thing all the way through.

In a world where we listen to Pandora, Last.fm, MP3’s, Podcasts, Remixes, and a constant stream of just about anything we want from Rhapsody, music has become cheap. An album I might otherwise have built a strong emotional connection with just slides by as the next one queues up.

Listening and cherishing one coherent album becomes a rare delicacy.

The first listen is critical. The circumstances have to be right. Your first impression, the things you’re doing, where you are, what you’re thinking as you listen to the album for the first time will forever be bonded to the music you might likely be listening to for years and years to come.

Over time, the associations you make with your first listen will fade, and be replaced by new memories of all the other times you’ve listened to that song. But not completely.

So that first listen is all-important. The first few listens, really… as you get to know the music.

Take the time to set aside distractions and reacquaint yourself with an old friend, whom you haven’t heard from in a few years. You have a lot of catching up to do.

Tumblarity

I’m with them on this… Tumbularity is great for people who are serious about getting popular, but I think focuses too much on popularity as a competitive thing for my taste. Not for me, at least.

upsider:

I don’t want to be part of some game to become more popular.  I’m on here to share my views and opinions and discoveries and learn about other people’s fascinating finds.  Some of my favorite tumblrs probably have a very low “score” because they don’t kowtow to the lowest common denominator, but instead are frank, intelligent, funny and incredibly unique.  They are niche blogs, providing me with insight that I can’t find anywhere else on the web, which is THE ONLY REASON I’M ON HERE.  That, and for my friends and family around the world to keep updated on my life.

If you post valuable insight about interesting topics that not EVERYONE cares about, your blog is more valuable to me than the shit people throw up on dashboards hoping something sticks.

More on this later. I have a meeting.