Cyberpsyche

Last week Trevor Butterworth in The Financial Times Magazine questioned the future of blogging. He created a blog, where many started to comment on what blogging means to them.

China have one thing right: the internet is addictive. The IEEE reported this month on China's Ejunkies, Beijing hostpitals are treating addiction to the internet.

I can remember Mudders at university that were addicted to text based adventure games. To the point where they wouldn't eat or do much else, they ended up failing courses. As the technology gets more like reality will the problem get worse?

A few years ago a Scot started a project to make an animated short using his home computer: Brian Taylor created Rust Boy. The news is now after years of development it sounds like there is a feature film in development. No announcement about what the deal is yet, but given the success of Wallace-and-Grommit and other animated features it could be a major player.

It just goes to show, that the dedication of a few people can really make the difference. Dedication might be what you need...

Recently a colleague gave me an article to read from a glossy management journal, the sort of journal I wouldn't normally read. The opening was promising, it talked about how many MBA students were business graduates. In the past students would have come from industry or they were graduates. It implied that this would make them worse leaders as there would be less depth of experience. The solution apparently lies in literature, if you know where to look. It ended up being more of an advert for a book. Not that leaders and philosophers through the ages have not faced the same problems. Something is getting lost here in the tradition of education, academia, I was taught once was often learning for learning's sake. Higher education can be as much about the learning environment than the course you’re on, and learning how to lead no more lies in a book than it does in the rest of the world. Don't get me wrong, I do think you can learn things from literature, but looking to a play for a leadership to make a choice would first mean you have to choose the right play.

The Ski Club of Great Britain is almost, if not, a year into it's green campaign Respect the Mountain. I've noticed that a number of national newspapers in the UK have green-ski articles. The independant recently asked is it possible to ski without affecting the environment. The biggest way to cut down on environmental damage, is unfortunately not to fly. As they put it:

CO2 emissions directly threaten the future of your favourite resort.[Take the train]

I was having a conversation yesterday about how front-crawl is so much more tiring than breast-stroke. The conversation went onto a book I once read on Total Immersion I discovered from reading this book that my swimming technique--- the way I was taught crawl--- was not that effective. Total immersion introduces some techniques to reduce drag and make crawl easier. The book I read is Total Immersion: Revolutionary Way to

Some people at thoughtworks have come up with a useful test engine for testing web services. Selenium allows all the tests to be run in the browser. Using its javascript engine. As they point out, it offers a way of checking that functionality works in a in all browsers.