Michael.Wilcox

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks | The Art of Manliness

Photo by Krisitina Dobo The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks | The Art of Manliness. Thanks to Nick for suggesting this article to me. I like the idea, I enjoyed reading the other Eisenhower articles, and the site generally looks really interesting. Of specific interest to me at the…

A temp fix for the wordpress.com dns mapping infinite redirect loop problem

Yesterday evening, I had a problem with domain mapping on a new wordpress.com site. Originally spelt out here: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/domain-mapping-redirect-loop Please could you check the domain mapping for pennysomerville.wordpress.com. It should be showing up on http://www.pennysomerville.co.uk. I set this up yesterday but I now seem to have a redirect loop going on. I have tried clearing…

Remember when ebooks were rubbish?

Photo by John Blyberg Ray Kurzweil: Online education is where we were in ebooks 4 years ago – people saying they still want printed books, that the ebook reading experience isn’t very good… Well, today most books are ebooks. You see the same complaints about online education. Well, just wait. Four years from now, you’ll…

Running and podcasts and the personal MBA

Recently I’ve started running. (First proper exercise in about 20 years!) Its only every other day and I’m doing very simple and gentle stuff. It’s actually a lot easier than I thought and the recent good weather has definitely helped. I started using Runkeeper to help me track progress – this has been really beneficial….

Emoticon-A-Day Calendar lets you capture your mood

This Emoticon-A-Day Calendar Lets You Creatively Catalog Your Mood | via Co.Design: business + innovation + design. I wonder whether this, or a version of this, could be used within projects in order to gauge the confidence of those involved in the project? Over time, the change in the smileys would be interesting to observe…

Technical Debts are often best tackled by paying…

[Technical] Debts are often best tackled by paying off the principal lump sum. In the case of “technical debt”, Mr Lesokhin believes this involves committing resources to work out which parts of banks’ dormant code are most likely to turn zombie to avoid potentially calamitous consequences. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21280943

How to work with difficult people

In Richard Sennett’s new book ’Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation‘, he explores the history of cooperation and posits that most tactics that we commonly use are actually making it harder to reach a position of real cooperation. There are four key skills Professor Sennett believes we all need to get better at if we…

Listening to https soundcloud com tags balearic I…

Listening to https://soundcloud.com/tags/balearic – I wouldn’t suggest following my music taste, but do try SoundCloud if you’re open to eclectic and new sounds.

What's a MOOC?

I was asked this week: “what’s a MOOC?” by someone who probably should have known by now what a MOOC is. As a professional, I refrained from this behaviour: If you’re after a description, a look at this video (under 5 mins) gives an overview – albeit from 2010. And more in-depth reading…

How to imagine the future

At a work meeting today we had an exciting chance to see the emerging ideas for our University’s new library extension. These were presented by the architects who did a great presentation – very refined and to the point, and without too much “architectese”. They then turned the tables and set a workshop session for…

e-Textbooks

A quick note on e-textbooks following up on a tweet this morning. Site: http://www.kno.com/homeOnly available to students with a .edu account at the moment (I think that was how Facebook got started). A simple sell: lighter, cheaper, and even easier. Cheesy videos on their homepage… More about them on this AllThingsD article: Kno Taking Electronic…