For the lighter side of and more serious discussion of how to do consulting badly, may I suggest:
Huhcorp: We do stuff. and Compass Newsletter (see the “Naked Consulting” series).

The sort of stuff touched on on these two sites is a reason to avoid calling oneself a consultant. But I don’t have any better word yet for what I do and wanna do. I suppose, though, that if someone’s view of me is materially informed by a single word, then I’m already headed down the wrong path with that that person.

Some stuff I’ve started listening to: U B U W E B :: Marshall McLuhan. Always good to hear from ol’ Marshall. I had not previously been exposed to his sound-collage facet. Cool.

Speaking of innovation and hence entrepreneurship, Lifestyle Entrepreneurs is a series of pretty interesting columns about people who have intertwined their entrepreneurship with their lives in general to get something that’s ‘not just a living’ (the title, by the way, of a book by Mark Henricks, the author of those articles (loc, amaz)).

That’s my goal with my consulting career, although there are times when that seems less possible than pithy titles would suggest. It’s nice, then, to see books and articles like these as a reminder that people can do this and also some details about how. I think there are still a few books to be written about this topic, because I haven’t been completely satisfied with any that I’ve seen yet.

I saw Jeff Lindsay giving a presentation called “The Magic of Patents” at ISU. Pretty entertaining to mix in some magic tricks, woven in in a way that actually made some sense to the presentation.

I’m still not sure how much magic there is in patents, though. The deepest feeling I had coming away from the talk was that patents were going to keep me from doing great things for the world. That feeling wasn’t permanent or well-reasoned, but it was still there. The fact that it’s so expensive and time-consuming to get a patent means that it would be hard for me to get one, yet (relatively) easy for some big company to come up after the fact, get a patent on something I’ve used successfully, then use the patent against me. I guess I just have to make sure to get some prior-art evidence documented for anything I think _might_ be patentable, then worry about all that stuff if it ever gets to that level.

But, like I said, the fear was not long-lived or necessarily reasonable. That’s the way I start to feel sometimes, though, when I hear legalistic stuff in its various forms. The sharp edges give my brain papercuts.

Patents are pretty interesting, though. That they’re (ostensibly) built around the idea of forcing inventors to divulge their work for the common good in order to get the incentive of enforced exclusivity for a period is a pretty neat idea in itself. Lindsay gives that idea credit for forming the core of the power of American innovation, and it’s hard to argue against that.

However, there’s still a big part of me that feels that there’s something not quite right about the way patents work. At this point, though, I can’t clearly articulate that, so I’ll just take comfort that it all seems to work pretty well pretty often as a component of an economic engine and a social structure that I can’t pretend to understand well enough to solidly critique :-).

I’m thankful for… communication networks. I wonder how different my life would be if I didn’t have ready access to such a vast variety of people and their works through a few simple portals like computers and phones.

This nice little free utility does something I like very much: it does the x-mouse thing but without the quite annoying tendency for some programs (MSDev, for example) to jump to the front when they get focus. I never thought it was possible :-).
True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows
However, I don’t really like the other features, and you can’t turn them all off… [Update: I found a way to adjust it to my liking. I should have updated this before Nathan went to the trouble of explaining this all in his comment below.] I think it may be time for me to write my own. In that vein, I found PyHook which I should be able to use to rapidly prototype the basic algorithm in a nice language.

Here’s a pretty decent list of potential ways to destroy the earth (physically demolishing it, not just screwing it up so that various things can’t live on it). How to destroy the Earth

The thing that’s not discussed in detail in the “Eaten by von Neumann machines” entry is the logistics of the ever-growing hoard. It’s not hard to imagine the first couple of generations of the machines, but I think some serious consideration would have to be made to start thinking about generations past about 20. The problem is, you have to gather the necessary mix of raw materials. Assuming that you’ve designed your machine to require the right mix in the first place, the mix isn’t uniform throughout the entire planet, and just transporting each machine to where it needs to be to gather the materials requires fuel, which has to be present in the right mix along the way to the destination… you might see what I’m getting at.

It could just be that I’m missing something obvious, but I think it would get pretty tricky to coordinate this aspect of that scenario, and further, your machines have to be intelligent enough to follow the plan, or to evolve enough intelligence in the meantime…

I think this gotcha applies to the ‘gray goo’ scenario of nanotech, too, so maybe gray goo isn’t so likely after all…

You’ll dig this if you’re me. But you’d better hope you aren’t me. Hamburglers – Happy Meal

Or as the site itself calls it, ‘Man Page’

I get occasional hits at my site looking for ‘pdftk manual’, so I figure as a public service I’ll give a direct link here. I’ll also ask Sid Steward over there to add the word ‘manual’ to his page so he can draw the hits directly :-).

A bit of a rant here…

I have seen a number of instances around the web now of the reasoning “so-and-so published such-and-such on their web site, therefore, they’ve violated Google’s Terms of Service”. In one instance, a web host (one I don’t think is a subsidiary of Google) went as far as saying “so-and-so published such-and-such on their web site, therefore, they’ve violated Google’s Terms of Service, therefore they’ve violated our Terms of Service”.

WHAT are you talking about?! As much as I dig Google and all their crazy services, they do not own the web.
Firstly, show me where in Google’s Terms of Service there is any mention of what someone may or may not put in the content of their web site.
Secondly, by what legal binding mechanism has a random web publisher been bound to follow ANY of Google’s Terms of Service or other wishes? Publishing something on one’s own webspace and having Google crawl it, because they chose to, does not constitute a legal agreement.
Thirdly, there is no thirdly. Though if there was, it would be something about how even if people are deliberately trying to manipulate Google or other search engines, they’re not committing any crime deeper than possibly being overzealous about their particular message.
(Fourthly is a great song by King Missile. It is also the point that why would an organization declare that “Google’s rules, whatever they may be and whether we understand them or not, are our rules”?)

The point of my rant here is not that I think there’s any legal meaning to these weird articulations people make, but that the thinking behind them indicates a sort of insidious self-delusion about power relationships that eventually petrifies itself into actual existence. And given that I own your mind (check my Terms of Service), I order you to not be prey to such delusions.