Creativ Zeit

Monday, 30 January 2012

Do Your Job Better

I want to be a grasshopper. At least I want to be seen as a grasshopper—a blithe spirit who sings and plays all day, creating beautiful ephemera. I want to be free from worrying about a less-than-comfortable future. I want to carpe that diem.

Being an ant, by contrast, is about as sexy as wearing white leather sneakers.

No ambitious person wants to look in the mirror and see a plodder—a toiling, plotting, planning laborer. It just doesn't fit with a self-image that is artistic, creative, and muse-worthy. Ants are the factory workers of the critter world. Most of us don't dream about doing time on an assembly line.

But I have come to understand that I am more antlike than grasshopperesque. While that realization is bad for a romantic sense of my own life, it's good for getting things done. Or, perhaps, it's the only way I am able to live and work.

http://chronicle.com/article/Accepting-the-Way-You-Work/130465/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

What kind of people have we become?

Between Christmas and New Year, the 70th anniversary of an event, which in no small way helped change the course of history, passed almost unnoticed. On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/9048427/What-kind-of-people-have-we-become.html

British children feel 'sad' without internet connection

Forty-nine per cent of British children aged 12 and under, would be sad without access to the web, while one in five would be lonely.

The ‘Digital Futures’ project, which surveyed 1,000 young people in the UK between the ages of eight and 16 about the impact of the internet on their lives, found that the emotional attachment to the web was even stronger with teenagers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9045134/British-children-feel-sad-without-internet-connection.html

Just one in ten Facebook users supports 'timeline' feature

Fewer than one in 10 Facebook users support its plans to make its biographical “timeline” feature compulsory.

As part of a major overhaul of the site, all publicly viewable messages, comments and photographs will be grouped together by date.

The idea is to create an online scrap book telling the user’s virtual “life story” – at least back to 2004 when the site was founded.

It means that, unless they are deleted, any long forgotten musings, embarrassing photographs or even messages of affection for a past lover will be easily accessible.

At present other users can only find material from several years ago by trawling through past pages.

Critics claim that the change could erode users' privacy but Facebook insists that it will not make anything publicly available which is not already viewable.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9048034/Just-one-in-ten-Facebook-users-supports-timeline-feature.html