I finally bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner yesterday. It completely changes my cleaning experience. Design that asks and answers the right questions can completely change other experiences, too.

I drove down to Boulder last weekend to participate in an open-spaces Python conference, speak at an eyes-forward programming conference, and attend a workshop on TurboGears 2. Here's what I learned.

I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.

I will be giving the closing keynote at the Developer Day conference in Boulder, CO this coming Saturday, October 10. The goal of this conference is to be cheap and local, so I'm curious to see how it works.

Our typical approach to problem-solving is to invent something new. If you've been around the block a few times, it gets harder to convince you to jump into yet another untested scheme.

I recently held an exploratory meeting with a potential new client where we needed to share a screen over the internet. Neither of us had used DimDim but it did the trick with no snags.

Guidance & inspiration vs. directing & controlling.

My coauthor James Ward was here last weekend and we managed to debug the screencasting process and produce 6 screencasts. On his next visit we plan to finish creating a screencast for each chapter in the book.

The internet takes a formerly-expensive cost (communication) and drives it to essentially zero. Any activity where communication is important is being disrupted. To find out how much, drive the result as far to the extreme as possible.

There's a saying that's been traveling the business circles in recent years: "Speaking truth to power." It means you are so confident and direct that you can actually tell someone in power what's really going on.

My prediction of how Chrome -- both the browser and the OS -- is going to flatten the playing field for programmers.

The kind of thing I've been talking about: time-share restaurants, edupunk and microlending.

The Linux Outlaws podcasters interviewed me when I gave a keynote at EuroPython.

In hindsight, it seems strange it has taken us so long to figure this out in the computing field. Applications elsewhere might be even more important.

Remember when you were a kid, hanging upside down over the couch? Everything you looked at was different.