Blogging from the iPhone
Wow! This is my first post from the WordPress iPhone application.
Not sure I’ll do this often, but how cool!
Love the fact that they open sourced the code. Really cool.
Posts from the ‘Blogging’ Category
Jul 29
How to Create Your Life Plan
Interesting timing on a post from Lifehacker today:
LifeHacker: How to Create Your Life Plan
The article points to a blog post by Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. The post from Michael is extremely detailed about the system he’s used for the past five years to guide his life (not just career, but life) on a quarterly basis with the help of his executive coach.
Here is the intro:
I have met very few people who have a plan for their lives. Most are passive spectators, watching their lives unfold a day at a time. They may plan their careers, the building of a new home, or even a vacation. But it never occurs to them to plan their life. As a result, many end up discouraged and disillusioned, wondering where they went wrong.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can live your life on purpose. It begins by creating a “Life Plan.” This won’t insulate you from life’s many adversities and unexpected twists and turns, but it will help you become an active participant in your life, intentionally shaping your own future.
I remember some of these exercises from the management and leadership curriculum in the IEEM (now MS&E) track at Stanford, but never with this much richness or detail. It’s a fairly personal and exposed post in many ways – impressive in some regards to see this kind of transparency from an executive.
On the surface, it feels a little strange to see this type of micro-management of your entire life. Of course, I’m not sure it makes sense to expect your goals to be fulfilled without both a clear definition of your goals, and a strategy & execution to get there. After all, it’s what I hold Product Managers accountable for, right?
Can you manage your life the way you manage a product?
Definitely worth a read and at least 15 minutes of consideration…
Jun 12
Adam Nash: Gentleman, Internet Tactician
Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for that title. 
My friend & resident blogger at LinkedIn, Mario Sundar, found this follow-up post to a comment I left on one of the “live-blog” write-ups on my Graphing Social Patterns East keynote yesterday. In the write-up, Craig (the author) had left a slightly snarky response to an answer I had given during Q&A. I posted a quick comment to help clarify the issue, and to express my honest thanks for the live-blog synopsis. As you can tell from the title, Craig liked the response:
Worth noting here is how Adam–in a way befitting the professionally oriented nature of his enterprise–responded so perfectly to my intemperate post. He started with a compliment and shifted into a clarification that reframed [and corrected] what I’d written. He ended with another compliment.
This is a near-perfect display of best practices when responding to a negative post: Remain calm and respectful, do nothing to escalate a the exchange, clarify the point, keep it short. He comes off looking good, representing himself and his company very well.
I’m really glad Craig wrote this post, because it’s a topic I’m fairly passionate about. (Plus, he gave me the title for this blog post.) I honestly believe that the way employees behave and communicate with the outside world is part of the brand and part of the connection that a company has with it’s customers, followers, and even detractors. More importantly, when you help participate and encourage friendly discussion, it helps you remember that we’re all just people – people with opinions, sure, but real human beings.
It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget sometimes when you get caught up in theoretical and emotional arguments in email, groups, and blogs.
The truth of the matter is, I was really grateful to all the people who captured content from the conference. I’ll be posting a more official summary of the material tomorrow on the LinkedIn official blog. For tonight, here are some snippets that might entertain my family & friends who read this one.
First, here are the three live-blogs of the keynote I gave, called “LinkedIn: The Business Social Network“:
The last one is where I left the original comment that Craig was responding to.
Here are some Flickr images, courtesy of James Duncan Davidson:
This is from the keynote in the morning.
These three were from a really fun panel called “The NEED for FEEDS” that we did in the afternoon.
Anyway, while it’s good to be home, I had a lot of fun participating in GSP East 2008, and I learned a lot from the conversations I had with different people there. We’re in such early stages of people figuring out the social internet, it’s wonderful to be a part of it all.
And Craig, just in case you read this, you should know that our Director of Communications at LinkedIn thinks I should add your article (and title) to my LinkedIn profile permanently. Hopefully, we’ll get to chat live in the future sometime.
Jun 5
Slowly But Surely… Resurrecting My Home Machine
Definitely not at full strength, but slowly resurrecting my home workstation from the catastrophic failure of my PowerMac G5 last Friday.
Tonight I got a brand new (OK, well, refurbished) 2.8Ghz 8-core Mac Pro from the Apple Store. I managed to use Time Machine to resurrect the boot drive from my G5 onto it, which seems to have worked well so far. I’m a little nervous though about how many PPC items might have been moved/executing as system extensions, etc, on the new Intel-based Mac Pro.
I also decided to go wireless with this machine on the Keyboard & Mouse. The keyboard is fine, but the bluetooth mighty mouse is a little… off. Not sure what it is, but I’m debating going back to my USB Logitech.
In any case, I likely won’t get a lot of blog posts in this week, but a few may crop up here and there. I’m excited to put the new machine through its paces, but that’ll have to wait until I get my photo library back online, install Photoshop CS3, and start ripping movies again. I hear that this machine can rip a 2-hour movie to MP4 in about 40 minutes, which would be approximately 10x faster than my old G5.
BTW Despite promises from the Apple Store on Saturday that they would run diagnostics and tell me the problem with my G5 by Monday, I had to call them today (Wednesday) just to find out that they still can’t get it to boot. They think it is the power supply, which is good news because that means $300 could net me a machine that will sell for $1200. If it’s the logic board, then I’m hosed, and I’ll likely sell the box, sans hard drives, on eBay for parts.
In any case, I’ll post at the end of this ordeal about the Mac Pro and the transition, and what is better/worse about the new setup. I have to say, I haven’t been this excited since… I got the PowerMac G5 4 years ago.
Don’t Worry, The Blog Isn’t Dead…
… but my PowerMac G5 gave up the ghost recently. I’m busy trying to get a new machine and get myself back up and running at home.
It’s times like these that blogs need hold muzak…
Feb 21
LinkedIn: The Long Tail of Professional Expertise
I don’t normally “cross the streams” on this blog by referencing posts on the LinkedIn company blog, but since I’m off to Boston tonight to speak at MIT tomorrow, I figured my posting here might be a little thin for the next few days.
Yesterday, I posted a piece on the LinkedIn blog called, “The Long Tail of Professional Expertise“.
Read it and let me know what you think.
Psychohistory Reaches 450 Posts
Just a quick milestone for this blog. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve posted any stats. I don’t have the patience tonight to go into extreme detail, but here are some high level numbers for Psychohistory to date:
Blog Stats
- Total Views: 272,308
- Best Day Ever: 4,536 — Monday, March 26, 2007
- Posts: 450
- Comments: 1,312
- Categories: 35
Here is a nice graph that shows page views, month by month, since I launched this new blog in August 2006:
The big spike in March 2007 was due to a flurry of interest in my Battlestar Galactica posts, which remain to this day the most popular posts on this blog.
Feb 12
Do You Hate My New Blog Header?
I was getting a lot of abuse at work today over the new image header for this blog.
Obviously, it’s just a quick Photoshop job over the Leopard background from Mac OS X 10.5. But people seem to be completely against it. Elliot has gone so far as to say he refuses to read my blog from the site anymore – just the My Yahoo reader – just to avoid the new header.
Thoughts? I can replace it with a plain vanilla color header.
Jan 10
Question to Other WordPress.com Bloggers
I love WordPress.com. I love this template. 3 columns, one on the left, one on the right.
There is only one problem that is annoying me to now end: this template does not display the sub-title of this blog.
It should be:
Psychohistory
The personal blog of Adam Nash
Does anyone know either:
- How to modify the template to display the sub-title?
- Another 3-column template on WordPress.com that has this layout that does display the sub-title?
If you do, please let me know.
Thanks.
Jan 10
Adam Nash, Timber Investor
One of the earliest investment posts I wrote on this blog was about why I love timber as an asset class.
I bring it up because this article appeared today in the Nuwire Investor, “Top 5 Recession Investments: How investors can protect themselves in the event of a recession.” In it, you’ll find the following paragraph about timber as an investment:
Timber is a solid commodity with steady demand that does well during stock market declines because it is not correlated to the market. Its returns reliably outperform the market, and its value increases over time, even without investor input.
Adam Nash, a timber investor, said owning and harvesting timberland is essentially a classic fixed-income investment. The land acts like principal, he said, and the timber acts like a perpetual dividend.
Yup, that’s me. Adam Nash, timber investor.
So, the backstory here is interesting, and directly related to this blog.
Back in early 2007, I was contacted by one of the journalists working on Nuwire Investor, for it’s launch. They had read my blog post on timber, and wanted to interview me. Initially, I begged off, explaining that I wasn’t an investment professional, and I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be an “expert” on the topic. Still, we ended up doing a 1 hour phone interview in March.
In May, this article on timber investing came out in Nuwire… but no mention or quote from me! So, I forgot about the whole thing… until the article today showed up in my “adam nash” Google Alert.
Very exciting, and a little fun for the day. I’m glad Nuwire contacted me.
So for today, you can call me Adam Nash, Timber Investor.
John Lilly: CEO of Mozilla
From John’s blog:
It goes without saying that I’m excited by the challenge of my new job. I’ve thought an awful lot about the role of MoCo (our shorthand for the Corporation) in supporting the Mozilla mission and manifesto, as the coordination point for our work on the platform and on Firefox. We’ve got a lot to do in the coming years, starting with getting Firefox 3 out the door, and then swiftly followed up by our work in mobile and services. Mozilla2 will be a major step forward on the platform after that, not to mention our new experiments in Labs and the work that we’re doing to move the whole Web forward with Javascript 2, HTML 5 and other standards work.
John’s post is here.
Mitchell’s post is here.
blog.adamnash.com
After running this blog for almost 18 months, I’m realizing that it’s confusing for people to have to remember a URL like “psychohistory.wordpress.com” to find this blog. It’s my personal blog, and people expect to find it by typing “adamnash.com” into their browsers.
I haven’t decided to 86 adamnash.com yet, but as of today, this blog is going to start being served off:
The Psychohistory title and URLs will remain, as well.
Happy 400th Post!
I didn’t even notice last week that my post on Activision & Blizzard Entertainment was my 400th post. What started as a 30-day resolution to start blogging again in August 2006 has turned into quite a collection of topics & content.
Some of the basic stats to date:
Blog Stats
- Total Views: 227,463
- Best Day Ever: 4,536
Totals
- Posts: 400
- Comments: 1,139
- Categories: 35
- Tags: 17
I think the weirdest thing about my 400 posts is the strange collection of search terms that now lead people to my posts. Check these 20 out from the last 2 days:
Today
Search Views
south park 10
high dividend mutual funds 3
boston accent 3
craigslist depreciating asset 3
pretty colors 2
marissa mayer 2
south park wii episode 2
electoral college chart 2
wii damage 2
PICTURE OF JACQUILINE KENNEDY 2
Yesterday
Search Views
south park 51
High dividend mutual funds 10
hot movies of 2007 6
wii damage 6
South Park 4
ntfs mac 4
hottest movies of 2007 3
battlestar galactica theories 3
battlestar galactica final five 3
us state map 3
Overall, I seem to hover now between 500-700 hits per day, with about 100+ people subscribed through RSS, 20+ through email. Not bad for a personal blog with a mixture of topics ranging from game theory to Battlestar Galactica to coin collecting…
Fake Steve Jobs to Join Forbes.com on August 6th
The 14-month quest for the identity of Fake Steve Jobs is at an end, and the answer is somewhat of a surprise.
I won’t spoil it here, but you can read about it directly on the FSJ blog. The announcement from Forbes.com is here. The New York Times coverage that outed him is here.
I find the FSJ blog extremely humorous on most days. It’s a little sad to have the illusion popped.
I feel like he deserves one of those “Real American Hero” spoof commercials for Bud Light…
So here’s to you, Mr. Fake Steve Jobs…
Jul 11
Dr. Sharon Nash, Ph.D. Blogs About LinkedIn
It sounds so much more official that way… much better than, “My mom posted on the LinkedIn blog today…”
Either version is true – today’s post on the LinkedIn corporate blog is from my mother, Dr. Sharon Nash, Ph.D. After my initial post on the corporate blog, I was surprised at how many people sent in comments about the fact that my mother was on LinkedIn. Since she is a relatively new user to the site, and a professional expert on relationships and people, we thought it would be an interesting user story to tell.
Considering that it is her first blog post ever, I think she did quite well. In fact, I think the bigger dilemma for her was picking the right picture to use.
The fact that my mother has enjoyed LinkedIn so much that she has recommended it to over 85 (and counting) colleagues and friends is incredibly validating. I spent four years at eBay trying to break her of the typical e-commerce habit, and never succeeded. Not even eBay Express, I’m afraid.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that the opportunity for LinkedIn goes far beyond the site as it stands today. There is a very real human interest in connecting with your trusted colleagues and friends in a professional environment. We have only scratched the surface of the interesting and useful applications for professionals built over this platform. Right now, most software and web applications are still based around a model that assumes that data & information are the basis for getting things done. However, in the real world, most problems are solved by referral and advice from the people that you trust & respect. LinkedIn enables exactly that type of model, and that makes me incredibly optimistic about the future for the site and the platform.
Or if you don’t believe me, ask my Mom.
