Phrase Finder, a quick solution I put together for finding popular expressions that include a specific phrase, is no more.
Yahoo made true of their promise to shut down their free Search API, and with it Phrase Finder. I am sad to see it go, because I regularly used it myself.
There are no plans to bring it back to life at the moment.
Today, more and more people find themselves living in a foreign country. Be it a temporary state or a more permanent situation (as for myself); regardless, the world is becoming more global and multi-cultural. Or is it? And what exactly is culture? These are some of the questions that is being answered in Geert Hofstede’s cultural research, which now spans five decades. The book is a goldmine for people who are puzzled by culture clashes, and want to increase their understanding of cultural behavior. And who isn’t puzzled by cultural enigmas these days? No matter where you live, you just have to turn on the TV or head down to your local market or restaurant, and you will be exposed to foreign culture.
 | Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition |
This book has personally helped me to straighten out two types of question marks; questions relating to why I sometimes feel out-of-place in my new country, and questions relating to how international conflicts play out.
The research identifies six dimensions, where countries are ranked:
For me personally, moving from Sweden to Israel, I can empirically verify Hofstede’s data that the greatest differences between the countries are in “uncertainty avoidance” and “masculinity”. Israelis are fighting the inherent uncertainty of life, while Swedes generally accept uncertainty. A trivial example of this, is that during my wife’s pregnancy we have had numerous medical examination and ultrasounds, more than I can count; while the Swedish pregnancy exams are counted on the fingers of one hand. The fact that Sweden is labeled as a more “feminine” country than Israel has implications, on many levels including personal, family, gender, sex, education, consumption, workplace, politics and religion.
I highly recommend anyone to read this book. And especially if you find yourself living abroad, you owe it to yourself to understand why your new life is so strange. There is logic behind it.
Maybe I am just getting old.
But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt, the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application.
I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence.
On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff.
I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when you need to get things done. The web browser is probably the most used application on your Desktop. That’s exactly why it needs to be a workspace that allows you to work without interruptions.
My yearly Sweden vacations are ever so offline. Checking e-mail is 15 kilometers away, and an unexpected liberator in that. So how does this affect me? Well, last year's experience made me discover Honore's "Slow", a short book about simplifying your life, and taking time to smell the roses. During this year’s vacation, I hit the Swedish book shops with the intent to find similar titles. But I was disappointed with seemingly shallow follow-ups trying to ride the success wave of Slow. Hours of book browsing later I came back empty-handed, disappointed not because I couldn’t find what I wanted but rather because I didn't know what I was looking for.
Some days later I received a gift from my mother, a book with exquisite drawings and fine writings from a Swedish lake in the Mälaren area ("Sjö" by Gunnar Brusewitz). I was extremely pleased with the gift and started to ponder how removed I had become from nature. Living a city life, commuting to a cubicle, racing between commitments both at work and at home, and never taking the time to reflect, my life is not in harmony. With the vacation spent in lush landscapes, it is a disturbing contrast. My wife says I get depressed when I return home from summer vacations.
Resting in the grass of my mother's garden, it hit me: Walden by Thoreau! Of course! This book is commonly referenced in the books I like the most. Why not turn to the original thoughts? Returning to the book store I was lucky to find a modern acclaim-winning translation to Swedish. Ka-ching!
I am proud to say that I digested Walden for two months, reading and rereading it and penetrating the text. Still, I am incapable of reviewing it. It is simply too unwieldy for such an effort. What fascinated me the most is how relevant Walden is today. Perhaps even more so than when originally published in 1854. A central question in the book is if we are slaves or masters of technology. I believe we have become more enslaved in the century-and-a-half since Walden was written; today it is all but possible to escape the ubiquity of technology. While technology has enabled tremendous progress and human potential, it has also tethered us to an ever-faster pace of technological invention. Are we in control of this pace today, and will we be in control tomorrow? This is an important question from a global perspective - but Walden deals with the personal perspective. Can we live a rich life with technology? Thoreau's answer is a resounding "No".
How did Walden change me? I try to achieve fewer things. I try to keep my to-do list short. I try to spend more time off-the-grid. I try to reflect before I act. I try to connect to nature. I try to smell the roses. But one thing is certain: simplicity is not easy, but comes with significant rewards.
I’m now back from a relaxing vacation, doing close to nothing. The return to a hectic business life is a stark contrast. This has led me to set out a plan of doing less this year.
But don’t get me wrong. Last year, I had great strategies, plans and goals for FeedJournal as well as for other personal projects. But looking back, nothing much moved forward. I can find no other reason for this than that I was feeling bogged down by the weight of my commitments.
That’s why I this year plan to do less. By this logic, I hope to accomplish more.
As an example, the long promised rewrite of the FeedJournal Publisher interface will take the back seat to a revamp of the existing interface, which by all means is working well. Improving what is there requires some magnitudes less effort.
I hope it’s as simple as that.
Do you ever feel like you want to change something but don't know how? If you are anything like me, this is a challenge you face daily. Luckily for us, the Heath brother has taken upon themselves to create a comprehensive framework for how to go about changing someone or something. What's even better is that they succeeded to write another great book, that lives up to the high expectations from their debut blockbuster Made to Stick.
Switch reaches Gladwellian mastery when it comes to readability and entertainment value. But the true value comes with the concrete framework for driving change. Laying out such a framework follows in the tradition of Made to Stick, and has become something of a Heath trademark. With this framework, driving change replaces the guesswork with a more methodological approach to change where the outcome can be predicted.
I enjoyed this book immensely and I expect to get as much value out of Switch as I got out of Made to Stick. I can't wait for their next book, whatever it may be.
