Sitting on my bed in Cape Town, South Africa and knowing that I'll probably never be able to attend his seminar, it's nice to read your folks good experiences.
It's nice to think that something you dream about is in fact something fantastic.
Tufte had a huge impact on me too, around the same timeframe (2001.)
Oh god... here I go... as a motorcyclist (sorry) this is something that is utterly frightening.
I'm out there on the road doing my fu-cking damndest to make sure that I'm driving defensively and predictably, kind of just trying to ensure that I see my wife and twi girls that evening.
I'm at standing height next to your window, so I can see right in there while you text and check Facebook whilst piloting a 2 ton machine at upwards of 100kph.
The mind boggles at just how common this is, I'd say one in three on some days. At highway speeds.
I'm not a motorcyclist, but there's no way I'd do it now. People pay so little attention to what they do. And people get in their cars and they think they're the only ones in existence (except who they're texting); not courtesy at all.
Not OP. In my state, it is illegal, but we're pansies, and so a cop can't stop you for it - they can only cite you if they pull you over for something else.
Hand-held Cell Phone Use Ban: 14 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving.
All Cell Phone ban: No state bans all cell phone use for all drivers, but 37 states and D.C. ban all cell phone use by novice or teen drivers, and 20 states and D.C. prohibit any cell phone use for school bus drivers.
Text Messaging ban: 46 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands ban text messaging for all drivers.
-2 states prohibit text messaging by novice or teen drivers.
-3 states restrict school bus drivers from texting.
If caught you you can be stopped and your phone impounded for one week and released only upon payment of a fine.
There was a news report recently indicating that only a very small percentage of these phones are ever recovered from the police which ties in with the stereotype for this kind of behaviour: Porsche SUV, Chanel sunglasses, ten spare phones at home.
Yes, some cell phone use/distracted driving is allowed for adults in most states[0], but most states do not allow 'young drivers' to use a cell phone at all[1]; and texting is specifically banned or partially banned for all drivers in all but two states (Montana and Arizona)[2].
Interesting, a cursory scan through suggests that in groups of friends, the men stay together whilst the women tend to have moved on/away from the group.
I wonder is this has to do with the communication styles of men and women where men focus on shared experience whilst women focus on outwardly shared communication (do things together as opposed to talk about things together.)
It's probably a little simpler than that. My guess is that, in the 2 pictures, the boys were friends and the girls were girlfriends of the boys.
It's also likely that one of the friends saw the photographer's advert and between them only had contact details for the other men. I doubt it's possible to extrapolate much as there were plenty of women in the other photos.
I noticed that as well, but only in groups that are mainly men. I immediately wondered if it was the effect of (unconscious, presumably) bias on the photographer's part – i.e. that in a photo of a group of male friends, the women are decorative or less essential somehow. Another explanation is that the guys all knew each other well while they only knew the girls in the photos in passing, making them harder to track down. But the photographer managed to track down so many other people, that hardly seems to explain it.
There's probably a form of survivor ship bias going on here.
From the text he took a lot of photos. If he advertised in local newspapers, school/football club sites etc, he wouldn't need to find everyone. He'd just need find someone who could get a quorum of the people from a particular photo.
As such, it's probably more likely that he'd only find friends as he wouldn't need to find the group, just an individual. If, for example, he had found one of the girls but not a boy, chances are he wouldn't have taken the photo.
Qlikview is a BI product. In their day they were very promising upstarts in the industry and they really shot ahead on the back of their in memory cube processing.
It pushed them out ahead of stalwarts like Cognos and Business Objects for a while.
When Microsoft entered the BI landscape they changed the world as we knew it by bundling a fairly decent BI stack right along with MSSQL and native Excel connectors, for free.
Many big names in the enterprise space went for it (and subsequently choked on Sharepoint) but I think this hit Qlikview pretty hard. They didn't have the legacy to withstand that battering that many of the more established BI offerings took during that chapter of the story.
I just really like to see more of the startup related stuff on HN.
I know that talking about content and your preference of things posted to HN is discouraged but I need to mention that for me personally, it's really helped me in the past to see other people talking about this stuff.
I live in South Africa and there isn't a huge startup scene here.
Checking out HN every couple of days and seeing stuff about other people going through the startup phases played a role in getting me to the point where I believed I could do it.
I failed but even then, I knew that failure wasn't the end. I learned that here. I saw Eric Reis book recommended here and I lurked on several thread where people discussed the trials and tribulations they were going through.
I discovered fakegrimlock here and he showed me the importance of being on fire, why I must burn.
It's nice to think that something you dream about is in fact something fantastic.
Tufte had a huge impact on me too, around the same timeframe (2001.)