Neil is going away on holiday for a couple of weeks and will have limited Internet access I’m sure.
He will no doubt use this as an excuse for his poor performance in the Predictor Minileague, so I thought I would just post the standings as they are today…
POS NAME POINTS
2756. GaryfraetheDale 59
6222. rubbish_runner 50
11715. wealsohatedufc 33
13176. stideon 25
24350. gudgeb 0
Was at the “Start-Up day” for the School of Entrepreneurship on Saturday. This is always a great event with about 40 speakers from around the globe and 400 participants. Speakers yesterday included the CEO of Telenor (the 7th biggest wireless carrier in the world) and one of the founders of Boo.com (Swedens biggest dot com failures who spent $135million of investors money in 18 months then went bankrupt).
A very interesting speech to wrap it all off came from David Axmark, one of the founders of MySQL who was making his last speech as an employee of MySQL (they sold it to Sun in 2008 for $1billion). He railled against the threat of software patents (in my opinion one of the major dangers to the freedom of the Web and Internet, not just writing applications). We then all went for a nice glass of wine and buffet thanks to the sponsors Microsoft and no one said anything more about it… 
The day started with a speech about celebrating incompetence which suited me down to the ground.
The thinking goes like this… If you always want to be competent in your professional life, you never take the risk of doing something new and you stay within the boundaries that you set yourself. It’s like never learning to play the piano because you might sound terrible the first few times (or years) you try. Of course, if you aren’t prepaired to be incompetent at something, even if it’s just for a while, you’ll never really test yourself.
One of my favourite sayings is “If something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing badly“. This is especially useful when you feel like you have a mountain to climb and just don’t know how to get started. Not taking yourself too seriously, just having a go and learning from the mistakes you make and then doing better the next time is the key to doing things which other people say can’t be done.
Unfortunately, most people like to feel competent and if you come along with new ways of doing things which are going to make them feel incompetent, you’re going to meet resistance. They started the whole seminar with the message that you’re going to get knocked down a lot and it’s up to you to get back up again. Here’s the subtle video that they used… (Not for people with a delicate disposition or people who don’t like Radiohead).
We woke up this morning to find out that yesterday was a historic day. Americans voted for Barack Obama to be their new president and of course the first ever black president.
The colour of the mans skin makes it a more important date for the history books, but I’m just hoping that under his leadership America can start to play a more positive and inclusive role in the world especially on the environment.
I wonder what it must feel like for Obama to wake up this morning? He’s got quite a lot to live up to. After 8 years of George Bush he’s being hailed as some kind of superhero (which he hasn’t really played down).
Well, I don’t think that he’s going to put on a cape, swoop into the oval office on his first day and send an email that brings peace to the middle east, but I am excited by the fact that we have a young and positive attitude in one of the most important positions in the world.
Anyway, I would have voted for him purely on the basis off his cool campaign posters…
Not wanting to feel left out, we Scots immediately took the chance to point out that the “First Black President of America (TM)” is in fact Scottish. The Scottish version of Barack Obama, Alex Salmond, welcolmed the president back to Scotland for the year of home coming in 2009.
The fact that the next president was going to be Scottish was a bit of a shoo-in as according to this piece in the Telegraph, both candidates are related to William the Lion, the monarch who ruled Scotland from 1165 to 1214.
We Scots are a bit funny this way. We like to say “Wha’s like us? Gie few an they’re aw deid!” and then point out all the top people who are actually Scottish (and then we go on to remind you that we invented EVERYTHING…)
We can do this because it’s true.
