Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC 

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Perhaps a more appropriate image to accompany my banging on about lucid dreaming:

Dali's floppy clocks. And here's a jaunt through his astounding works:

In a world before computer graphics, and abundant 3D modeling tools, how much more astonishing and utterly magical must these images have seemed?  Even with an ILM, Weta, and Avatar saturated mind, I still delight in Dali's dreamscapes.

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STOP! Pause, and ask yourself "am I dreaming?"

Are you?

How can you tell?

The wonderful thing about dreaming is that you use the same mental-world-modeling machinery in your brain that you use in waking life.  So the experience in a dream is indistinguishable - it's made of the exactly the same stuff as your waking experience.  This is why dreams seem so utterly vivid and real.

So are you dreaming?

Well there is a way to tell.  A curious characteristic of dream awareness is that you can't hold it together when looking at symbols...not for long.  If you look at a clock, or pick up a book, if you try to concentrate on the symbols your find they start to morph and melt and ooze around.  And if you find that happening...you know your dreaming!  And if that happens, good for you!  You've just entered a lucid dream, one of the most wonderful tricks you and your brain can pull.

So, you've just read to the end of this post...and the words haven't gone soft and splodgy on you...you know you're not dreaming.  But keep asking yourself the question.  Make it a habit of mind...and then one day, you'll ask, and discover that in fact, yes, you are.

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Some good (if not extreme) recommendations on how to read more books.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/morebooks

I particularly agree with getting rid of the TV.  Not only will it free up some time, it'll stop your brain turning to "mushy mush" too.

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In general I've found Trader Joe's staff is a cut above the rest in terms of friendliness.  But tonight the gentleman serving me at the counter actually thanked me for bringing my talent to America (and this was a heartfelt, warm and genuine exchange, not put on or affected). 

"Thank you for coming here to America
and bringing your talent to share with us." 

Far out! That's really pulling out the stops in terms of kind hearted friendliness.  Of course the topic of whether I have any talent didn't come up...and I skedaddled promptly before it could.

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This is a drawing I did of an Eames Lounge Chair.  This is not art.  It's more akin to visual dictation or note-taking I think.

The advantage of exercising the brain's natural ability to draw is not in the production of drawings.  Rather it is in what that muscle building does to help your brain do totally other, seemingly non-related, creative tasks.  Sort of like yoga, or weights, or any sport.

What's cool is drawing doesn't take any special kind of talent.  All brains come pre-loaded with the bits to do it.  I discovered this after attending a Betty Edwards "Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain" class, instructed by her son Brian Bomeisler.  As Brian points out, we don't teach children to read and write to create poets (although that may happen), rather we teach these skills because they are fundamentally powerful tools of thought for amplifying any kind of thinking.  Drawing is in this same category - and some would argue, in the new creative economy, that these tools are even more important.

The thing I'm most excited about with the upcoming iPad is the release of a natural media painting app called Brushes.  If artists can paint New Yorker covers on an iPhone screen, having something the actual size of a piece of paper is going to be heaven!

An interactive surface that lets you capture something as nuanced as a set of brush strokes, or a delicate pencil cross-hatching pattern...well that's something I want in my satchel.  And what is more, it won't even leak paint or graphite dust everywhere!

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In the last few weeks I finally got around to publishing the source to a Silverlight TestHarness application I've been working on for a couple of years.  That's not two years of dedicated work, rather this is more like a carefully crafted piece of re-usable scaffolding I've built up to assist in my other developments over that time period. 

The concept of a rapid-and-simple-to-use UI TestHarness (like the one embodied in this piece of work) is something I've always done for as long as I can remember.  It's so integral to the way I work and think that I am often amazed that people can start any kind of significant UI effort without something like this in place.  Well, turns out I'm often amazed (or too easily amazed) and this is not so common.  People I think generally do "something" as scaffolding around their UI work, but what the TestHarness does is automate as much of that throw-away work as possible, allowing you to write the absolute least amount of code to get your UI up, on screen, so you can start prodding and poking it.

I am opening this up for anyone else who thinks like me and would find this kind of thing a useful addition to their bag-o-tricks.  It also allows me to wrap up (and publish as open-source) the Open.Core libraries I've been developing.  The TestHarness uses these, but so does everything else I work on.  This is where I put that fiddly, low-level, UI stuff that you do over and over again and you just don't want to write (and test) on every new project.  There's no profit to be had in gritty infrastructure stuff like this, and as such there's much greater value in sharing openly.

Accompanying the source is a blog where I am publishing technical articles about how to get started and use the TestHarness. 

http://TestHarness.org

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Mr #LeanStartup, Eric Ries just spent some time in GodZone.  Summing up his trip here he notes:

"Overall, I came away from the experience optimistic about the potential of New Zealand to cultivate a significant startup hub. I look forward to seeing it happen."

Here here!

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