What Do I Want To Do When I Grow Up?

I come back to this question, now and again, when things are tough; when I find that I want to break out of the mold that I'm in, and head in a different direction. Springing from all the latest MacWorld speculation, I re-read an old posting on Daring Fireball about Apple's culture.

[W]hat gets chalked up as devotion to/obsession with Apple is, in fact, devotion to/obsession with great design, and there’s an utter dearth of rival PC or handheld gadget makers that value design as Apple does. The last time I was truly interested in an operating system that wasn’t from Apple was BeOS, and that was over 10 years ago...

[M]any ... companies see Apple’s success this decade as an aberration — that the Apple bubble will soon pop and mediocre jumbles will return to the top of the technology heap. But what if it’s the other way around, and the aberration was Apple’s tepid success in the 1990s?

I sure hope that many more companies follow the Apple path. It's that kind of attention to detail that I want to see out of products, and what I like to put into my work. Being in an environment where others don't value going that extra mile is usually what makes things tough for me. That's when I start asking the question again.

Electoral Compass

Here's an interesting site. It gives you a survey, and plots your opinion against the other presidential candidates out there.

No wonder I'm having a hard time with this -- I'm nearly exactly in the middle between all the candidates, with no others sharing the same views. Ah... the compromises one must make to live in a republic.

End of the American Empire

Deep thoughts for today, but this has been bugging me for awhile. Via Richard Florida I found this article from the Financial Times. It provides an apropos warning from the Ottoman Empire.

[T]he upshot of this debt crisis is the sale of assets and revenue streams to foreign creditors. This time, however, creditors are buying bank shares not canal shares. And the resulting shift of power is from west to east.

Disturbing, isn't it?

Money is power, and we will become indebted to foreign nations that do not share our ideals. Sooner or later that will lead to a geopolitical shift, if it hasn't already. Just like any financially responsible individual, we should be wary of who we take money from, and for what reasons. I hope we take the advice of another blog posting I read recently.

It is this generation’s task to renew the tree of liberty and keep the American experiment going – to remain true to the ideals that made America and have driven it since 1776.

Perhaps Shakespeare had it right:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

I am glad to understand this, but sad that I feel powerless to prevent it.