By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

The full article has some good examples.

Asian regionalism: How does it compare to Europe’s?

(h/t to Gen)

I hope to keep the momentum going with a few more tweaks and enhancements over the coming month. Enjoy!

The main problem was that PHP files weren’t being parsed correctly. I confirmed that the PHP module was loaded (/usr/sbin/httpd -M), and my /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf file contained the right directives. This was a stock install of CentOS 5.2 after all. I even tried moving some of the directives around to the domain-specific vhosts.conf file. I also confirmed that *.conf files were being loaded by the httpd.conf with “Include conf.d/*.conf” in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

Or so I thought. Turns out, I needed to wrap the contents of php.conf with <VirtualHost _default_:80>…</VirtualHost>. I realized this when I ran /usr/sbin/httpd -S to see what was actually being called - and noticed that some SSL directives were pulled in from ssl.conf, but nothing from php.conf. WTF?

So when different ports are supported (i.e. 80 and 443), directives for each now have to be wrapped? I have another CentOS machine (the only other - I don’t get to make these choices) w/o SSL and the php directives are loaded w/o the <VirtualHost…>.

At any rate, I usually opt for Debian-based distros as the folder structures make more sense to me. And I dislike GUIs that attempt to make server management easier for the layman but in fact barf files all over the system (I’m looking at you, Plesk).

Since then, Umair has become the Director of the Havas Media Lab at Harvard, and I just came across a recent presentation of his that is a must see.

http://www.daytona.se/sessions/vol2/umair

Basically, this global crisis we are witnessing is not just a financial crisis - it’s an “interaction crisis”. The principles that have been driving capitalism through the 20th century have ultimately maxed out, and Umair proposes 5 new principles that will guide the 21st century - that *must* guide 21st century capitalism lest mankind dig it’s own grave.

I’ll share these 5 principles here more for my own notes, but you should really watch the presentation - it really just skims the top of changes to come. (20th century capitalist principle → 21st century principle):

• Exploitation → Renewal
• War → Peace
• Domination → Equity
• Value → Meaning
• Command → Democracy

And the tag-lines for these principles:

“tomorrow is today”
“people, not product”
“connections, not transactions”
“creativity, not productivity”
“outcomes, not incomes”

Q. I know you don’t like to give advice, but do you have any general thoughts on how to cope with hard times?

A. The best plan now is to have as many bosses as possible. I call it boss diversity. If you work for a company and you have one boss and that boss doesn’t like you or wants to get rid of you, you’re in trouble. But if you work for yourself, you have lots of bosses, who are your customers, and if a few of them decide they don’t like you, that’s okay. You can get new ones. Boss diversity is the one kind companies don’t talk to you about, but it can save your career.

Hallelujah