• why bother there is plenty of time
• it won’t kill you if you don’t do THIS workout
• you really should get some sleep
• this music is not helping you, that’s why you aren’t feeling good this morning
• being in a gym is like being on a hamster wheel
• blah blah blah blah

Just a lot of stupid negative stuff. Then I thought to myself, am I going to be this negative riding the GDMBR or the 24 Hours of Great Glen? I’ll never finish!

I have had a few tough mornings like this and I just try and push through. It’s only February, so I am going to be stuck on the hamster wheel for a little while longer. But spring is around the corner, warmer weather, warmer water, hopefully those things will help keep me moving.

my training partner of late

• Why do you paddle?
• Why do you want to ride the 24 Hours of Great Glen? Solo?!?!
• Why would you want to ride the Great Divide Mountain Bike Race?

I don’t know a good way to answer it, other than I don’t know how else to live. I am glad I am not the only person…

WHY – Nikon D4 Release Video from Corey Rich on Vimeo.

I want to pull this to see where it’ll pop open.

If you want to reach peak performance, you have to find the limit. Finding the limit means stepping over the limit. Going too far, going too fast. It means taking a good idea to the extreme to learn just how far it’ll bend before it snaps.

Records are set by the people who said fuck your limits and found their own.

Full post over at Signals vs. Noise.

I’m not going to be out @ SXSW this year. If you are going, try and catch the BUILT talks. Bikehugger is hosting this series of lightning talks, the theme is Giving New Purpose to the Ordinary

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

Image via Mark Goetz

Some notes

Here are some of my notes from the presentation.

• Information overload is caused by redundant information
• Come to the information with a question you are looking to answer
• Model government should use for reporting information is that of non-fiction websites.
• The average table produced by a government has 12 numbers in it, a sports table on ESPN.com has 120 numbers
• 2 Industries call customers “Users”: Illegal Drugs and Software
• Do whatever it takes to explain something, never predispose the dataset or mode of display
• Once you identify a number as a goal or benchmark, that is when people start fudging data to meet that number
• Tables are just paragraphs of numbers