I thought that phrase, “It’s the not the Toys, it’s the Playing,” was a good reminder of the source of happiness this holiday season. (via The Big Picture).

Great article in the NY Times Magazine (full text) about Mike Leach, the football coach at Texas Tech turning college football upside down.

Tempo. Surprise. Simple execution. Complicated to defend.

What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech’s offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn’t against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense – with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers – and says, “You’ve got two positions that basically aren’t doing anything.” He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast… All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers’ ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field… And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach’s tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.

As Tom Peters says:

[Making the competition irrelevant is] precisely what Mike Leach has done—and what you need to do is read every damn word in the article …. which may be the best article on business strategy I’ve ever read. Especially biz strategy for the 00s.

It’s not about the athletes, but the system, according to ESPN’s coverage in the run-up to the Cotton Bowl:

The Red Raiders have been using the same system since coach Mike Leach took over six years ago. He’s got it so refined that he’s plugged in a new starting quarterback each of the last three seasons without missing a beat.

Who would have guessed there’s room for value innovation in football?

I’ll sign up for Mike’s Pirate School. :-)

In Wired:

The cereal aisle at your local supermarket may soon resemble the Las Vegas strip. Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios.

Three areas of technology had to mature to make this possible:

• The display, of course (Siemen’s innovation here is using an electrochemical reaction)
• Memory (“memory strips are being used to store the images”)
• Batteries (ultra-thin, ultra-cheap power)

The quality of the materials for mass production is in doubt

Siemens has yet to demonstrate the electrochromic material’s stability and performance when it is mass-produced, researchers say.

But a 1”x2” piece only costs $0.30 to produce, so I’m sure it will find some low-end applications (it will be commercially available in 2007).

If so, it feels like the beginning of a disruption in display technologies. It’ll be cool to see if and where it starts.

This is cool—diagramming conventions that could be very useful for modeling site architectures and application flows.

Here’s an example (pdf) of what metafilter looks like diagrammed this way, and here’s (pdf) Yahoo Mail.

I found this via David Kadavy who says

After spending three years at an architecture firm and seeing the documents involved in getting a building built, I was sure there must be some equivalent visual language and documenting system for web design. After some research, I found that visual language…

Jesse James Garrett, the originator of these conventions (called “Garrett IA”) makes shape templates available for Visio, InDesign, OpenOffice and OmniGraffle has one built-in.

I just listened to Geoffrey Moore’s excellent presentation from the 2005 Open Source Business Conference

Thought-provoking and a great introduction for me to the OSBC, which I wasn’t familiar with prior to this.

I was disappointed to find that the presentation materials from the conference weren’t available online.

It’s inexcusable for an open source conference not to make presentation materials available online.

Looks like the conference is run by old-school IDG, so it’s no big surprise, I guess.

Amazing, beautiful, game-changing.

Alexa (the search engine owned by Amazon) will be making their search index (5 billion pages), their platform, and their server farm available to developers.

The third-tier search engine needed something to launch themselves to the head of the pack—this may be bred of desperation, but is brilliant, opening whole new opportunities for entrepreneurs—and for Alexa.

On the site, the service is described:

The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents—even create their own search engines—using Alexa’s search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data.

John Batelle says

...what has been a jealously guarded secret – the contents of the entire index – is now available to anyone who wants it… The costs are modest – a few thousand bucks to process the entire web, Gilliat told me.

There’s a quick-n-dirty test app, a camera image search

Pricing:

• $1 per cpu hour ($0.50 for reserved but unused hours)
• $1 per GB/year of user storage
• $1 per 50 GB processed
• $1 per GB uploaded/downloaded
• $1 for every 4,000 user-published web service requests

Just finished reading a fascinating series of articles from Steve Pavlina about his adopting polyphasic sleep

He went from a relatively normal “monophasic sleep” schedule of about seven hours of sleep a night to a series of six 20-minute naps a day, for a total of about 2 hours of sleep a day(!).

The theory is that the schedule trains your body to enter REM sleep immediatly upon beginning a nap, so you actually end up with more REM sleep each day than you do with a “normal” sleep schedule.

As you can read, his results were fantastic

• A huge increase in available time, approximately 40 hours a week
• Much of that time is gained at night, so it’s uninterrupted and available for creative endeavors (or for more exploration or downtime while travelling)
• A greater awareness and elimination of “mental chatter,” with a more free-flowing intelligence and clearer decision making

I’m beginning to notice that challenging mental work seems easier for me, especially writing. You may have noticed that my blogging output has increased since beginning this experiment. But I’m not putting any more time into it than I used to. The words are simply flowing faster and more easily.

This is really attractive to me.

The additional time that would be available for creative activities that my current schedule doesn’t accommodate. A more fluid consciousness and intelligence throughout the day is extremely attractive, too. It would also be very practical with Isabela on the way. I’m going to have to adjust my sleep schedule anyway, I might as well do it in a way that would productive across the board.

There are a couple of barriers, though. It sounds like Steve’s lifestyle was already optimized for this: he’s a vegan and doesn’t drink coffee at all and very little caffeine. (Herbivores need less sleep than carnivores or omnivores.)

It’s been my intention to start to eat more healthily, but no coffee, too? Hmmmm. Those three pretty significant life changes all at once would have to be attacked with a lot of discipline and patience and will. But the payoffs could be huge.

As I have to be at the office for my company during the traditional workday, there’s also the very practical question of how and where to nap. Don’t have a good answer to that one yet, but I’m pretty confident it could be worked out.

Evidently, Da Vinci, Einstein, Edison and Franklin were all vegetarians, frequent nappers and likely polyphasic sleepers.