Here and Now

Aaron (from Aaron Rambles to the right here) turned me on to this link: I'm That Dad And, like Aaron, I'm that  dad (mostly).

As of 11 PM tonight, I am officially on vacation.  Topsail Island, house right on the beach, not a thing on the agenda - well, except for tomorrow evening's Sandcastle building.  And turkey for dinner (not beach food?  I beg to differ). Anyway, taking lots of pics but forgot the cable to upload them...sigh... Just finished my first beach wedding.  It was really neat - very windy and loud, though.  The fires burning ... somewhere ... were pretty evident in the sky behind the couple from my perspective - but the guests just saw the ocean in the background.

In going with my self-imposed theme this week of creativity,  here's an article from Catalystspace  from like a year ago.  It was something that someone talked about at Catalyst last year (so, yeah, less than a year ago) - probably Daniel Pink who wrote the article (and a book called DRIVE - I think I have it here - I need to read it soon).  might have been Seth Godin talking about Lynchpin  (I'll be reading that this week, so...expect to hear soon. Anyway, the idea is that smart companies give some percentage of their time to "non-sanctioned" work - that is, stuff that's not on the schedule, stuff that the employees just "want to figure out."  The article begins with two guys who won a Nobel prize for science for a Friday Night non-commissioned project that they were fascinated with.  More to the point, check out the article for what Google has done from the beginning. So...life is full of stuff we HAVE to do.  I look at my calendar and see lots of

Just back from Annual Conference (possibly a post for another day) - exhausted - trying to accomplish something on Monday morning (and catching up on my article reading) I came across an article linked from  HERE  that talks about bias against creativity in business  HERE The group found a significant correlation between being creative and being seen as poor management material. "By definition, people will say creativity is positive," Mueller states. "It is almost impossible to get people to say they don't want creativity. But when someone actually voices a creative idea, there is a response of, 'Wow -- What is that?' This issue really comes to life at the moment the idea is voiced. There is discomfort when people encounter creativity." And the article ends with: The key is how companies view the traits associated with creativity. "There are some cultures where it is less of a problem than others," Mueller notes. "The question is, 

I just discovered a blog that I'm adding to my links section because I want to remember to go there - as often as I go to Aaron's and Michael's on the side  Take Your Vitamin Z Blog . Here's a repost of one his posts (that such things still happen sickens me...so what will we do?): She's 10 And Now May Be Sold To A Brothel By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: June 1, 2011 KOLKATA, India M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel. Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are ofte