Nerdery

Here’s a robot that was designed to mimic the subtle and intricate movements of the human face and lips.

Full article here.

Impressive strides in animatronic devices, but still creepy in my book.

(via SvN)

Here’s an interesting snippet from Malcom Gladwell’s upcoming book Outliers: The Story of Success:

This idea — that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice — surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

I’ve also read that number about three years ago in one of my issues of Scientific American, and I suppose that study – as well as many others – has helped the research community settle on the figure.

(via DF)

If you remember the smash video from A Ha’s Take On Me from the 80s, here’s the literal version where the lyrics refer to what’s actually happening in the video.

I see this as a huge internet meme starting in 3…2…1.

Along similar lines: Here’s the Family Guy version of the same video.

In our recent newsletter, two of our senior principal consultants wrote a quick bit about the differences in PeopleSoft invoice matching functionality from 8.9 to 9.0.  We get asked about this a lot, and for most users, the differences can be somewhat arcane.  Because of this, I’d like to share the article.

Differences in PeopleSoft Invoice Matching from 8.9 to 9.0: A High-level View

by April Black and Jack Kochie, Sr. Principal Consultants

From PeopleSoft 8.9 to 9.0, some of the invoice matching and processing rules changed significantly, and we find many of our clients don’t know about the changes in any sort of detail.  At a high-level, here are the biggest-hitting changes:

• 9.0 includes all features of prior releases
• Expanded document association included (e.g. receipt selection)
• Expanded rules engine (contexts: summary, tolerance, global), which provide:
  • More flexibility
  • Flow control (allows matching – i.e. check all or check first)
  • Summary rules
  • Rule tolerances
• Auto-matching with debit memos
• Configurable matching workbench
• Expanded workflow

As for what we get asked about steadily, it’s the intricacies of the rules engine.

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Every Friday from here on out I’m going to delve into something more conversational simply because I want to.  This Friday, here and now, is all about a productivity tip from Merlin Mann over at 43folders that I find very valuable, simply because I have a zillion things on my plate and keeping sight of what each of them is really driving to sometimes gets difficult.

Mann basically says to take what we’re thinking about doing, and re-phrase it into a more actionable what and why format:

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.

Try it.  It seriously cuts away the stuff you’d normally do when diving into a task and helps you get right to the heart of the matter.

Happy weekend.

One of my favorite new business blogs is Deal Architect by Vinnie Mirchandani.  It’s become a daily read for me.  But here’s the thing: I follow over 100 feeds.  I don’t go to any website regularly, even personal favorites like Daring Fireball or kottke.org.  I live my digital life, in large part, in a feed reader (Google Reader for me, but there are many of them out there), and clicking away to a website — especially for the sake of clicking and little else — is a total interrupt to my workflow.

So Vinnie, if you’re reading that, can you please switch to full RSS feeds?  Your subscribers will thank you.

Internally, we’ve talked about doing videos of things ranging from the instructional to the campy.  Check out what our partner Workday did with their American Idol spoof, below.  The editing is actually very good.

Dave Duffield is a master of culture-building, among many other things.  Good to see the PeopleSoft-in-its-glory energy resurfacing here.

If you take this blog’s RSS feed and drop it into Wordle, you get a neat word cloud composed of oft-used words found in the feed’s RSS data.  The cloud for Unfiltered looks like this (click to enlarge):

Nice idea for a web app, and good design aspects too. 

All you need for Wordle to work is a bunch of straight text or a RSS or ATOM feed from a website or blog.  That’s it.  More fun than you might imagine.

Let’s have some long weekend fun.

As we approach the holiday break (at least here in the US), I’d like your thoughts on the ongoing iPhone vs. BlackBerry debate.  I ask mainly for my own purposes, but I know for a fact there are others out there considering a similar move, so I hope this is useful as a larger discussion.

I use an 8130 BlackBerry Pearl on Verizon right now.  It’s a fine phone, but not without its shortcomings.  I’ve long wanted an iPhone but have resisted the first generation due to a lack of 3G and business-class email, and now that most of my concerns have been addressed, I’m really considering the 3G.

I have some questions, however, that I hope current iPhone owners (preferably those who came from a BlackBerry) might be able to answer.  If I move to the iPhone, I have a pretty clear understanding of what I will gain, but I want to be clear on what I will give up.

So, here goes.  Your thoughts welcome in the comments.

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Must be the season for social-engineering spam, because if you thought this was bad, get a load of what just showed up in my inbox:

This is a well-done ploy on many counts: it appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, looks official, and logically follows tax season. The attachment, a Word DOC, was opened without incident on my Mac, but the document showed an embedded object foreign to my operating system (OSX Leopard), so there was no issue.

Deeper research shows that it quite possibly might be a trojan horse that installs a virus; if you read the comments in the previous link, you’ll see different delivery mechanisms. Some are PDFs, some ZIP files, some DOCs. Regardless, it seems as if the object, regardless of its wrapper, installs some sort of malicious payload.

Be careful. This ploy was clever enough to get past SpamAssassin, so I’d guess most antispam definitions don’t have this one in their tables yet.

If you’ve received anything like this, post it below so others can understand what’s floating around out there.