Monday, 15 February 2010
What are the underlying values that motivate you in the work that you’ve been doing all these years?
Today I was asked this interesting question. Below was my response:
My Values, Vision & Mission are at: http://www.minessence.net/default.aspx?tab=4 My whole approach is predicated on the efficacy of the conscientization process coupled with self-organizing systems (click here to see a great video demonstrating learning via technology and self-organizing systems).
I also work a lot with Multiple Intelligences as epitomised by this quote:
"Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom." [Dee W. Hock, Fast Company]. This video: [click here to see it] explains better than I ever will the problems emerging from the over emphasis on only one form of IQ.
Humans' place in the scheme of things
Some thoughts came into my mind in relation to the futility of trying to effect social change on a grand scale so I decided to record them here.
No one can change another's world-view through facts. One's world-view only changes when something of significance happens in the person's life to cause them to see the world differently--that process can't be engineered, it just happens.
Yet, it is only when a person's world-view changes that their values change. And, it's only when a person's values change that they choose a different path.
If we stuff things up so humans can no longer exist on this planet--I'm sure something human-like will evolve somewhere else at some point in time--there's billions of years to play with.
Anyway, I don't know why humans are so caught up in their importance. We are just a species like the dinosaurs who have our time at the moment, no doubt some other species will have it's time when we are gone.
In fact I wonder why we look at humans as so "evolved" that we put them at the top of the "tree of evolution". After all when you think of it, animals (of which humans are the worst) are a gruesome species. We can only live through killing and devouring other life forms. In my books, most plants are a higher life form than animals (including humans who by this measure are perhaps the lowest of life-forms). Plants are solar powered, on-balance they create rather than destroy the eco-system, and they live off life forms (compost, etc.) which have died a natural death. Above all, the majority of plants don't kill other life-forms in order to keep themselves alive.
No one can change another's world-view through facts. One's world-view only changes when something of significance happens in the person's life to cause them to see the world differently--that process can't be engineered, it just happens.
Yet, it is only when a person's world-view changes that their values change. And, it's only when a person's values change that they choose a different path.
If we stuff things up so humans can no longer exist on this planet--I'm sure something human-like will evolve somewhere else at some point in time--there's billions of years to play with.
Anyway, I don't know why humans are so caught up in their importance. We are just a species like the dinosaurs who have our time at the moment, no doubt some other species will have it's time when we are gone.
In fact I wonder why we look at humans as so "evolved" that we put them at the top of the "tree of evolution". After all when you think of it, animals (of which humans are the worst) are a gruesome species. We can only live through killing and devouring other life forms. In my books, most plants are a higher life form than animals (including humans who by this measure are perhaps the lowest of life-forms). Plants are solar powered, on-balance they create rather than destroy the eco-system, and they live off life forms (compost, etc.) which have died a natural death. Above all, the majority of plants don't kill other life-forms in order to keep themselves alive.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Hallelujah--I've solved it
For about two years I've been trying to get a small snippet of code written to make navigation at my website simple for users, whilst at the same time, simple for me to update the site. I decided three days ago I was going to solve it once and for all.
I immersed myself in 2000 page programming manuals, did google searches on code snippets, & tried different variations of four lines of code over and over. A few minutes ago I finally came up with a code combination which works!! Yeh!
For those who are pragmatically inclined, I was "simply" trying to add "target" to a sitemap node (For some inexplicable reason Microsoft didn't include target). This is how it's done...
- In the page where you have a gridview control add a template column thus:
Note the [ ] bracket around target in Eval("[target]"). That was the solution to solving this puzzle. The square bracket supplies a key, in this case "target" and retrieves its value, in this case "_blank" or nothing. - And the way to add target to the sitemap node is...
The objNode.Item("target") = "_blank" is where the "Target" property is added to the standard: ID, title, url, & description properties of Microsoft's sitemap node.
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