Sweet Spot

I’ve always been impressed with home-grown technological solutions. This Streetuse website has some great ones. Note the different categories in the left hand menu. I remember seeing a TV episode on a design contest between MIT students and members of some Amazon village. They were given certain tasks to do, and provided certain scrap materials. The MIT kids were blown out of the water by the ingenuity and time to completion of the solutions.

http://www.kk.org/streetuse/

It reminds me of my growing years in a little Arab village outside of Jerusalem. There was a blacksmith/scrapmetal guy at the the bottom of our hill who could make or repair anything we ever needed. Sorry Home Depot, your people have disappointed me over and over again when I come to them with a challenging task. Hint: The solution ain’t got a SKU number or RFID tag, and few employees (not all) can seem to think outside of even their assigned aisle or department.

-Joel G.

I recently made a post on my blog about simple tools, and how they remove the technology from the picture for many users.  I’m pleased to see so many web 2.0 tools headed that direction.  I recently had the opportunity to “upgrade” my Microsoft Office suite–I didn’t.  I don’t know what more it could need in that application. I’ve increasingly found myself using Google docs for my work.  Admittedly, there are some ”Word” features that I wish it had, but overall, It has 80% of everything I ever use a word processor or spreadsheet for. 

See my blog post for additional thoughts on blogging, Viddler and simple tools.

-Joel G.

http://edusign.blogspot.com
(photo: http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/)