Interact first, sell second!

The panhandler's secret

from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

When there were old-school parking meters in New York, quarters were precious.

One day, I'm walking down the street and a guy comes up to me and says, "Do you have a dollar for four quarters?" He held out his hand with four quarters in it.

Curious, I engaged with him. I took out a dollar bill and took the four quarters.

Then he turned to me and said, "can you spare a quarter?"

What a fascinating interaction.

First, he engaged me. A fair trade, one that perhaps even benefited me, not him.

Now, we have a relationship. Now, he knows I have a quarter (in my hand, even). So his next request is much more difficult to turn down. If he had just walked up to me and said, "can you spare a quarter," he would have been invisible.

Too often, we close the sale before we even open it.

Interact first, sell second.

Interesting take on our current situation

Jared Diamond is one of my most respected authors. Here is a piece on PBS where he discusses the current state of our society.

The key point I took away was that if people who make decisions are isolated from the impacts of those decisions, then they will inevitably make poor choices.

Are our current lawmakers isolated from the financial crisis?

Great Photo

Interesting technology used to capture this photo.

how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address

Courtesy of Ze Frank

Really interesting technology ...

Back to the fun geek stuff. Imagine Transformers!

More Science experiments at 5min.com

Another generation or two lost ...

Being neither a jew or palestinian, I don't have a dog in this fight. It just seems to me that as long as these stores continue to surface, there is no way peace will ever be achieved. The children that survive know what happened and they will grow up to be the next leaders ... and the fighting will continue.

Bullets in the brain, shrapnel in the spine: the terrible injuries suffered by children of Gaza

Playing with camera ...

Just got a new camera and I was playing with some software to push the video to YouTube then to my blog ... appears to be working pretty well.

Parsing an OpenXML document (Word 2007)

Back to the geeky ...

I was attempting to parse a Word 2007 document for mail merge purposes and found that libxml was the fastest way to do it with Ruby. The XML document uses namespaces heavily but it's not readily apparent how to search the document with libxml using the namespaces.

Here is a sample section and the code I found after an extensive Google search:

<w:doc>
  <w:p>
    <w:t>Text being sought</w:t>
  </w:p>
</w:doc>

and the code used to find the paragraph node "w:p"

ns="w:http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main"
doc.find("//w:p",ns).each do |p|
#do something special with the paragraph node here
end

It took me a while to track this down so I thought I would share here in the hopes of helping someone else.