Travelogue: Last Day in Doha

//Doha//Thursday//Departure//0400 The alarm clicks on, and a singer fills the pre-dawn room with exotic consonants over a heavy background of strings and a plucked ood. It is 4am here, and in an effort to get on California-time, I will immediately commence to pretend that it is 5pm. I extricate the daily slippers from the plastic [...]

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Travelogue: From There to Here – Doha

//Saturday//East-bound We are flying east, across the top of the Atlantic, racing toward daylight. Our flight-path creates a mechanical compression of time, collapsing 12 hours of night into 5 elapsed hours. We lose the normal advantages of economy of scale in these long-haul flights. Fourteen hours in the air, requires enormous fuel reserves, and the [...]

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Toys for Learning – a visit to the d.school at Stanford

Since co-producing the Plerkshop (a day-long workshop examining the meaning and value of play in the workplace) with Scott Klemmer, and Bill Verplank of the d.school at Stanford University, I’ve become fascinated by some of the work going on there and have had the privilege of being invited back on many occasions. Recently Bill and [...]

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India Diaries #2

Days 1, 2, 3 – Delhi A crew of men sweeps debris off of an elevated road in downtown Delhi. The dust and bits of metal blow directly onto a small apartment building where a chain of women in brightly colored saris vigorously sweep it hierarchically down until, after many transfers, it falls to the [...]

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India Diaries #1

Day 0 It is late at night. It is early in the morning. We are crossing Northern Canada and the slow undulations of a weak Aurora Borealis tease the horizon. I am watching a Bollywood movie to mentally prepare myself for what is to come. If rickshaw drivers and fruit merchants do not spontaneously burst [...]

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