I’m not the Smartest; but I am determined, I’m curious, and I’ll try solutions from other domains or from the Blue itself.

I’m not Confident; but I’m humble, and I listen, and I learn.

I’m not Accomplished; but I’ve taken risks, and I’ve explored, and I’ve experienced, and I’ve created.

I’m not an Expert; but I study, and I adapt, and I practice, and I appreciate, and I hone my Craft.

I’m not yet ashes; I refuse to be dust.

Runkeeper is a Boston Baby, one of our darlings in the local tech community. Their philosophy is about the love of running, that it can be fun for anyone at any skill level (hey I’m only at 5k myself). It’s about motivation and maintaining the long run (see my pun?). Runkeeper is now moving into a new phase of its life where it’s expanding that idea, and a particular focus appears to be its eCommerce frontline.

Let’s step briefly into what’s going on. Back in February, ASICS acquired Runkeeper for $85M. Out of an investment capital of at least $11M…

I’m re-reading John Boyd’s The Last Starship from Earth, and an interesting scenario pops up in the middle. The character, a brilliant mathematics student named Haldane IV, is under investigation and trial. One of the jurors / investigators is a leader in the State’s Department of Sociology, and he is interested in Haldane’s research into building an electronic Shakespeare. Haldane believes there to be an underlying mathematics to aesthetics, which can be replicated and built into a machine. This machine would then replace the professional category of Poets. This Sociologist offers a “business proposition” to Haldane. In exchange for clemency…

“There’s a weird intellectual pleasure in exploring the odd, the offbeat, and the arcane. It reminds me of when I was doing historical research for the novel The Difference Engine, set in the nineteenth century. You start the process by paging through the Official History. Then you dig back farther into the stuff that the official history mandarins merely footnote. There you find a reference to something that almost no authority is willing to cite. Then dig down just one more layer and: Whoa!”

— Bruce Sterling. Foreword. The happy mutant handbook, edited by Frauenfelder, Sinclair, & Branwyn, Riverhead Books, 1995.