Jean Sini: web. scale. software.

Chris Dixon, on the need to constantly stretch your professional limits: “If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough”. Classic.

Spectacular speaker lineup at Saturday’s TEDx Berkeley event. Eric Cheng’s ocean imagery: mesmerizing. Amit Deutsch’s first person account of his exploration of identity and group narratives: humbling. And boy, did Eric Lewis rock the house on the piano! Watch him do unprecedented, unlikely, and probably illegal things to the instrument at TED 2009:

What an amazing job on the part of the organizers, mostly undergrad students, who put the flawless event together: you are truly an inspired and inspiring group. Thank you!

In a recently posted TED talk, Itay Talgam likens the challenges of leading in business to those of conducting an orchestra, by exploring the multiple ways in which the best get, indirectly and with varying degrees of success, musical harmony to emerge out of chaos. Leveraging his own experience as a conductor, he demonstrates the range of unique styles embodied by a handful of world-famous masters, and draws potent analogies to the world of business. Fascinating.

That’s a start, I guess. The funniest thing happened last month while I was at Mai Tai Kite Camp ’08, the fantastic event put together by Bill Tai and Susi Mai. We were chatting at dinner, when I mentioned to Tom Court that I had a great board built while on a summer kiting trip to Cabarete a few years back.

I was going on and on, about how I loved the board, about its extraordinary ability to ride upwind (it’s a super compact 115cm yet heads upwind better than most 135cm boards I have ridden), about how great it pops during jumps and about its durability (yes, I have come in close proximity with my share of sand and rock). He interrupted me and asked whether the shaper was, by any chance, German. He was. After a few more questions, Tom figured out that I had unknowingly bought a board shaped by Susi’s dad, no less. We quickly produced the board and confirmed its origin with Susi: unmistakable. Here’s what Bill had to say after carefully scrutinizing the board:

I was looking at it, and it is one of the few I’ve seen that have a true concave bottom. Susi’s and yours are sculpted, the entire board has the curve, not just the bottom surface. At speed, the rail of the board itself acts like a fin and gives you a lot of stability and upwindedness. Susi was placing in course racing with that twin tip against others on surfboard directionals. Quite amazing.

The good news: I have been using the board exclusively for three years; it’s absolutely fantastic. The bad news: all this time I thought it was me getting better, and now I have to come to terms with the fact it was mostly in the gear. Oh well, more time on the water is in order. The best part: if you want one of those, drop me a line in the comments or email and I’ll try to put you in touch.

Ever since the organizers at TED started posting video footage of the conference talks, back in 2006, I have been watching avidly, and bugging my friends to do the same: each in their own way, most if not all of the presenters are truly fascinating and inspiring, both in substance and in style.

TED is now digging into its archives, posting talks going all the way back to the very first edition in 1984. Faced with this accelerating stream of great content to consume and disseminate, I am giving up on spamming friends with email to highlight this or that talk. Instead, here’s my growing list of favorite presentations, in no particular order.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight.

Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating children.

Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto.

Anna Deavere Smith: Four American characters.

Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other Mathemagic.

Craig Venter: on the verge of creating synthetic life.

Matthieu Ricard: habits of happiness.

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.

Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary.

Hans Rosling: Debunking myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen.

Patrick Awuah: Educating a new generation of African leaders.

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law.

Nicholas Negroponte: From 1984, 4 predictions about the future.

Ideas worth spreading, indeed.

“Oh well, maybe next year I’ll stay in San Francisco.” Yes, we heard this opinion voiced quite a few times last week, including some comments by Matt Marshall  on the stock-option cloud not going away. There’s been so much hype about the iPhone by now (including the noise around its name) that I simply can’t imagine where things will fall with regards to user uptake when it finally rolls out in 6 months (Jobs did project selling 10M units in the first year!).

how closures relate to continuations: a good overview from Sam Ruby.