NEA’s Read Across America is an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss.

Several years ago, while working as the Gentle Leader Product Manager at Premier Pet Products, I had the good fortune of visiting San Francisco to tour the then new and state of the art San Francisco SPCA. At the time, there was no other facility like it in the world and to top things off, Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash and Dogs are from Neptune, was there putting together her widely respected Academy for Dog Trainers.

After touring the facility, I hit a few stores, looking for dog-related gifts to take home. I ended up in a little shop called The Loft where I found some note cards by an artist named R. Nichols.

His work was simple, playful, and clean. I loved his work so much that I bought every box of cards they had.

I finished reading Agile Software Development with SCRUM yesterday. The book provides an excellent introduction to the scrum methodology, highlighting its ease of use for newcomers and clearly defining the methodology’s benefits for anyone wanting to introduce scrum to an organization.

Several well written case studies are published throughout the book to which any software or web application developer can relate.

At work, we’re thankfully moving away from our old development methods (a non-codified, often painful, waterfall approach) to scrum. Three teams were recently set up and we’re already seeing positive results—in terms of productivity, creativity in problem solving, and morale.

Jeff De Cagna posted a fantastic song about innovation on his Principled Innovation blog a couple of days ago.

The song, by Stanford student Gus Bitdinger, speaks for itself and is worth a listen but I’m posting this because Jeff references one of my favourite books, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, by Gordon MacKenzie.

I first heard about Gordon’s work when my former wife, Karen, was working for John Pastore at Capital One - back when COF was an innovative powerhouse and Rich Ronston wasn’t so much of a wanker.

If you haven’t read Gordon’s little masterpiece, I suggest you check it out. If you have read it and it’s collecting dust on your shelf, please find someone who would enjoy the book and pass it on.

The world needs more innovative thinkers.

(Thanks to Fouroboros for pointing me to the Principled Innovation blog)

Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.

Anitra picked up a copy of Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community as a Chrsitmas present for me.

Gratuitous plug for Joe’s new book.

Matthew Homann’s [non]billablehour posted some information from Eide Neurolearning Blog about the benefits of family dinner:

According to a Harvard study, family dinners were more important than play, story time, or other family events for building vocabulary. And “families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like ‘eat your vegetables,’ had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, a professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study. Parents should be encouraged to use adult-level vocabulary and encourage back-and-forth conversation with their kids. It also helps social skills. Today, 65% of families with kids under the age of 6 have dinner together 5 or so nights per week, but that drops to 50% if a family has kids age 12 to 17.

How true. We routinely have discussions at our dinner table and include our daughter in them at all times. Recently she and I had watched both The Incredibles and the first 3 Star Wars movies together. Some people would argue that those films may be a little “old” for her - but they didn’t hear our dinner conversation either…