New at the Rijksmuseum room at Schipol Airport

One of the delights in the international part of the Amsterdam airport, Schipol, is a large room that the Rijksmuseum fills with paintings and other art works. There’s usually, say, six or eight paintings in there. There’s a new exhibit, landscapes. Here’s the newest one they have. The description on the card next to it is as magical as the painting itself:

This garden is somewhat enigmatic: where are we? The space is enclosed, you can barely see the sky. There are no people. There is no realistic light, nor any realistic representation of trees, grass, flowers. Every leaf and fruit is reduced into a colourful geometrics shape. As a result, the garden becomes a magical place, detached from the real world.

WHERE ARE WE?!

Wastebook

• I am trying very hard to be nostalgic about the present, instead of waiting for years, decades, to enjoy the day.

• “We’re clever creatures,” here. That is something to try to remember, like a mantra, when things are down. It’s an optimistic, fun statement.

• I have mixed feelings.

• “I want language that belongs to me.” Here.

• “It’s really the same thing over and over, just slightly different. But nevertheless painful.” Here.

• “[A] hedge fund is an organization designed to find something that will one day be illegal, and to do it until it is.” Here.

• Try to avoid setting a strategy where the first step is: find someone who can do this.

• This once delightful author has turned into a crotchety old person who writes well.

  

Relevant to your interests

• Migrating two banks to the cloud after a merger, interview with Ken Meyer, CIO of Truist bank (merged from BB&T and SunTrust Bank) – Good interview with some digital transformation tactics (focused most only software development) and examples. Also plenty of culture/meatware commentary, e.g.: “Looking back, I felt a tremendous amount of resistance, but I don’t know now that it was actually resistance. I think it was just a lack of understanding. There were a lot of folks eager to learn who wanted to be part of the journey, and we wanted to make sure this wasn’t something we were doing just for technology’s sake.”

• Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails – I don’t understand all the science-math here, but reading how social science experiments are actually done is fun. They’re often inventive hacks. This also makes them seem kind of weird and often far-fetched as far as showing anything.

Logoff

Back in Amsterdam, after an uneventful flights back. No fog like last time. I have a long stretch of time before my next trip, to SCALE in LA.

This is some good, long stretches of time to work on some internal project and thinking and some content. I don’t like to hope too much because my ambitions to do big things can become “an overwhelming amount of little things,” but we’ll see.

Not much today. We’ll see about tomorrow. My work, VMware is giving tomorrow off, so I’ll either have plenty of time to type, or be too busy doing nothing.

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