Today we look at Chapter 27 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 27 is (yet another) restatement of the message of Chapter 2, albeit in the specific context of employing praise and sincere appreciate as positive reinforcement of any improvement (as you see it) in the other person’s behaviour.
The iPhone documentation discusses a technique for laying out certain types of tables in NIB files; you add the table’s cells to the NIB file, connect them to outlets that you add to the table view controller, and then write a simple tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: function that returns the proper cell for the proper index path. There’s a little pitfall to this approach if your cells have non-standard heights, having to do with the fact that the frames of UITableViewCells are changed by the framework after you return them from the UITableViewDataSource.
Interesting interview with Cassandra Peterson, the woman behind the “Elvira” character, up at the Onion’s AV Club. She makes a particularly interesting remark on the subject of motivation:
My character’s not owned by anyone, which has a great side and a bad side. The great side is, I can do anything I want. The bad side is, I don’t have the money from a big studio behind me, so I get much less exposure. But it pays off when I go to horror conventions or Comic-Con, where you see people from Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever. When people wonder why they get tired of their characters and I don’t, it’s because I make 100 percent of everything I get, and they only make a small percentage. The studio gets all the money, and they’re just “allowed” to appear and get paid a fee. When I sell something, I get all the money. So I don’t ever get tired of my character, because I get all the money. I was at a convention with “Captain Kirk”—you know, what’s his name—and all he wanted to do was get away from that character. And it’s because he can’t make any money at it.
Today we look at Chapter 26 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 26 emphasizes the importance of always allowing the other man to save face.
Today we look at Chapter 25 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 25 advises against giving direct orders.
Chapter 25 consists almost entirely of a description of Owen D. Young’s style of management. That style is said to have revolved around the asking of questions and giving of suggestions, rather than the issuing of orders. DC argues that this style encourages co-operation, whereas the issuing of orders arouses resentment and undermines the other man’s feeling of importance.
This is the shortest chapter in the book, coming in at less than a full page.
I just posted a small update to my Taipan! port; Under some circumstances, a fine could reduce your cash-on-hand below zero. This caused problems, and also looked squirrelly.
The Irish experience with the Lisbon Treaty strikes me as representative of a broader problem with democracy. Briefly, the Irish were asked to vote on ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. They voted against it. They were then asked to vote again in 2009, and this time voted for it. What troubles me is that, on this sort of question, “no” means “no, for now” and “yes” means “yes, forever” (to a first approximation). When the side that wants the “yes” result keeps asking the question over and over and over, it seems to me to be not quite cricket.
I can see no real alternative to this state of affairs; this is a problem with the type of question being asked, and such questions will from time to time arise. It suggests, however, that “standing athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’” is not a viable long-term strategy; one must aggressively push forward towards the ends one desires – merely resisting drift away from them is doomed to failure. I believe that this is the meaning of the political aphorism “you can’t fight something with nothing”.
Today we look at Chapter 24 of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (DC). Chapter 24 claims that it you’re going to discuss someone else’s mistakes, it’s best to begin by talking about your own.
In the app I’m currently building, there are many longish text fields that can be edited. I decided to create a little utility class to handle the presentation of an editing interface for these fields, and I’d like to share it with you now.
Sudoku Grab is a neat little iPhone app that enables you to solve a Sudoku puzzle by taking a picture of it. The author was kind enough to post an overview of the computer vision mechanics behind the app; if you’re interested in how the iPhone can be made to perform some neat tricks, it’s definitely worth your time.
