- from What the Duck?

As a big fan of the TV series 24, I identify quite strongly with the central character. The anti-hero. Jack Bauer.

Jack is an odd character to achieve such popularity. He approach to things is not often clean. People he is involved with usually end up dead. However, he is a very watch-able character; although constrained by the world around him - he wins through.

Simply, Jack is a man of strong principles and equally strong talents. As each series progresses, he is put in impossible situations that test his principles. Things that most people would admit defeat over. But not Jack. He is a survivor.

The strength in Jack’s character is also his major flaw. By sacrificing everything for his principles, for the success of the missions … he has done exactly that. Sacrificed everything.

He is currently imprisoned by the Chinese, with a dead wife and an estranged daughter. Not exactly the paragon of success.

Over the last few months, I’ve felt remarkably like I’ve been in the plot of a 24 series. The project I’m involved in provides a constant stream of impossible challenges, with not much pause. I too am driven by the end goal and have managed to find solutions to numerous road blocks. This, however, has required substantial personal sacrifice.

Today I realized I am not in the 23rd hour, as originally thought, but merely watching the clock tick over the 59th minute of a very long day.

Progress for sure. But at what cost?

From wincent on Leopard APIs:

Some of the stuff is annoyingly good, in fact; annoying because in many cases I spent days or weeks implementing stuff myself which Apple will be offering “for free” in Leopard.

…

I will continue to support the older versions of Mac OS X, but only for bug fixes; most of the new feature work will go into the Leopard-only versions.

Apple is likely to continue support for their own products on at least Tiger and Leopard. This makes the case for upgrading less compelling. So far I’ve yet to see anything (aside from Time Machine) that I’m dying for in Leopard.

However, if third party applications start to ship for Leopard only, then each application is going add more weight to my desire to upgrade. This is the brilliance of the ease of programming offered by Mac OS X. Something that seems to get better with each and every release.

I’m hearing “Developers, Developers, Developers”, however this time the music is coming from Apple.

Not a good time to be stuck waiting for an API in Vista …

From the perspective of an entrepreneur, an idea on its own is not worth much. To be valuable, the idea has to be nurtured through to a product or a process, and then on to adoption by your end users.

In the “Web 2.0” world, there are lots of new ideas, but very few gaining particular traction.

Andrew has an interesting article examining the difference between an invention and an innovation:

Inventors must start with a world of possibilities and work to create new ideas, patents, prototypes or processes, and propose that other people should consider their contribution to the world (often through publication). Innovators take a possibility or idea, often one that inventors have already proposed, and turn that into something that they follow through to adoption.

Which are you working on?