On Success in Creative Endeavors: How to Write Literary Masterpieces of Sheer Gilded Genius by Dumpster Diving

My alter-ego has a guest blog up on the Penumbra magazine site today that talks about how to succeed at creative endeavors. You know, writing and artwork, music and sculpture. All the good stuff.

And yes, scientific research is very much a creative endeavor as well.

In this short essay I also recount a story that Gary Starkweather, the inventor of the laser printer, used to tell about how he evaluated start-up companies, and I promise you will laugh when you hear how he did it.

I used to frequent the hardware lab where Gary worked before he retired so I consider myself very lucky to have spent a lot of time talking shop with him and enjoying his jokes. And this one is one of my favorite of his stories that he would tell about working in Silicon Valley. Great fun.

How to Write Literary Masterpieces of Sheer Gilded Genius by Dumpster Diving

PS: Gary was also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in the New Yorker about The Creation Myth. Seek it out – it’s a great read on the truth about innovation!

Organizing the Blog; A Bunch of Posts Will Be Coming and Going

Hey folks, I’m going to be experimenting with hosting all of my research papers inside this blog and so I will be adding a whole bunch of posts in the next few days to start testing that out.

My old static web page listing my research publications, videos, and other things has gotten woefully out of date. Rather than wasting more time on that, my plan is to instead set up the categories on my blog so that folks can just click on them to see lists of papers on different topics, or get a page that lists all my scientific papers, and so forth.

Anyway, apologies on the number of posts that will be coming across, but when it’s done it will be a good information resource on all the crazy sensor and devices and pen and touch and interaction work I’ve done over the years.

Thanks,

Ken

Welcome to The Past and Present Future

I’ll be using this blog as an easy way to post my research– new results, videos, papers, talks, you name it– as well as opions and observations about the vast world of technology from the perspective of a researcher with a long track record in the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction).

This is also the new home of the AlpineInker blog, which used to live on a blogging site now retired by Microsoft.

So, stay tuned as lots of content will soon be hosted here.

And be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to stay posted on my latest research papers and developments.