I recently stumbled on this story involving a flight, an expired passport, and a fiance waiting at the destination. A scary story, which reminds me that I'll have to renew my passport which expires in less than a month. Last year around this time I almost missed a training gig because of an expired passport. Which is why I ended up getting a year-long "express" passport which is why I'll again have to queue for a passport in December with plenty of other stuff I could/should be doing...

Subliminal messages. What do you think of them? Do you feel they're ok? Do you feel they're immoral? Even though research has apparently failed to show that subliminal messages have any effect, I'd hazard a guess that most people consider the use of subliminal messaging suspect at best.

What if I told you that you're being affected by something rather similar to (but not the same thing as) subliminal messages every single time you speak with someone?

The clothes you wear, the perfume you use, the words you choose, the facial expressions you make, the movement, everything. All that stuff is essentially a more or less distant cousin of subliminal messaging from the "unconscious" recipient's perspective. And we do that all the time.

Is that a bad thing? Should we stop wearing clothes? Should we stop smelling good? Should we inject Botox to our cheeks once a week to lose those facial expressions? I don't think so. Do you? Does this make any sense? Why am I still awake at this hour? And why am I blogging about subliminal messages?

Kevin Lawrence's old post from 2004, titled Fight complexity with complexity, is a nice story about the value refactoring can create.

(via Keith Ray)