ideoverse home to the ramblings, experiments, resume, and portfolio of Adam Dunford

We were a little stumped this year in deciding what to give Wendi’s mom and her new husband for Christmas. They have no kids at home, their home itself is nicely furnished, and they were able to visit us a few months ago on their honeymoon. They frankly don’t really “need” anything.

So we (okay, Wendi, she’s the creative one) decided to give them a share of a sheep from Heifer International. What they do is use the money from donations to purchase anything from pigs to bees to goats (and of course cows) and then gives these animals to people throughout the world. This gift of livestock is designed to be self-sustaining, with the recipient managing the resource through milking, breeding, etc., thus providing long-term benefit to the receivers and their communities.

I’m not sure how they took it, but I guess we are pretty weird, so they may have just chalked it up to us crazy tree-hugging Vermonters (by way of Utah and Georgia).

2 years. 1 month. 23 days. I cried my eyes out.

Ali Walks – Quicktime, 313kb

After a mighty fine partnership with Dan Rubin at SuperfluousBanter, Didier Hilhorst has gone off on his own with an even more excellent solo effort: Nundroo.

One of his first entries describes how he is going to be leaving the field of economics and going into interaction design, attending the exclusive Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy.

While such a step seems pretty enormous, he obviously has talent to spare, so more power to him, right? What I find particularly interesting however is the point he makes that:

Follow your passion with dedication and talent and money will follow.

I would agree that for success (in this case, money), you need both dedication and talent. But what if I’m reading this wrong and Didier is trying to make a different point? Could it be said that talent and money follow passion and dedication, that so long as you have a desire, you can gain the talent necessary to be truly remarkable at something?

Take art, for instance. I enjoy drawing and at one time in my life it could have been called my passion, but I soon figured out that I didn’t have the innate talent and skill that others had, so it slowly lost its importance in my life. Did I just give up too early? Did I miss the dedication part and so lost out on a chance to become a “great artist”?

Or, more likely, Didier is saying that success requires both dedication and talent, and I’m just getting worked up over a compound sentence with ambiguous clauses.

No wonder people love Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, currently number 8 on Amazon’s Bestsellers List.