Maybe he is trying to paint a more bearable portrait of himself in his own mind, and our correspondence is just a tool for doing that.

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Some people handle increasing income well, using it as a tool to increase their happiness (Oprah comes to mind).

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Pizzimenti, also a co-founder of chat client startup Olark, says he wrote the tool with his family members who were on Facebook in mind, after the recent bout of privacy changes made the settings more complicated.

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"We thought he was out of his mind, " says William Tursky, a general manager at an Illinois Tool Works factory outside of Chicago that turns out 6 million screws a day.

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Recite is one of the more innovative things to come out of Microsoft's Windows Mobile team in the past few years, a voice-based note-taking tool that gave users a quick way to say whatever was on their mind, archive it, and retrieve it later by speaking any keywords from the recording.

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The choice of appropriate analytical tool (and data) should be driven by: what could change my mind?

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