I was enjoying the heavy rain from my covered back porch today when the sun reflected off of this previously unnoticed spider web. Unfortunately the camera didn’t capture the rainbow-like iridescence that I saw:
Category: Uncategorized
Sunday Reading, 7/25/2010
Just some stuff I enjoyed today and felt like sharing:
“A Buddhist would advise that power comes when you detach from your past. An exec would say you’re only as good as your last Pn’L. They’re both right. When it comes to your genius, there’s always more where that came from.”
– Danielle LaPorte: Cocktail Lines and True Presence: the Power of Not Relying on Your Past
“Look at what you would like to achieve and ask yourself, ‘What is the smallest step in the direction of my dreams that I can take right now?’ Then take that baby step. Now.”
– zen habits: How to be Insanely Productive and Still Keep Smiling
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv7w200rrcs&hl=en_US&fs=1]
Immortal Technique – You Never Know (unofficial video directed by Al Mukadam)
Polyprogramy
Twice on this blog, I’ve written listings of the various software I use: one from when I owned a Dell laptop and worked in all-Microsoft shop, and one half a year after I switched to a MacBook Pro. But I’ve noticed that in just the five months since that last one, my technological behaviors and habits have changed in a less common way. Instead of having an application of choice for a given task, I’m no longer able to pick just one, instead using many similar programs because of their minor advantages over one another:
- I constantly switch between Safari, Firefox and Chrome for browsing. Firefox has my beloved Firebug, Chrome does tabs exactly how I want, and Safari has the most adherence to the Mac OS UI guidelines and seems to hate Flash the least. (Their asynchronous release cycles often also make one browser temporarily less stable than the others.)
- On my Mac, I use three apps for accessing Twitter and Facebook in slightly different ways. (Echofon is great if you view one feed at a time. TweetDeck presents it all but has either weak or no support for browsing and exploring different categories/lists/friends. Socialite is unparalleled at aggregating and organizing feeds from multiple sources, but only if you want to read every single item as short text or a link, and has quite a few buttons that don’t behave as you expect them to.) And on top of that, sometimes I can’t get any app to quite do what I want, so I have to – shudder – actually use the Facebook or Twitter web applications. I do the same thing on my phone, switching between HTC Peep/Friend Stream, Touiteur, and touch.facebook.com . (Not Facebook for Android, though. Whoever let that app see the light of the day needs to be taken out back and forced to use MySpace. Or their own app. I can’t decide which is worse.)
Those are just the most prominent examples, but I find myself app-hopping just as much with my text editors, word processors, SSH clients, video players and photo libraries. (I won’t even get into how I carry around an Android phone but still use my old iPhone on Wi-Fi for certain tasks.)
I think the “normal” behavior is to pick the application that best fits one’s needs and find workarounds for the needs it doesn’t satisfy, and to switch programs if a more fitting one comes along. I used to do this for sure. But I’m finding that recently, I’ve become so picky/anal/demanding that I am no longer willing to settle for an app that addresses 95% of my needs – that I’d rather manage two web browsers for their individual niceties than use one.
My new approach certainly isn’t a comfortable one; running so many programs in parallel is taxing both on my computer and on my multitasking-challenged brain. And then there’s that feeling I get every time I decide to switch from one program to another that does the same thing: the reminder that there isn’t one application that works quite the way I’d like. I guess I’ve done this in different ways in the past, like when I switched e-mail providers and addresses all the time, or when I was installing a different OS on my laptop each weekend. Maybe this is just an uncomfortable period of chaotic upheaval before I settle into something more predictable. Maybe I need to go super minimalist and do everything from a bash shell. One thing, though, is certain: I am too geeky for even my own taste.
Untitled
The press embargo for iPhone 4 reviews is over. Engadget, who does a pretty good job of objectively reviewing devices, has a very thorough iPhone 4 review. I’m surprised by just how positive this review is – Apple must have really hit it out of the park this time. Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky went as far as to write:
“We can’t overstate how high-end the design of the iPhone 4 is. The 3GS now feels cheap and chubby by comparison, and even a phone like the HTC Droid Incredible — which just came out — seems last-generation.”
Way to twist the knife, Topolsky. I feel like I’m missing out now with my 2 month old Incredible. (I keep telling myself, “I went with Android for the software, I went for the software…” It doesn’t help.)
Celebrating Much More Than Dads
This day is for those who are fathers not by blood, but by actions.
This day is for single moms, because one mother’s day is far from enough to recognize just how much you work and sacrifice for your kids.
This day is for the extended family members who step in and share the burden of bringing up a child in often unexpected times of life.
This day is for foster & adoptive parents, who go out of their way to give their everything to a child who has nothing.
This day is for anyone that has a less than perfect relationship with their father – may you have healing, strength, independence, and the grace to forgive.