"When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself"

 

Not sweating it

Max Fisher: So tell me Curly, how do you know Miss Cross? Dr. Peter Flynn: We went to Harvard together. Max Fischer: Oh that's great. I wrote a hit play and directed it, so I'm not sweating it either.

Max Fisher: So tell me Curly, how do you know Miss Cross?

Dr. Peter Flynn: We went to Harvard together.

Max Fischer: Oh that's great. I wrote a hit play and directed it, so I'm not sweating it either.

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something you have left behind, let it be something good.

                  ~ Poster at my doctor's office

Draft: a new online text editor and collaboration tool

Just started using the new web text editor/collaboration tool Draft and it is intriguing. I wish it weren't called Draft as 'Drafts' on the iPad and iPhone is my favorite and most used app currently. That pettiness aside, it really feels like Nathan Kontny is on to something. The ability to see the markup by others is far and away superior to google docs.

And he added a bookmarklet that allows you do use Draft anywhere you would write. For instance, this is a blog post to my Squarespace account. I went to my blog, clicked Add Post, then clicked on the bookmarklet. It opened a new tab and I'm actually typing this in Draft.

If you can read this, then it posted to Squarespace successfully!

Habits Update

Shortly after New Year's I wrote a short piece on habits and thought it would be a good time to check-in.

So far, the habit part is going well. I've been doing it in small bits and just started back on the exercise side of things this week.

I started by adding LoseIt to my iPhone. This allows me to keep track of my eating habits. I'm not worrying about finding the exact right food, but I have gotten into the habit of tracking everything I eat, even if it's a quick, small snack like a piece of cheddar cheese on a cracker. The critical thing isn't whether I estimated wrong on a homemade piece of banana bread, but that I am more aware of when I eat. I have cut down on my sweets and late-night eating, as well as cut back further on stopping for fast food when I'm out and about. Now, that's not to say I've lost a ton of weight, I haven't, but I haven't set goals up for that yet. I am really trying to be careful about building these habits up a little at a time and not trying to do everything at once, as my history has shown that it's not sustainable.

In addition, I wrote about Good Habits. For the way my brain works, this has been a wonderful app. I created a handful of easy habits that I've wanted to work on and set them up to tick them off. The first one was flossing. I have always been bad about it, and that's stupid as it is a simple thing that takes two minutes a day. The next one I added was my 'gratitudes'. Following the 'Happiness Advantage' book, every morning I think of three things for which I'm grateful. Then I added meditation. I started by meditating five minutes a day and after about forty-five days, upped it to ten minutes a day.

Recently I added my exercises and writing. In late June / early July, my boys and I are going to Philmont Camp in New Mexico for a 10 day 80 mile hike. That's the motivation I need for my exercise. So I have added push-ups, sit-ups, kettlebells, and treadmill to the habits. I am starting small with all of them and will up the minimums over time. But the idea at first is to build the habit, i.e. build the time into my day to do this. Right now I'm doing 1.5 miles on the treadmill and will be upping it by half mile increments every two weeks.

As an add-on to that my wife and I bought FitBits. We are setting goals for walking and flights of stairs. I really like that the FitBit tracks sleep as well and have been shocked by (a) how little sleep I get and (b) how many times a night I wake up. Going to have to look into that this year too.

The writing component is 500 words and can be anything, even a work product, as long as it is not an email. I use Day One for journaling so may use that, as well as this blog. I may allow myself an 'out' if I find a quote that is especially meaningful. And I'm okay with that.

Ultimately, I've made the decision that phase 1 is building the habit, however small, into my day, build the ticker up in my Good Habits app, and set some goals in my FitBit. Then, over time, maybe over years, I'll build up deeper, more challening goals.

Habits

Newsflash. Building habits are good for you.

Well, it's not really news, but it seems like everyone needs to learn this for himself, and in my case, re-learn it. But I just finished reading The Power of Habit and it was the lesson I needed at the right time. Earlier in 2012 I read The Happiness Advantage which is a book about building good habits as well as a new-ish trend in psychology called positive psychology, which is basically about building habits that can turn your attitude around.

Then I listened to Mac Power Users episode on Geek Fitness. I jumped in. The apps in question are Lose It and Good Habits. I've wanted something like Good Habits for a while. Basically it's a streak builder, e.g. if you've exercised for 10 days in a row it will show 10 next to that habit, and if you skip a day it cycles over down to zero, so the pressure is on for you to keep going even when you don't want to.

I'll have more to say on habits over 2013, hopefully good things on them, but for now, like many people at the beginning of a new year, I'm excited about trying to build some better habits in my life.

Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants. Comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

~ Winston Churchill quoted in the book by William Manchester and Paul Reid. The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm

It was a story that took on the moral power of what heroism is and what it is not. In a post-Davy Crockett universe we have hungered for meaning. In the void, we will hang our affections almost anywhere. The {undeserved} of our world are trumpeted on the front pages of our papers and on television-while the {deserved} of our age toil, strive, live, and die unnoticed.

                  ~ Stephen Tobolowsky. The Dangerous Animals Club

Fairly or unfairly, many people are tried in life. The mistake people make is that they think the trial is a sign of failure. It's not. It's only a doorway that leads to who you really are.

                  ~ Stephen Tobolowsky. The Dangerous Animals Club

Loving this book.

Musicality

I use Last.FM as a logging system for my music, nothing more. When I played music in iTunes there were no issues. But I use Pandora at my desk quite a bit, and I wasn't crazy about the work-arounds to get Pandora to work with Last.FM. There were various web-solutions that put a 'wrapper' around Pandora and logged the activity. The issue was a personal one, I don't leave my browser open and was often quitting the service inadvertently.

Enter Musicality. It is still a 'wrapper' in that the browser-version of Pandora is inside the shell of Musicality. But Musicality is not in the browser. It sits in my menu-bar and is a desktop based software. This allows some iTunes-like features, such as creating keyboard shortcuts to Like or Dislike a song. It works great with AirPlay as well.

So the only gap I have in terms of logging music now is Pandora on my iOS devices. Getting there.

You don't get to say "I'm bored."

'I’m bored' is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored'.

                  ~ Louis CK

iTunes Audiobook

A reminder to myself.

When burning a CD Audiobook to iTunes:
* Select all tracks
* Go to the options tab
* Change 'Media Kind' to Audiobook
* Now here's big one that I forget. If the 'Media Kind' is disabled and can't be changed, TURN OFF iTunes Match.