Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.
~ Ron Swanson.
On Winter in the Midwest
'This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.
~ Willa Cather. My Antonia
I feel like this every winter...
The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
~ Willa Cather. My Antonia
Really enjoying this. It's not a page-turner, but Cather can really paint a portrait of a scene.
Focus
The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it...
~ Thomas Edison. via article on Johnny Holland
My Antonia
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.
~ Willa Cather. My Antonia
Just started reading this after I saw an article stating that Willa Cather was one of the best and most under-rated authors of the 20th century. This phrase caught my eye.
"I would have liked to have seen Montana"
I'm heading out to Montana for a couple days to see some of my college buddies. I'm looking forward to it even though I don't ski. There is not phone coverage at all so I will be 'off the grid' for four days. I haven't been without phone service that much in over 5 years.
And the quote in the title bar, it's Sam Neill from Hunt for Red October.
;)
Five Guys Burgers
so not good for me, but so so good
Meatballs
Just a test to see what an image from my iPhoto photo stream looks like unedited when I drop it in here.
The reason that Pandora exists
The Hans Zimmer channel
This is fantastic for when I'm working. I cannot have total quiet, and no vocals is better for working.
It was the best of times
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair
~ Charles Dickens. Tale of Two Cities
Missed chances
But stupidity is one of two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
~ Stephen King. 11/22/63
Embedding Twitter Posts
This has probably been around for a while, but I just saw it today. Twitter now makes it easy to embed Twitter posts into a blog.
Simply:
Click on a twitter post so that it expands to show the time of the posting and a hyperlink labeled "details".
Click on the details link.
- Click on the 'embed this tweet' link.
- Copy the html tab and choose an alignment.
Reviewing videos of user observations I did in Dec. using an iphone 4s, looks great (not in terms of my skill but the clarify of the images)
— Kevin Farner (@kevinfarner) January 7, 2012
The great thing about this implementation is that the reader can interact with the tweet, e.g. replying or retweeting the post.
Jawbone Jambox
This year for Christmas my company, Gomoll Research + Design got everyone the Jawbone Jambox for Christmas. I'd seen the device on the web, including the youtube video for it. It was neat, looked like a lego brick but I wasn't sure about it. Now that I've had it for a couple weeks, I can tell you I love it.
Like so many of these things, I ended up appreciating a feature that I didn't even think was important. I have several iPod/iPhone speakers at home, but they are now firmly ensconced in their respective plugged-in places. The Jambox comes with me everywhere.
The portability and ease-of-connectivity are what makes this device great. The sound is good. I don't confess to be an audiophile, and I can get my other speakers to play louder than the Jambox, but most of the time that I am listening to music, "turning it up to 11" is not what I need. I want to be able to grab the speaker in one hand, my iPhone in the other, and listen to music in the shower. I want to be able to grab and go and listen to this in my car.
(I have a tape converter in my car, i.e. I put the tape in the cassette deck and plug the attached wire into the earphone port of the device. The problem is that the tape converter is so loud it sounds like someone is rolling a cart of ball bearings right next to me. I've tried at least five different types of converters, and over a small amount of time, they all get ridiculously loud.)
And I want any of my devices to easily connect. With the bluetooth capability it is as easy as turning the Jambox on, then going to the bluetooth settings on the iPhone/iPad/computer etc.
It's not cheap, but if you want a portable speaker that you can grab and go, with one hand, that sounds good, connects easily, and has great battery life, I recommend the Jambox.
But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
~ Herman Melville. Moby Dick
Meaning
It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.
~ Jean-Pierre Dupuy cited by James Gleick. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
The Infinite Playlist
It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist, and he sees how mixed is the blessing: “anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.”
~ James Gleick. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Information Retrieving
The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: “Unfortunately, ‘information retrieving,’ however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one’s own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature.”
~ James Gleick. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound.
~ Stephen King. 11/22/63
We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.
~ Stephen King. 11/22/63
11/22/63
I am a huge fan of Stephen King. I've always loved the way he tells a story. The macabre and strange nature of his books were never what got me hooked. Rather, it was (and still is) the way he tells a story, and I always liked how he wrote characters. (As an aside, his book On Writing, is my favorite book on the topic.)
I was in high school in the 80's when Stephen King was on an amazing run. I didn't read them in order but once I read Christine I was hooked. So I then went to the library and started to read some of his other books as well. I don't recall the order in which I read them, but I read a lot of them, and read them more than once. The ones I vividly recall are The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and Pet Sematary. To this day, I trace my dislike of cats to that book.
I was among the very excited when I heard about the book he was writing about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63. I thought I would be excited because he was going to write about the actual assassination in detail and bring up some of the different conspiracy angles and tell about that day in ways that no one else had. And to be sure, he does. But that had nothing to do with why I loved the book. And I knew that about 5 pages into the book. Stephen King is great at 'the hook', the angle that gets a reader sucked in. I cared about the characters and the story and ended up reading this in about 3 sittings, only because I couldn't cram it all in, in one.
Go read this book.