Knocking out some books this weekend

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I decided to turn this rainy Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend into a catch-up on reading day, especially because I had so many in-process books. So I wrapped up all these books today.

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe I have become fascinated with the math/computer science history of the 1930's to 1950's lately. This book was exactly what I was looking for.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I enjoyed this book almost as much as Turing's Cathedral, just a great portrait of a particular period in American history and some key characters in it.

Man's Search For Himself

Man's Search For Himself

This book is entirely different than the other two and I can't remember how I even came by it, but, it is a book written in the early 1950's about the state of man, and I was delighted that this book helped inform the previous two, and visa versa. Namely, the first two books talked about the math and science involved in computers and bombs during the middle of the 20th century, and Rollo May's book looks at the ramifications of that from a psychoanalytical perspective. The other thing I liked about this book was how relevant it is 60 years later.

The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

I saw the author's Ted Talk online and bought the book and am 100% onboard with it's findings.

A History of Reading

A History of Reading

Not that this was a light read, but it was less taxing intellectual and just an enjoyable treatise on the title that I found enjoyable.

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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment...
The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility...
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

                  ~ Rollo May. Man's Search for Himself

Change as a good thing

This is a great article about the San Antonio Spurs that relates to anyone who has been doing something for a long time.

(Background: The Spurs and Lakers are the two teams that can be called a basketball dynasty over the last 10-15 years having won 4 and 5 titles respectively in that timeframe. The Spurs have had to undergo some radical shifts in their style of play over the last couple year.)

This secton is a gem.

On a professional level, Popovich said that the change wasn't merely a product of necessity, but also rejuvenating for a coaching staff and roster that had known only one thing for the better part of a decade.
"It was great because we'd been the same team for a long time," Popovich said. "If you want to keep winning you have to be aware of changes that might need to be made. It was pretty obvious we had to do it. But it did make it more fun. I think the players enjoyed it, too. They were probably getting bored of the same old stuff."
This is the language of a creative person, someone who values not only result, but the process of his work. Popovich isn't just a tactician, he's one of the most expansive thinkers in the game.

                  ~ Efficiency Experts Strike Again

re: stacks

I've been a fan of Bon Iver since For Emma, Forever Ago came out, and being a Minnesota, WI person (lived in WI my whole life until 2004 then moved to MN) I'm sure made me like the album more, but for whatever reason, I've been listening to that album on repeat for days now. The whole album is great, but the song re:stacks is just staggeringly beautiful.


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"We're just not interested in making software we don't love"

Part of our ethos is that the people working on the software are also users, and passionate about it – we develop software that we want to use ourselves. We’re just not interested in making software we don’t love. If some users decide to go elsewhere because our crazy ideals – that’s no way to run a business! – drive them mad and they just can’t wait, we understand that, appreciate it, but such factors cannot have any influence on our design and development process, and we hope we’ll win them back with an end product that is worth waiting for.


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We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born...A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future. We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings.

                  ~ Rollo May. The Courage to Create

Goodbye Calepin (and thanks!) Hello Scriptogr.am

I was sad to see the news on Twitter today that the Calepin site/service is going away. Calepin was/is a Web site that allowed you to create static files in Markdown on Dropbox and then publish them to a blog. I only posted a handful of writing posts, but I liked the idea of this type of service.

What is intriguing, however, is that in the Twitter post, the creator of Calepin pointed people to a very similar service called Scriptogr.am . I decided to perform a quick experiment. I went to Scriptogr.am's site and created my url name and authorized it to sync with Dropbox. It created a folder in Dropbox for the site.

I then went and moved all my files from the Calepin Dropbox folder to the Scriptogr.am Dropbox folder, pressed a sync (publish) button on Scritpogr.am and 'voila' the files were all there. I ended up doing some clean-up, changed the publish date and did a find/replace on Calepin but that was my choice. All I had to do was move the files from one folder to another and I was back in business.

I totally understood in a 'this affects me directly' way and not just a theoretical way, the things that Dave Winer has been saying about avoiding lock-in and the benefits of having your own data. Even if I had done nothing, the files would have still been on my computer when Calepin shut down, but with alternatives sites, I can get right back up too.

Positive Psychology

I started following the blog Simplicity is Bliss in January, and I'm so glad I did. I started because I am an OmniFocus devotee and the author of the blog, Sven Fechner, writes often about maximizing the use of OmniFocus. Really good articles.

But the article about which I'm posting today has nothing to do with OmniFocus, but rather is an article about a Ted Talk he referenced back in February. I set the link aside until I had a chance to watch with the family. We finally got around to that last night.

The speaker, Shawn Achor is an incredibly talented speaker. He is witty, funny, passionate.

His focus is on positivity and how you can train your brain to focus on the positive. He recommends very doable things you can add to your daily life that will 're-wire' your brain to look for positivity. After watching together, we decided (okay, I decided, I'm the dad, I get to do that, it's one of the perks) that we are going to try this out.

Go read Sven's article about it, then go watch the Ted Talk, it'll be the best 12 minutes you spend today.

My Multi-Browser approach to privacy

I still remember when someone first introduced me to Google in the early 2000's. It was so much better than everything else that was out there. The results were more relevant and there was less cruft on the pages. It was terrific.

Then gmail came out, and it was a gift from the heavens. Actually, before gmail, I was paying for email from a terrific company called Oddpost. They were very early developers of an AJAX interface and had what is still my favorite email interface. Unfortunately, they got bought by yahoo, and with the horrible design aesthetic Yahoo has, and the unbelievable amount of advertising crap they put in front of me, the technology could be so cool as to have Princess Leia read my emails to me in a holograph and I still wouldn't use it. So gmail it was. The ads were minimally invasive (from a design standpoint) and the ability to make rules and labels and folders were fantastic. Still really like it.

But I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the path Google is going down when it comes to privacy. (And I've never been happy with Facebook's at all. But I moved to MN from my home in WI, and I stay on Facebook to stay connected with all parents, siblings, cousins, and next generation of kids coming up.)

I'm all aboard the train that is leaving Google station. I started using DuckDuckGo last summer after hearing about it from Garrick Van Buren. In the last couple months I've read articles by MacSparky and Ben Brooksthat also offered alternatives and ways to make it easy to have DuckDuckGo as your default search engine.

But I don't have a good alternative for gmail right now. And as I said, I'm still on Facebook. So, call me paranoid, but I've come up with some ideas on how I'm going to use those two services and keep my privacy to a minimum, with a minimum of hoops to jump through.

For the record I have a Mac, and Safari is my default browser. Last night, I downloaded the Opera browser as well as the Omniweb browser. In Opera, the only thing I will be doing is checking gmail. In Omniweb, checking Facebook.

I use Quickeys to set up keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions. So using control-O opens up Opera, and control-F (for Facebook) opens up the Omniweb browser. This allows me to keep my productivity (not having to remember which browser opens which site) while also feeling somewhat better about how I am being tracked (by keeping the two biggest offenders quarantined.)

So, many thanks to those folks on the web that are experimenting with this stuff and posting it for people like me to learn from.

Music as of late

I posted back in January about how much I was enjoying the Hans Zimmer channel on Pandora. He is a prolific composer and has created the scores for movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, and the Dark Knight. I have since created one or two other channels that are great for working. Research shows that if you listen to music that has vocals in it, you are diverting some of your brain to those lyrics whether you realize it or not, and I have noticed that I work better with non-vocals music.

I added a Bear McCreary channel. There is some overlap, but not all. And I loved Bear's work in Battlestar Galactica.

But my favorite addition to my musical catalog in 2012 (maybe even all of 2011) is the Moneyball soundtrack. My buddy Kris told me to give it a listen, and I listen to it constantly now. It is a terrific soundtrack. Give it a listen.

Fish and PBR

One weekend a year for the past 25 years, 4 of my high school buddies and I get together at a cabin in WI and just relax. And my buddy Mark ice fishes. He is a helluva fisherman. This year he caught a couple fish, and we put one down on a PBR box. This might be one of my favorite pictures ever.