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.
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.
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.
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.
Interactive Fiction
Found this tonight via this terrific article on Interactive Fiction for iOS , and promptly downloaded Frotz emulator , then proceeded to stay up playing Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which of course reminded me of this scene from Chuck.
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'.
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.
This is a Printing Office
This was on my original blog but fell off at one of my conversions. It's at a place called the Open Book in Minneapolis.
DuckDuckGo Search in Safari6
Turn the safari address/search box into whatever search engine you want via the AnySearch extension.
- Download the extension.
- Go to prefereces/extensions.
- Go to AnysSearch extension.
- Choose your search engine of choice from the drop-down.
Quick Test of Slogger and Day One
I am playing around with Brett Terpstra's Slogger and want to see how the blog posting works with markdownify into Day One.
Loving the update to Day One. Going to have to figure out how I plan on using Day One versus Momento.
Mayo Clinic - Transform
I registered for the Mayo Clinic Transform Conference to be held this September 9-11. Last year I went, and it was the most inspiring conference I'd ever attended. I'm looking forward to this year's and am hopeful and excited that it will be just as good.
I'm really impressed with how the conference is run, and how they handle logistics big and small. As someone whose job is to improve the user experience of things, I am appreciative when people do the little things right, especially when it is apparent that the only way someone would get that little thing right is if they were paying attention to how people were using/doing something.
Fresh Pasta
Tonight we had fresh pasta that we picked up from Broders. I tossed in tomatoes, kale, and eggplant all from my garden. Fresh pasta is a treat.
I'm more detached from the result than I have ever been in my career.
He played the smartest way he could, working as hard as he knew to work. If that ended in a loss … well, life's like that sometimes. But it's no reason to go changing everything.
It's exactly not how most of us think about sports. But maybe it is, in fact, exactly the lesson we should all take from the best teams in the NBA and into our daily lives. Do things the right way, even when that gets you bad results.
This is the same article that my Scott Brook's quote from yesterday was from, just a fantastic article about doing the work. That Shane Battier quote shows a commitment to doing things the right way that most people cannot commit to, but if you can, I'm going to say that whether the results are good or bad, as a person, you will sleep better at night and be happier.
Mountain Lion
I upgraded to Mountain Lion this evening. I cannot believe how easy it was. The longest portion was the download, which doesn't really matter since I could do other things while that was going on.
Once it was downloaded, I kicked the process off, then went and had dinner. By the time dinner was finished, so was my install. Incredible.
There are a million reviews out there already for Mountain including the legendary John Siracusa review. I will say that in the 30 minutes I've been playing around that I love that Reminders and Notification Center are now on my mac. Having Reminders on my mac makes it easier to quickly set up location based reminders to use later on my iPhone.
So in the span of 48 hours I've updated to Squarespace 6 and Mountain Lion and wrapped up 3 projects. Seems like I should be leaving on a high note.
We talk about process, but process is work →
We talk about process, but process is work. It's doing your work every day. It is not just a word, it's an action that we do every day. Nothing is going to change. We're going to come to work today and work on things that we think that is going to help us win tomorrow night, but that process is always about work, and our guys believe in that, and that's not going to change.
This is such a great philosophy and, as is true in most of my sports-related quotes, appropos in all walks of life.
Upgrade to Squarespace 6
Thanks to MacSparky's post on upgrading to Squarespace 6 I made the plunge this week and did the upgrade myself. I was so daft about the announcement that I didn't even realize it was a manual upgrade, I just thought it would happen!
But the process was fairly painless. I had two questions that I emailed to support and in both cases they got back to me promptly and more importantly, got back to me with helpful information.
There is a learning curve insofar as it is different than version 5, but I think I've spent less than two hours on this and have managed to tweak some CSS, add in my typekit font, take off the 'share' button, and make some other changes I wanted. And, I actually like it more than my previous site after only a couple hours.
Kudos to the Squarespace folks for making it easy and dare I say, fun, to play around on my site.
The real risk is in playing it safe
Hans has sometimes been accused (not within earshot) of taking the long way round, but what I’ve seen over the last eight years is that you have to take the long way round to find the new sound, the new approach. I have never worked with someone so dedicated to the idea that the real risk is in playing it safe. Hans taught me that you have to pull aggressively in the wrong direction to discover the possibilities- and that without discovering the possibilities you can never do anything exceptional.
Christopher Nolan, talking about Hans Zimmer, collaboration, and not playing it safe. I saw the movie last night and thought it was fantastic. And I can't imagine it without the soundtrack.
"A clear head will find itself"
Finding oneself when lost is the test of a man ... A thinking man is never lost for long ... keep the old brain in commission and the chances are you will come out of the woods on your feet.