January 2012
2 posts
“Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still...”
– Wendell Berry, from In Distrust of Movements
November 2011
6 posts
Tomorrow's R&T post is... →
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“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us...”
– E.E. Cummings
“What is deceptive, especially in the West, is our assumption that repetitive and...”
– Dsyke Suematsu from his white paper discussed at Why Ad People Burn Out.
October 2011
2 posts
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his...”
– St. Francis of Assisi
September 2011
2 posts
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something,...”
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
2 tags
August 2011
2 posts
July 2011
6 posts
“Make every detail perfect. Limit the number of details.”
– @Jack
“Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas. A human being is a part of the...”
– Albert Einstein
June 2011
8 posts
“I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being...”
– Dieter Rams, in the Telegraph article, “Dieter Rams: Apple has achieved something I never did”
“Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it...”
– Lao Tsu
Watch“We have seen this gradual transition of the city of Copehagen from a traffic-infested city to really a people-oriented city, which is quite lovely.”
From their pedestrian systems, public spaces, and low-speed areas to the bicycle highways, how Copenhagen has created such a healthy, social urban fabric in such a cold climate should be a real inspiration to Canadian and northern...
“Seeing the Future” at Minimal Mac →
Patrick Rhone’s put down an insightful post over at Minimal Mac on how frustrating it is to see Microsoft floundering in its implementation of what ought to be game-changing technologies, and turning them, such as in the case of Kinect, into little more than toys, or, I might add, such as in the case of the ill-fated Courier tablet, never even letting products see the light of day.
Patrick...
“One of the things about design that makes it such a joy is that it requires...”
– Kent Beck on Coupling and Cohesion
May 2011
12 posts
Big things afoot for The Hit List
I was greeted this morning with a 1.0 update for my install of Potion Factory’s The Hit List ($49.95), which I’ve been using as my primary task-tracking app for the last number of months.
This is a big deal, because The Hit List — once one of the most promising and well-received apps in its space — has been in perpetual beta for a couple years in which the developer, Andy Kim, seemed...
“The Daily Rind”, a Better Way to Plan the Day
Photo: A sample “daily rind” from my notebook
For years my task and schedule management lived across various apps — OmniFocus, Basecamp, Google Calendar, and others (and more recently, as I pared down my “productivity” tools, a simple combination of The Hit List + iCal.) But mapping out what to do throughout my day in a reliable way has always been a problem. Really...
That lump of coal called creative gifting.
Found in among my email drafts.
A ten pound melon, sopping with juice that wants to be released before it rots. And somehow, I’m missing the knife to carve into its rind and let that goodness flow. I beat my melon against a wall, metaphorical or real, trying to release it. I crave having it set free. I long for it. But a heavy thudding fog hangs over my head. Like I’m missing a...
Hiring support people? Look to the trees. →
Great post from CoSupport on getting to the root of whatever problem is requiring you to do inordinate amounts of support:
Throwing more people at a problem doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it a problem for more people. If your staffing is purely reactive, you have chosen for your support to be reactive as well. Why keep hiring people to just stay on top of daily emails?
Instead of...
“It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which...”
– Mr. Rogers
Keeping it Straight, a book by Patrick Rhone →
Patrick has got to be one of the most thoughtful, craftful writers online, and he’s just released his first honest-to-goodness book: Keeping it Straight — You, Me, & Everyone Else. Randy Murray puts it well when he says of it, “Patrick offers the ‘Why’ to GTD’s ‘How.’”
It’s available in in paperback, ePub, PDF, or Amazon Kindle format, and I very much recommend you go...
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 2011
16 posts
Intimacy Publishing
Lately, there’s been some terrifyingly, gut-wrenchingly honest pieces posted by folks I follow closely online. Some samples:
Struggling With Time & Attention by Ian Hines
Tuesday, 12pm by Pat Dryburgh
Cranking by Merlin Mann
What’s in a Name? by Patrick Rhone (and its companion, My Mother)
Not all of the stories I’m talking about are even put down in text. For instance,...
“Rdio is the Netflix of Music” →
Looks like I got quoted by the prolific writer and podcaster Mike Vardy! For the record, I completely agree with his caveat about Rdio actually having a better and larger collection of content than Netflix does (at least in Canada.) I don’t even have a Netflix account at this point, while my Rdio subscription is perhaps the best $10 I spend each month.
“A great idea without great communication is worthless. And great communication...”
– Michael Mistretta in Why Great Writing Does Matter Online (via Jorge Quinteros)
“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop...”
– David Foster Wallace in The Pale King