Interesting and thought-provoking, but I have a feeling things will turn out differently – it’s too early to make definitive predictions, though.

☯

Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are still a constant and reading is the one form of entertainment that withstands constant interruptions and truly random access, so I’ve been on a sort of a Sci-Fi classics binge, interspersing them with more recent works, and instead of posting a triptych, this week I thought I’d go for a six-pack – I may lack the energy to draft new articles, but putting together my usual notes on each book I read is pretty easy, and a great help when I stumble across something in my shelves I haven’t seen in a while.

Although I’m also reading other kinds of books (more on those in a later post), one of the reasons I like the genre is that it reflects people’s expectations and concerns towards the future – it’s fun to see how underlying themes reflected their author’s background and perception of possible futures and the way plot devices and scope changed over time – we’re now looking towards the post-human and pervasive technology where a couple of decades back (or earlier) the themes tended to reflect post-war concerns and rely less on operatic settings, and I’m always trying to catch glimpses of our collective unconscious in current writers’ topics.

But without further ado, here are the past few weeks’ books:

The Forever War	Mindbridge	The Engineer, Reconditioned
I read this one ages back, and dug it out last week for a re-read, since it was one of the first books I got from the S.F. Masterworks collection. As such things go, it is a decent rendition of what interstellar war would be like at relativistic speeds and with the resulting time dilation between campaigns, and it’s become a classic because of the way the resulting dislocation mirrors that of every infantryman – Joe Haldeman being a war veteran himself.	I wasn’t at all enthused by this one, though. The overall writing is terse and with little character depth (occasionally reading like a bunch of mission reports), and the plot isn’t exactly crammed with original ideas even if there were some interesting bits. So I can’t really recommend it, although it was interesting enough to pass the time.	This is a collection of Asher’s short stories, some of which fill in a few blanks in his Polity series and/or provide a sort of continuation to the same. I found them to be an entertaining mosaic, well-suited to my foreshortened attention span and providing a few glimpses into other avenues he might yet explore in his writing.
The Stars My Destination	Nova War	Hilldiggers
Another re-read, prompted in part by my realization that I had previously come across something along the lines of Jumper (read a few weeks back) but with grander scope. A masterpiece of imagination and ingenuity, the way the lead character changes as his motivation makes the action progress becomes an essential part of the story and makes it truly gripping, even if there are some decidedly odd angles to the plot.	Next in the history arch from Stealing Light (previously), this is a competent, fast-paced and entertaining sequel, although there are a few bits where the backstory is repurposed to expand on some characters’ motivations in a way that does not feel wholly consistent. Nevertheless, there is much to take in and enjoy	Classical Asher that I only came across recently (I seem to be reading his Polity series in the most random order possible), it’s a smooth, fast-paced and sticky tome, with satisfyingly complex characters that play against an original (if sometimes predictable) plot line.

☯ (comments allowed)

Devices

Notes on some e-ink¹ devices other than the Kindle and the Sony Reader:

Device	Date	Link	Notes
Misc.	Mar 02	ASUS DR-900 e-reader hands-on	Doesn’t look half bad.
	Oct 30	ASUS to launch 3G, WiMAX-equipped e-book readers by March, 2010?	I remember when they claimed they’d do a sub-$200 netbook.
	Oct 27	A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades	Truly impressive.
Alex	Feb 24’10	Spring Design’s Alex pushed to first week of March	The timing’s awful.
	Jan 06’10	Spring Design Alex hands-on	Interesting, although it seems little polished yet.
	Nov 06	Spring Design Alex comes out to play and show off Marvell’s Armada chip	Looks pretty nice, actually.
	Nov 03	Spring Design Sues Barnes and Noble — Nook Infringes on the Alex	So if this is true, they “borrowed” the idea. Weird.
Samsung E series	Feb 22’10	Samsung’s E6, E101 and E61 e-readers shown on video	Interesting, but… a stylus?
Plastic Reader	Jan 07’10	Plastic Logic debuts QUE proReader, shows off truVue publications	Interesting – they claim not to be doing “just an e-reader”. Would it be a usable personal assistant as well?
		Plastic Logic QUE proReader first hands-on	The bezel is far too wide. Can’t anybody design one of these things with a smaller bezel and good controls?
	Jul 22	Plastic Logic’s E-Book Reader Will Surf AT&T and Wi-Fi	Makes perfect sense.
	May 27	Plastic Logic e-book reader: now with 3G	Let’s wait and see.
	Feb 9	Plastic Logic announces content partners, open publishers platform	It’s going to be interesting to keep track of this one.
Nook	Jan 23	Learn from my misery: Don’t buy a nook.	A remarkable tale of truly appalling customer service.
	Dec 21	Nook 1.1 doesn’t affect hacks, root still possible	It’s going to be fun watching this unfold.
	Dec 17	Nook hacked with Web browser, Facebook, and Twitter apps for starters	Yep. Pretty predictable, really. Might get my hands on one if they sort out connectivity and browsing.
	Dec 14	Barnes & Noble Nook torn down and rooted—but still respected	Well, now that’s interesting… Having the OS on an SD card makes it hackable as hell, but the question remains as to whether it’s worth the bother…
	Dec 11	Advogato: Blog for mjg59	Slow and pokey.
	Dec 10	State of the Art – Barnes and Noble’s Nook Reader Fails to Live Up to Promises – NYTimes.com	Pogue weighs in.
	Dec 09	Nook E-Reader Has Potential, but Needs Work	Mossberg says it’s better to wait.
	Dec 08	Buy for Free?	A more interesting review than the mainstream ones.
	Dec 7	Barles & Noble Nook Review	Not overwhelming, then.
	Dec 05	Barnes & Noble’s Nook gets a brief and early hands-on	Hmmm.
	Dec 05	Nook ship date pushed back to January 15th for new pre-orders, no Nooks in stores before Christmas?	Slipping and slipping…
	Dec 01	Nook ship date slips to January 11th, supply chain managers weep	Well, there goes Christmas.
	Nov 30	Nook begins shipping, in select Barnes & Noble stores on December 7th	I’m curious as to when real-world reviews will start popping up.
	Nov 22	e-Book Echo: Nook Sells Out; Kindle Update Coming	Selling out isn’t that relevant: what is relevant is how many units they produced in the first place…
	Nov 03	Spring Design sues Barnes & Noble over the Nook	Now this is a novel business strategy… Work together and clone things.
	Oct 23	Barnes & Noble nook LendMe feature is severely limited, assumes you have friends	I love the way simple, straighforward stuff is completely screwed up by DRM.
	Oct 22	Barnes & Noble Puts Wi-Fi, HSPA in Nook Ebook Reader	So, apparently, no web browser. Meh.
		Barnes & Noble’s Nook Reads Books	The format support looks a bit confusing, but the real issue is whether they’ll make it easy to import already existing stuff (not to mention whether they’ll allow even basic browsing via Wi-Fi). I’d love to sync my Google Reader feeds with one of these.
	Oct 20	Barnes & Noble puts Android on an e-reader with the Nook	Impressive at $259 and considering it runs a form of Android, but still US-centric.
		Barnes & Noble Nook’s first close-up
		Barnes & Noble Nook is Official — Knocks the Kindle to the Curb
		Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader leaks a bit early: $259, pre-orders are live
	Oct 15	Barnes & Noble Reader Deets Appear	Seems interesting, but the pictures are… strange.
	Oct 14	Barnes & Noble twin-screen e-reader revealed early?	Nothing useful about DRM or format support.
	Oct 9	Barnes and Noble ‘confirms’ color Plastic Logic e-book reader for Spring 2010	Couldn’t care less about the color bit – but would love to get a feel for build quality. Oh, and the video doesn’t show anything of interest whatsoever, and was contradicted the day after.
Sep 18	Barnes and Noble e-book reader hits the FCC	Looks like it has a SIM card slot cover, but it’s too early to tell. Not holding my breath.
Jul 20	Barnes & Noble partners with Plastic Logic, becomes ‘exclusive eBookstore provider’ for its e-reader	This keeps getting better and better. It will probably be hideously expensive.
Bookeen	Jul 7	Video: Bookeen Cybook Opus ebook reader gets handled and adored	Again, smallish.
	May 18	Bookeen Cybook Opus- Pocketable E-Book Reader	Looks nice, if smallish.
BeBook	May 14	BeBook mini and BeBook 2 priced, 3G added to the latter	Not much detail, though.
	Apr 30	BeBook mini e-reader with 5-inch display makes pictorial debut	Not sure if this is a good idea, but it does look cute.
	Apr 22	BeBook Reader Captured on Video	Short, not much interesting.
	Mar 6	BeBook e-reader getting WiFi, new firmware update: eyes-on	Wi-Fi access via SD card, which isn’t all that bad.
Foxit	Dec 10	Foxit busts out ebook store for eSlick owners	Yet another store.
	Mar 30	Foxit’s eSlick e-reader ships out, gets photographed	Not much to go on.
Samsung Papyrus	Mar 24	Samsung Papyrus e-book reader on track for Korean launch this summer	Somewhat oddly designed, and sadly carries a stylus.
Mentor	Mar 24	Mentor-branded 5-inch e-reader surfaces alongside PocketBook collection	Tiny, which seems to buck current trends for larger screens.
Fujitsu FLEPia	Mar 18	Fujitsu’s Color E-book Reader: Mobile Computer Form Factor of the Future?	The title is a bit pretentious, but the device, despite its odd name is interesting because it sports a color screen.
Boox	Feb 27	Onyx International to unveil the Boox e-reader at CeBIT	First I ever heard of it.

—

¹ E Ink is a Philips division devoted to “electronic ink” displays. ↩

☯

Brilliant. I liked Finding Nemo best – Dory/Ellen DeGeneres out-acted everybody anyway.

☯

I’ve always found Despair Inc.‘s motivational posters nothing short of brilliant, and ever since they put up a DIY page I’ve been having a go at making some myself – the gallery below contains the 25 latest ones (the rest are in the site gallery).

Except for a few who are part of miscellaneous promotional materials and others courtesy of Pedro Pinheiro, the vast majority of the images used were fished willy-nilly off the net completely at random, and I’ll give due credit (or remove them) according to their rights’ owners wishes.

☯

Simply hilarious. And a cardinal example of how overly simple public APIs can be used to do a bit more than just mashups.

☯

You have got to be kidding me: “a more professional color scheme with purple and orange”? Do these people even have a clue about visual design?

☯

Something new, something borrowed, something blue, something hyped. There’s a bit too much enthusiasm about this story right now, but at least this is a reasonably comprehensive list.

☯

I’ve been wondering about whether I should get one myself, and the return of decent weather has made me muse about taking up photography again in a more serious fashion. Alas, budget constraints don’t help.

☯

This site is not a commercial operation, and despite my use of AdSense, it runs effectively at a loss. So if you feel like supporting it in any way, here's four ways to do it - two directly related to its operation and two more personal ones:

1. Try out Dropbox via this referral link (I use it for maintaining site content, and I'll get extra storage).
2. Create your own Slicehost VPS using this other link (which will go directly against my hosting costs).
3. Donate cash (which I'll typically use to pay for some of the shareware I try out) via PayPal:

4. Or pick out something from my Amazon.co.uk Wishlist, which has stuff I (or my kids) would enjoy.

☯

Squeeze is a background file compressor that takes advantage of the new filesystem compression technology included in Snow Leopard:

It does, however, have a few shortcomings (like not allowing you to compress files off your boot volume), and if you want to compress specific files manually you may find that afsctool does all you need (and includes source code).

☯

The mobile platform sponsored by Google as part of the Open Mobile Alliance, evolved from their 2005 acquisition of the company with the same name.

The following is a link dump regarding both the platform and those devices more closely associated with it:

Resources:

Date	Link	Notes
2010
Feb 26	Nexus One coming to Vodafone UK in April, says Telegraph	No comment
Feb 15	Nexus One could be more Environment Friendly	Why add the charger instead of replacing it?
Feb 14	New Nexus One ROM leaks, fixes more radio issues?	Another try, I guess…
Feb 11	Nexus One 3G problems persist after update—is it a design problem?	Oh, yeah, sure. Like baseband firmware fixes poor coverage.
Feb 09	Google makes biggest gain in smartphone market share	More pretty charts (US-centric, therefore meaningless). The difference here is that there are umpteen versions of Android devces and far fewer of other platforms…
Feb 08	Google reduces its Nexus One termination fee	Interesting.
Feb 03	Nexus One gets a software update, enables multitouch	Will it change anything?
Jan 26	Google: Nexus One 3G issues result of poor coverage, bugs; patch possibly within a week	Wouldn’t be surprised if it was a baseband upgrade.
Jan 21	Google’s Nexus One is no iPhone – and that’s OK	A more balanced review.
Jan 14	Nexus One Phone	Hilarious video review.
Jan 13	In the First Week, Google May Have Sold 20,000 Nexus One Phones	Comparing 20K against 1.6 million iPhones on the first week is a bit unfair considering the way it’s sold.
	Google Charges ETF For Nexus One On Top of Carrier’s	Interesting. More here and here.
Jan 12	Google at the crossroads: a review of the Nexus One	Pretty detailed and comprehensive review, as always.
	T-Mobile gives reps troubleshooting tips for Nexus One’s 3G issues	Looks like a baseband issue alright.
	Google learning that users want real support for Nexus One	Learning can be painful.
	On-duty with the Nexus One: form factor, battery, Android	An odd review.
	Android 2.1 SDK	About time.
	T-Mobile makes mention of 3G issues with Nexus One, hopes to have ‘more information’ soon	Here’s to some heroic debugging.
	Nexus One: $174 Cost to Build	About the same estimated production cost than a 3GS, except that Apple has likely done a better bulk deal on parts… Also, nice comparative tables.
Jan 06	Vodafone promises Nexus One ‘in a few short weeks’	And this is probably where I stop keeping track of this particular device…
	Google’s biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL	I find it amazing that they’d write this much about ordering a phone online on a third-party store, but that’s the US mobile market for you.
	Google Isn’t Targeting iPhone Users; It’s Targeting Everyone Else	Much ado about nothing in particular, basically.
	Nexus One teardown reveals 802.11n WiFi and FM transmitter	This teardown mania is somewhat fun, but one wonders how long it will take until people realise that only a very small minority of what is “unearthed” is news…
	State of the Art – Google Shakes but Doesn’t Upend the Cellphone Market – NYTimes.com	Pogue doesn’t seem terribly impressed.
Jan 05	Google Phone Unveiled Today	A coherent list of specs, although there are plenty of meaningless stats bolted on to beef up the article.
Jan 05	Google’s Nexus One is official	$529 unlocked, shipping to the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong, or with a two year T-Mobile US contract for $179. There go a lot of pipedreams about it being sold direct to the public at “astonishingly low” prices.
Jan 04	Nexus One review	not much in terms of review, actually.
Jan 03	Exclusive: Google Nexus One hands-on, video, and first impressions	Not an iPhone killer. Hardly capable of killing a fly, apparently.
2009
Nov 30	Droid Doesn’t: It’s Not Ready For Prime Time · Alsop Louie Partners	A month later, reality calls.
Nov 23	Stats show Motorola Droid is the new elephant in the Android room	I’m still wary of stats (local copy of PDF), but I hear it’s selling pretty well indeed.
Nov 11	Motorola Droid torn down despite desperate cries of ‘no disassemble’	Worth looking at.
	Droid Does… only have 256MB of storage for apps	Now that’s gotta be… Useful.
	Analyst estimates 100,000 DROID smartphones sold in first weekend	It isn’t the RAZR, but it’s a decent figure.
Nov 05	“Andy Ihnatko on Verizon Droid “iDon’t ads: baloney	Yep.
	Personal Droid Data Plan Will Cost $30 Per Month, Even With Exchange	I honestly don’t get why they are trying to charge it this way.
Nov 03	Exchange Access for Droid: $15 Extra Per Month	Wow.
Oct 30	Android Phones Get Free Turn-By-Turn Directions	Best overview yet
	Google adds free turn-by-turn navigation, car dock UI to Android 2.0	The quip about an Apple version is not to be missed.
	Google Navigation video hands-on: you want this	Looks nice indeed, but let’s wait to see how well map caching works.
Oct 29	The Droid Has Landed…Unboxed! Plus a Few Facts	Nothing to worry about except that it’s the start of a trend.
Oct 28	Droid Launches Nov. 6 Priced To Match iPhone	The price matching approach is interesting, but then again in the US handset prices don’t work quite the same way as in Europe…
	Motorola DROID first hands-on!	I can’t figure out why these people keep wasting space in hardware keyboards.
	Verizon Droid Phone: Nov 6th, $199	A pretty decent feature set overview.
	Google Releases Android 2.0 SDK	But the UI guidelines are still a bit on the loose side.
Oct 27	Android 2.0 Highlights	The e-mail client looks nice, but I’m curious as to usability.
	Android 2.0 is Official — Quick Contacts Look Nice	This is just what I think is needed in oh, so many other places.
	Droid to be Verizon’s Android Product Line — Not a Single Phone	Now this is a clever move.
Oct 24	Verizon’s Droid is a series, not just a phone; Droid Eris coming from HTC	Let’s see how this pans out. I’m quite curious, actually, to see if Verizon can pull this off in the sense of generating genuine buzz around an operator-specific set of Android devices.
Oct 20	Android thoughts two years later	Well worth reading through, and mirrors my own views. One to re-visit a few years from now indeed.
Oct 7	Android, not iPhone, is Bigger Symbian Challenger Says Gartner	Not rocket science, but a bit exaggerated, since nobody can really look that far into the future in this industry. Still, here’s the chart:
Sep 23	Cyanogen	Modified firmware for some devices. Just had to happen.
Sep 15	Android 1.6 SDK is here	Well, at least compatibility is assured.
Sep 10	A nice summary table of devices
Sep 3	Some News from Android Market	It took them this long to add screenshots to apps.
Aug 17	The Android Opportunity (addenda)	Mostly agree, although this is too US-centric for it to be considered the whole truth.
Jun 24	HTC Hero running Android and Sense UI leaks from HTC‘s own website	Flash turns out to not be that exciting. Or useful. Plus the phone is plain ugly, and a lot thicker than what the first shot makes it look.
	HTC Hero hands-on: Flash, keyboard and ruminations
	Adobe demos Flash on the HTC Hero
Apr 29	Vodafone suggests future Android phones could have less Google	People keep confusing the platform with the services.
Apr 27
Loads of fun for various reasons.
Apr 20	Introducing home screen widgets and the AppWidget framework	An interesting technote on how Android handles home screen widgets.
Apr 2	Some Fun Facts About The Google Phone	Interesting stats about usage patterns.
Mar 5	HTC black Magic (Sapphire) hands-on: a Vodafone exclusive	Very few decent shots
Feb 25	Google blocks paid apps for unlocked G1 users	Interesting hint of fragmentation.
Feb 17	HTC Magic is official, bringing Android to Vodafone sans keyboard	And after adding these links, this page now merits a direct, obvious, reference to my Disclaimer
	HTC Magic in-depth hands-on, with video!
	HTC Magic first eyes-on!
	Photos: Hands-on with the HTC Magic Android phone
	HTC Magic – The new Google Android mobile phone from Vodafone
Feb 13	Android Market update: support for priced applications	Using Google Checkout, of course.
	Android Market: Open for Business	A very nice (if shallow) analysis that bunches together some interesting tidbits of info.
Feb 12	TeleNav Does Turn-By-Turn on Android	Apparently US-only, which is a pity.
Jan 1	Android netbooks on their way, likely by 2010	Dubious in both title and subject matter (we’ve known that Android could be made to run on PCs for a good while now.
2008
Dec 28	AD IV: Programming Newbie	Tim Bray lists a few interesting resources for new developers
Dec 17	Huawei powers up its Android plans	For Q3’09. Let’s see what they come up with.
Dec 9	Open Handset Alliance announces 14 new members	including Sony Ericsson and Vodafone. Most people missed this last bit, which is fun.
Dec 8	Unlocked Android: $399	Development samples, available for purchase.
Nov 7	Worst. Bug. Ever.	Although this was fixed fairly quickly, it is the perfect example of why mobile phones aren’t exactly trivial to “improve upon” using today’s technology.
Oct 31	iPhone vs T-Mobile G1	A short comparison.
Oct 24	Android Phone Teardown	How weird is it that this is in Japan?
Oct 22	HTC Dream T-Mobile G1 (black) Smartphone review
Oct 21	Android is now Open Source	Let’s see if someone will port this to Intel and get it running on a netbook…
Oct 16	Almost Human: a review of Google’s Android G1 phone	Good reading – a thorough appraisal.
	State of the Art – A Look at Google’s First Phone	Pogue weighs in.
	T-Mobile G1 review
	T-Mobile G1 Google Android Phone Review
Oct 15	Review: Over 260 images and 5 videos of the T-Mobile G1 Google Android device	A tad overkill, but interesting nonetheless.
	What Android Can Learn From the iPhone: It’s the Software, Stupid.	Brilliant title.
	The Google Phone Review: What I Love & Hate About T-Mobile G-1	Om weighs in.
	Google answers the iPhone	Walt Mossberg’s take.
	T-Mobile G1 review	Engadget’s lenghty two-part article, covering hardware and software (loads of imagery).
	T-Mobile G1, a hands-on introduction to the first Android phone	Some interesting videos
	Review of the T-Mobile G1 Google phone	Pretty comprehensive gallery.
Oct 9	First T-Mobile G1 user review	Not particularly gushing.
Sep 23	Video: Android walkthrough on T-Mobile G1	A few demos
Sep 16	Google shows off masked Android handset	About a year later, one of the first sightings of actual hardware (but running over Wi-Fi). I don’t get the “masked” bit, though – the hardware’s pretty obvious.
2007
Nov 11	Wikipedia	Background info
Nov 12	Android SDK	Includes plenty of links to videos and reference information

☯

Palm’s surprise entry for the newfangled “web-based smartphone” category.

Date	Link	Notes
2010
Feb 26	Palm’s webOS 1.4 emerges: screenshots galore	Not that different. Smoother, if anything.
Feb 07	Palm Pre Plus (and Pixi Plus) review	A year later, and still not quite there (and with constant re-shufflings at the corporate level).
2009
Nov 14	Mojo SDK 1.3.1 Now Available, featuring Pixi emulator support and docs enhancements	Well, can’t fault them for making sure the emulator matches the shipping versions.
Nov 12	Palm Pixi review	I can’t really get excited about this one for some reason – maybe it’s the hardware keyboard.
Nov 09	I’m Putting My Palm Pre on Notice	Not a keeper, then.
	Sprint Palm Pixi unboxed on video	It’s a phone, comes in a box.
Nov 05	Time For Palm To Drop WebOS And Embrace Android	I was wondering when folk would start asking these kind of questions, but Palm already tried using someone else’s OS and got no good out of it…
Oct 27	Palm Pixi on sale November 15 exclusively at Sprint for $100 on contract	Cheap, interesting – let’s see how good it really is.
Oct 19	Dear Palm, it’s just not working out.	The ripples are still spreading, and will for weeks after this was written.
Oct 13	First GSM Palm Pre now on sale in Germany, with new Euro-specific apps in tow	Not much detail on the apps.
Oct 7	Palm Pre coming to Spain on Telefonica on October 14	Makes sense.
Sep 23	USB group none too happy with Palm’s iTunes hack, either	Bloody predictable
Jul 16	Announcing webOSdev	Finally, a developer portal and SDK.
Jul 15	iTunes 8.2.1 brings Pre’s music syncing capability to a halt	How very… predictable.
Jul 9	Palm Pre Review	Praise for the software, but not the hardware.
Jul 7	Official: Palm Pre launching in O2 and Movistar by end of year	Kind of makes sense.
Jul 1	O2 Wins Exclusive on Pre in UK, Announcement in one week?	Ah well…
Jun 26	Palm Has Half of the Business Plan Puzzle in Place	I’d actually say they have a quarter of their business plan in place, given Palm’s current presence (or lack thereof) in Europe.
Jun 23	Ars reviews the Palm Pre, part 2: the webOS experience	The second installment, still wandering here and there but more interesting.
Jun 22	iDesign * Pre	Great selection of wallpapers.
Jun 18	In-depth review of the Palm Pre and the webOS	Late to the game, but chock full of videos.
Jun 10	Ars Reviews the Palm Pre, part 1: the BlackBerry killer	The piece wanders here and there, makes a few cogent points, but does not convince me in the least. To beat the Blackberry, Palm needs to address corporate needs, not the personal ones the article waltzes through.
	Palm Pre	A cogent and reasoned breakdown of the Pre’s Linux underpinnings
Jun 4	Designing the Palm Pre: An interview with Michelle Koh	This is the stuff that really matters – the tech is useless if there aren’t guiding design principles.
	How Palm Designed the Pre
Jun 3	Palm Pre review	Possibly the most detailed of them all.
	Palm Pre, Elegant Contender	Pogue drains the battery in less than a day
	Multitasking Palm Pre Brims With Power, Potential	Steven Levy also mentions heavy battery drain, also thinks the keyboard is small.
	Palm’s New Pre Takes On iPhone	Mossberg emphasizes the app store’s current weak selection
May 28	Palm Pre First Hands On!	Some complaints regarding the keyboard.
Apr 29	Palm Pre: $138 to build according to iSuppli	Considering they can’t possibly have gotten one yet, this raises questions about iSupply’s reputability…
Apr 2	Palm Pre Classic emulator demoed on video	Doesn’t look half bad, although realistically there aren’t that many legacy apps that make sense using on a Pre, and the lack of personal data integration can be a downer.
Mar 3	Is Vodafone in Negotiations with Palm for Pre Release?	Another link that falls under my Disclaimer
Feb 24	The Pre’s Combined Messaging: Patent Pending	Some notes on Palm’s patents for the Pre
Feb 18	Google demos HTML5-based Maps on the Palm Pre	This is why I think HTML5 is a big deal on mobile.
Feb 16	Palm to add Flash support to webOS and Pre, joins Open Screen Project	It’s almost as if they’re ticking off a ‘beat the iPhone’ checklist. Multitasking, tethering, cut&paste, Flash… (more)
	Palm joins Adobe’s Open Screen Project, Pre to support Flash – Engadget
	Palm Pre Eyes-On, Plus Plenty of Pre Questions Answered	Rather nicely rounded article, even if the writer didn’t know that Gmail does have IMAP IDLE support.
Feb 10	GSM Palm Pre spotted with Vodafone SIM card – Engadget	Here’s something that falls squarely under my Disclaimer in more ways than one.
Jan 30	Another Pre hands-on video with Palm’s VP of design	Not much to say other than there are glimpses of some interesting portions of the UI.
Jan 23	Palm Pre: The Definitive FAQ
Jan 13	Palm Pre WebOS: hardware hands-on	The Reg fondles it, after having licked the UI
Jan 9	The pre’s got Mojo: a developer speaks about Palm’s new SDK	Not much detail, though.
	Palm Pre interface tour	Around 30 screenshots.
	Ars talks to Palm at CES, gets under the hood with the pre	Some info on the hardware (a TI OMAP 3430 CPU) and the “App Catalog”
Jan 8	Palm Pre in-depth impressions, video, and huge hands-on gallery	Title says it all, really.
	Palm Unveils Its iPhone Rival: The Pre. Don’t Expect to Buy One Cheap	Missed the bit about Exchange support. A few other factual errors.

☯

After last fortnight’s post, this week I have barely enough energy to go and steal a quote from Heather Armstrong (by way of Pedro Santos):

I think the best way to describe what it’s been like to bring a second child into the family is to imagine having a jazz band blasting an improvisational set in your left ear while listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Christmas carols in your right ear, and there you are, a drummer in a rock band, and you’re on stage in front of 30,000 people trying to keep the beat to an acoustic version of “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols.

I took note of it last June, at about the time we had an inkling the second kid was coming, and that opening paragraph stuck with me all this while – it’s the best description of what it’s been like so far, and if someone tells you that two kids are exponentially more work than one, tell them they only have half of it right.

I’ve been in zombie mode ever since I got back to work, but this past week has been simply… Overwhelming.

Sleep deprivation means your brain starts playing tricks on you at 6 PM, so I do as much brainwork as possible early on (after I manage to fully wake up, of course), spend early afternoon running around and in meetings and stack up “safe” tasks (like filing e-mail or clearing my desktop) for closing time, so that I can just go through the motions and try to get home on time to have supper, do miscellaneous kid-related stuff (from running baths to simply setting the table) and hit the sack as early as possible until kid #2 starts waking us up every 2.5 hours (on average).

Which is why I’ve kept offline, mostly. At work, I keep dealing as best I can with the recurring misalignments of a matrix organization – for instance, miss the right time window (unfathomable in advance, of course) to schedule a meeting and it will balloon into two or three separate ones – not everyone can make it the first time around, and assuming the first meeting had six people or less in the first place and you’ve reached Jedi Master level on Calendar Battleships, you may get things done in, oh, a week or so.

But let’s not go there – I’ve got some serious catching up to do where it regards R&R, and am getting on to it right now…

☯ (comments allowed)

Movies I intend to see, without any particular order or bias:

Movie	Notes
Land of Plenty	Wim Wenders does the US.
Hard Candy	Seems a different twist on an otherwise predictable plot.

Last Seen

Most recent at the top, not all deemed noteworthy here, although I tend to watch movies in weekend bursts these days whenever family duties allow. Ratings are subjective and personal.

Date	Movie	Rating	Notes
2010
Feb 27	Jumper (2008)		Watched it out of curiosity after reading the book, on which it is only loosely based on. Not worth the time, either.
Feb 21	Transformers (2007)		Crap. Fluid special FX crap, but seriously, not worth the time.
Feb 10	Avatar (2009)		I originally thought this would dive headfirst into some kind of “Elves meet Halo Wars” in terms of plot, alhtough “Pocahontas in Space” seemed a more appropriate moniker: What made it work for me was that even if you took out a couple of stars for clichés, the overall execution is very good – we’re long past the uncanny valley here.
Jan 24	Surrogates (2009)		Sort of makes sense, sort of doesn’t. Mostly predictable. Still, it’s watchable, even if a bit weird at times.
Jan 23	Moon (2009)		Pretty damn good plot – has a few loose ends, but apparently there’ll be a sequel.
2009
Dec 31	District 9 (2009)		Sublime.
Dec 29	Objectified (2009)		An odd mixture of brilliance and inspiration. Makes me wonder what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.
Dec 21	Helvetica (2007)		Inspiring, but somewhat stale. I would have liked it to have covered computing a bit more.
Dec 9	Watchmen (2009)		Gotta love alternate realities. Damn good movie.
Dec 5	The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)		Meh – the 1951 original was far better.
Dec 1	Iron Man (2008)		Pretty decent overall. Far better acting than in your average superhero movie – some well carried-out sequences in there, great FX.
Nov 29	X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)		The plot could be a bit more consistent, but that’s franchises for you. Not too bad if you like the style.
Nov 22	Marley and Me (2008)		Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age. Still, it is well worth watching, not for the lead actors or cliché family bits, but for the way the dog’s presence manages to keep the whole story together without too much emphasis.
Nov 21	Igor (2008)		Not bad. Not brilliant, either – perhaps it’s the lack of “yesh, mashter” jokes.
Nov 15	Up (2009)		Lovely. Simply lovely, with a great mix of character development and a compelling argument.
Nov 14	Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)		Loads of in-jokes. Worth watching a couple of times to pick up on the amazing detail and subtle hints.
Nov 8	Coraline (2009)		brilliant. Not a perfect match with the graphic novel, but an improvement upon it, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Nov 2	Star Trek (2009)		Too predictable. Nice SFX, sure to have a bunch of sequels now that they can do whatever they want with the plot lines and have fresh faces for the characters.
Pre-2009
Previously	Ratatouille (2007)		Pixar keep surpassing themselves. The expressiveness and realism of the characters is amazing – rats never looked this good.
	Over The Hedge (2006)		Kids will love the talking animals (and it has some funny sequences), but it isn’t quite as amazing as Cars.
	Cars (2006)		Utterly, utterly brilliant. Besides pushing the tech even further (the particle simulations for dust are amazingly believable), the sheer amount of detail is astounding. The car stickers, the audience doing the “wave” with their headlights, the landscapes, the little car-shaped insects (loved the Beetle), even the cameos at the end make you want to grab the DVD as soon as it’s out and watch it again and again.
	V for Vendetta (2005)		Hugo Weaving proves he can out-act anyone without even showing his face. Engrossing, oddly fascinating in some bits.
	Ultraviolet (2006)		The character and plot depth of a saucer. Interesting aesthetics, though – loads of eye candy in some segments, even if there were some pretty weak attempts at emulating some sequences from the Matrix.
	X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)		Woverine cries “NOOOOOO!” again. I know I nearly did, halfway through. Nice eye-candy, but no character depth to speak of and a rushed ending.
	Aeon Flux (2005)		The overall aesthetics of the thing deserve another viewing. The plot is a bit dull but has some nice twists, and I have no idea how true it is to the comics (my guess is not much, considering the ending).
	Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)		a competent sequel, wherein we find that Pixar isn’t the only one able to deliver believable and expressive characters. Good fun, quite a few good jokes, and lots of subtle homages to previous movies.
	The Chronicles of Narnia (2005)		kids have all the fun. Glorious, even if you’ve read the books.
	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)		a much darker, entertaining Potter with some interesting visuals.
	Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)		Lots of fun. The Madagascar psychotic penguins’ short that precedes it is hilarious, and deserves mention.
	Serenity (2005)		Although the “cowboys in space” approach seemed utterly stupid at first, it is an excellent way to bring closure to Firefly (which I watched beforehand), and a genuinely inspiring film on its own. Recommended.
	HH2G (2005)		Mostly harmless to my vision of the book.
	Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (2005)		Brilliant imagery, lots of fun.
	Fantastic Four (2005)		So-So, I guess. Okay, anything is better than Spiderman 2.
	Millions (2004)		inspiring and fun, only spoiled by a rather tacky ending.
	Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)		Marital counseling and ordnance. Utter crap with a couple of moderately fun gags thrown in.
	Sin City (2005)		Not that hot. I guess you need to be a fan of the comic.
	War Of The Worlds (2005)		The story of a perfectly ordinary man that traipses around the U.S. hiding in basements and narrowly avoiding being blown up, crushed or turned into fertilizer. Aliens are somehow involved, and guess what – E.T. ain’t that friendly anymore.
	Madagascar (2005)		cute but plasticky and lacking in character depth (even for a cartoon). The penguins take away the show.
	Batman Begins (2005)		the first Batman that felt solid.
	Revenge of the Sith (2005)		28 years of cult Sci-Fi let down by some of the stiffest acting ever (even without a mask). Nice GFX, though.
	Million Dollar Baby (2004)		Clint churns out another stirring story about ordinary people.
	Ray (2004)		Good acting, great soundtrack, very inspiring.
	The Aviator (2004)		Grandiose, full of glamour, but oddly lacking in depth.
	The Recruit (2003)		Fun, but not memorable.
	The Terminal (2004)		Tom Hanks lost in the middle of somewhere without palm trees.
	Blueberry (2004)		Strange, but oddly riveting.
	Collateral (2004)		Well-paced, with a couple of nice twists.
	The Incredibles (2004)		Wow. The first computer animated movie that made me forget I was looking at RenderMan output.
	Bridget Jones – The Edge Of Reason (2004)		the book was a far better sequel, but there’s something about seeing Colin Firth portray the perenially embarassed Englishman that carries the story forward. Jolly good fun despite rather conspicuous product placement and a little repetition.
	Shark Tale (2004)		It’s a cartoon. So what if one of the sharks behaves a little fishy? Welcome to the 21st century.
	Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow (2004)		Faux futures, a luxury we don’t really have anymore. A glorious visual voyage through a world some of us grew up missing. And quite a few references to the genre (like door number 1138 , the female android a la Metropolis , etc.). Blue screens never looked better.
	The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)		I can’t even remember Pitch Black, but it left a better impression. Thin plot and saucer-like character depth spoiled exotic vistas and interesting scenic approaches (although some of it was in rather bad taste).
	New York Minute (2004)		I had to see for myself how bad it was.
	Stepford Wives (2004)		Plastic. I’m told the original was much better.
	Alien vs Predator (2004)		Clichés galore. Expect a sequel soon.
	Immortel (2004)		Bilal. Brilliant. Need I say more?
	Kill Bill 2 (2004)		never keep a snake in a trailer.
	Spiderman 2 (2004)		Why the hell not, even if it was a cliché?
	Catwoman (2004)		Crap. I don’t care how hot she looked in that leather harness.
	Starsky&Hutch (2004)		Yes, I know movies can also make you think. This is not the case.
	Hellboy (2004)		Tongue-in-cheek dialogue, fun. Not earth-shattering, but probably better than Spiderman 2.
	Shrek 2 (2004)		As long as Eddie Murphy keeps being an ass, I’m sold. Full of hilarious movie puns (like the Indiana Jones last-second hat-grab). Five stars.

Here’s an automatically generated listing of any movies referenced throughout the site:

Item	References
Transformers	Movies
a movie	Movies Book Stack
Matrix	The Matrix Theorem
Sin City	Movies
Hard Candy	Movies
The Chronicles of Riddick	Movies
Surrogates	Movies 2009 in Review
Alien vs Predator	Movies
Moon	Movies
Watchmen	Movies
Catwoman	Movies
original	Movies
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit	Movies
Kill Bill 2	Movies
Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow	Movies
Over The Hedge	Movies 40C
Fantastic Four	Movies
War Of The Worlds	Movies
Hellboy	Movies
X-Men: The Last Stand	Movies
Serenity	Movies Five Things I Liked About 2005 Random Bits of News
The Aviator	Movies
E.T.	Movies
Spiderman 2	Movies
The Incredibles	Movies Entertainment, In Whatever Form
Iron Man	Movies I, for one, welcome our new diapered overlords
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	Movies
Aeon Flux	Movies
Batman Begins	Movies
District 9	Movies
Helvetica	Movies
Up	Movies
Ratatouille	Movies
Igor	Movies
Immortel	Movies
Stepford Wives	Movies
The Recruit	Movies
Revenge of the Sith	Movies Slugs And Other Vermin
Pitch Black	Movies
Avatar	Movies 2009 in Review
Madagascar	Movies
Ultraviolet	Movies
Ice Age: The Meltdown	Movies
Collateral	Movies
Millions	Movies
Coraline	Movies
HH2G	Movies
The Terminal	Movies
The Day The Earth Stood Still	Movies
Mr. and Mrs. Smith	Movies
Starsky&Hutch	Movies
Land of Plenty	Movies
Monsters vs. Aliens	Movies
The Chronicles of Narnia	Movies Five Things I Liked About 2005
Shark Tale	Movies
Cars	Movies 40C Relaxing
V for Vendetta	Movies
Firefly	Movies
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory	Movies
Million Dollar Baby	Movies
Ray	Movies
Metropolis	Movies
New York Minute	Movies
1138	Movies
X-Men Origins: Wolverine	Movies
Star Trek	Movies
Blueberry	Movies
Objectified	Movies
Bridget Jones – The Edge Of Reason	Movies
Shrek 2	Movies
Marley and Me	Movies
Pocahontas	2009 in Review
Space: 1999	It's just a (3G) phone
Rain Man	The nPhone
High Fidelity	Os Meus Quinze Pageviews de Fama
Moonraker	Nearly Halfway There
The World is Not Enough	Nearly Halfway There
Ice Age	Snow in Lisbon
The Incredibles	2004 in Review
MacGyver	Foxes on fire, and other entertainment
Bee Movie	Foxes on fire, and other entertainment
Beverly Hills: 90210	Foxes on fire, and other entertainment I, for one, welcome our new diapered overlords Amazon's New Music Store - MP3 Bestsellers
Eureka	The Fun's Nearly Over
MIB	The Last Phone You'll Ever Wear
Final Fantasy	Musings On Consoles Inbox Lint
Nim’s Island	Chicken Broth, The Meal of Champions
Minority Report	Things I Can't Get Around To Do, Part One Wii-ing on PowerPoint Stripe Three
Nemo	4 Pixels or Less Mighty Mousing
Minority Report	Random Thoughts On Nomadic Life
Alien	Geek Toast
original War of the Worlds movie	WowWee introduces Mr. Personality, Rovio, and Flytech Bladestar
Babylon 5	On Priorities
Kung Fu Panda	Checking in
WALL-E	Checking in
Blade Runner	Interlude
Corpse Bride	Five Things I Liked About 2005
Desperate Housewives	Five Things I Liked About 2005
le Big Mac	Feed Raid
Lost	Heat, TV and Data Retention
Mission: Impossible	Kafka Lives On
Sherlock Holmes	Dr. House
series	Dr. House
ER	Dr. House
reimagined series	Battlestar Galactica

☯

And they’re not likely to stop there, now are they?

☯

I saw this coming a year or so ago, and kept track of most of it until a few months back.

☯

Hilarious. I wish I could get rid of a load of stuff I don’t use anymore too – but it takes time I don’t have right now.

☯

Sony’s third attempt at creating a games console, which they managed to make hopelessly confusing for mere mortals:

Also a classic case of industrial design compromise. The original concept design (below) has pretty much nothing to do with the looks of final devices:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Besides the (increasingly irrelevant) Blu-Ray and DVD formats, the machine supports H.264 AVC and DivX video playback and can act as a DLNA media extender (see UPnP for server software to publish media to it).

The “slim” edition finally came about in August 2009, irrevocably dumping PS2 and Linux compatibility (I couldn’t care less about the latter, but the former stings).

Resources:

Date	Link	Notes
2010
Feb 22	Rivet	Another DLNA streamer a la MediaLink
2009
Aug 27	PlayStation 3 Slim review	Smaller, greener, quieter, upgradeable, nice.
Aug 26	PS3 Slim tore down, explored, huge fan revealed	Hopefully quieter than the vacuum cleaner they built into the 60GB edition…
	PlayStation 3 Slim Teardown
Apr 18	AVIAddXSubs	A Windows program to merge/mux .srt subtitles into DivX files without re-encoding.
2005
Oct 27	PS3 Backward Compatibility Status	US titles
Oct 27	Backward Compatibility Status	For PAL, European titles, seems to be on the blink

☯

Origami is the ancient art of paper-folding to break the ice at parties. The definition of "ancient" and "parties" is a bit fuzzy right now, but it is definitely about folding paper into amusing and artful shapes.

Resources:

• MapEnvelope, a neat idea.
• PocketMod, a Flash front-end to build a "hipster PDA".
• Origami Macs and other Apple hardware
• A very useful double CD holder for when you hand out CD-Rs:

☯

Notational Velocity - Version 2.0β2 Release Notes

Two of the best things on my Mac now sync programmatically and without the need for either spit or baling wire— that means syncing with “the cloud,” syncing with my iPhone (App Store link), and, by extension, syncing with every computer I own via the game-changing Dropbox. Yes. Big.

If you live in text files and crave seamless, no-brainer syncing (that doesn’t require growing a neckbeard), that little icon represents a milestone in the evolution of simple, low-friction workflows.

[via Fletcher, whose SimplenoteSync.pl has been a godsend in the interim]

43 Folders - Interview with “Linchpin” author, Seth Godin (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

I talk with Seth Godin, whose new book, Linchpin (Kindle, Hardcover, Worldcat, ISBN), comes out today. Topics include, “The Lizard Brain,” Bob Dylan, protecting the well, and beating back the fear and resistance that drive mediocrity.

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• Episode details
  • Direct MP3 Download
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• The Linchpin Posts on Squidoo
• Get Linchpin:
  • Kindle (Amazon)
  • Hardcover (Amazon)
  • Worldcat
  • ISBN

By the way, here’s Seth’s lizard brain video mentioned in this episode:

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain on Vimeo

Seth’s Blog: What Matters Now: get the free ebook

A few months ago, Seth Godin asked about 70 people to talk about a word or phrase related to their own idea of What Matters Now. He collected them all into one big ol’ file, and now you can download a PDF of all those contributions, including pieces by folks like Elizabeth Gilbert, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pressfield, and, improbably enough, yours truly.

My essay’s called, Enough.

 

Wanna read more of these? Download the PDF of What Matters Now, or view it here using this squirrely widget from that totally annoying Scribd site.

I honor any project to write something — especially to write a long piece of fiction. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but, like most people, I have always been too scared to attempt it.

So, kudos.

But, here’s the thing: it’s hard to start writing, and it’s almost as hard to keep writing. Believe me, I know. And, there will be times every day when you get discouraged or you want to throw in the towel because you feel lost or depressed or useless or just plain tired. Empty. That’s the word. Empty.

All I want to say is, keep at it. You can do this.

Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.

So, keep your hands moving [PDF], don’t self-edit, and above all, don’t let past failures (or successes) have any place at your desk during the time you’ve set aside to do your work. There’s no good that can come out of trying to see the present, creative moment through the overly emotional, shaded lenses of either the past or the future. Just be in the room with yourself and, as my pal Andy says, keep moving the cursor to the right.

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to figure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

Just as thinking is not writing, advice is not writing. Got it? So, don’t blow your day on metajunk.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself to the best advice about becoming a better writer (see below), but it does mean you sure as shooting better not be reading blog posts about “surprising writing tips” during your Special Writing Time. Personally, I love books about writing, writing advice, and just plain talking about writing. But, I also know (all too well) that something that seems or feels helpful can quickly turn into an anti-pattern. Especially when it does anything to stop that cursor from moving rightward.

Seriously. Read the next sentence out loud to yourself three times. No, do it:

When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.

And, of course, the irony is, nearly every (good) book on writing will eventually end up telling you – or leading you to see – the same handful of things.

1. Set reasonable goals and honor them
2. Draft with complete abandon; edit with surgical precision
3. When you sit down to write, focus without distraction; when you’re not writing, keep it off your mind
4. Read great books (actual big books, not blogs or magazines) as often as you can
5. Just write, and just keep writing, and just keep writing, writing, writing. Then write more.

Good luck with your novel, and have fun. For what it’s worth, here’s a few of my favorite books on writing (alphabetically, by author). Just remember: if you read them during Writing Time, you must smack yourself. Hard.

• Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day; Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”
• Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.
• Hart, A Writer’s Coach; Failures in non-fiction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).
• King, On Writing; Writing is a craft, and it’s difficult, and it matters. If you don’t believe it, get hit by a goddamned van. (N.B.: If you need to pick just one of these, get On Writing. No question. It’s the best.)
• Lamott, Bird By Bird; Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”
• Zinsser, On Writing Well; The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.

---

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has five stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me figure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA)

Here’s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn’s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community”2, and it contains my typically NSFW use of, well, words, I guess.

It’s about how to get started—just started—with any project that really matters to you.

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• Listen above
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Foam Barriers (and Granite Fears)

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable.

But, why “perceived?”

Thing is, when you really put your back into it, and push against your barriers a bit harder, they often turn out to be nothing very substantial at all. More like fake foam boulders that just look lifelike because they’re illuminated by the unreliable light of fear. See, fear’s the really hard part.

Yes, the barriers give you a theoretically dignified toupee for carpeting over your neuroses, but the underlying fears are still unspeakably real. And, you totally know it.

So, just humor me. Think about something you’ve been really excited to make or do.3 Maybe something you’ve been thinking about starting for weeks, months, or even years. Dance lessons? Short story? Web comic? MAME cabinet? Tree house? Doomsday laser? Excel spreadsheet?4 What stops you?

Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?

Well, at least in my experience, if you’re honest enough to push past those sensible, well-worn consolations of generalized procrastination and unrelenting “busy-ness,” you’ll discover how many hang-ups trace back to some dumb, shameful fear. Yeah, I know. Crazy hippie talk, right? Still.

Any of these sound familiar?

• Fear of Apathy. “I can’t start this until I’m positive the work will never become dull or difficult.”5

• Fear of Ambiguity. “I can’t start this until I know exactly how it will turn out (as well as the precise method by which I’ll do it).”

• Fear of Disconnection. “I can’t start this until I’m totally up-to-date and current on everything.”

• Fear of Imperfection. “I can’t start this until I know the end product will be flawless.”

• Fear of Incompletion. “I can’t start this until I’m already done with it.”

• Fear of Isolation. “I can’t start this until I know making it will never be lonely.”

• Fear of Sucking. “I can’t start this until I’m already awesome at it (and know that even horrible people whom I dislike will hail me as a genius).”

• Fear of Fear itself. “I can’t start this until I’m guaranteed that making it will never be scary.”

There are probably a lot more, but these represent a few of the greatest hits spinning on my own particular jukebox.6

And, sure, there’s a lot of overlap, or if you prefer, design redundancies. Because once you let one fear hang out with you, it starts bringing all its buddies along to the party. And The Fears are a tightly-knit, mean-spirited posse who egg each other on and love nothing more than trashing your house while you sob in the guest bathroom. Fears are total dicks.

Then, There’s That Talking Lizard

To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art7, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.8

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

1. Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California.
   So, stop being childish.”

2. Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace.9
   So, stop having fun.”

3. No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you.
   So, stop trying.”

4. Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now.
   So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

But, honestly, do you ever hear yourself providing a running commentary on how much you suck? Giving yourself a spirited anti-pep talk? Sure you do. I do. Everybody does—including people who produce unbelievably, unexpectedly successful work.

It’s not that successful and productive people don’t see those same barriers or feel that same fear—it’s just that most of the good ones have figured out how to either accept the fears as a natural part of the process, or they just choose to ignore each fakey barrier the second it appears.

And, that is precisely what this starting business is all about. Putting aside every “reason,” and announcing to your Lizard Brain that it can either evolve or suck a nut.

Not that this is easy. But, you know that, right? Exactly.

The Switch Flips

Think about the times you’ve tried to get started, but things just weren’t happening for you. What wasn’t right? What were you feeling?

Could be lots of things,10 but I’ll postulate one theory on how a lot of us knowledge-worker types get derailed at the point right before we really get started. At the point when we’re most susceptible to an attractive nuisance.

So, imagine the place where you go to make whatever you make. Could be a studio, a library, an office, a cafe, living room, or what have you. You’re sitting there. And, of course, you’re not doing Real Work for your Real-Life Obligations. You’re trying to make something new and perhaps wonderfully unnecessary. “Something useless,” the Lizard Brain whispers, “That no one will care about. That you won’t finish anyway. That you’re too busy to do….”

You’re now shamefully staring at your blank page or an empty canvas or a fresh Compass install or that unpopulated Excel spreadsheet. And your poor mind is already feeling like a lost duckling. You’re desperately casting about for something to save it—if not a big idea or the muse of “inspiration,” at least something that you really know. Something that you can get the hook into. Something that’s…important.

That? That right there? That is the enemy, my friend. That fear of your own inability and of the triviality of your non-work is so toxic. Because it opens you up to insane anxieties about what’s happening outside the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you.

It’s all those fears tearing ass like a colony of E.O. Wilson’s ants. In growing numbers, they’re on to the scent of your anxiety, so now they can build new and customized barriers in record time.

Then, in what can amount to a split second, a switch flips. The Lizard Voice has gotten too loud to be ignored. You’ve come to what you believe are your senses, and you feel compelled to escape this Elysian dream world of nonsense and feelings and unfinished thoughts and “what the hell was I thinking?” After all. You’ve got real shit to do, right?

Ah. Those three horseman of the maker’s apocalypse have come to your rescue: the unknown, the ambiguous, and the incomplete.

Better go check email. Might be something “important.”

The Opposite of That Thing

So, are you getting the perverse irony at work here?

Given that your fears know you too well, they can capitalize on any uncertainty that they know you’d find intolerable. So, even a surprisingly trivial matter—so long as that matter might represent items unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete to you—can suddenly seem extremely important and will swiftly divert your attention from the cool stuff you’d like to be doing onto….oh, whatever that other stuff might be. Better find out.

And, yes, I’m waving at you here, email inbox.11 J’accuse, you horrible little troll.

But, you’re getting it, right? How the Lizard Brain lies and you believe it because it’s easy to believe?

When your resolve melts—when that switch flips and you’re pulled away from a generative kind of anxiety to be thrust into the more caustic and strangely addictive anxities of “real life”—you’re giving up a precious part of your real “real life” in exchange for security of the familiar. Problems you understand. Anxieties you’re comfortable being anxious about. Busy, busy, busy.

Problem is, all of this becomes like chugging saltwater.

Drinking saltwater is a terrible idea. Because it makes you thirstier than you were before you started drinking it. So, you have to drink more saltwater. Then, that makes you thirstier still, so you end up drinking more saltwater. Which makes you also drink more saltwater. And so on. Until you die. Still thirsty.

Ditto empty email checking. Ditto anxiety about anxieties. Ditto every other Lizard Brain impulse to solve a perceived problem by amplifying the thing that’s actually causing the problem.

Tolerance: Bulwark Against Fakey Barriers

If making anything substantial really matters to you, you’re going to need to take the cure. And, the antidote is nasty, difficult, and tastes way worse than saltwater. The answer? You do the hard thing. No matter what it takes. You stick with it at the time you’re most tempted to run away.

Like I said in the talk, developing those invaluable tolerances (the tolerance for ambiguity and the tolerance for sucking) requires the exercise of some very small muscles. The muscles are super-hard to locate, and once you do find them, they hurt like a bitch to exercise. But, doing that exercise repeatedly will pay you back ten-fold.

Because that next time you’re in the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you, and you start to feel the fears building barriers, you’ll know what to do. And you’ll know how to do it. Because you’ve done it before.

There’s no trick here, guys. No system. No diagram. No hack. No tips, no webinars, and no Digg-able bulleted lists. It’s simply work.

You sit, you work, you tolerate. Then you do it again.

Enough. Just for Now.

I’m not sure whether this is precisely relevant, but as I’ve been working on the “Large Writing Project” I’d mentioned in the talk (more on that soon), a particular phrase keeps going through my head:

How do I know what I need to know…for now?

Not, “I can’t start this until I know everything about everything,” or “I can’t start this until I’m 100% up-to-date on every aspect of my life” or “I can’t start this until my skills, tools, expertise, and experience are flawless.”

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.

So, how about instead of waiting for the perfect conditions, maybe try thinking about this stuff in a kooky, opposite way:

1. Assume there will will always be tools that are better than the ones you have now.
2. Assume that events in the world will continue to happen or not happen regardless of whether you learn about them immediately.
3. Assume that you understand and control an embarrassingly minute percentage of the universe.
4. Assume that none of this matters if you’re determined to make something you care about today.

You already have everything you need. It’s all there. And it doesn’t take sandals, or perfect pitch, or iPhone 4.0, or full-screen mode, or a ★★★★-star reputation on the seduction community forum to get started. Or re-started. Or re-re-re-re-started.

Seconds Away

Your Lizard Brain is absolutely right when it tells you that most people won’t notice if you don’t make something, and that a lot of people won’t particularly care if you do. But, how you choose to respond to that existential kōan will say a lot about your potential as both an artist and as an engaged human.

Because, if you’re relieved that universal apathy provides legitimate cover for eight blissful hours of “managing email,” then you’re in luck. Every day for the rest of your life. Punch out.

But, if you’re like me, you may find you’re invigorated—even challenged—by all that bigger ambiguity. By knowing that, at any time, you might be seconds away from starting something amazing that seemed impossible a minute ago. Even oddly prepared to drop the lizard crap whenever the need arises.

Weird to think how insanely different your day could be today. Purely depending on what you do in the next 10 or 15 seconds. If that switch gets flipped in the right direction, then stays there.

What can you tolerate? What will you start? Now.

See? You’ve got enough of everything you need. You’ve already started. Now just keep going.

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Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound flight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.

So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but – well – you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was fine with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.

Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.

I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Suffice to say, fixing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.

“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.

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Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their influence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.

Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

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When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” – to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.

Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.

This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe – real, imagined, or prospective – in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.

Even though their influence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shuffle them around like Monopoly pieces?

Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

Related example. You ever had a loved one – especially a very young relative – pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.

And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shuffling. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”

Day One Buddhism.

Because, once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture – you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.

Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.

What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity fly in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?

For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:

First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack – then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Also, number two – and this is a biggie – I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is defined by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terrific opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.

No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.

Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.

So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.

Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.

Anyhow. To get up to speed, please read these in order: Matt said something, Josh said something, I said something, Andy wrote this awesome post, Jason responded, then, Anil responded. For extra credit, and to get you in the mood, go back and re-listen to Gruber’s and my talk from this year’s SxSW.

I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.

[Time passes, and then:]

Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong

Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.

But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difficult to understand, summarize, or fit back into our original story.

Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.

Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by fiat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.

In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and – what? – I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-profit corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-profit corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And – if and when I choose to give away the things that I make – nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

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But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1

Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men

As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically profitable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, fidget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.

Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting influence on whatever thing you really want to do – on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.

But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.

When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.

The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction

And, that is where things start turning to shit.

You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stifling regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count – simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.

You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backfill banners.

Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I first started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.

Today, links have been converted into a wildly inflated currency – farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul

When page views run your life, you eventually start fibbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?

And, finally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those finicky but influential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)

Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.

Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.

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The Ingratitude. The Temerity.

So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-profit publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum – and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives traffic!”

Hey, traffic. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.

See, links and traffic are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and traffic are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if – as I said in that email to Andy – what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?

Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3

And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.

The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-financially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.

I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).

But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:

I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation – but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?

Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing first.

Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.

This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”

Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.

There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.

Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.

If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome – and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.

But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either find more or simply try to steer clear.

And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little flotilla afloat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of first-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.

Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the floor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.

And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to figure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.

Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine

This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.

Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.

I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually benefits all of us to take this stuff seriously.

The Niche Shall Set You “Free”

And, finally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and fiduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it benefits someone who pays us by the compliment.

But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you finished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who filled your belly for “free.”

SxSW ’09 - Gruber & Mann - HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

My pal, John Gruber (from daringfireball.net), and I presented a talk at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, March 14th. We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal). Here’s what we had to say:

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• Direct MP3 Download
• Subscribe via the iTunes Store
• Subscribe via another podcasting app

N.B.: Awesome drawing by Dave Gray. Here’s more.

Selected Notes

• #SXSW Merlin Mann & John Gruber | Tony Steward:. Blog
• HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog with Credibility at Notes from SXSW Interactive 2009
• Roo Reynolds - SXSW panel snippets - ‘HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!’

Related

• Essay: Better
• Video: kung fu grippe - How to Blog
• Audio: Full Merlin Mann Series: How To Blog | Spark | CBC Radio
• Video: John Gruber - Auteur Theory of Design - Macworld Pulse
• Video: Merlin Mann - “Toward Patterns for Creativity” - Macworld
• Video: Fireball - The John Gruber Story

Don’t keep calm and carry on. by moleitau

Apart from noting that I adore Matt and want to acknowledge his inspiration for this, I have nothing to add.

This, my friends, is the thing.

So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?

That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.

Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical benefits that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and flexibility? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.

And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.

Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.

Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.

iTunes: “Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks”

Learn how ganging and constraints can help you create the blocks of time you need to devote 100% of your attention to making your best work. (10:32)

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• Direct MP3 Download
• Subscribe via the iTunes Store
• Subscribe via another podcasting app

Thanks for your patience, everybody. Nice to be back.

celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production

QPR - CryingStore - “Cold Tulips” by merlinmann (Celtx - Project Central)

I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text file or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than fiddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly flexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.

Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your final draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.

To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management – even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)

One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can flip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff – kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.

Anyhow, here’s the script for my recent public radio “CryingStore” parody as an example. Powerful app, and very flexible and fun to use. And at $200+ less than the commercial gorilla, FinalDraft, it’s most definitely worth the free-as-in-everything download.

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Celtx - FREE - Open Source - Application for Script Writing and “Integrated Media Pre-Production”

Celtx Links:

• celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production. (Overview/Intro)
• celtx - Screen Shots
• Celtx Features: The Feature Tour
• celtx - FAQ
• Main Page - CeltxWiki
• celtx - Download Version 1.0 (Dang, man: 4 platforms and up to 23 languages. Nice)

Design Observer: 26 Years, 85 Notebooks

Why a notebook link from the guy who’s supposedly over notebook pr0n? Easy. This is all about how Michael Bierut has used his 85 notebooks over the past 26 years.

The notebooks function like a security blanket for me. I can’t go into a meeting unless I have my current notebook in my hand, even if I never open it. Because I carry one everywhere, I tend to misplace them a lot. Losing one makes me frantic.

It’s a fascinating mini-memoir, told through almost three decades of lines in a go-to capture tool. To me, this is much more about habits, cognition, and memory than paper and cardboard.

Like most designers, I get asked a lot about my process. A lot of my ideas are so simple and dumb that a simple dumb drawing is all it takes to describe it. I probably did the drawing for the cover of Tibor Kalman’s monograph in a meeting. Picture on the front, stacked type on the spine: what if we did something like this? That’s how it came out. If a process is supposed to have steps, to reflect a method, that isn’t much of a process.

I disagree. Any process that stops feeling like a process has become an ideal process.

[via: Kottke: 26 years of notes]

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

Robert Christgau: CG 70s: The Grades

I love Christgau’s original (pre-1990) explanation of how he grades the records that he reviews.

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

[… further explanations, then …]

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.

It’s not that people aren’t interested in hearing what anointed “experts” have to say about a given movie, CD, book, or what have you. And, it’s not even that the lumpenconsumertariat requires that everything be reduced to a pre-chewed paste about buying decisions.

But, disclosing the fahrenheit, celsius, or kelvin of a given reviewer’s mercury would make it much easier for readers to understand how closely a critic’s cognition maps to their own.

Because, by itself, a thumb is really just a decisive finger. And, by itself, a finger almost always benefits from a little extra context.

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]