500 Words or Less

Last Minute Christmas Ideas (for yourself)

Christmas is a time of giving. I generally focus more on giving gifts to others than I am about crafting my own “wish list.” Just ask any of my family members. It’s next to impossible to shop for me.

But Christmas is also a time of where there are plenty of deals happening, whether they are sales in retail stores or coupons for products online. It’s the perfect time to purchase some of those extra apps or ebooks that you have been putting off buying and would be a bit awkward to put on a wish list, e.g. a $4.00 app that is on sale for $1.00 – do you really need someone to purchase you a dollar app?

I have been monitoring my feeds for some good deals, and here there are:

Frictionless Freelancing – Aaron Mahnke

Promo Code: Christmas20

Frictionless Freelancing is a book by Aaron Mahnke geared towards people wanting to break through with their freelancing career. Aaron is a freelance graphic designer by trade, but also hosts the excellent Home Work podcast. The book is full of practical advice for anyone who ends up having to do client work of any kind. It deals with productivity friction, client friction, financial friction and personal friction.

The manifesto is available for free on the website, the eBook bundle with some extra resources used for planning/tracking is priced at $19. Using the code listed above the price drops to $15. The book is also available as a paperback for $25.00 on Amazon

Paperless – David Sparks

Paperless was recently named to the Best of 2012 by the iBookstore. As you can guess by its name, Paperless is all about transforming your workflow from dealing with paper to handling as much as possible through your digital devices. It outliness processes to help you capture, organize, and use your files. He also shows you his workflow and the applications he uses through video and screencasts. It is Mac-centric (along with iPad and iPhone) but a lot of his tips can easily be migrated to other operating systems.

In conjunction with it being named to the Best of 2012 list, David has dropped the price down from $10 to $7 through to December 31st. It is available as a PDF on his website or through the iBook Store. It is not available at Amazon, but his other books, Mac at Work and iPad at Work are.

Marked – Brett Terpstra

Marked is an app for Mac that is incredibly useful for writers of all breeds, and most likely coders. It is a live preview window for Markdown text syntax with a lot more punch behind it. Link verifying, multi-file documents being viewed as one, Scrivener support and more. It works with any text editor (working beautifully with my preferred app, Byword and looks incredible.

It is available on the Mac App Store for the discounted price of $0.99 through to the end of December (normally $4.00). Here’s a video (in German) will show you how it will look with your favourite editor, but check out the website for more information:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed-1BNo-zAs&version=3&hl=en_US]

Tonx

Tonx is a coffee roaster that ships out the beans to you every other week. It goes beyond just sending you the same kind of bean each shipment though. It basically curates a selection of the best beans of the world and sends them to you. The beans they send are always freshly roasted shortly after they have been harvested during their peak cycles. The beans aren’t sitting on a store shelf for a month waiting for you to purchase them.

Additionally, you may or may not receive the same roast twice in a given period, which can be torture if you find a roast you love. I think of it more as expanding your taste buds in a safe manner, because you are almost guaranteed to love the roasts. It isn’t the same kind of crapshoot that you find when visiting a grocery store and choosing from the 30 different blends.

The best part about Tonx is that they are available in Canada, as well as the US. People in the US can request a free trial. You can also gift subscriptions to people and share your love for coffee with others.

Right now, you can also ask for a booster pack of coffee for $7 to share with your friends – maybe. My roasts have been so good I only let my parents smell the beans, not taste a cup of coffee. I am that greedy.[1]

Sketchnote Handbook- Mike Rohde

Sketchnote Handbook teaches you how to capture the ideas in your head and transfer them onto the page. It helps you organize your thoughts or the thoughts of others (e.g. while listening to a lecture) in a way that will help you remember the key points. There isn’t a special deal on the book right now, but it is that time of year where people start planning their goals for the following year. One of mine has been wanting to pick up drawing again, so the Sketchnote Handbook seems like a good starting point for me.

Mike Rohde is the designer behind the sketches in Rework (by 37 Signals) and The $100 Startup (by Chris Guillebeau). You can purchase the book at Amazon or the other dealers listed on the site. Take a look at the video below to get a better idea of the book or visit his site.

[vimeo 48892571 w=500 h=281]

Others to Consider

It’s useful to look through your junk mail folders to discover if renewal deals have gone missed. Most services are offering 20–50% off right now, which can cut down on your business costs tremendously. Here is a quick hit list of services to take advantage of and some other recommendations as a treat for yourself :

  • Hostgator – webhosting, 20% off.
  • Outright – business accounting, 50% off, December 23rd only.
  • Freshbooks – online invoicing and time tracking.
  • NSFW Corp – excellent daily dispatches about world events. $3 per month.
  • The Magazine – bi-weekly magazine published to the iPad. $2 a month. Awesome featured writers.
  1. And love the coffee that much.  ↩

iPhone 5: Two Weeks In

The dots have not been connecting for me lately, which is one of the main reasons why I am switching to using an iPhone 5.

Over a month ago, I wrote up my thoughts on Why I am Switching to iPhone from Android, and two weeks ago, I finally received my iPhone 5. I don’t want to write a review of the device, simply because there are others who have done so previously.1 Instead, I want to focus on the reasons why I switched and whether my initial problems3 have been resolved.

In my post, I did not outline a laundry list of problems, but instead grouped them into one area: the ecosystem, the system of flow from my mind to phone to iPad/laptop. The short answer is this has gone much better than I first expected.

My biggest problem was the disconnect I was having between my phone and my laptop or iPad. Basically, I wanted what was on my phone to be transported to my laptop easily, and for the files on my laptop to be brough to my phone easily. While some may have had issues with iCloud, I have not. It has been working out extremely well for me, syncing photos immediately, syncing my writing files quickly, and able to wireless sync iTunes. I suspected this would work as advertised, since I had been seeing it work with Byword between my Mac and iPad.

There are a few apps I want to highlight that have been making life easier for me, but first I want to mention something that was an after-thought before now: the home screen.

After I read Ben Brooks Organizing an iPhone 5 Homescreen, my initial thought was, “It can’t matter that much, can it?” Of course, once I started downloading a lot more apps and swiping around the various home screens, I realized it was a problem. To simply Ben Brooks approach, he gave each spot on the home screen a number to signify its priority and accessibility. Using his original number structure, I started to shift my apps around into the slots, putting the ones I access the most on the sides instead of in a linear line from left-to-right.2

Scratch

Scratch is one of those indispensable apps for me right now. It allows you to write out quick notes, save them quickly and them access them afterwards without having to worry about how to organize them or tag them. They are just there as a list. It also supports Markdown, with a quick access menu for commonly used functions (i.e. #Headers, lists, > and *). Apart from copying and pasting the text into a different app, you can also use the share menu to send it to Byword or Poster (my favourite WordPress editor). I’m starting to jot down a lot of future post ideas in Scratch, developing them a little bit before doing most of the work in Poster or Byword on my iPad or Mac.

It solves a problem that I had with my Android phone. I could find lots of to-do list apps, but never a good, basic notepad app that would allow me to get the text into my blog editor easily on my Mac. Copying and pasting it into an email, then copying and pasting from that email into a different editor is too many steps. With Scratch, I write, then hit share, and it’s in the blog editor ready to go either on the iPhone, iPad or Mac. Simple.

Tweetbot

If you had told me last year that I would be purchasing an app to use for Twitter, I would have said you were nuts. After many rave reviews when it first came out, I knew I had to try it out when I received my iPad, and then when I got the iPhone 5. It is rather strange to say this, but Tweetbot is one of those apps I love picking up and using. Even if I’m not all that interested in seeing what has been updated lately, I want to use the app. It reminded me when I first purchased my Mac and wrote about marketing the Mac: it’s fun to use.

It is also awesome to use, too. Easy to navigate between the Timeline, direct messages, lists, mentions, etc. One of the best features is the mute button. Finding someone who is tweeting too much, or a hashtag showing up way too frequently? Mute it. You will never see it show up in your timeline or lists (you will in mentions, however). I am pretty sure I have been using Twitter far more often once I downloaded it earlier in the year, and definitely more on my iPhone now (not sure if this is a good thing or not, of course).

I am sure I will discover and share new apps I come across that I find useful. I am exploring some of the fitness tracking apps right now (Runkeeper is my preferred one) and still searching for some more productivity apps. If you have any suggestions of apps I should check out, let me know in the comments.

  1. iPhone 5 reviews: Daring Fireball, MG Siegler ↩
  2. I would do something similar on the iPad, except my daughter enjoys moving around the icons too much. I gave up on organizing it and rely mostly on the “swipe left and search” approach.  ↩
  3. The problems with the iPhone 5 have been so minimal, I am going to bury them here. Notifications drive me crazy, lack of a good Gmail App (Sparrow comes close), and difficult to have a true silence (no ring, no vibration) without multiple taps.  ↩

The Only Feeling That Makes Sense – Sons of Anarchy

It’s hard not to hate.

People, things, institutions. When they break your spirit and take pleasure in watching you bleed.

Hate is the only feeling that makes sense.

But I know what hates does to a man. Tears him apart. Turns him into something he’s not. Something he promised himself he’d never become.

Sometimes my life feels like a deadly balancing act, what I feel slamming up against what I should do. Impulsive reactions racing to solutions miles ahead of my brain.

– Jackson Teller, Sons of Anarchy

There are a lot of emotions that I feel on a daily basis, but Jackson’s right.

Hate is the only feeling that makes sense.

Jealousy was the only emotion that comes close to making sense to me. It still confuses the heck out of me with how quickly those feelings come alive within me. Love makes you do things in the moment that may not make sense when looking back upon them. How can you pin down what makes you happy? A smile can appear in the most random moments.

Needless to say, you are watching this show, right?

Sons of Anarchy, Season 1 – iTunes

Marcus Aurelius – Inward Power

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces — to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it — and makes it burn still higher.

– Marcus Aurelius

More on Medium

The media has not become a medium. We've failed at creating cohesive digital formats.

Jay Dolan, What the F is Medium?

After writing about Medium yesterday in Verbosity, I came across the above post exploring how Medium fits in alongside Tumblr, WordPress, Twitter, and so forth. Fresh with my ideas about Medium, I decided to take the plunge and wrote this lengthy comment:

I had a different take on Medium, which is yan extension of another product they backed/helped create, Branch

If you read their introductory blog post, they mention how there are a lot of places to create content, but not enough quality content. Tumblr is a site that already allows you to post a picture with text or video with text, or just one or the other. The problem (in their view) is that people only view their site when creating, or reblog something someone else has done. There is no real building upon an idea. There are extensions of ideas (i.e. memes exploding in popularity) but no shared experiences.

With Medium, the individual pieces aren't what matters. It's the shared collection that matters. People read one person's story, video, picture, and want to share their own story/video/picture with that collection.

With Branch, the individual message isn't what matters, but the "branch" of curated conversation. You don't refer to one item from a branch, but the entire branch.

In a way, it's like Pinterest, because people create their own collections there, but most often there's nothing meaningful behind each collection. It's just an easy way to organize our own thoughts. So Medium takes the visual style of Pinterest, but allows people to create shared collections.

The main thing that helped clue me into this is what happens when you click the author's name. On every other site on the Net, it takes you to a profile page which has information about the author and other items they've created on the site. On Medium, it takes you to the Twitter profile (go figure, really). Right now, there's no way to discover what other authors have written, just explore other ideas more thoroughly.

Of course, this is only the alpha release, and who knows if this is going to change in the future. To me, Branch is a much more appealing service, like Quora but you invite people into the conversation, and make it public or not. I see a service like that being more valuable and replacing email. But why would I share a piece of writing on Medium instead of my own site? That's the biggest question facing Medium, and one I don't see a clear answer for.

Making the switch


Even though the official start date for the fall season is September 21st, Labour Day is a big day of transitions. It is most often associated with the beginning of the school year, especially most Universities and Colleges. It also the last major weekend of the summer holidays, so tourism tends to trail off. And in some years, like this one, it lands close to the first of the month, which means a lot of people are moving.

I happen to live in a vacation rental condo complex where all of these events collapse into one. All the tourists flood the building on Thursday-Saturday, making one last ditch effort to taste the warm weather, before departing on the Sunday to give themselves the Monday to prepare for the week.

On the 1st, the moving vans started to pile up on the streets as people moved into the building – most of them renters for the winter season, but some of them new owners. The majority of these new residents are students, since the complex is relatively close to the College campus here, and convenient to the bus routes to get to the University campus.

Watching one mother help her daughter move into the building took me back to my first days of University when I first moved away from home. There is an aura of excitement in the air as people get ready for the school year – new computers, setting up desks and living spaces, meeting new friends for the first time, buying stacks of textbooks and waiting hours in line in the University bookstore with the other hundred students talking about how broken the system is. 1

The leaves slowly start to change, and in the far north, the snows have already started to settle into the mountains. The Pacific salmon run is just finishing up, and the Kokanee salmon run will be beginning in the coming weeks. Baseball seasons start to finish up, as hockey seasons begin. And people go from having glasses of wine on the patios of restaurants, to warm cups of tea or coffee in their local cafes.

Last year at this time, I had moved into my new place. The first week of September was a month of exploration, discovering which coffee shops were best, how far it took to walk to the grocery store, and spending time at the beach soaking up the last hot rays of sunlight for the summer.

This time, another switch is happening. I have found myself more energized to do my work, and wanting to explore other avenues for work. I have been pushing myself harder with exercise this summer, but want to push even harder this fall and see where it takes me by next spring. Most people switch their diets around in the springtime to clean it up for the summer. I want to do the same right now and further improve my discipline away from having cheat meals.

My focus in the past has always been on others, and the past two and a half years on my daughter. Now is time for a switch, to put a little more emphasis on me.

  1. Maybe this is unique to the University of Regina, but when I went to school, you couldn’t order textbooks online (the web was only just getting underway), couldn’t even order by phone and have them set aside. All of the textbooks were never placed out in advance, either. Everyone was buying them the first week of classes, which meant for huge lineups running down the length of the store. Ironically, the bookstore used to be the location for the cafeteria when the University first started, so it was a space meant for lineups and waiting around. ↩

Lincoln

Lincoln, which is coming out November 9, will follow the country’s beloved 16th president in the days leading up to his assassination. It’s adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, which tells the story of how Lincoln stocked his cabinet with a bunch of guys who disagreed with him so he’d have a whole slew of perspectives on his presidential decisions. I know — this sounds like science fiction and not historical fact, but it totally happened. If all of that isn’t cool enough, the screenplay was written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America). So there is a very good chance that a historical movie about Abraham Lincoln that is written by Kushner, directed by Spielberg, and starring Day-Lewis will win some Oscars next year. In fact, maybe everyone else should just stay home.

- Jamie Frevele, Daniel Day-Lewis completely disappears into Abraham Lincoln | BoingBoing

I think I have seen more rumours and movie trailers for films I want to check out this year than in any year past. Bringing on someone like Kushner to adapt a book is a brilliant move on Spielberg’s part. I hope more Hollywood films tap into the world of playwrights since they know how to craft dialogue better than anyone – and it’s usually one of the big things that drags down a film. I think people can overlook a bad plot-line or effects if the dialogue and acting is better than average, but if the dialogue is poor, people tend to avoid going to that film.

Apart from the films that have already opened (Prometheus, Dark Knight, Savages, and Moonrise Kingdom), here are some of the others I’m looking forward to seeing (links go to the trailers):

Life of Pi

Skyfall

The Hobbit

Cloud Atlas

The Master

Les Miserables

Hyde Park on Hudson

 

 

Matt Gemmell on Email

To effectively manage our email, we have to accept a few basic truths. They’re hard truths, but that only makes them even more valuable. Here they are:

  1. What’s important to other people is not (as) important to you.
  2. You are inherently lazy and egocentric.
  3. Ruthlessness is a hell of a time-saver.

Matt Gemmell, Managing Email Realistically

This is such a great post about how workflows with email should work. I follow a lot of his suggestions already, but after reading it through, I think I need to take my ruthlessness up a notch.

One of my biggest issues with email right now is how people use it like an IM, sending short responses back and forth rapidly, making it difficult to follow along with the conversation or to jump into it.

If only people could be smart about writing emails as much as they are smart about reading them.

Just One of Those Days

I find it interesting that I can say something along the lines of, “Just one of those days,” and most people will understand what I am saying almost immediately. It’s similar to that joke about how we can refer to “the pill” and people know which one we are talking about. There are only a few hundred varieties of pills to choose from, and there are how many thousands of days to experience, yet “the pill” and “one of those days” is so easily isolated from everything else.

I don’t think it would be of interest if I went through the details of my day. It was just me and my daughter of two and a half in an intense battle of mind games, trying to outlast the other, out maneuver and thinking five steps ahead to wear down their defenses.

The details also may discourage other couples who read this from having children.

When I had one of those days at work, I could easily get by with a few drinks and a conversation with a friend to get my mind off of what happened.

When you have one of those days with a toddler running around and have no real escape (can’t drink, go to a movie, etc) it can be exhausting mentally. I was finding myself yawning at 8:30pm.

The worst part about these days is I feel like I am failing at everything I do. There is no easy solution for me to resolve things with my daughter since it’s an ongoing process, and I don’t get much of an opportunity to focus on anything else I want to be doing. Meanwhile, I spend time during the day watching the Olympics[1], admiring the athletes in all their perfection and wondering how fortunate most of them are to be able to focus so much energy on training to achieve success at a high level. If only I were so lucky to be able to do that.

The only thing I can do is lay in bed exhausted and hope tomorrow is a lot more fun for us both.

Just one of those days is thankfully only one day and not a week, a month, a year.

I don’t know how single parents of multiple kids survive these days. Kudos to them for survivng.

  1. My daughter loves gymnastics, will sit on the couch and watch carefully.  ↩

Quote: George R. R. Martin

“I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”

- George R. R. Martin

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