500 Words or Less

To People Who Complain About Being Tired Without Kids

If I ever hear you whine about being soooo fatigued from all of your adult socializing and physical activity, I am going to come to your house and fight you.

But before we fight, can I just ask that you go easy on me? I’m really bagged.

In fact, can I take a nap at your house first? And then we’ll get right to fighting as soon as I wake up. Promise.

Zzzz.

Geof Harries

This is by far the biggest adjustment to fatherhood that I still struggle with. It doesn’t matter what I eat, how much/little caffeine I consume, doesn’t matter how busy or relaxing a day I have had with my daughter, by the end of the night I am dead.

Deader than dead, more often than not.

I had some preparation for this stage in life by working dance competitions while I was the Technical Director of a theatre. 8 AM to 10 PM, dance music constantly throughout the day. I didn’t have to do much other than babysit to ensure the lights were on and the music was playing. The challenge was keeping your mind awake and not going insane by listening to the same song four times within a few hours (the Ukranian dance competitions were the worst).

Fatherhood is rather similar, except not only are you trying to keep your brain going by keeping track of your needs, but you’re keeping track of a smaller person’s needs, too. Then you add on physically demanding it can be lifting a child up many times in an hour, playing shepherd to your little sheep. On top of that, add screaming and tantrums.

I am going to be thrilled when my daughter is four/five and able to be a little more independent.

But, after a long nap, I will probably miss the hustle and bustle of the days I’m going through right now.

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Two Writers, Two Products for Entrepreneurs and Small Biz

Two writers I follow regularly through an email newsletter (both have decided to stop publishing to a blog, which is an interesting choice) have released new products that may be of interest to people. They are both geared at small business owners and entrepreneurs (or wanna-bes), and are available at a discounted price until March 14th, and are under $50.00 US.

Ev Bogue released a rewrite of his popular Minimalist Business

MINIMALIST BUSINESS BASIC

Who is Minimalist Business For?

  • You want to live and work from anywhere in the world
  • You want to achieve more peace, freedom, and autonomy in your life
  • You’re willing to make hard decisions
  • You’re ready to do the work
  • You have an open mind, and are willing to hear a true and different perspective on reality
  • You’re ready to take the leap, and live and work from anywhere in the world

What you get:

  • The complete 171 pages of Minimalist Business
  • 23,000 words on how to live and work from anywhere
  • Free updates to Minimalist Business for 1 year
  • Designed and compiled for Kindle, viewable on any device
  • Delivered to your Inbox via Mailchimp

Gwen Bell released, Reverb: Get Your Business Seen + Heard

Reverb: Get Your Business Seen + Heard

Who This is For:

  • This is for you if right now you’re toiling in obscurity but want to create something that gets seen and heard
  • This is for you if want to learn to sell with confidence
  • This is for you if you’re unclear on how to best market what you’re doing
  • This is for you if marketing intimidates you and you’d prefer a way other than “viral”
  • This is for you if you’re ready to create a business and communicate what you’ve created has the potential to change the world
  • This is for you if you’re ready to learn how to deal with flux
  • This is for you if you want to launch in a way that’s aligned with your values

What You Get:

  • Learn how to get your business on people’s radars
  • Learn to sell from a place of alignment
  • Get the 10 steps you need to go from zero to reverb
  • Find out ways to strengthen your current message
  • Learn ways to position your business
  • Get clarity around why your business isn’t currently reverbing
  • Get the Kindle .mobi file delivered immediately to your inbox upon purchase

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Knowledge is Action

Knowledge is Action

Regardless of how much knowledge
you might acquire,
you are still ignorant

without action-
You would be neither scholar nor learned,

but an animal carrying books.
A donkey does not know
whether it’s carrying books
or firewood.

Sa’di

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Spring Renewal and Revamping

There’s something quite liberating when you start from scratch instead of build upon a previous structure.

I was thinking about this when I cleaned out the design of this site and installed a new theme, removing the advertisements and most of the other nonsense. I decided to do something that I had only done before with my Windows machines of the past: wipe the drive and start over. It was the first time I had done a clean install of my Mac since I purchased it – over five years ago 1

I started the process last night, doing a Time Machine backup to an external drive, just in case, and then moving important work files to the drive separately for quick access. 2 It’s incredible how easy the process is on a Mac. It’s so easy, I would almost think Apple wants you to wipe your drive on a regular basis. Compared to installing Windows, which I did over the weekend for a relative’s computer, it was quick and painless.

When it first boots into the new machine with galaxy image and the Dock down below, there’s a moment of excitement when you realize you get to start playing once again. Not using and working, but playing, tweaking, exploring options once again. I forgot what it was like to play with a computer after being stuck in certain usage patterns, certain fonts, the desktop image, and having a sense of joy come to life when you hear that “quacking” sound when hitting the Volume Up buttons.

I never have this experience when booting up a Windows machine for some reason. It’s almost always a moment of disgust, a constant reminder of how much needs to change before it’s actually useful and runs smoothly. Perhaps Windows 8 will be different, but for now, I am more than happy with my Apple experience, both with my MacBook circa 2006 and my iPad 2.

It’s almost spring officially. I’ve revamped my blog, how I write, my computer, and have started to revamp my workout regime.

I wonder what I will revamp next?

  1. Incredible to think that I’ve owned it for so long when people are trading in their iPads for the new ones a year later] ↩
  2. Plus photos, and my purchased music.  ↩

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Attribution and Curation

There was a bit of discussion popping up in my feeds about the act of curation and attributing the discoveries to the original work. Since this is something I tend to do more of here, rather than creating articles on how to do certain tasks, I find it extremely interesting.

Two of my favourites:

The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.

Marco Arment, I’m not a curator

and

But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act;

Matt Langer, Stop Calling it Curation

Both of them refer to the Curators Code, which is aiming to codify the way we attribute our discoveries online to a set standard to make it easily identifiable whether we personally discovered it, or we discovered it through someone else.

Both Marco and Matt make exceptional arguments as to why this is a stupid idea, so I hope you go and read their posts in their entireity. I’m not sure how long the Curators Code has been active, but I find it interesting that the discussion of attributing discoveries has arisen after the rants of MG Siegler a few weeks past about the news outlets quoting the direct source and not giving him credit for breaking the original story.

What’s more important, the original source or the discover of the original source? 1

  1. Unrelated, but I wrote this using my latest writing tool, Byword and using Markdown. I think it’ll be much more useful than writing something and having to use my mouse to highlight and click to setup links, etc. ↩

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An Invitation to the Future

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.

Paul Graham, Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

This past week could be deemed the Week of the Future. It’s hosted the launch of the new iPad, the successive launches (and updates) of several popular apps (Highlight, Sonar, Path, Flipboard), and SxSW is taking place. It has been difficult to keep track of all of this information, and I have yet to delve into all the news coming out of SxSW yet. For that, I’m going to wait and listen to TWiT and some of the other podcasts on the 5by5 network.

All of these items are important to varying degrees, but another small event happened that is more satisfying to me. Jason Kottke released a new version of his website, kottke.org (you simply must read his coverage of the iPad event). The design of the site has always been minimalist in nature, and it always appealed to me over the years. It’s one of the quickest loading sites out there, and puts a real emphasis on the reading of it. Heck, he even eliminated his logo from appearing at the top of the page and moved it to the side.

Watching the launch of that site made me reflect (once again)1 on how the site looked. I was pleased with the overall look of the previous design, but never quite happy enough. I didn’t like the font choice for headers, but not entirely sure what to replace it with. Some web browsing later, I came across the current theme. I made a few minor modifications to adjust the fonts across the board, and finally took the time to eliminate a lot of the extraneous plugins that I had installed but never used completely.

This site is more in line with the sites I enjoy reading the most (not just for the content, but for the design, as well).

and also inspired by Instapaper and Flipboard.

I also decided to get rid of all the ads on the side and put more emphasis on the writing for the site. I’m going to continue making minor tweaks over the coming days, but I am much more at peace with this design than all the previous ones. This is something I can stick with and won’t muck around with.

I have a suspicion that as the web becomes more mobile, these kinds of site designs are going to become more prevalent across all types of websites. The flashy websites are neat to look at once, but are rather a pain to visit on a consistent basis. Stripped down retail sites are becoming more popular, as well, (Beyond the Rack, My Habit are two that are gaining in popularity). Design has gone back to focusing on the reader, the shopper, and away from cluttering the screen with as much information as possible.

There is a real draw to using Flipboard on my iPad to get away from a lot of the noise of reading on Twitter, and the web in general. I long for a clean web, with Flash entry pages gone, popup ads gone, and as much advertising as possible gone. I wonder what would happen if the internet had an ASCII text day where all webpages were just words and links. How much faster would our internet services be if that were to happen?

I can’t solve this problem on the net, but I’ll contribute my little piece to help speed things along.

  1. 4th time in the site’s existence, if not more, I’m sure. [↩]

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Do We Need to Branch Out?

What interests me most about Branch is that it has the possibility to be the continuation of the evolution of online communication. Blogging -> Tweeting -> Branching (? — too soon). It has elements of both blogging (putting down words online) and tweeting (speed and character limits) while opening up new paths of discussion thanks to context and curation.

MG Siegler, The Branching of Content

I read MG’s1 post tonight about Branch, took a look at the example Branch, and have been letting the concept sink into me.

It’s difficult to say exactly what Branch is since it’s only beta-testing right now, but it appears to be a nice-looking comment engine. MG questions whether it is the “continuation of the evolution of online communication,” but when I look at the underlying function of it, it seems to be Google+ without the extras added on (the photos, hangouts, etc).

At the bottom of the example Branch, Ev Williams says:

“More specifically, we see these conversations being spawned by both news stories and social platforms. I could easily see starting a Branch based on a tweet.”

That’s exactly what Google+ does right now. A user posts a comment, a link to a news story, a tweet, a video, and a discussion starts right away. You can watch it stream by live if you were so inclinded, as well.

The only difference I see with Branch and Google+ is that Branch is going to be heavily curated. It’s always interesting to hear what the experts think about recent events, but I wonder if this is the best platform to be doing this. And I wonder if the “regular Joes” need another platform to discuss things on that doesn’t currently exist.

The one value I can see with Branch is it replacing email. It answers a lot of the problems email currently has – message length, participants are invited to join (thus people in the conversation are actually paying attention), and you’re not required to join every conversation. With people only able to respond with brief responses, it should help keep conversatiosn focused. It would also eliminate a lot of spam, because there would be filters in place to decide who would get to contact you2.

This idea may not be so far-fetched. As MG put it:

“The only real “solution” is to change the way people think about email. It needs to be considered more of a stream than an inbox. That is, it needs to be more like Twitter and less like a to-do list.”

Who better to bring a more “Twitter-like” experience for email than the co-founders of Twitter?3

Branch on Twitter
Statement from Obvious about funding Branch
Branch main website

  1. More and more, I’m finding I discover new products via MG first before finding it through TechCrunch, PandoDaily, etc. [↩]
  2. I imagine it will behave like Twitter were you have to be mutually following each other in order to send a private message. [↩]
  3. Evan Williams and Biz Stone are partnering with Branch, and will be key members in the development of the product, most likely [↩]

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Commitment

Commitment

Until one is committed there is a hesitancy, the

chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)

there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of

which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

that the moment one definitely commits oneself,

then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur

that would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision,

raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen

incidents and meetings and material assistance,

which no man could have dreamt would have

come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s

couplets:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can,

begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and

magic in it.”

 

From the diary of W.H. Murray

The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

 

According to Wikipedia, the quote is a loose translation of Goethe’s Faust. Here is the original quote:

Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth — that the moment one definitely commits oneself then divine providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred and which no man could have dreamed would have come their way.

 

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One of the Problems with Social Media [Short]

Every day, we push more meaningless crap onto the web. We’ve devalued our relationships into meaningless numbers of friends and followers. We’ve stopped being people, and started being personal brands. Are we finally ready to reduce our identity into a collection of photoshopped images of crap we can’t afford?

Jay Dolan, The Anti-Social Media

 

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A New Gladiator

This is what it must feel to be a gladiator
Dripping in sweat,
Eyes looking forward at the enemy
But the enemy is within
It is the one that restrains you
In hopes of making sure you don’t take that extra step
To keep you human
And not to become God-like.

A gladiator faces fear in the ring
I face only my beating heart
The tears falling from my chest
The stains of dirty gloves
When I lift weights, I am invincible.

I can conquer any challenges put in front of me
No limits can hold me back
I keep pushing until I can push no more
Then I push some more
Causing me to bleed
Not blood, but more salty drops
Stinging my eyes and coating my lips.

Panting breaths, I feel near death
But a pause in action makes me feel alive
The walking dead
An immortal walking among the living
I stare ahead at my challenger,
Looking at him in the mirror,
And question how much of him remains
How much further can he push

There are no words spoken in response
Just a fist grabbing the iron to throw into the air again
More hard breaths
More sweat
All of which breeds
A new gladiator

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