“The exercise you do in your 40s is highly relevant to your heart disease risk in your 80s.”
Good thing I’m finally exercising. I can do a 7-minute mile. A year ago I could barely make it in 10. Now the thing I worry about is being the guy who gets hit by a bus while running.
The upshot of this, I think, is that the greatness of a novel in the mind of its readers is often alloyed with those readers’ sense of their own greatness (as readers) for having conquered it.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
The reason I like longer novels is that if it does in fact turn out to be good, there’s more of it.
“People who put incoming e-mails in folders are no better at finding them than those who simply use search”
That might be true, but I don’t file emails to find just that one. I file them to find groups of them that don’t usually lend themselves well to searching.
My mom never wanted power windows in her car. She was afraid that if she went off the road and landed in a river, the windows would short out and she would be trapped in the car. True story, that.
Mom’s semi-irrational fear reminds me of why so many people cling to using text files for everything instead of using something a bit more, well, useful. What if they end up upside down in a river? Or, (barely) more realistically, what if that fancy proprietary format becomes unsupported in the distant future? What if I change operating systems and the new one doesn’t run the right software?
Right.
I love plain text files and use them all the time, but they don’t display images very well. They can also be hard to read if presenting anything slightly complex. What about Markdown? I love Markdown too, but only as an easy way to generate something that actually looks good later.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to sacrifice real and immediate usefulness so that I stand a better chance of surviving some imaginary computer apocalypse.
Anyway, in case of apocalypse, there’s always File->Export.
So I’ll continue to write and analyze notes in Tinderbox, store snippets of text, serial numbers, images, and PDFs in Yojimbo, and take meeting notes and brainstorm in MindManager or OmniOutliner.
I like not having to pull a muscle leaning across the front seat to roll down the passenger window.
“Back in the late ’90s, everybody was talking up ‘portals’, and advertising was going to pay for everything. Now, in the getting-late ’00s, everybody is talking up ‘social networks’, and advertising is going to pay for everything. ”
There’s this thing going around where people imagine they have to limit themselves to using a 64GB MacBook Air. What would the essential apps be if space was at a premium? Interesting question.
As an example, below is a list of apps Stephen Hackett of Forkbombr would install, given the crazy 64GB ceiling. I have most of those installed on my Air, and have included their sizes for reference. Where I don’t have a specific app I picked something that should be close.
That’s it? You’ve got 64GB to work with, and you’ve just limited yourself to a little over 1 GB of software. I’m all for going minimal and I love the idea of choosing essential apps, but the Air doesn’t really need to be a significant factor in that decision.
I have a boatload of apps on my Air. All of them, I think. My Total? 8.4GB. Never once have I not installed something because I was worried about drive space^ps. Why not skip an album or two in iTunes and install whatever useful app might someday come in handy?
64GB is both not very much and a lot.
My mom is awesome.
As I pulled out of the driveway this morning, AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock began playing on the radio. God DAMN what a song! Every morning should start that way.
And then there was rock. And it was good.
“Microblogging without message length restrictions is blogging. Or a very convoluted IM setup.”
(Via Better Elevation.)
I admit it. I’m a fan of Vivian Maier. It happened to pretty much everyone over the past year. Her story spread so fast and so far that it’s now unpopular for cool photographers to even admit they like her work. Whatever, I fell for the whole thing. Love her work, love the story, everything.
When I saw that there was a Kickstarter project for creating a documentary “Finding Vivian Maier” I donated 10 bucks. In return, I received this empty film spool which at one time held one of her negatives.
Being a total film nerd means that I think this is the coolest thing ever. A Vivian Maier photograph may have originated from this very spool. I wonder which one. Maybe this?
Or this!
