On the potentially chaotic nature of our brain:
Functional connections can flicker in and out of existence in milliseconds. Individual neurons appear to change their tuning properties over time and thus may not be “byte-addressable”—that is, stably represent some piece of information—but instead operate within a dynamic dictionary that constantly shifts to make room for new meaning.
I like the cut of this man’s jib.
This little cartoon by Hallie Bateman cracked me up.
I’ve been using 2Do for iOS and Mac for a while now and I love it. What’s interesting is how little literature there is on this suite of apps. I’d like to do my best to right the ship, so I’m going feature little ditties that I have found while enjoying the app. Today, I’m going to introduce you to the Quick Entry input in iOS—which Guided Ways (developer of 2Do) features on their homepage but doesn’t showoff.
To access this wizardry, do the following:
I'm never sure about what I should be doing on the internet. I am not great at blogging, my twittering skills remain unhoned and I tend to abandon my (internet) children whenever given the opportunity to “go to the store.” So what to do? Easy. Start another thing that you can let whither and die. In my case, a Tumblr to serve as a mood board of sorts.
Expect a bunch of tomfoolery, links to music I'm digging and perhaps some little tidbits about what is occupying my obsession these days. Overall, it'll be uncompelling, which is fitting of my little empire in the metaphorical sand.
Spotlight on the middle of the stage.
Enter an awkward floating eye with gyrating shoulders. Jazz hands abound.
I've been running this site on Jekyll for three or four years now. It's been a gas, truly. I have bent my mind around some of the idosyncracies over the years and by all accounts, it appears like it has a bright future ahead of it. In fact, Octopress 3.0 looks to be around the bend, which should make Jekyll even easier to use for kooks like me.
That said, Ruby—the language Jekyll is written in—has been a friction point.[1] I can understand snippets and have dedicated more than a few late nights poking my fingers in different pies to make Jekyll due my bidding with reasonable success. But I will never be a Ruby, and therefore a Jekyll, master. Together they are a ship that deserves a more worthy captain to take them into new and unknown waters. I am a mere garbage barge operator; my longing for the seas extends only as far as my gaze from the moorings of this dump.[2]
The crowd prepares themselves for what can only be described in peculiar dialects of languages that have become extinct because their native speakers had, well, terrible taste.
I have been playing around with different “social networks” lately like Ello and Tumblr to post different sorts of content. Each have neat-o interfaces that are well suited for their particular jobs that are, dare I say, fun to use. I'm not arguing for a backend to my static site generator, rather I realised that I have aspirations for new forms of content beyond the basic “blog post.” I'm not abandoning my blog, instead think of it as buying new furniture for this dumpy old place.
Here's what I’ve been thinking I need:
So I don't have a solution. I haven't picked up a programming language or created something new. Instead, I have constructed a problem and written up a shopping list. Its high time I look for a new dance partner.
Shake, now shuffle left. Cha-cha-cha.
“It's all gravy when you've got moves like mine.”
Feel like noodlin’ on the internets? But don’t feel like downloading a massive web development environment like MAMP? Yet you just… can’t resist the urge to noodle on the internet? Have no fear—unfortunately, your sorrows will be entirely unaffected by what I’m about to show you—you can resume praying to your internet-based FSM god using a clever little script to manage the pain that is Apache2 for you.
Tap the following keys into your command line editor of choice:[1]
$ brew tap jide/clamp
$ brew install clamp
After that, move to the directory full of your sacrificial web noodles and clamp away!
I started using one of those artsy social networks that no one is meant to visit and will probably fizzle out in the near-future. It’s called Ello. I’m not sure how my participation will pan out but Ello seems like a reasonable enough place to add my longstanding photo collection of sticky notes.
Consider this a public display of my lukewarm adolescent rebellion—make of it what you will.
I've had a load of knuckle-headed ideas for new projects over the years. I love the thought process that has gone into many of them—although not enough to follow through—and it would be a true shame to just let them whither, like a forgotten tomato on the vine. So without further adieu, I present a silly and unfinished idea from the archives.
2012-07-18
Extraordinary things happen around a dog (e.g., time travel) while the dog pretty much remains completely inactive. In the example given, Shobu remains relatively motionless as the entire universe is plunged into chaos. Mongol hordes and Roman armies descend upon the idyllic suburban neighbourhood where Shobu’s owners live. Every story ends with the dog doing something entirely innocent, like rolling over, and a child says, “Oh Shobu!”
Every story ends completely unresolved.
Website redesigns are hard. Harder still are redesigns for yourself. My optimism for a fresh start faded away when I realized that I couldn’t quite nail down the specifics of what I wanted or how far I would allow the scope to creep. The cost-benefit analysis of a redesign posits that you want to change enough to justify your time and leave enough extra that you could pick up if you felt ambitious enough to realize your full dream. Obviously, I’m no economist, so here I am writing this post.
At the height of this despair I ran into an article by Jonnie Hallman titled Redesigning with rules. He describes the process of designing his current website, starting not with sketches or wireframes but a set of constraints he dreamed for his particular site. His process was this:
For an entire day, I sat at my desk and thought about my then current website. I thought about the obstacles that made updating it such a chore. I thought about the parts of the website I squeezed in later, which weren’t considered when establishing the original design. I thought of all the advances in the web world that occurred in the past two years. Then, I made lists.
You can see his final list here.
I thought Jonnie’s advice seemed sensible enough to reproduce for myself.[1] So here is a hobbled together list of my current redesign rules. They are subject to change and will be noted if they do, but I am comfortable enough with the current list to make myself accountable for them by putting them out for all to see.
Layout:
Style:
Behaviour:
Content:
I haven't yet put together a public repo, but I will soon. There are some experiments that I would like to try and perhaps someone might find some of that useful. ↩︎
I've been busy doing a little work behind the scenes. This site has made the arduous journey across the barren desert of the internet to a new domain. This is now officially trst.co and not, well… whatever it was before. I dare not speak its name.
There were a number of reasons for this but the foremost being that the previous domain was silly and rather long.[1] So to save you the hassle of typing an unnecessary number of characters (in an age of t.co links which effectively makes this a non-issue) I have made the switch. If you follow my writing through RSS—thank you, by the way—you shouldn't have to do anything, everything should just work.
I'm hoping that this effort will be a small sign of the things to come. There are a number of other improvements in the works that should hopefully come to light in the coming months.
An entirely planned for consequence of this change is that the “person” referenced in the old domain is now out of the picture. What remains is the mind of a child without the weight of former attachments—i.e., useless pillowcase full of meat. ↩︎
On April 20th, this site officially turned three years old. Every year, I write one of those “happy birthday” posts and then I make promises to be better than I have been. Perhaps it’s a sign I will return to writing more regularly or who knows, maybe this is the year I swim with sharks. Either way I spend the day atoning for my menial sins—all of the broken promises made by an earlier self.
Typically these posts coincide with the end of the university semester, in other words at a point where I have an influx of free time that should motivate me to make good on my promises. I honestly believed that my ability to focus had an inverse relationship to the amount of work on my plate. I now realize the folly in my thinking because if I hadn’t found time to write as a lowly student, then perhaps there were other issues. (Let’s be honest there aren't many opportunities to capitalize on free time like university.)
Identifying the problem could be as simple as admitting I never felt the need to be that person, whoever they were: the writer, the creative, the internet wünderkind. Yes, I might have desired to be recognized but where did all that fire go? Goals can’t be met through desire alone and hard work counts for naught if it is as short lived as those fleeting desires.
So, what then am I doing here? Why bring this up at all?
Good question, let me detour for a moment.
I have been meaning to write at length about Frank Chimero’s “Homesteading” article (probably since it first came out in December of 2013) and this feels as good a time as any. Frank writes about carving out his own niche on the internet. By investing time into the four “walls” of his own site he keeps his digital soul from being stretched too thin. Rather than keeping his various thoughts in small silos across the internet, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Instead he decided to invest the time he might have used elsewhere—to the benefit of others—on his own site—to the benefit of himself.
He has effectively made a comitment to stop being a “mover and a shaker” to become a personal collector. The pace of his online life (and his meat-space life too, no doubt) gears down towards his own speed as less of his efforts are spent trying to keep up with everyone else. He can take his time to choose which artifacts are truest to himself and set them on display however he sees fit. The aggregate of all the little pieces in his collection, whether it be books, essays, images or pithy quips all contributes to his personal identity. He’s building up a personal monument of sorts, not knolling[1] small pieces of himself across the floor. What will remain when all is said and done might be as close an approximation of his being as one could possibly hope to achieve.
It takes commitment to stay the course on any project and see it to its end, this is no less true on the internet, perhaps more so. I would like to believe it takes real vision to continue forward, especially when it is so easy to find other “distractions”. While I am too simple to come up with my own profound insight I can follow the trails blazed by others. Frank’s journey is certainly inspiring but the essential message isn’t altogether new. The great wisdom out of Voltaire’s polemic Candide was—and I am paraphrasing—to tend to our own gardens. If the message holds, perhaps somewhere buried amongst the weeds I can find myself. With a little grit and some focus I might even be able to draw it out.
It comes to me now, as I sit in the disturbingly cramped cabin of an AirTransat 747 that I am practically homeless. I have places to stay but no home of my own. The stability of living in the city of my birth, the “nation” featured in my education and around the people that made each of those real are fading from view.[2] I am moving on.
Without a physical home I seek hallowed ground. The only place left to turn is here.
My mind always circles about the idea of virtual worlds and identity. Despite the intangible nature of a Klout score[3] or a hastily written tweet, they form a part of me no less real than the sausage-like fingers that I use to type these words. There is an intrinsic link between the who I am online and offline. Even a gonzo-esque character schtick on Twitter points to something about you. Our actions, regardless of place are indexical. They point to certain features or properties and are borne out of our peculiar circumstance.
Shed of its former analog counterpart, this online home may be the only tangible signifier of my identity. Sure, I actually exist somewhere but what does that matter to the few people who stumble upon this site? Or to my friends and family who in the meantime can only connect to me through digital means? I am a collection of pictures, a jumble of words and a dial-tone. The longer I stay this far removed the more comfortable everyone involved becomes with thinking of me this way.
Far from being something to become depressed about, I've found the idea comforting. So long as I can keep this song and dance going (i.e., this silly website) I have some mooring for my identity. I can point and say, “this is what I have been doing”, or better yet, “this is what I am about”.
Spreading out and arranging the individual pieces of an object or collection into perfect 90° arrangements.I first heard the term from Jason Kottke. ↩︎
Don’t worry, my partner—the love of my life—will be there to keep an eye on me. She deserves so much praise and thanks for the last 9 years it’s unfathomable. Thank you from the bottom of my soul. (Bonus: she enjoys hidden love notes for her future self to discover.) ↩︎
An online popularity/influence score that clever humans tout ironically. Sadly, even used ironically, its mention always rings of desperation… including this one. ↩︎