Category: Thoughts

I posted the above photo on Instagram the other day, and have gotten several questions about it.

The explanation is pretty simple. I don’t play games on my iPhone.¹

I noticed at some point over the last year or so that I used iPhone games to fill little gaps in my day. Instead of writing, reading or just thinking, I would play a game while waiting for an appointment or while on hold for a conference call. Any time I had a few “extra” minutes, I found myself pulling out my phone to play something.

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On Friday, my wife and I closed on our first house. It’s a nice place in a great neighborhood here in Memphis. We’re super pumped, and a little scared.¹

As most people do who buy 56-year-old houses, we set to work immediately on our new property. One of the biggest tasks on our list is to re-build a shed in our backyard that is currently in pretty bad shape. We hadn’t spent a lot of time in the shed before closing due to the large amounts of stuff in it.

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Emily Rapp, whose son Ronan will pass away before his third birthday:

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

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James Shelley:

But as counter-cultural as it may be, I have serious misgivings about the pursuit of happiness. There is a massive, irreconcilable clash between our modern obsession with happiness and the lives of our cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa — people who would have never inspired us had they simply taken the path of least resistance in order to achieve their own happiness. No, these individuals followed a trajectory set by a pursuit of meaning, justice and purpose. Values set their respective frameworks for making decisions (and significant sacrifices) in life.

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I’m getting ready to expire.

Well, not me. Let me rephrase that.

I’m about to let my ACMT expire. This is the certification Apple requires technicians to have to work on in-warranty Macs. I will be an “Apple-Certified Macintosh Technician” for just a few more days.

I’ve carried this certification for years. All Mac Geniuses have it (although it is named differently for Apple employees), as do any techs working at third-party Apple Authorized Service Providers. Both are line items on my resume.

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Observation

This weekend, my wife and I enjoyed a weekend away in Franklin, TN. While out to eat for Sunday brunch, I noticed something that really got under my skin.

At the restaurant, there were — as you could imagine — several tables with large, multigenerational families enjoying brunch after church. At many of these tables, the kids weren’t talking with their parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents, however.

They were glued to iPod touches.

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Kourosh Dini:

One thing I actively work on, and have been actively working on for sometime, is maintaining a non-reactive mode of working. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as technology continues its steady advance promising “convenience”, I believe it’s not really a convenience which it delivers. Rather, it’s a shortening of a distance between thought and action. If I’m not careful, this can lead to a more reactive way of working - checking email, twitter, and the like reflexively.

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I have a pair of failed notebooks on my nightstand.

Both are Moleskines. Both have about eight pages of writing, in blue ink.

Both are failed attempts at writing for my own good.

Recently, I’ve been realizing that writing for me would be a healthy thing.

(Read: my doctor told me to do it.)

I got my first batch of Field Notes notebooks in the mail last week. Being so much smaller, my thought was that I would be more likely to carry one with me at all times.

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Alex Payne:

If what you’re doing isn’t making you happy, you probably won’t do a good job at it. You might even subconsciously sabotage yourself.

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Michael Lopp:

The problem with notifications is that the cost to create them is close to zero — just hit that Like button or go ahead and click that retweet button. As their creation cost approaches zero, notifications rapidly become spam-like as the noise of their quantity masks the quality of their signal. But we learned our lesson with spam. We knew what happened when we lost control of our inboxes and spent our time sorting through the useless noise searching for the signal. We learned how to curate. Curation is social-media-douche-speak for “deliberately choosing and pruning the content you care about” and I think part of the next Internet is curation at scale thanks to notifications.

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I’ve written at length about OmniFocus here before. It’s a fantastic app, and has quite a following.

This isn’t an OmniFocus-specific phenomenon. Mac nerds cling to and defend their favorite programs will a fervor rarely seen. The TextMate guys beat up us TextWrangler folks on Twitter, while MarsEdit fans scoff at those who like living in WordPress’ web interface.

But in the GTD landscape, the fighting is fierce. Everyone has an opinion on what app and what method is best. But Chris Bowler gets it:

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I have a problem. I get anxious anytime I see a notification badge on my iPhone.

Be it Mail, Reeder or something else, those little red circles really get under my skin. I check my email constantly, am always refreshing Twitter and love marking RSS feeds as read just to kill the little bastards.

I — like most of you — am addicted to input. It’s a terrible side effect of growing up in the 90s, I suppose. But it’s slowly eating away at me.

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