The War Effort.
Life packed end to end.
Beginning to feel spread thin.
Wish life was pretend.
Me
The Typewriter and the Shotgun – Shawn Blanc
The Typewriter and the Shotgun – Shawn Blanc
This is one of the cleverest pieces I have read in a while. Even more so for what it does not say (“the pen is is mightier than the sword”) than what it does. It is like the perfect school piece on how to write – Tell a story in a few words as possible, avoid cliché, respect your audience and their time, etc. I have tucked this away for future reference because this is how all writing should be.
Levenger 5-Year Journal Review
Many of my long time readers and those that follow me on Twitter and elsewhere, know how long and deep my love affair with Levenger runs. I have been a customer for over 20 years now. Words are not enough to describe the quality of their products, the attention to detail, or the outstanding customer service. Properly maintained, Levenger products are made to last a lifetime and then be passed along to your descendants for theirs.
I recently purchased a Levenger 5-Year Journal and it is true to every word stated until now. For those not familiar with how a 5-Year Journal works, there are Pages for 366 days, including February 29, with 1 page per day, with 5 line entries – one for each year. It allows just enough to highlight the bullet points of a busy day but forces brevity. It is like Twitter for a private and bygone era. There is no pressure to catalog every detail of life or how you are feeling. Want to simply write a single thought or idea? Well, that is OK too. The beauty is that, those who have felt the pressure of maintaining a journal in the past (like myself) will likely feel far less so with such a low barrier to entry. Take just a few seconds at the end of the day and write what strikes you.
The quality is extraordinary. The paper is bright, thick and takes fountain ink well with no feathering. The binding is clearly meant to last as a living document of record to be passed down for generations. The cloth and leather make it a stately addition to any desk or shelf. If I have one concern it is this – will I have enough for all of my years. I am seriously considering buying 10 more right now, for fear that I may not be able to 50 years from now.
Levenger 5-Year Journal
Many of my long time readers and those that follow me on Twitter and elsewhere, know how long and deep my love affair with Levenger runs. I have been a customer for over 20 years now. Words are not enough to describe the quality of their products, the attention to detail, or the outstanding customer service. Properly maintained, Levenger products are made to last a lifetime and then be passed along to your descendants for theirs.
I recently purchased a Levenger 5-Year Journal and it is true to every word stated until now. For those not familiar with how a 5-Year Journal works, there are Pages for 366 days, including February 29, with 1 page per day, with 5 line entries – one for each year. It allows just enough to highlight the bullet points of a busy day but forces brevity. It is like Twitter for a private and bygone era. There is no pressure to catalog every detail of life or how you are feeling. Want to simply write a single thought or idea? Well, that is OK too. The beauty is that, those who have felt the pressure of maintaining a journal in the past (like myself) will likely feel far less so with such a low barrier to entry. Take just a few seconds at the end of the day and write what strikes you.
The quality is extraordinary. The paper is bright, thick and takes fountain ink well with no feathering. The binding is clearly meant to last as a living document of record to be passed down for generations. The cloth and leather make it a stately addition to any desk or shelf. If I have one concern it is this – will I have enough for all of my years. I am seriously considering buying 10 more right now, for fear that I may not be able to 50 years from now.
Akihabara Majokko Princess – Kirsten Dunst (via sailorsean)
I’m not even sure where to begin with the awesomeness that is this…
Fact: I am still surprised by the number of folks who don’t know that “Turning Japanese” is a metaphor for the jerking off (which is what this song is about).
The video is NSFW by the way and neither is this post really.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Business Advice From Van Halen
Business Advice From Van Halen
Dan and Chip Heath for Fast Company:
Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of their contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”
I have been aware of this for years but it is always a good reminder. Having attended a show on just about every Roth era Halen Tour, I can vouch that they were always some of the most impressive and deftly executed rock shows ever staged.
That said, many other bands and performers use similar methods to ensure not only technical perfection but also give them an easy out of their contracts with a venue should anything not be just so. People often look at this stuff as arrogance but, as you can see above, most of the time it is simply to ensure that all parties are paying close attention to detail.
Duluth Pack Sparky Bag
One more month of this garbage and then it’s time for spring, why not celebrate with a new day pack? The Duluth Pack Sparky Bag is constructed out of burly 18-ounce canvas and offers up two “winged” zippered outside side pockets. Look at all those rivets securing the back straps in place! Like all Duluth Packs it’s guaranteed for life and made in the USA.
I’ve always been a sucker for bags and this one is certainly lust worthy. Plus, being I’m in Minnesota, if fits my “buy local” sensibilities.
Back that thang up!
A friend of mine recently suffered a devastating loss. His MacBook Pro hard drive died taking with it a bulk of his data. I know how it feels. It has happened to me in the past and I have seen it happen to many clients and friends. I can say from that experience that it only has to happen once for one to vow to never let it happen again. That said, I have seen more than a few people, even after suffering the loss of hours of work, years of photos, archived email, get a new machine, begin to rebuild their digital life, and still not backup. The reason…
Backup is a pain in the ass.
Let’s get real about this for a minute. Backup is not a solution to a problem — at least not one that is actively happening. I know people who have gone through several computers without ever having a problem. Why would they think about backup. Backup is insurance. It’s a solution for the “maybe” and not the “now”. The computers of today are, in general, as reliable as toasters. They just work.
Devices like the iPhone and the iPad won’t change that. In fact, the backup is “built in” — it just happens when you sync it. Increasingly one never has to “think” about backup.
All of this is true until, that one time when you go weeks without syncing or that first hard drive fails taking with it the bulk of your digital world and the maybe has become the now.
I employ what is often called the 3-2-1 backup strategy:
3 Backups (at least)
2 Onsite for failsafe immediate recovery.
1 Offsite in case of catastrophe (fire, flood, etc)
I think most experts would agree that this is the bare minimum of what one should have. That said, any one of the three is better than nothing at all.
Here is how I execute this strategy:
CrashPlan Pro — I am a big fan of CrashPlan. It just plain works. Quietly, in the background, performing incremental and recursive backups (backs up only changes after the first full backup and does file versioning and deletion protection to boot) and uses so few system resources I find I have to launch it every few weeks just to make sure it’s still working (It always is). I actually have the Pro version running on a Mac Mini, with a Drobo attached for storage, backing up not only my machines but also 20 of my client’s machines (I am providing offsite backup for them). Works around the clock, day in and day out. It even backs up to my server from anywhere, anytime I am connected to the Internet. If I go out of town to a conference, as soon as I connect to the hotel wifi it will back up any changes that occurred while on the plane. It’s pretty badass. CrashPlan does have a free version that works just as well backing up to an external drive or other machines. Furthermore, they also have a paid plan for offsite backup to their servers. Great product and a responsive company. Could not recommend it more.
SuperDuper — I also do a regular complete clone of my hard drive using SuperDuper. The advantage to to is that, should my hard drive fail, I have a complete bootable duplicate. Therefore, I can simply boot off of that clone and keep going just as if nothing happened. There is also Carbon Copy Cloner that does the same thing but I prefer SuperDuper for reasons I can’t explain (mainly the UI I think) since they do pretty much the same thing. I have Super Duper set so it just automatically updates the clone drive every time I plug it in.
Dropbox – Of course, all of my personal crucial files are in Dropbox. I keep all of my documents, several application databases, even the draft of the very post you are reading now is stored in Dropbox. If you are not familiar with this wonderful product and service, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Because Dropbox syncs between multiple machines and “the cloud” I basically have, in effect, an offsite backup. Eventually I will have a “real” offsite backup using CrashPlan Pro to backup to a server outside of my house as well as the one within but I am not quite there yet and, with the two full backups I already have, this is good enough for me now.
Now, if you are paying attention and are very keen, you may notice something about my setup – It is as ass pain free as possible. The tools I employ all work with little intervention or extra work from me. CrashPlan just works silently in the background. So does Dropbox. Even SuperDuper is set up to just work when I plug the right external drive in. I really feel that this is the special sauce that will get most people to back up regularly. Make it something you don’t have to “think” about. It was certainly true for me.
All of this is just to let you know that I get it. I know there are some of you who are paranoid and backup your backups. I know there are many more of you who will read this post, nod your heads in agreement, and still not actively backup because the work of doing something about it does not equal the maybeness of the problem. If that is you, I really do hope you will see the light and adopt something similar to my setup because hearing the post loss stories is painful and so very avoidable.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.“ He and Nathan "Mosquito Zapper” Myrhvold are backing a nuclear approach. It’s called Terrapower, and it’s different from a standard nuclear reactor. Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel. “In terms of fuel this really solves the problem.” He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky – the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.
Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero! | Video on TED.com
(via boingboing)
(Source: http://video.ted.com/)