vanderwal.net

Newsroom Wraps-up an Evening that Tilted

At 8pm my temp goes up and I start not feeling well. Just after 9pm I start watching Newsroom for the final episode. 9:10 for the next hour I am yelling solids at a small body of water between hitting pause and play. About 10pm tears are rolling thanks to Newsroom it is good deep letting go. The next 20 minutes are tears and feeling a bit better.

Now to sort out if the medication I took to feel better needs to be retaken. Also need to sort out how to monitor keeping my temp low through the night (it is about 100F, thanks for asking).

I think Newsroom may be one of my favorite shows I’ve seen in a long time, as I am a sucker like that and I love banter and considering the difficult things in the world around us, then trying to sort out what to do next to make it better. To make real lasting change.

But, for now that lasting change is a good night sleep and feeling better in the morning. Don Quixote has a very short vision this evening, but also has a long long memory, which likes the visions of much better things in the future as well. (what good is having a good memory if it can’t help you see a better future too?)

Link Like Bin 13 December 2014

Another week of cleaning up, organizing, and working out partly broken identity and still working to get that resolved. Just the second time in 14 years with a Mac that I have had something this bothersome, which is much better than the nearly monthly with prior OS and same “corporate” OS when working on client sites.

• Simplicity is Bliss “Omnifocus Perspectives Redux: Miscellaneous”
• Code of Ages
• How I Made — Instead of Spent — 26 Cents With a Mobile App - Interesting take on turning entertainment cycles into pay cycles with similar activities
• And a Child’s Robot Shall Lead Them
• Simon St. Laurent’s “Web by default”
• Joe Nocera “The New Republic’s Rebellion”
• Dana Milbank in Washington Post Opinions “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes”
• Andy Baio teaches his son video games historically
• Anil Dash on “How ThinkUp is doing as a business”
• Kevin Anderson “Strengthening communities and strengthening journalism”
• When A Branch Becomes The Root - This was the stand out of the week. I did light summary of it over at Personal InfoCloud “Design Fiction Futures for NYC Libraries”.
• Jessamyn West “Things That Make the Librarian Angry”

Link Like Bin 6 December 2014

A week of clean-up on work and project front and prepping for a some personal projects and getting new work projects settled and sorted for the new year (you still have time to grab some time, you this is you reach out and say hello).

I am also in the midst of moving from the sofa as my work space and back to my desk. This summer the lighting was much better at the sofa and then had a stretch of work travel where my desk got buried when I dumped my bag on Friday returns and not really dealt with before Monday’s trip back out. While the sofa is comfortable and the natural light is still great, I miss having a good work space to have a few books open and working through things.

Links for the Week of 6 December 2014

• Getting Started with JavaScript for Automation on Yosemite
• Dan Saffer’s “My Favorite Design Articles 2014”"
• Chris Messina Google+ post - I forgot to add this one last week and may have spent more time thinking about it than any other thing I’ve read in a while
• Design Explosions: Issue #1: Mapping on iOS - a great in depth breakdown of visual and interaction design through comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps on iOS devices. So much goodness in this one
• Cloud Typography: Webfonts by Hoefler - I have no idea how I just ran across this during the past week, but cloud font and Hoefler type at a great price. My design iterations just got a new twist thrown in them
• Typed - Always a sucker for good new text writing app with Markdown and this is a real gem that fits in the light and easy to use category
• Sixty Words - RadioLab - I finally gave this a focussed listen and it was well worth it

24 Ways: A Web Holiday Favorite

Nothing makes me happier than to see the winter holiday begin and 24 Ways start its annual release of web development and design goodness. Drew McLellan and the 24 Ways crew have done another great job and I look forward eagerly for every day’s gem that is released.

To make all of this better, 24 Ways is in its 10th year. Congratulations for all the great content and work, from the very first to the current offering of the day.

Link List 30 November 2014

This is the first go at a “liked” links push. It is through 30 November 2014.

• Michael Sippey’s filtered: week of nov 17 2014
• Paul Ford “The Group That Rules the Web”
• Khoi Give Insight into Designing Wildcard
• Anil talks about something that has been on my mind a lot, good relatively small projects staying alive
• Cameron Moll “The Disease of Being Busy”
• vanderwal Medium recommendations - a capture of things I liked / recommended in Medium
• Apple iWorks ’14 inspection by Ars Technica

30 Days Had November

Well the attempt to blog every day in November didn’t get as much wind in its sails as I had hoped it would have. November had 30 days, but I had far fewer posts than 30. I didn’t get a new habit set. But, I am not yet deterred as I am keeping this attempt going.

One of the things I’ve thought about doing is doing a weekly link dump of items I found of interest through out the week. These are some of my favorite week end reads when I curl up with the laptop (or iPad), a cup of coffee and a blanket. I have long been a fan of Om’s weekend delivery of his 5 (or 7) things to read this weekend as they are nearly always high quality, in depth, and decent (meaning on the longer side) length. I’ve also grown to head toward Josh Ginter of “The Newsprint” weekly “The Sunday Edition” link dump of the week. Recently Michael Sippy has been back sharing on the web (just like the days of yore) and his Filtered Week series on Medium is an annotated link list gem.

One of the reasons I have been considering this (and actually tucking links away for posting) is the past few weeks I realized my blog’s link list on the side of this blog that was posted from Delicious is now dead and gone. The link roll that was a staple of Delicious from 2004 or so was nuked with many other helpful features and functionality that kept Delicious as one part of my workflow. I moved most of my social bookmarking to Pinboard a few years back, but I still fed Delicious and then Delicious fed Pinboard. Well, that was the case until the new owners of Delicious (sadly Delicious gets passed around the IT community like a hot potato with each new owner thinking they are going to update it and improve it, yet lack a rat’s clue of the basics nor how to keep (now kept) the workings that underpin many parts of the web running) fumbled things and Pinboard stopped automatically ingesting Delicious. I really missed the change at Pinboard (was heads down on a project when that happened), but now all my social bookmarking is happening there.

The lack of a link sidebar is the push to share things that I find as gems from the week. I could repoint the Delicious javascript to Pinboard, but Pinboard also captures all my starred / favorited items (I don’t use starring in Twitter as a favorite, but more of a hook for things to hold on to and / or come back to) and things favorited in Instagram, and imports from other services. Pinboard, because I use the paid archive service is an endpoint that serves also as a place to do full text search of the items bookmarked there. Until I can sort out a good filter or means of tagging in my workflow, I am keeping the link list off the sidebar. But, in its place I am likely going to do a weekly link list.