Month: June 2013

When in Doubt, Make A List. Great advice from Scott. When I’m stuck or doubting the right way to approach something my fallback is always to write a list down in my notebook, think it over, and then add it to OmniFocus. It may feel like a step backward at first but it always gets me moving in the right direction.

Oh my god, don’t make things for “Everyone.” Fantastic post from Dan Sinker about the pitfalls of trying to design for mass consumption. My favorite line:

Don’t ever make something for “Everyone” make it for someone. And make that person love it.

The Space Between the Notes

These days, doing anything on my phone isn’t measured by what an app does, but by the space in time I’m navigating between apps—the moments of transition between doing something and doing something else.

The Space Between the Notes.

24 hours in Kirkby Stephen

At the very end of our 3 weeks in England Leah and I took the train up to Kirkby Stephen to stay with a college professor of ours. It was a wonderful change of pace from Southern England and London. Kirkby Stephen is just east of the Lake District and is gorgeous.

We stayed in the Cranesbill Barn that Jeanette and Alex own. It’s a great holiday cottage in a small village.

While there we went on a whirlwind tour of the area including Brough Castle and a fantastic old, working mill. Really great way to spend the last day on vacation.

Cambridge and Newmarket

After Bath and London, Leah and I went to spend a week in Cambridge with our friend Sarah. While there we wandered around the city and the colleges and took a day trip out to Newmarket and The National Stud horse facility.

With the exception of the day in Newmarket the weather was wonderful. Sarah’s studying at Lucy Cavendish, too, which meant we got to wander around a bit more of the campuses as well as free entry in to King’s College Chapel.

Tourist time in London

Before spending time in Bath Leah and I spent a week in London. Overall we spent two weeks in the city in April. It was great to split that time up with breaks in Bath and Cambridge. London is great and all but smaller towns are nice, too.

This was Leah’s first trip to England so we hit a lot of the popular sights in London: British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Westminster area, Tower of London, National Gallery, and more.

Status

Apparently it takes about two weeks to get completely out of shape. Ooph.

How to activate faculty to fuel your content. Great set of tips for motivating consistent blogging among faculty.

Checkboxes that kill. Great post about the dangers in complex, customizable settings. Two key takeaways: regularly audit how people are using your product and consider whether more than 2% of your users will use a setting.

Tech biologists

Dyson: We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.

Wired: If this is true, what’s the takeaway?

Dyson: Hire biologists! It doesn’t make sense for a high tech company to have 3,000 software engineers but no biologists.

From a Q&A between George Dyson and Wired’s Kevin Kelly.