The Old Guard is the cultural bellwether of the company. I believe that culture is a slippery thing to fully define, but I do believe it is the responsibility of the Old Guard to not only take the time to define the key values that are the pillars of that culture, to communicate the nuance of those values over and over again, and, lastly, when it becomes apparent they are no longer serving the company, they must be willing to let those values evolve.
Rands writing about The Old Guard.
Those Olark folks are good people. I was even live chatting with some WordPress.com users when this arrived.
The Diminished iPad. Ben Thompson writes about the diminishing importance of the iPad. I love my iPad Mini as a reading device. But, I wouldn’t put it anywhere near the same level of necessity as my iPhone and MacBook.
A long time ago I used Craig Mod’s Twitter for Minimalists. It was nice. Using that in a Fluid.app instance gave me the benefits of Twitter’s web application without the distraction of having it in my primary browser.
Craig’s recent tweet about modifying the notifications panel put it back in my mind.
I find the Twitter website to include some key pieces that third-party apps lack. I enjoy seeing favorites and other activity that’s only available through the web interface. The downside is that I dislike the habit of opening it in my primary browser; I prefer distractions that take more deliberate action to open. So I threw together some basic styles and now have this running:
It helps me build a small, digital habit field around using Twitter. If you want to set up something similar here’s a Gist of the CSS I’m using. Using that in Fluid.app will require the paid version, but it’s just $4.99. I also found this handy replacement icon that looks nice in my dock.
Pomodoro Timer. I found this app a while ago and recently began using it more frequently. It’s a simple, menu bar app that runs in the background. The goal is to help you deliberately break your work day up in to focused chunks. There are, of course, tons of variations on the theme. This one’s the nicest mix of function and design.
An upside to tracking my reading is knowing that, so far, I’ve read 34 books this year. 1 I’ve been aiming for one book a week and am close to that goal; just 7 books short.
Those 34 books break down as 19 non-fiction and 15 fiction. I’ve been on a bit of a sci-fi kick this year, reading 11 books. That will soon be 12 sci-fi books as I’m nearly done with Abaddon’s Gate.
Notes:
The Robots of Resistance. Long feature story on Chris Csikszentmihályi. It focuses on his projects that bridge art and engineering.
Definition of a good Saturday: breakfast at Besaw’s, a 3-mile walk, reading Universe on a T-Shirt, and making beef stew for dinner.
Beautiful weather out here today.
