Brilliant Corners

I was working with Google Maps for something I’m dealing with for work and thought I’d take a look and see if the “Street View” vans (or cars, or whatever they use) had been down the street we used to live on in Dallas. little StreetView trip to our old house–our first house–in Dallas. They have:

It’s odd looking at the house from this perspective. First of all, it’s no longer our house. Secondly, the current owner has been adding all kinds of changes to the front yard. It looks like he’s adding some big flower beds or something there. From the Street View, they’re still dirt so who knows what the final result will be. I’m sure he had a blast going to the Dallas Preservation Society meetings to get those changes approved. We had to go several times ourselves: first time was to let us remodel the inside, one time to get the fences approved, another time to let us tear down the old garage, and another time to get the “O.K.” to have a new front porch poured. It was a hassle of paperwork and useless meetings, but in the end we didn’t really have many problems.

Next time we’re in Dallas we’ll have to drive by and see what went into the new flowerbeds, since I doubt Google will update the views anytime soon. I don’t really have that strong of an attachment to the house anymore, but it is a strange experience seeing it from the angle of ex-owner, and seeing the changes that have happened since we sold it.

And as long as he keeps the trees that we planted, one after each child was born, then I’ll look on the changes with approval. Otherwise, he’ll need a talking to.

I’m going to crib the linking style of Things Magazine to post the links I’ve been collecting for a while. So then, in no particular order…

Andy Baio is posting daily again. / I’ve been meaning to really learn how to use Illustrator. Now, with these Illustrator tutorials, and these, and these, I’m unsure where to even start. / A long thread of mostly-funny jokes on Reddit. It reminds me of this joke post with great comments on Defective Yeti. / Did you know that adding milk to your tea reduces its health benefits? / A few simple LAMP performance tips.

SuperDuper! has finally been released with Leopard support. / Have you ever wanted to register the copyright for one of your photos? / A Web 2.0 Style Guide. / Wet Paint carries the Print Gocco printer and supplies. / Dinosaur Gardens posts mp3s from the Gangster Fun album Time Flies When You’re Gangster Fun.

“davesecretaryatwork” has a knack for telling stories, and someone archived his story thread from the vivalavinyl message boards. I’m glad they did. Here’s one of the shorter ones:

SO ALSO IN KINDERGARTEN I APPARENTLY THOUGHT THAT THE KIDS IN MY CLASS DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT COUGARS FOR SOME REASON, BECAUSE I DEFINITELY MADE A SWEET COUGAR QUIZ WHICH I INSISTED ON GIVING OUT TO THE CLASS THE NEXT DAY.

WHAT COLOR IS THE COUGAR? GOLD? NO! BROWN? NO! RED? NO! THE ANSWER IS TAWNY.

There are many more and longer stories at the link above. I wish I could remember half of my own crazy childhood memories as well as he does.

It seems the original thread on the vivalavinyl message board is gone, but someone posted these stories into a new thread here where “davesecretarystillatwork” comes in later with some new uppercase hijinx.

• The Fountain Pen Network
  “Welcome to the Fountain Pen Network where the pens are abundant and the ink and chatter flows freely.”
  (tags: pens forum writing fountainpen pen fountainpens ink)
• Black Star Rising - Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons
  “But it does seem clear that an increasing number of photographers – not just professionals but high-end hobbyists also – have become disenchanted with the Creative Commons system.”
  (tags: copyright creativecommons cc photo photography creative business legal)
• Confirmation bias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  “In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.”
  (tags: interesting psychology bias logic cognition brain science lifehacks)
• How To Read and Understand a Histogram (Professional Photographer Magazine Web Exclusives)
  “What is a histogram and what does it tell us about a photograph?”
  (tags: adobe color design articles photography histogram photoshop tutorial photo howto)
• how to fold a shirt
  I keep forgetting to try this. The video makes it look so simple.
  (tags: diy culture howto video shirt folding)

Whether you want to call it “Getting Things Done” or call it keeping a list of Things That Need To Be Done, there are many applications out there to help you out. I’ve tried out several of these applications, as well as several web-based ones (like Ta-da List). I think I’m finally ready to give up with all the fancy solutions, and have returned to a simple one: the plain (though lightly-formatted) text file.

The first of the applications I tried was OmniOutliner-based KinklessGTD system primarily because of Merlin Mann’s review and recommendation. It worked pretty well, but I’d occasionally get frustrated with how the system worked (with the rebuilding and whatnot). Then I tried iGTD and that also worked well, but something about the app’s layout and icons eventually turned me off it (free or not). When The Omni Group announced the OmniFocus alpha testing, I thought I’d go ahead and try that one as well. I’ve been using that up until early this week. It’s worked the best of all the options I had tried so far, but still it seemed to be too much work for keeping a todo list.

More recently I’ve seen some posts about YAGTDA (Yet Another Getting Things Done Application) called Things. It certainly looks pretty and I was enthused enough about the application and hype to sign up for access to the beta. I haven’t received an email with info on how to get the beta, but I don’t think it’ll matter. I think I’ve moved on from the big (and not cheap) applications for my todo lists. I haven’t stuck completely to the GTD philosophy (or theory or implementation or whatever) so I’m not sure I ever really needed one of the heavyweight apps in the first place.

Today, when looking for something simpler I came across a couple of TextMate bundles that are more along the lines of what I need, especially since most of my day is spent in TextMate anyway. I first found Henrik Nyh’s Tasks bundle, which in turn pointed to Sven Fuchs’ Taskmate bundle, which is based off of Tasks, but is a little more functional. And it’s exactly what I need (for now). It uses a simple text file as the base with some minimal formatting (colons and dashes) to mark up your task/todo list. This is more like it. Not jmuch effort needed and it does exactly what I need.

I did have to make a few changes to Taskmate for it to work for me. I like using the Quicksilver “Append to” command, but it only allows appending text to files ending with the “.txt” extension. After adding the Taskmate bundle, I opened up Textmate’s Bundle Editor and changed the following info:

fileTypes = ( 'todo' );

to

fileTypes = ( 'txt' );

so that it will recognize .txt files instead of .todo files. In order to avoid issues with other basic text files, I added another line to make sure it’s working with Taskmate files:

firstLineMatch = 'Todo List';

Now, in order for Taskmate to work, the file must have a “.txt” file extension, and the first line of the file must be “Todo List”. Of course, if you’re reading this and would like to use your own qualifier, just make the necessary changes. I did make this solution a little more complicated than the default installation, but once these things are set, you don’t have to think about it again.

• RobertSabuda.com: Simple Pop-Ups You Can Make!
  Many patterns to make your own pop-ups, from the Robert Sabuda (the KING of pop-up books) website.
  (tags: art books build crafts papercraft howto popups)
• Loronix
  Loads and loads and loads of Brazilian albums (mainly from the 60s and 70s, it seems) for download. My guess is that many of these are now out of print.
  (tags: music mp3 blog brazil audio mp3blog tropicalia bossanova samba)
• devthatweb: Deploy any project using Capistrano 2
  “Feel left out of the Capistrano party because you don’t use Rails?” - Some good tips here that I’ve used for a CakePHP app I’m working on.
  (tags: programming rake ror rubyonrails ruby rails capistrano cap php)
• 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer
  (tags: business freelance jobs rails rubyonrails ruby hiring advice)

I wonder why we haven’t seen DVR-like ability on car radios yet, because I would love it. I don’t actually drive much–taking my daughter to school in the morning is the one constant–but the times I do, I find myself wanting to either

1. record a song (or NPR show) to playback again later,
2. “bookmark” a song (which saves the artist & title) so I can buy the album,
3. set up a certain show to be recorded (such as a show that comes on once a week when I’m not sure if I’ll be in the car, like Piano Jazz).

For the computer there are hardware options like the RadioShark, which can do some of these things. But getting recordings from that into the car seems like it would require too much effort (especially since I don’t have a decent way to play my iPod in the car).

Car radios seem to be getting more and more complex, with voice-activated controls and whatnot, but we still don’t have any DVR-like abilities. Get on that people!

• Fray: The Quarterly of True Stories
  Awesome! The Fray is back!
  (tags: stories storytelling fiction collaboration community)
• Illustrated Watercolor Journaling; workshops, classes in drawing, watercoloring, journaling
  “In Beginning Watercolor Journaling we introduce the concept of Illustrated Watercolor Journaling, give a little history on our interests and demonstrate much of the topics that we teach in our classes…”
  (tags: art drawing tutorial video watercolor sketching instruction)
• How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail
  (tags: apple email google gmail imap mail howto)
• Digital Web Magazine - Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3
  “If you don’t want to set up, configure, and maintain a few extra servers just for hosting your media files, you can instead use Amazon S3.”
  (tags: amazon aws s3 hosting tutorial web webhosting scalability)

I’ve yet to hold a copy of Maya Waldman’s book, to-do list, in my hands, but I can heartily recommend that it be bought. Immediately. I’ve come to know Maya’s work from a friendly online community, and over the years I’ve enjoyed seeing the artwork she has contributed. And now, some of what’s she has drawn (and written?) comes in the form of this neat little book.

Can I really recommend this book without seeing it first? Why, yes I can. If you’re not convinced, here is some of Maya’s other work to get an idea of what you can probably expect from the book:

• Some of Maya’s finely-detailed work from her notebooks
• A weblog of Maya’s letters home during her stay in the Marshall Islands

And just for good measure, here’s the description from the Amazon listing:

To-Do List inspires young and old not to take life too seriously. The “tasks” on Maya’s to-do list range from the everyday-buy milk, be less messy, go on vacation, make friends, and no fighting-to the exceptional-dance like an octopus, hug flowers, star gaze, smile giant, eat sweets, and count clouds.

Each “task” is adorned with an ink drawing that has been painstakingly hand-rendered in astonishing detail. Soon enough, your own to-do list will include enjoying the novelties found on every page.

And please note that although Amazon lists this as an audiobook, it’s not. That should hopefully be corrected soon.

Okay, maybe Jeff isn’t that famous (yet!), but his solo music project, Myopic, is featured on NPR’s “Open Mic” program. I played in three(!) separate bands with Jeff many, many years ago. Way to go, Jeff. The music is wonderful.