I just watched this awesome talk by Joel Spolsky on the conflict between simplicity and choice in design. One of the coolest things he mentions is Amazon's 1-Click button and how it actually is just one click. The magic of the button is where it asks forgiveness instead of permission by having an undo instead of a confirmation.

And that's when it struck me, do you know how hard it is to actually implement an undo feature?

I bought an 11" Toshiba laptop yesterday. Before I start, I just want to say it's a beautiful machine, and I'll probably get a decent amount of use out of it. It just happens to be plagued with the usual windows OEM issues. The thing is borderline netbook, but I figured I'd want something smaller and less distracting to take to my classes this year. My Macbook Pro is just too much of a pleasure to use. The hypothesis was that if I get some windows laptop that I won't want to use, I'll spend less time in front of the screen right? I'm having second thoughts already.

These pictures were forwarded to me from my aunt and through my brother. They're from the sand castle competition in Oregon, really impressive stuff. I'm really amazed at the level of detail these guys achieve with sand, like the fur on the bear for example. Not sure who took them originally though, let me know if you want to claim credit.

Here's a random idea that just popped into my head: Eat dessert before your meal to eat less.

This is purely hypothesis, and I don't think it'd be a good idea for every meal (that's just asking for diabetes), but it might be worth a shot. I just ate a cookie before lunch today and it really killed my appetite. This resulted in me eating a surprisingly small lunch considering I didn't have breakfast today. Had I not eaten that cookie, I probably would have filled myself up on lunch, then fallen to my cravings and stuffed in a cookie afterwards anyway.

This all seems a pretty logical if you think about it. Dessert is usually that extra temptation at the end of your meal, but why wait 'til you're full to indulge if you know you're probably going to anyway? Indulge first. Get it over with. Then move on to finish as much of your main course as you can. I bet the second half of that steak is much easier to leave behind than that deep fried triple fudge cheesecake volcano that you can't wait to try.

 

A quick google search: There's a short 1962 Time article that seems to agree with me (although since I started watching Mad Men, I became keenly aware of everything wrong with '60s culture, so I wouldn't give this too much credit without some more investigation)

I've spent a lot of time trying out various to-do lists and task managers and even creating my own before settling on one amazing one. After finally settling in with something that does (almost) everything I want it to, I'm moving on to the next big step in productivity: getting myself to actually do the shit I put on my list.

i need to work on my writing skills. the entire time i was writing that last post, i couldn't stop finding things wrong with the way it was written. eventually i just said "fuck it" and clicked publish. well, i'll try to post here more often from now on. definitely need the practice.

I think I’ve stumbled upon one of my biggest gripes with American society: they think bigger is better. The good news? It's changing. Fast. Consider what people think are good here:

1. a successful company: lots of employees, corporate structure, large buildings
2. a good car: V8, lots of room, SUV maybe, otherwise corvettes, chargers, etc.
3. a nice house: big, multiple bedrooms, multiple bathrooms, hell, go for a mansion
4. good food? steaks, grills, all-you-can-eat

After living here for over 15 years, these have become the same things that come to mind for me as well. But especially this summer after coming home from college, I've really started to realize how much stuff my family has that it doesn’t need. Maybe it’s also due to all the minimalism blogs I’ve been following lately. But they have a point: bigger (and more) isn't necessarily better; better, is better. One of the things that prompted this thought was recalling a quote from my friend Tasha last winter. We were walking out of Culver's after snowboarding, and I was holding a shake that I was too full to finish. As I contemplated tossing it out and complained about how I felt bad throwing it away and wasting it, she mentioned that her grandmother once told her “it’s wasted whether you throw it out or not” and since then, she's never thought twice about throwing away excess food. The shake was promptly inserted in the nearest trash receptacle. It wasn’t until earlier today that it hit me how powerful that quote was. When it comes to food (among other things), we only think of it becoming waste when we throw it out. But what that single phrase does is change your mindset about when something effectively becomes “waste.” In this case, it no longer mattered whether I thew it out (waste of resources, my money, and other people’s time) or I finished it (waste of my time, energy, and possibly future health), the shake was already wasted. If we follow that waste to the source of its origin, the shake probably became waste the moment I bought it, because I didn’t really need it. If you want to be even more precise, you could trace the shake further into the creation of it’s ingredients, and how the US is making more food than we can eat, etc., etc… But I won’t get into that now. There seemed to have been a societal pressure to prove your wealth by the accumulation of bigger and more lavish things, as well as more of them. But with the growth of the minimalism movement, alongside the green/environmentalist movement, I’m seeing the beginning of a trend towards quality over quantity, which is especially refreshing. One of the biggest mistakes I see people, families, and corporations big and small making is the pressure to get bigger or get more stuff: bigger houses, more cars, more employees. I believe this focus on “growth” is due to the fact that people simple don’t know what to do with excess money and resources, so they simply get more of what they had. But by the law of diminishing returns, we know this doesn’t work. What should you do instead? Start focusing on quality instead of quantity expecially when you start growing, making some extra cash, or get some extra time to kill. It's too easy to take that extra money to buy new clothes you only end up wearing a couple times, or buying that extra shake on the side that you can't finish. When you gain extra resources - time, money, education, cats, etc. - invest them on the things you do already and do them better (faster, more efficiently) instead of doing them more, or bigger, or looking elsewhere to find more stuff to accumulate. To return to the four exampls I started with, this time applying the new standards of "better":

1. the best companies: most profit per employee, smallest resource consumption
2. a best cars: highest ratios of power-to-weight, miles-per-gallon, and enough room to do exactly what you need, no more, no less.
3. a the perfect house: enough room to live, no more, no less.
4. the best food: healthy and tasty, and given our current circumstances, probably shouldn’t fill you up

So next time you buy something, make sure you can finish your shake, otherwise you’re just creating waste.

working on teuxdeux. with teuxdeux devs. hoping for big things to come? you and me both.

just a typical day in the life. planning to enjoy some memorial day gaming fun today, so i boot into windows... upon booting up, i start up windows update, start up steam and trillian (because all i use windows for these days is left4dead). within the first 5 minutes, somewhere in the midst of editing trillian settings - a fairly trivial task - everything freezes up. and i mean everything. windows update is stuck installing Games for Windows Live, steam is still downloading stuff, and trillian editing settings. that's it. completely frozen. with windows 7 being all advanced and cool and all, i thought to myself "well, no big deal, just the usual end process" right? wrong. ctrl-shift-esc doesn't work, ctrl-alt-del doesn't work, nothing does anything. oddly enough, all these "this program is not responding, end task?" windows pop up but they don't tell you WHICH program is not responding (but at this point it doesn't matter since they're all not responding). of course, clicking on these vast sea of popups does nothing. the other thing i find absolutely ridiculous is that same random things still work. in my case the taskbar, and all it's aero previews still worked! clicking on them of course, as with everything else, did nothing, and what's worse, i could still click the start menu, only to yield a white box of death where the start menu should be and another "not responding" dialog. like i couldn't tell already. it's as if the OS programmers are trying to keep you logged in clicking around by providing a random sense of hope by making some things still kind of work. out of frustration, i hit the power button. the computer goes to sleep. well, it tries to go to sleep. *facepalm* i force shut down the comp by holding the power button. upon reboot, of course you get that big black screen with blockly low resolution monotype font asking if you want to boot into windows in varying degrees of safe mode, or just boot normally. i don't know of anyone who would ever choose safe mode at these screens until all other options are exhausted, at which point safe mode probably won't do shit anyway. since windows update was running, boot up doesn't go to the login screen, it prepares to configure my updates, then it actually configures my updates, then it says "shutting down..." WTF. but at this point it's not even surprising. after another reboot, all is back to normal, as if nothing happened. you want to know what frustrates me the most though? that this unnecessary waste of 20-30 minutes of my time happens to millions if not billions of people every day, and they're okay with it. they prefer this to learning something better, something different, something that will save them their time, money, and sanity. microsoft has fucking bred mediocrity and frustration into computer users so they expect it. i liken those poor bastards who love windows for no other reason than 'familiarity' to sufferers of stockholm syndrome. maybe i should thank microsoft for giving me a filter for brainless zombies.

was gonna write about this, but found it written already pretty well on facebook of all places. anyway, here's to quoting:

It is Better to be alone, than in the wrong company. Tell me who your best friends are, and I will tell you who you are. If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights. A mirror reflects a man’s face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses. The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate for the good and the bad. The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative people. As you grow, your associates will change. Some of your friends will not want you to go on.They will want you to stay where they are. Friends that don't help you climb will want you to crawl.Your friends will stretch your vision or choke your dream. Those that don't increase you will eventually decrease you. Consider This: Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don't follow anyone who's not going anywhere. With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it. Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life. Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships. If you see people without a smile today, give them one of yours. Choose to rise...Don't settle...and go for your dreams!!! And most of all let God lead you in everything you do I send you Love, Peace, Happiness, Freedom, Harmony, Unity, Facts, Knowledge, Wisdom, Overstanding, Choice, and much Success. Love and blessings in divine order, Mark kurupt Stoddart

So true. So much easier said than done. Just watch who people associate with, and how they associated with them. You'll learn a lot more about them, and maybe even see a bit into the future to who they'll become. As for me? I know what it's like to be alone. I'll choose that over fake company I don't like any day. My theory on friends goes as follows: I do what I do. If you like it, you'll find me. If I like what you do, I'll find you. If we change our minds, then we go our separate ways. I don't do things to please people, or make them like me, unless it's worth it to me. I don't try to keep friends for the sake of keeping friends. I'm not nice for the sake of "being nice". I'm nice because I choose to be, for my own reasons. It's just how I've always lived, and I find that I find better, more honest friends this way, and that means much more to me than the number of friends I have at any given time.