Me on how I write
February 6, 2012 · 0 comments
I’m sure you read Macdrifter every day just like I do. But in the off chance that you don’t, here’s a link to an interview there with none other than my self-promoting self.
Gabe asked me some questions about my writing workflow. I talk about how I Markdownify my thoughts in nvALT, TextMate, Byword, MarsEdit, and more.
Tagged as: interviews, writing
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If that standing desk isn’t working out…
February 3, 2012 · 1 comment
A WSJ article on the growing trend of stand-up meetings in the tech industry, a culture looking for any way possible to divorce its ass from its seat:
Holding meetings standing up isn’t new. Some military leaders did it during World War I, according to Allen Bluedorn, a business professor at the University of Missouri. A number of companies have adopted stand-up meetings over the years. Mr. Bluedorn did a study back in 1998 that found that standing meetings were about a third shorter than sitting meetings and the quality of decision-making was about the same.
This article caught my eye because it made me think about how I much I like standing in meetings myself, even when others are sitting. For one thing, if I’m not in a meeting, I’m generally sitting at a computer. Meetings are a chance to not sit.
But I also feel more engaged when I stand, even if I’m not talking. And when I am talking, I feel like I have a greater command of people’s attention. Come to think of it, I don’t remember Darth Vader sitting in many meetings aboard the Death Star.[1]
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Yeah, I went there. And yeah, I just said “went there,” too. Boom. ↩
Tagged as: meetings
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iBooks Author: a preface
January 20, 2012David Sparks: I just spent several hours playing with iBook Author’s media tools inserting movies, keynote animations, and interactive pictures into my new secret project and it ruined me. There is no turning back. As an author and a reader, I will never look at a static page e-book the same. While for some types [...]
Steven’s notebook
January 19, 2012What do you do when a guy like Steven Frank hands you his tech tip notebook? You go read it of course. … there has always been a subset of my notes that I’ve wanted to share with the public — those little techie one-liners that take hours to figure out or find on the [...]
You are what you type
January 17, 2012Before the rise of technology culture, knowing when to capitalize a noun was pretty intuitive. Proper nouns were capitalized, while common nouns generally were not. Things aren’t so simple now. The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the use of mixed case nouns. To complicate matters, the neologisms spouting from technology culture often [...]
The forgotten manuals
January 12, 2012General life lesson: If everyone else is doing Thing A, there’s probably an advantage to be gained doing something other than Thing A. I’ve seen at least one study [PDF] that shows that we’re reading significantly more thanks to the internet, and we’re spending a lot more time doing it. That’s not to say we’re [...]
The PowerCurve
January 6, 2012I’ve not had great success finding non-Apple USB ports that supply enough power to charge my iPhone and iPad. Until recently. The PowerCurve Mobile Surge Protector works really well. As far as I can tell, it charges my iPhone and iPad just as fast as the wall charger that Apple ships with new iOS devices. [...]
More from Charlie Park on slopegraphs
January 1, 2012Continuing the semi-theme of data visualization around here, Charlie Park just wrote a detailed follow-up to his original slopegraphs piece. Whether you’re a data viz junkie or just curious about trends in everything from economic indicators to infant mortality to tablet markets, you won’t be disappointed in Charlie’s follow-up.
Steve Jobs via Walter Isaacson
December 27, 2011It’s possible—likely even—that Steve Jobs could have picked someone better than Walter Isaacson to write a biography. Isaacson is just one man after all. One writer. One lens. One shot in a game devoid of do-overs. I picked up my copy of Steve Jobs with low expectations. I’d heard some pretty scathing criticism of Isaacson [...]
A few stocking stuffer apps
December 21, 2011Some apps, though beyond-words useful, are just too niche for the developer to have any chance of winning a yelling match with the thunderous white noise of the internet. That’s where the Mac App Store has helped the software economy. It facilitates the creation, marketing, and distribution of low-priced apps that we’d probably never see [...]
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