Photos
I threw a little blog together to post photos on.
I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
The Leg Splint
Everybody in the world knows who the Eames’s are so I’ll spare you the history lesson and just say: they made really cool furniture. The thing that made their iullustrious career possible was a government contract to make leg splints using a machine Charles had built that could bend plywood in two directions at once.
They’re conversation pieces in people’s homes now.
What makes these really interesting are the holes on the sides. They weren’t supposed to be there, but they were necessary to relieve the tension in the wood so it wouldn’t crack. It just so happened the holes did need to be there; bandages were tied through them, which kept them on the patient’s leg.
Don’t you love when that happens?
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
Timothy Ferriss (via Swiss Miss)
Living in the Future
The first thing I thought to write when I sat down to write this was “I’m about to show my age,” but I’m not. It just feels that way.
I’m 26 years old. When I was in college I was using an HP laptop with Windows XP. Nobody had a Mac. The proliferation of the iPod was just beginning. My campus only had wi-fi in the library and cafeteria. That meant you did your homework in your dorm, at your desk, tethered to the wall by an ethernet cable.
I write every blog post (and everything else I write, from emails that need a little consideration to a few sentences of copy for a project) using Information Architects‘ beautiful and perfect app, Writer. Now, in 2012, only a relatively short time since I was writing 10-pagers of literary analysis in Microsoft Word, I can use this piece of software anywhere I happen to be when an idea hits me; I can pull my iPad out of my bag, make a new document, type enough words to make sure I don’t forget the idea, save it to iCloud and finish it on my Mac when I get home where the document will magically appear as I left it.
Group projects used to involve emailing files back and forth, overwriting documents and all sorts of cross-platform errors. Now there’s Dropbox, a ubiquitous tool that gives you the Why-Didn’t-I-Think-Of-That feeling, and it might as well be shipped inside OS X.
And, of course, I lost months of work when my hard drive died in a way I can only describe as untimely and with great flourish. Cloud backup didn’t exist, and even local backup was a pain in the ass. You had to either make copies of your entire drive manually (which took hours, and made your computer unusable until it finished), or be willing to lose everything at any time.
All of these advancements make me feel old when I think about the fact that they didn’t exist in the previous stage of my life. But I’m not old. Things are just changing at an exponentially-increasing velocity. This is a truly incredible time. Integrating your life with your technology is becoming more seamless every day, and it’s so easy even your mother can do it.
