Life Notebook

Meet the Life Hackers, By Clive Thompson

[productive people's] suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. ... they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it.

I pretty much swear by the dump your life into notebooks method. I personally use Hog Bay Notebook, when I'm at the computer and a Moleskine unruled paper notebook when I'm not. It's a given that if I don't write it down, I'll never remember it. With three kids, I need a couple extra places to put my brain.

Links

1. Meet the Life Hackers, By Clive Thompson
2. Hog Bay Notebook
3. Moleskine Notebooks.

Yahoo!'s Blog Search

I'm on the fence about the new beta release of Yahoo! Blog Search on Yahoo! News. My worry and I think the biggest negative is that the results look a bit too much like text ads. But that negative is also something of a positive. It really would make it very easy to include as a module in my (or anyone's) blog once they get the API up and running. And of course, having the blog results come back with the news results is a good thing. I don't need two separate interfaces.

The other issue that needs to be worked out: I'm still not sure how they're deciding which blogs to include at this point but coverage is limited. But it is a beta, and given the new way they're presenting the results going early is probably a good thing.

Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! but not in Search or News.

A Couple Months and a Dollar Per Gallon

Last week, because I was still getting over my cold, I didn't ride the bike. Instead I did my rainy-day commute: Caltrain to Mountain View and then light rail to Yahoo!. I hadn't done that in months because the weather has been so nice (and still is). Wow, what a difference a few months and about a dollar per gallon makes. Every single day light rail was full. Their revenues must be way way up. For the first time I wasn't the only one doing the walk from the light rail station to Yahoo!

This morning I was finally over the cold. Jumped on the bike and wound up commuting in with a couple other cyclists. So very cool.

Reality Check

Was just sent this picture of my Uncle Phil doing some volunteering for an English class in the West Bank. Seeing that, I think, what a pampered slacker I am. And I get this feeling a lot! My wife is a NICU nurse at Stanford Children's Hospital. Before she went on maternity leave it wouldn't be that unusual for me to give her a call at work and have her tell me to hold on for a second. A couple minutes might pass before she would come back on the line with an apology, the baby she was taking care of had forgotten to breath. No really, forget me ... I think that's a little more important.

So while this tech world I live in is fun and challenging, it's great to be reminded just how unimportant it really is. And I say that in the nicest possible way.

Not So Inquisitive

This Tiger only thing is getting out of hand. Again I missed the fact that another piece of software, this time the search tool Inquisitor is 10.4 only. They did use a lovely stand out shade of gray on black. And hey, it's free. On the plus side, it warned me that this was a 10.4 only product before installing. But this one had a somewhat insulting twist. On quitting the installer it sends you to the 10.4 product page at Amazon. What the heck?

Is there a piece of shareware out there that warns you on the website before you download it, that it requires 10.4? I want to congratulate them.



For the record, my computer is a corporate laptop. Yahoo! hasn't moved to 10.4 yet so neither can I. And for goodness sake, please don't send me to the Amazon download page.

1. Inquisitor: Must-Have add-on for Safari, by Dan Wood via RSS.
2. Inquisitor website.
3. Deleted Doctopus, a little thing I wrote.

Hidden Font Preview

For some reason I never noticed this before. But on OS X you can pull down the top of the font chooser panel to reveal a preview of the selected Font. I never noticed the circular grippy. I just happened to accidentally drag it down this morning while working on a spec, and did one of those, "what the ... cool!"

Wallowing In Retro

Man, I'm wallowing in retro. While I was at the Computer History Museum for the Moore's Law celebration, I had some time before the talk to wander around their "Visible Storage" display. A nice volunteer seeing the giant smile spread across my face asked if he could help. I told him I really wanted to see a PDP 11/70 if they had one. This was my high school's computer donated by DEC that I hacked away on in 1983 or so. The volunteer lead me right to their machine. Next thing I knew I felt like I was 15 again. Oh man, they even had one of those teletype-like terminal printers. The only thing missing was how incredibly noisy the machine room was. Perhaps the exhibit should pump a mix of dot matrix printer noise, industrial air conditioning and the old disk drive chatter over speakers to complete the experience.

It was fate I guess that I'd run across an OS X port of Adventure. I picked up a nasty cold this weekend and before I knew it I was recreating a map of the caves that I had done back in the day. Only now I know enough to call it a finite state diagram. I did a search for a "map", having made one as a kid I didn't feel like I was cheating, but strangely I couldn't find one out there.

Links

1. Computer History Museum's PDP 11 collection. Adventure was originally written on a PDP 11 in FORTRAN. Unfortunately their website is not really set up for linking to a particular machine.
2. Play an 'old-school' adventure game, By Rob Griffiths, MacWorld, via RSS
3. Freeware Adventure from Lobotomo Software.
4. A history of Adventure
5. Happy 40th Moore's Law that I did.

Daniel Holloway

If you haven't heard of Daniel Holloway, I'm hopeful that you will soon. He's a young cyclist who just finished up his last year as a junior (18 and under). He's been turning some heads out here in Northern California, down at Hellyer Velodrome and the local road races. He had a fabulous junior track nationals, but a last minute cold made a mess of his junior world's bid.

Next year he's looking to ride for a pro team on the road. I wish him all the luck in the world, and will certainly be watching. And of course, there's 2008 looming.

Links

1. Daniel Holloway's blog
2. Lombardi Sports, Junior Team
3. Hellyer Velodrome