How to Build an Upside-Down Fire: The Only Fireplace Method You’ll Ever Need

I'm trying this tonight!

How to Build an Upside-Down Fire: The Only Fireplace Method You’ll Ever Need

Again, standards rock!

James Strachan's Blog: How Sun could fix Swing and promote innovation and unification in the UI space: this is a great idea!

Firelight - Not Silverlight, Not Flash

This is the direction web development should be moving in. Standards compliance and no plugins. Now we're talking.

(Via Reddit.)

OK, I need to make one of these.

The Omnomicon: how to make a rainbow cake!

(Via Reddit)

Seaside Statefulness

I really hope this is the future of web development. Smalltalk and Seaside have been secret loves of mine (Smalltalk since 1988, Seaside somewhat more recently) that I had been afraid I'd never be able to publicly acknowledge.

Wait for it...

Wow. Who would have thought it. Wil Wheaton can actually sing pretty well. And can let go and disappear into a game of Rock Band 2 in front of a live audience at a con.

(Vial Wil)

Koumpounophobia

You absolutely need to see the first one (at least) of these videos. And yes, the video will explain the title of this post.

(Via Neil Gaiman.)

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump from FGump44

OK, this is a great job of spotting a movie-recyle:

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump - watch more funny videos

Tips from the Master

Scriptwriting in the UK: Joss Whedon's Top 10 Writing Tips is an amazing set of writing tips. They're focused on screenwriting, but I think they're pretty universal.

johnaugust.com » The Remnants, in full

johnaugust.com » The Remnants, in full

Cool web pilot done during the writer strike. I'd love to see Ze get more work.
The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

(Via Gruber.)

The Joel on Software Discussion Group - Why I Hate Frameworks

The Joel on Software Discussion Group - Why I Hate Frameworks:

The factory factory factory will produce only the tool factory factories that you actually need.

I can't tell you how closely this matches my recent experiences.

(Via rands.)

Getting more out of life

Maxing out your Triangle — jackcheng.com

Some people might ascribe to the philosophy that it’s okay to be at a well-paid-yet-crappy day job and use the remaining time and money enjoying your hobbies. I disagree.

How full is your triangle?

(Via Merlin Mann.)

Contagious Happiness

Check it out.

Smile and Your Social Network Smiles With You:

Every wonder about how you affect your friends in online networks, or how you are impacted by them? Check out this article from Edge:

Edge: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS By By Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

(Via Unquiet Desperation.)

Matt Legend Gemmell – What have you tried?

If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question ‘What have you tried?’

If everyone would listen to Matt before posting, we'd have a tremendous improvement in the pool of developers.

An opinion on Gay Marriage Rights « The Little Cog

Sounds like I'm not alone.

Let's Play

Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too.

I have to agree.

Once again Ze nails it

children's songs for adults:

Laura wrote and wanted a song to remind her to chill out when she got anxious. I asked people to send me vocals so that I could have a chorus behind me...(special thanks to everyone that sent in audio)here's the result :: wear headphones, it ain't mixed so great

(Via ze's page :: zefrank.com.)

Jalkut on MS Ads

Microsoft Ads Are Genius: "The very fact that Microsoft can dance at all will be enough to sell them as belle of the ball to most who look on."

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

Gruber on Apple vs. MS

★ Memoranda: "Apple and Microsoft, as ever, offer a study in contrasts. Take, for example, two recent company-wide memos from CEOs Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer."

(Via Daring Fireball.)

My Hipster & Process

I've become a big fan of my Hipster PDA. I had the original Palm Pilot, back when there was only one model and so no choice. Over the years, Palms died and I bought new ones. I went through five. When the last one died, I stopped and thought about what I used my Palm for. I realized that a 40¢ pack of 3x5 index cards and a binder clip could do the same job. Not long after, I ran across the Hipster PDA on 43folders. I started using the DIY Hipster with 3x5 cards. It's been fantastic. Eventually, I added Fiendish Master Plan (fmp) to my arsenal, along with a Quicksilver trigger for adding tasks to fiend.txt. Then, I wanted an easy way to print my fiendish contexts as 3x5 cards, so I wrote carder. Now, I use the Quicksilver trigger to add lines like this:

^agenda chainsaw @Mike
^agenda gloves @Mike
^agenda Return Megaforce @Bill
^agenda rope @Mike
^agenda plastic sheeting @Mike

The first tag (^agenda) gets used by fmp to move the task into the right context file (agenda.txt). The task itself is "Return Megaforce." And the last tag (@Bill) is used by carder to categorize items on the context card that prints. This ends up with a card that looks like this:

                          2008-07-23 Agenda
===========================================
-------------------------------------- Bill
[] Return Megaforce
-------------------------------------- Mike
[] chainsaw
[] gloves
[] rope
[] plastic sheeting 
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________
[] ________________________________________

Hipster Organization

I have four sections in my Hipster PDA: context lists, later lists, blank preprints, and true blanks.

Context Lists

My current contexts are: home, call, errand, office, web, macbook, and imac. I use different kinds of category tags in different contexts. In the agenda context, the category is the person I need to be with for the agenda to apply. It used to be that I had contexts per person for these tasks, but that resulted in a dozen cards with one or two items each. Compiling them under an agenda context with the person as the category has been a huge improvement. For the errand context, the categories are specific store names (or unfiled/no category if it doesn't really matter where I get it). The web context usually has categories for music, sites, specific work projects, and personal. The macbook and imac contexts are transient. There are a couple of things I need to do on those specific machines, not just any computer, so I have those two contexts with two tasks each. When I finally do those things, the contexts will be dropped.

Later Lists

These are lists that seem similar to the context lists, and in fact are managed with carder and fmp just like the context lists. But their contexts are more vague: basement, someday-maybe, to-read, wishlist-audio, wishlist-print, wishlist-video, and a card of phone numbers I need but don't rate adding to my phone such as the contractor working on the new roof. The big difference between these and the context cards is that these lists tend to remain static for long periods of time. There will be a trickle of additions, but things tend to come off the lists only once in great while. Wish lists tend to shrink around birthdays and Christmas. To-read shrinks as I get around to reading that book I've always meant to. Basement shrinks as I complete elements of the basement remodeling. Someday-maybe will shrink when I finally start working on that novel I said I'd write in high school. And I'll take the contractor's number off the list when he finishes the roof. It's the time-scale that makes these fundamentally different from the first set of lists, which change many times a day. These are access much less frequently, and so I've finally moved them into a separate section, thereby keeping them from getting mixed in with the fast crowd.

Blank Preprints

I have about five copies of the DIY Hipster to-do list here. I can pull one out to add a context to the first section if I need to add one when I'm not in a position to do it through fmp, say when I'm at my daughter's softball game.

True Blanks

These are just plain blank 3x5 cards. Sometimes lined, sometimes unlined. Usually a mix depending on what I picked up last time I was at the store. Usually five to ten cards here. A year from now I'll probably be doing this differently. In the past, my hipster has included many other preprinted cards, such as yearly, monthly, and weekly calendars. I found I didn't use them enough to justify carrying them around. YMMV.