We Have The Power To Create Our Own Happiness

This I Believe: I believe this is something all of us can do: Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves. —Wayne Coyne

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The Joy of Developing

The great Mac RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire, has a new beta out, version 3.0. It’s really good, with a ton of performance improvements and nicer layouts. But, they say it crashes some, and they want bug reports. In fact, it did crash on me once in the past couple of weeks ago, so I sent a […]

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Food Security

When I say that “the food supply is far more fragile than people realize,” this is what I have in mind. It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last […]

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Stop Buying This Crap

Rant, defined.

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Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Reading this interview with Cory Doctorow (by RU Sirius, nonetheless), I discovered Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (of text). The speed-read shows you one word at a time, and it shows them at a speed that’s determined by a little slider. And it pauses a little after a comma, and longer after a period, and longer […]

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Chopin Polonaise-fantaisie #7 by Claudio Arrau

Yesterday morning, waking up at 5:00 but then drifting off to sleep again from 6:00 to 7:30, heard the most amazing piano concerto. Tracked it down via the VPR playlist (thank you!!), and finally tracked down the CD on Amazon. Welcome to my wishlist, oh Claudio Arrau.

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Panasonic Lumix FX-01 Digital Camera

I took the Panasonic Lumix LX-1 to Europe last year and loved it. But it was too big for my front pocket and I wanted to downsize to a consumer-grade point ‘n shoot. So I bought the FX-01 and loved it even more. Since then I’ve recommended it to several people (Chris, Jeff, Marc, Graham, […]

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Notes on Arial

If anyone ever recommends to you Arial for a primary typeface, these links will turn out handy. LifeClever: There are two types of people in the world: those who can tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial, and those who can’t. The Scourge of Arial: Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely—at least for […]

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Web 2.0 In Just Under 5 Minutes

Tour de force video explaining how Web 2.0 is changing the nature of online interaction.

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[Local] Good Thai Food In Concord NH

Siam Orchid served us well last night. Flavorful, aromatic, and fresh ingredients. 158 North Main Street. 603-228-3633. It’s on the same street as the courthouse. If you take the Louden Road exit on 93, turn left to head downtown, then turn left at the first traffic light – it’s on the left. I think if […]

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Social Web Hits The Election Cycle

Great post over at Bokardo Social Web Design, altering us that Hillary Clinton is using Yahoo answers to gather the prol’s thoughts on health-care reform. One, Clinton is actually asking the American people what they think, rather than assuming or generalizing from the party she’s a part of. (this doesn’t mean she’ll listen, but it’s […]

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Results of Thinking Systemically

Finally found the quote I’ve been looking for: “He’s the only guy who has applied systems thinking to media,” said Paul Saffo, a consumer electronics industry consultant who is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. Paul is referring to Steve Jobs. Bonus: This is an interesting Google search.

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True Stories

Sometimes, you can’t make this stuff up.

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The Speech

For my money, Andrew Sullivan sums it up perfectly. What we will discover in the next few months, therefore, is simply whether the entire premise of this strategy is actually true. The president is asking us to find this out one more time. He seems to disbelieve the overwhelming evidence on the ground – that […]

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Ryu at Dartmouth

Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org: And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere (“an ambient way to see your weather”) is […]

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Completely Redefining What You Can Do

I will be one of approximately 143,215,697 people to mention this today or tomorrow, but this is as close as it gets to product-orgasm. Cell phones have sucked forever, and this is a whole new game. iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet […]

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Black Tie Optional

Current students at Hannah and Sherry‘s alma mater are getting awfully hip…. The Pundits, founded in 1884 as a society of “campus wits,” have a history of rebelling against Yale tradition, often through elaborate pranks. They organize six to eight covert naked parties a year, which attract anywhere from 30 to 300 people to off-campus […]

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Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Mouse over each cell to get an example.

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Design Is Good For Business

DETROIT, Jan. 3 — The Chrysler Group was the only Detroit carmaker to report a sales increase for December, while the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda both saw their sales grow last month, figures from the auto companies showed today. I assert Chrysler gained sales because of design, with a capital-D. Of the US automakers, […]

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Mattresses

How to cut through the marketing gimmicks. The secret to mattress shopping is that the product is basically a commodity. The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they’re pretty much all the same. And that’s all you need to know. Not […]

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