Letters of Note:

In March of 1961, nine years after the publication of Charlotte’s Web, author E. B. White received a letter from a young fan named Cathy Durham who wanted to know when, if ever, his next children’s book would see the light of day.

Little did Cathy know that White hadn’t written another book yet because the fan mail he was getting after writing Charlotte’s Web had been taking up most of his time and creative energy.

Click through for the letter White wrote to Cathy as well as the letter he sent to Cathy’s librarian.

Klint Finley tries to break down Amazon Glacier’s convoluted and mysterious pricing for data retrieval.

Who knows where they came up with that name, but Glacier is a new, extremely low-cost data storage service from Amazon. The reason it’s so cheap is because it’s meant for archiving and long-term storage of data that you don’t expect to access very often.

Storage costs are just $0.01/GB. That’s 9.3x cheaper than Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage and 12.5x cheaper than their Standard Storage. And Glacier gives you get the same data durability and reliability of the Standard Storage (99.999999999% durability).

The first thing I thought when reading about Glacier was, Hellooooo Arq. I already use Arq to backup my most important files to Amazon S3, but it’d be stellar if I could use it backup my entire MacBook Air while also reducing my S3 bill. A complete backup of my Air to Amazon’s rock-solid, encrypted, redundant data centers would only cost me $2.50/month. That’s crazy!

I got in touch with Stefan Reitshamer, the developer behind Arq, to ask about Arq’s future support of Glacier. He’s done more reading than I have about just exactly how Glacier works, and it won’t be as simple as it may sound.

There are a few factors that make the storing and retrieving of data on Glacier not as straightforward as it is on S3. The biggest factor being the retrieval cost. There’s a discussion on Hacker News about it and it’s not quite clear just how much it would cost to retrieve all your data, but it looks like it wouldn’t be cheap.

Cal Newport writes about his daily “shutdown” technique. It’s not unlike what Aaron and Dave talked about on episode 6 of their Home Work podcast, which spurred me to start a new habit of jotting down the mental loose ends of my day and basically debriefing myself so that when I step away from my computer for the day my mind is clear.

(This of course should not be confused with trying to kick out the top idea in your mind.)

Jason Fried:

Change is important. When we were growing up, we got summers off from school. Summer vacation was change. It was something to look forward to. A few months of something different really meant a lot.

We grow out of a lot as we grow up. One of the most unfortunate things we leave behind is a regular dose of change. Nowhere is this more evident than at work.

Work in February is the same as work in May. June’s the same as October. And it would be hard to tell August from April.

To step out from behind the curtain for a moment and be transparent with you guys, what Jason writes about here has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve been learning to navigate ever since I took this site full time.

I haven’t taken a complete break from this site since I started it 18 months ago. Even on vacation I steal away for an hour or two every day to read and write a bit (and I’m not talking about recreational reading and writing).

Because, in a way, I don’t work for myself. I work for you, dear readers and members. And if I don’t visibly show up every day by posting something, there’s a sense that I’m not working.

Of course, in reality, I doubt any of you are thinking that. But that’s what I assume you’re thinking even though I should know better.

I know how to invest my time in the long-term growth, innovation, and quality of this site. But often it’s the short-term expectations or the seemingly urgent events that take hold of my attention. And, if not that, then it’s the fear that taking a complete break from work (or taking time away from publishing something in favor of working on a different project) will be perceived as laziness. What? Nothing new on shawnblanc.net today? I thought this guy was full-time. Sheesh. What a bum.

In short, I wonder if I would do better, more challenging, and more exciting work if the value and consistency of that work was not measured in 24-hour cycles.

My thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I have heard nothing but great things about version 6, and many of my tech-savvy friends have begun using it. If you’re in need of a sturdy and classy website and you don’t want to self-manage everything, you should definitely check out Squarespace 6.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Loren Donelson:

Since I’m noodling a move back to iOS, I thought I’d make a list of things that I’ll miss about Android — things that might make my shiny new iPhone 5 end up on Ebay.

His list is spot on for several of the things I’ve found Android does better or makes easier than iOS. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention Notification Center which I find to be far and away more intuitive and usable on Android than on iOS.

Chuck Skoda, astute as usual:

[Twitter] should have a vision for what the future of communicating and sharing looks like, and be building it.

But from the looks of it, they aren’t. They’re just trying to protect what they’ve already built.

Chris Bowler (he wrote this over a year ago, but it sounds like he wrote it this morning):

Twitter spent the early years building up as many users as possible — due in large part to the third party apps that accessed the service — and decided to put off figuring out how to make money off of their service until later. Now that they have the users, they seem to have no remorse about commoditizing those users and cutting out the very people that helped Twitter become what it is.

And be sure to read the concluding paragraph in Chris’ article. He hits on the same reason that I (and probably many of you) find this transition to be so frustrating.

David Smith:

Twitter seems to have forgotten its roots. The long tail of Innovators and Early Adopters at the head of the adoption curve does not become irrelevant to your audience once you begin to welcome the Majorities. The same people who pioneered the adoption of your platform would also be the people leading an exodus.

Paul Haddad on why Twitter’s API changes won’t have a massive, world-ending impact on Tweetbot:

• Our user cap for Tweetbot for iOS is pretty huge (which is 2* our current users, not 100k)
• At the current rate our user base is growing we won’t hit that cap for a few years
• Our user cap for Tweetbot for Mac is also large and we don’t expect any problems given the smaller market
• Even if we were to run out of room all our current users will be fine

There are some great quotes and stories from Seth Godin in this interview:

I think “creativity” is better described as failing repeatedly until you get something right.

And:

I keep looking to have enough guts to do something that might not work. The phrase “this might not work” is something I try to say on a regular basis.