A clever addition by Chris Bowler.
My Sister is Getting Married
It’s not too often that I share personal tidbits here, but this one is worthy.
My one and only sister, my younger sister, is getting married this coming Sunday. My future brother-in-law, Mark, is a stand up guy; I couldn’t be happier.
The wedding is here in Kansas City, and family has already begun to arrive. Which means posting on shawnblanc.net will be slim this week because family always, always comes first.
So if and when you check this site and you don’t see anything new, say a quick prayer for Elise and Mark and their new life together.
The 2011 State of the Union →
And speaking of the State of the Union speech, President Obama will giving his Address tomorrow night at 9:00 pm EST. If you don’t have a TV, you can watch the live stream on the White House website or iPhone app.
The delivery of the State of the Union Address has come a long way. Did you know it used to be called the Annual Message and was simply delivered as a written letter on paper? It wasn’t until 1913 that the Address was first given as a speech. And then, a decade later, technology entered the scene. The first radio broadcast of the Address was in 1923; the first televised Address was in 1947; Internet webstream in 2002; HD TV in 2004; iPhone and iPod touch in 2010; and (since the White House app runs on iPad, albeit in double-pixel mode…) iPad in 2011.
Writing the State Of The Union Speech →
If you think design by committee is hard, imagine writing by committee. And then imagine that the committee is the government.
More Ideas Than Time, but More Time Than Focus
Often I find myself wrestling with the tension that I have more ideas than time. There are many great things I want to do and build and ship and start, but I just don’t have the time to do them. However, I’m finding that the real problem is not my lack of time — it’s my lack of focus.
Ideas > Time > Focus
More ideas than time, but more time than focus.
This is not exactly a revelation. But the above equation has helped to put it in perspective for me. What I want it to be is this:
(Ideas > Time) + (Focus > Time)
More ideas than time and more focus than time.
If we have more time than focus it means we’re wasting time. Time is the only thing in that equation that we have no control over. And so it should be seized for all it is worth. I do not want a wasted surplus of time due to a lack of focus.
Does this mean I spend all my time “focused” on work? Not at all. I don’t have the energy for that. And neither do you.
What it means is that I’m being proactive and intentional about how I spend my time. It means I’ve establish some awesome default behaviors to fall back on when my focus and energy run out during the day.
* * *
For more thoughts on this, check out this video and article combo that I put together about “How to Get it All Done” when you’ve got too many awesome ideas.
[Sponsor] Due — super fast reminders, reusable timers →
Jot down a task and set up a reminder alert really, really fast? A companion to your GTD manager where all your mundane but important reminders can go? Now you have it.
Pear Note →
Many thanks to Useful Fruit software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote Pear Note. Pear Note is a note-taking utility app with a bucket full of useful and well-thought-out features. It’ll recored audio and/or video while you type in your notes. It tracks the timing of what you type with the position of the audio/video track which is great for going back to hear what was said and when, based on the notes that you typed. Pear Note could be especially useful for those who take minutes at meetings. If you take notes or have an assistant who does you may want to get a license.
Download a free trial online, or pick it up in the Mac App Store.
David Pogue’s Two Favorite PR Pitches from 2010 →
The whole PR pitch scene is a disaster. You either don’t know what the PR is even talking about, or you can tell they don’t really care if you’re interested or not; they’re just spamming you because you have a blog.
I don’t get 50 PR pitches a day like Pogue does — I get about 5 or 10 a week. Usually the email is just text that has obviously been copied-and-pasted from a generic write up, or else it’s just a giant image or PDF attached to an email. And so I just delete 90% of them.
Do they even know they’re sending it to me or are they just using a giant list of “tech blogs” or something? Do they even care if I am interested? I doubt it. They’re just throwing their news out there and hoping for the best… Deleted.
Maybe they’re putting such little effort into their PR pitches because they don’t think it’s worth their time to address me directly. It’s not like shawnblanc.net is a mega site. But by sending annoying PR pitches all they’re actually doing is wasting my time and theirs.
I do, however, get an occasional pitch that I can tell was actually written with intent. And I almost always reply back to say thanks for the heads up. Alas, from there it’s not uncommon to get a generic reply or even no reply. And then, a week or two later, I get a follow-up pitch: “Hey, we just wanted to know if you had a chance to review and post about our app?” Seriously? Deleted.
People should take note of David’s favorite PR Pitches. It’s amazing how far a little bit of thought and some personal connection will go.
It is a rare day when I actually get in contact with someone who cares about the product or service they are pitching. And I wish I could promote and review all of those people’s products and services. But since this weblog is still a part-time gig for me, I simply don’t have the time. Maybe one day that won’t be the case.
TestFlight →
This is the way beta testing for iOS devices should be. At any given time I am helping beta test a handful of apps. A few of the developers have been using TestFlight while it was still in private beta. And keeping up to date with their latest builds became so much easier I became a more useful tester.
If you’re an iOS developer, you should be using TestFlight. If your a beta tester, tell your developer friends to sign up.
That’s Enough →
Enough is the brand new Minimal Mac podcast, with Patrick Rhone and his co-host Myke Hurley. Congratulations to both of them for kicking this off. I’m subscribed; I have no doubt that it will be fantastic.
A Pretty Good Script for Creating a Yojimbo Bookmark From Safari →
Considering all the bookmarking going on yesterday, it seems like a ripe time to point out this AppleScript I wrote in 2009 based on some others by Jim DeVona and John Gruber.
Here’s what it does:
When invoked, the script takes the frontmost tab in Safari and creates a new bookmark item in Yojimbo. You’ll be given the opportunity to enter any tags before the bookmark is created, and if you’ve selected any text from the Web page you’re bookmarking it will get pasted into the Comments box of your new Yojimbo bookmark. Finally, once the script has successfully run, a Growl notification will let you know.
Follow the link to read all about it, or just download it now.
That Was Fun
From where I’m sitting, Blast from the Past Link Day turned out to be a wild success.
Many people posted links to their website and/or Twitter throughout the day. Some of you wrote a single article with a list of favorite reads. Some people highlighted favorites written by others, and some highlighted favorites that they had written.
Thank you everyone for joining the fun and for sharing some great articles.
We should do this again sometime. But not for a while… I have a lot of reading to do.
A Shared Instapaper Folder for all the #pastblast Links →
Anthony Morelli wrote a python scrip that is grabbing all the links from the #pastblast Twitter hashtags and tossing them into a shared folder on Instapaper. This way you can easily pull in all these articles to your own Instapaper account. And since Instapaper de-dupes automatically you shouldn’t have to worry about seeing the same article over and over again.
Pure genius! Here’s how to get it:
- Log into Instapaper
- On the right-hand side bar click “Add Folder”
- Choose to add “Another user’s Starred items”
- In the text box for Username to subscribe to, type: [email protected]
- Click “Create starred-item subscription folder”
- Enjoy
Thanks, Anthony!
The Top Idea in Your Mind →
Paul Graham:
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.