Recipe for Banana Wonderful

a.k.a. Peanut butter and coconut Banana Boat

Banana Wonderful

Ingredients

  • One ripe banana
  • Smooth peanut butter
  • Squares from a Hershey’s chocolate bar (Feel free to use any brand of chocolate — milk or dark — depending on how much of a chocolate snob you are)
  • Coconut shavings
  • Marshmallows (regular or mini)

Preparation

  1. Peel the banana, and with a very sharp knife slice it down the long middle from top to bottom.
  2. Lay the two halves, with flat side facing up, onto a sheet of tin foil.
  3. Spread a generous layer of peanut butter across the top of both banana halves.
  4. Place the chocolate squares evenly along the banana, on top of the peanut butter.
  5. Liberally sprinkle coconut shavings on top of the chocolate squares.
  6. Finally, place marshmallows on top of the squares.

Cooking

You can cook your Banana Wonderful indoors or outdoors. At home, simply place the tinfoil holding your banana onto a cookie sheet and broil it in the oven for just a few minutes until your marshmallows are slightly browned on top and the chocolate is soft and melted.

If camping or grilling outdoors, fold the sides of your tinfoil sheet over the top of your Banana Wonderful and place near your campfire until the marshmallows are gooey.

Eating

Your Banana Wonderful is best enjoyed with a fork, along with a warm drink and some good company.

Recipe for Banana Wonderful

Mike Rundle’s Sweet Mac Setup

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I’m Mike Rundle, a designer & developer living in Raleigh, NC. I’ve been designing for the web since before people used CSS and am currently a User Interface Architect for a marketing software company in Durham, NC. For the past 2 years I’ve been working on Mac and iPhone apps in my spare time and am the designer & developer of Digital Post, a news app for the iPad.

What is your current setup?

Mike Rundle's Mac Setup

Mike Rundle's Mac Setup

I have a 24″ aluminum iMac (bought it right when they came out), a 15″ 2.53Ghz MacBook Pro, an iPad, a first-gen iPhone and an iPhone 4. On my desk at work is a 27″ Core 2 Duo iMac which is the best computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve got a Logitech MX Revolution mouse which is fantastic, and under that is an XTracPads HAMMER mousepad which is gigantic and totally awesome. I highly recommend it. I also own a Rain Design mStand laptop stand which is built as if Apple made it. It’s the best laptop stand out there, hands down.

Why this rig?

The 24″ iMac replaced my aging PowerMac G5. The iMac is a great computer, but I just don’t use it anymore now that I have the MacBook Pro. When I work on my iPhone apps at night I’m usually on the couch so the MacBook Pro is just more versatile. I’m currently planning to sell the iMac that I don’t use and buy a new 27″ Apple LED Cinema Display for when I need extra space that a laptop can’t provide. I’m also planning to buy a new Apple Magic Trackpad to replace a mouse at home but I want to try one first.

What software do you use and for what do you use it?

I have Adobe CS4 at home and CS3 at work; I actually prefer Photoshop CS3 due to how it handles windows and its speed on Snow Leopard. For web coding my tool of choice is TextMate, the finest text editor on the Mac right now. For Cocoa development I use Xcode 3 but have recently been playing with Xcode 4 since it’s the new kid on the block. The new interface is really nice but there are still some quirks that I’ll have to get used to. I use Bjango iStat Menus 3 for putting interactive graphs into my menubar and CloudApp for sharing screenshots and shortening links to post to Twitter. For email I’m a Gmail guy and have been a Mailplane user for awhile, also I use Safari 5 for web browsing.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

TextMate is really the key part of my workflow when working on the web. I have dozens of macros that help me write HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP faster. I actually do something quirky with TextMate: I wrote a macro that maps the 7 key to the Escape key so I can access code completion faster without moving my hands from the main part of the keyboard. I also mapped Ctrl-7 to output the normal 7 key in case I actually have to use it. Crazy, but it’s great!

How would your ideal setup look and function?

My ideal setup would still involve my MacBook Pro but it’d have 2 fast SSD drives in a RAID-0 configuration plus maxed-out RAM. I don’t have a terribly ergonomic office chair so an Aeron would be a must. I have typography and design posters all over my walls so I’d probably just buy more and more till there’s no more paint showing.

More Sweet Setups

Mike’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Mike Rundle’s Sweet Mac Setup

Inbox Zero

“It’s not about email.”

While eating an apple galette and announcing his forthcoming book, Merlin lets the cat out of the bag regarding Inbox Zero: it’s not about email. It’s about managing your inbox and using it as a tool to help you make good decisions, build good relationships, and produce good work.

Lately it has clicked for me that my compulsive tendency to constantly check my email does not help me do my job any better. And what’s worse, that compulsion has bled over into some other, non-email inboxes.

For a long time Inbox Zero was my system for processing email so I wasn’t constantly swimming in messages all day. And if I did the system well I won the Inbox Zero badge. Shawn: 1 Inbox: 0

Now I love an empty inbox as much as anyone. But Inbox Zero is more about how I approach my inbox than how I process what’s in it. And it’s not just the email anymore. There’s the Twitter, Ping, my blog stats, my RSS subscriptions, my Flickr contacts, my Instapaper queue, and who knows what else. These are all inboxes and they all need Inbox Zero.

Inbox Zero means I care more about the outbox than the inbox. It means I choose to focus my time, energy, and attention on creating something worthwhile instead of feeding some unhealthy addiction to constantly check my inboxes. Pressing the Get New Mail button or refreshing my Twitter stream is like pulling the crank on a slot machine. Did I win? No. Did I win? No.

Inbox Zero means I care more about this moment than I do about my narcissistic tendencies of knowing who’s talking to me on Twitter. It means I care more about doing my best creative work than about keeping up with the real-time web and being instantly accessible via email.

To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson: Inboxes are good enough in their own right, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for work.

Inbox Zero is all about the outbox.

Inbox Zero

Busy People Will Always Feel Busy  →

This article by Marissa Bracke is what inspired Scott’s aforelinked piece. There is some great insight and advice in here:

It took me a while to realize that there’s a big difference between someone who feels busy and someone who has a lot going on in their business. […]

Skeptical? Try this for three days straight: don’t use the word busy. At all.

You want to email this article to everyone in your office who always talks about how busy they are, don’t you? Yeah, me too.

Busy People Will Always Feel Busy

The Cult of Busy  →

Fantastic essay by Scott Berkun:

People who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.

On the other hand, people who truly have control over time have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. They have a sense of priorities that drives their use of time and can shift away from the specific ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify.

The Cult of Busy

The new Twitter.com  →

The promo video is very cute. It tells more about what Twitter already is than it does about their website’s new UI.

And speaking of the new UI, the unconventional design of Twitter’s new iPad app now makes a bit more sense. But it looks as if there are two significant advantages Twitter’s website has over their iPad app: (a) selected tweets don’t stay ‘pinned’ in your current timeline view; and (b) side-loaded pages are closable.

The new Twitter.com

Speaking of the Value of a Reader’s Attention  →

Seth Godin on “The massive attention surplus”:

It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it’s anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.

This is why elite ad networks like Fusion and the Deck are so wildly successful. They’re serving up relevant, anticipated ads on sites of good report with a trusting readership.

Speaking of the Value of a Reader’s Attention

Alarms  →

What an incredibly clever alarm/timer/to-do app. It sits in your Menu Bar and you can drag files, emails, URLs and contacts onto it and schedule a concrete time to hash out a to-do item. It syncs with iCal (and therefore, Things). And you can even use it to set a timer.

Alarms was just released as a public Beta, so it is currently free test. (Via Patrick Rhone.)

Alarms

Content Distribution, Metrics of Impact, and Advertising

Link posts outnumber articles on this site three to one. Some of you may remember about a year ago when I first made a change to the way links were posted within the RSS feed. And then, just a few weeks ago, savvy readers may have noticed things changed again.

Up until a few weeks ago, the <link> element of a link post in the RSS feed would point to this site. Now it points readers away from shawnblanc.net and directly to the linked-to URL.

I made the change as a short-term experiment. I was curious to see how it would affect:

  • those of you who read this site via RSS.
  • pageviews.
  • my approach to posting links.

The feedback I have recieved from readers has been nothing but positive. And the affect on pageviews has not even been noticeable (August was this site’s biggest traffic month to date, and September is close on its heels).

Something I did not expect was just how liberating the new link behavior would be for me. Any prior sense I may have had about “pimping pageviews” has been completely removed simply by default. Posting a link to the RSS feed does not directly send any pageviews to this site since readers within RSS are directed straight to the linked-to URL.

Needless to say, the experiment is over. I am keeping things this way.

For those who are curious, the change was mostly prompted because I now read websites and subscriptions differently than I did a year ago. I now read much less on my Mac using NetNewsWire and Safari, and much more my iPhone and iPad and in Instapaper.

I used to open NNW and comb through my feeds, opening the ones I wanted to read in Safari in the background, and then going and reading all the open tabs. It was nice to have links open the site they were sourced in instead of the final destination, because that way when I got to that link I could remember why I was there and who had sent me to it.

Now I read feeds in shorter, more-frequent chunks. And I send a lot to Instapaper. For the sites I read which do not send links directly to the linked-to URL, that extra tap in my iPad seems more annoying than it used to be.

Trust and attention, or eyeballs

As a publisher it is difficult to abandon pageviews and subscribers as the metrics we compare the success and value of our site against. We all “know” that what is more important than pageviews and subscribers is the actual attention and trust of a few readers. But how often do we act on that knowledge, versus paying it lip service? To act on it means anything I can do to make the reading experience more pleasant and trustworthy is a win — even if it hurts pageviews.

It used to be that pageviews did equate to impact and reader engagement. If people were engaging with your site, they were visiting it. But in today’s Web, engaged readers don’t always visit. Instead they are reading your content via their Tumblr Dashboard, feed reader, or Instapaper account. Not to mention how easy it is to conjure up anonymous pageviews; uninterested, drive-by traffic is getting cheaper by the day.

Consider it in terms of coffee shops. The trendy coffee shop on the corner of First and Main may get a lot of regular foot traffic. But it’s mostly tourists. However, the hole-in-the-wall roastarie which is situated down a few blocks and brews the best Americano in town, is the one serving all the locals. That’s the coffee shop you’ll be told to visit if you ask any local. And that’s where you’ll be sure to come back to next time you’re in town.

Leaving the coffee analogy, another metric of reader engagement is RSS subscribers. This is currently a more valid number than pageviews to measure how many engaged readers you have, but I think subscribers are the new pageviews. Which means subscribers as a metric is already on its way out (though slowly). And so I don’t know if there are any reliable quantitative metrics for impact left.

To put it simply: you can no longer measure value by pageviews, impressions, or subscribers. And so it’s folly to build a site that uses those numbers to measure its success.

As publishers, we should be building our websites and distributing our content with the goal of earning trust, not numbers. If we hope to grow our reach — and make even a modicum of income from our content — we won’t be able to lean on pageviews and subscribers alone. Trust and attention that are our most valuable commodities. Eyeballs can be bought and pageviews can be forced. But attention and trust is something that can only be earned over time.

Content Distribution, Metrics of Impact, and Advertising

The Death Of The RSS Reader  →

Google Reader was seeing upwards of 267 percent year-over-year growth in traffic to now a 27 percent year-over-year decline. Perhaps RSS readers are on the decline, but it’s because syndicated content is becoming more popular, and is therefore available through many means beyond just a feed reader. Such as email, Twitter, Facebook, the Tumblr Dashboard, etc.

(Via Khoi.)

Update: Google Says Google Reader Is Doing Just Fine.

The Death Of The RSS Reader