Thomas Jefferson on Congress and unity
“As to those matters which are referred to Congress, we are not so many states, we are one large state. We lay aside our individuality, whenever we come here.” – Thomas Jefferson
Twitter zombies? My favorite.
Within the last few weeks, a very annoying trend on Twitter began to pique my curiosity. I saw random accounts that don’t follow me marking some of my tweets as favorites. What was weird though was the tweets that were getting marked weren’t, frankly, my best work. But I started noticing more about these accounts. First of all, as I said, the accounts that seemed odd were generally marking odd tweets as favorites. Take this tweet for instance, which has…
Beware of strangers bearing subscriptions
Stop for a second and think about everything you subscribe to. These are things that you pay monthly or annually for, that if you didn’t pay for, some service would discontinue. The list probably includes everything from utilities to reading material, and most likely a streaming or media service like Netflix or Hulu, or a subscription to Amazon Prime, Xbox Live or iTunes Match. I’ve been noticing a tendency for seemingly everything to move towards subscriptions. Frankly, it irritates me…
You can’t take it with you.
At the end of your life, you take nothing with you. You leave behind everything. If you’ve spent your life taking, you leave behind a legacy of taking. If you’ve spent your life giving, you leave behind a legacy of giving. You decide. Every day.
The Cloud is the App is the Cloud.
During the last week, I have had an incredible number of conversations about Office 365 with press, customers, and peers. It’s apparent that with version 3.0 of their hosted services, as Microsoft has done many times before at v3.0, this is the one that could put some points on the board, if not take a lead in the game. But one thing has been painfully clear to me for quite some time, and the last week only serves to reinforce…
Tools to optimize working on the Mac
A few weeks ago I wrote about gestures on the Mac vs. Windows 8. By and large, I’ve shifted to using my Mac with most apps in full-screen, and really making the most of the gestures included in OS X 10.8. It isn’t always easy, as certain apps (looking at you, Word 2011), don’t optimally use full-screen. Word has Focus mode (its own full-screen model) and now supports OS X’s full-screen mode – but not together. Meaning if you shift…
The Internet is Made of People.
Yesterday I read Paul Miller’s piece on The Verge, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. Having decided not nearly as long ago (4 days) to take a break from Twitter and Facebook, I found the piece timely. I recently decided to take a bit of a timeout from Twitter – and even more from Facebook – because I felt that the energy I put into them, and the negative energy I received from them was…
On peanut butter and chocolate and APIs…
A friend recently posted a link to this blog. It’s an interesting read about where you should focus when building your app; should you have one app for each platform, or an API that goes as high up as possible into each platform? In particular, he quotes the expression, “the API is the asset, the UI is simply throwaway”. I get the point he’s trying to say. Platforms come and go – but an API should be designed to be durable….
“Bring this country to its knees…”
“It’s increasingly likely that a small group of well-financed people are going to be able to really bring this country to its knees.” I couldn’t agree more, which is why we shouldn’t let them be re-elected. Anyone willing to grab a pitchfork and stab the rule of law in the name of fear doesn’t deserve to hold office in this country. Fox News: Republican lawmaker defends call to torture (Linked from USA Today)
Learn one weird old trick to reducing your disappointment in life
Stop buying more stuff, believing that buying more stuff will make you happy. Happy Earth Day.