Anonymous asked: Any advice on stationary pig pens?
Drainage is pretty much essential.
On academia as a creative endeavor.
Any advice on stationary pig pens?
Drainage is pretty much essential.
A new feature on Semicolons.net for both fun and profit by yours truly. Got questions about the best pens, pencils, paper or other office supplies for your special snowflake needs? Use the contact form in that there link. It’s gonna be fun.
ProfHacker Jason B. Jones on Merlin Mann’s recent discourses on tenure and safety nets, developing an academic identity and remaining true to what you want out of the profession of learning.
Good comments here. I think Jason’s a little hard on Merlin, and we talk not nearly enough about the responsibility tenure carries with it, but he makes some good points about understanding yourself in relation to your work.
“My process is thinking…thinking…and thinking. If you have a better way, please let me know.”
– Hayao Miyazaki (via merlin)
After today’s announcement, I’m looking forward to The Prompt, a Apple and technology podcasting venture from the recently merged 70 Decibels and 5by5, featuring 70 DB poobah Myke Hurley, 512 Pixels’ Stephen Hackett and MacStories’ Federico Viticci.
As someone whose into technology but has hopped between platforms from time to time, I’ve always noticed a certain undercurrent of negativity in the Apple chitchat space, particularly among some of its more prominent personalities. It’s a real distraction for someone like me who turns to tech podcasting to sort of avoid that kind of tension, and I think puts real blinders on hosts who think about Apple as though it is a company of angels and not a company of people. Myke and Stephen were never guilty of that kind of thinking on the 512 Podcast; it’s also clear they’re real friends. Federico is another one of the figures in the community I trust for his positivity, so this seems like a great fit.
If you’re an OS X automation obsessive, you probably use both Hazel (the automatic file organizer and renamer) and IFTTT (the web service which connects various APIs) obsessively. I’m a big fan of both. I’ll often use IFTTT, via Dropbox, to save files from a bunch of different sources and Hazel to put them in place, often by date. What drives me crazy, though, is IFTTT’s dating structure: it writes dates as “June 04, 2013 at 1244PM” instead of “2013-06-04_12-44-00” or something else machine sortable. So, I made some Hazel rules.
These five rules will change out the month name for a digit, then move the numerals around for, in order: files dated with a noon-time hour, files dated with a midnight hour, other AM files and other PM files. Order of the rules matters. You should be able to change the rules based on the date format you prefer. There may be some complex scripting that could do it better, but this seems to work. You can grab it here:
Download IFFTT Date Adjustment Rules for Hazel.
Think about how successful you feel right now. Think about the success, or failure of your big thing. What would make it different?
Now consider whether you’ve pointed the barometer of success in the right direction, and whether that success will really accomplish the flourishing you set out for.
It’s great to be Fireballed, or Metafiltered, or App Store Featured, or whatever bits of public recognition you can imagine. You’ll get a bunch of new eyeballs, at least today. But will those people stick around? Will they do it long enough to make your thing better?
It’s great to hire a direct report, or three, or ten. The work gets easier with many hands. But if you’re motivated right now less by doing your thing, and more by managing people who do your thing, your love for the thing itself is probably waning.
And it’s great to be rich. Wealthy people do a lot of good for the less fortunate. But, come on. You’ve read the evidence. Rich people aren’t happier. They’re often less happy. The management distractions that come from wealth - those take you away from doing your thing, too.
In academia, we think about the small pinpoints by which we advance human knowledge. Our contributions are tiny in the grand scheme. But keeping them that way helps keep us peer-checked members of a community, one whose overall success is regulated by the overriding importance of getting it right before getting it big.
Will you do your thing better tomorrow? Can it feed your family (and I mean really feed them, not buy them designer handbags)? Then you’re successful. Has your improvement stagnated, despite the staff, the eyeballs, or the money? Then you’re not successful yet.
“Art should never be Interesting. Wikipedia is Interesting. Nightmares are Interesting. But to feign Interest in other people’s art is just smug. Don’t be so fond and fatherly about it … The real reason to go to an art gallery is to witness a small number of people elaborate publicly on their own confused striving, beyond explanation or accountability or compromise. You don’t see that just anywhere. In a gallery, one finds all the raw elements of fear and desire, the most dim and keening shapes, smiling strangely from the backyards of awareness and submitted painfully for general inspection. This is not what you might find at, say, Boston Pizza.”
– Stupid for Art, Mark Mann
Imagine a carpenter. The carpenter is someone who works with wood to put food on his table. So, the carpenter owns a hammer. It’s probably a very nice hammer. It’s built to be comfortable after thousands of swings a day, and it’s built with the power the carpenter needs to do serious work. It’s likely also an expensive hammer. It’s definitely more expensive than your hammer, and it may be more expensive than your entire tool box. The carpenter understands the value of something he works with every day, and that’s why he spends so much money on the hammer. But he also understands that value is a double-edged sword: he’s committing to the product he knows, that is reliable. He knows he’ll only invest in a new hammer if it brings something dramatically more useful to his work. And he knows no matter what the hammer company does, he’ll always at least have this hammer, as long as he can still swing the handle.
Now imagine you tell the carpenter about Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Remember to duck when he swings the hammer at you.
