It’s professionally fashionable to bitch about your company and your inept manager, but when you start bitching about your career, I call bullshit. The idea that anyone besides you is responsible for your career is flawed.
Michael Lopp - Being Geek
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.
— Paul Graham in The Acceleration of Addictiveness
history meme
things I use:
quicksilver:~ $ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnk1,1 | head -n 20
244 hg
48 cd
35 nmap
34 ls
15 sudo
14 vim
13 pwd
9 man
9 clear
8 rm
7 find
6 cp
5 ssh
5 ps
4 python
4 less
4 history
3 whois
3 kill
2 wget
(※) a new hope
Before you speak, you should listen. A lot of consumption is that way. I use my iPad to read news, books, things that (I believe and hope) help my synapses fire in new ways. Get new ideas, new perspectives. Oh, and did i mention I plan to do all my reading in grad school on my iPad? Saving some trees and all that…
To simply discount a device as a consumption-only toy is shortsighted. In this age of reblogging and retweeting incessantly and MTV admitting to not being about music anymore, one might feel that all consumption is this trivial and short-lived.
To say the iPad is nothing but a gimmick, a toy for those in desperate need of always eating up ‘content’ is to insult creators everywhere. If artists copy and steal, then the process of creation involves as much consumption as possible. Creators need to go through much more content than anybody else, because they need to see what’s already out there, how others approached similar problems. Designers spend hours going through tons of websites or magazines, getting ideas by seeing what’s already out there.
So while not all consumers create, all creators consume. A lot. In that sense any device that improves and simplifies that process is part of creation, just a much as a trip to art galleries is part of a painter’s next piece. People don’t make useful things in a vacuum. And if an iPad helps creators stay in touch with the pulse of their world, we should be thankful. It means we will never be short on things that inspire us.
Grades are a validation mechanism. It’s important we outgrow them quickly, and become self-aware of the value of our work, or we will always be confined to aiming for 100% completion, rather than 5% improvement.
(※) a new way
Ever since the iPad was launched, some have complained that it doesn’t foster creation in the same way that a computer does, thus limiting itself to a consumption-only medium. And that this trend is dangerous, as it turns us into mindless consumers, sucking everything and anything, all the time.
Yes, the iPad doesn’t foster creation the same way that a computer does. You need only to hold one, to use one for any length of time, before you can tell it’s a completely different kind of beast. This, I don’t refute — quite contrary, I think it’s one of it’s most important characteristics. And that’s kind of the point. We don’t talk nearly as much about any other device nowadays: when’s the last time the tech press was all over some new Dell, or even most new Macs? But the iPad is something else, and so we talk about it at length, and we try to figure out just what the hell it is we’re supposed to be doing with it.
So it strikes me as bizarre that people want to force the iPad into being a device for creation in the same way that a computer is. We’ve seen that performance art is possible on the iPad, and while my words might not be nearly as masterfully crafted as others’, we can still write and tell stories using it. And most importantly, we are still very much discovering all the ways in which we can create with the iPad. This is what more people should be focusing on, what they should be trying to figure out. Criticising is easy.
The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.
