CHATROULETTE + MOLESKINE = (via MonsieurDream)

When I try Chatroulette I get old fat men getting to know themselves a bit better. Why can’t I see this guy?

Little-Known Secret to Typing Contractions on iPhone

seoulbrother:

freitag:

When you’re typing on your iPhone or iPod Touch and you were to type W E R E and hit space it’ll think you typed “were” but if you type W E R E E and hit space, that’s not a word and it’ll default to “we’re.” There are other contracted words where that works but you kind of have to discover them, such as I L L L = I’ll.

I’ve used this tip extensively in the last week and it’s been a time/life saver. Thank you Freitag.

W E L L L be using this from now on.

"Stop looking for a recipe for success. You want it? So far as I can tell, it is to relentlessly do what you’re best at, keep at it, and to keep moving and take advantage of opportunities."

Frank Chimero has a blog. (How-To)

Frank Chimero neatly sums up the frustrations I’ve been having with the how-to community of late.

Everyone seems to want absolute guidance. An ‘Instructables’ for your work and personal life. Well, sorry - but you can’t have that.

You’ve just got to get out there and bloody well do it. That’s the only way to learn. There are no hard and fast rules. Take each game as it comes. Roll with the punches. Other assorted cliches. But do yourself a favour and just get out there and do it. Do it now.

"If his game-plan was the right one against a sub-system of 11 men, he seems to have reasoned, it remained the right one when that sub-system had been weakened by the removal of its key element."

The Question: Are teams getting better at playing with 10 men? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport | guardian.co.uk

The wonderful thing about Jonathan Wilson is that when he’s writing about football, he’s writing about strategy, and by extension, life.

What’s the best strategy to take when the balance is suddenly tipped in your favour? Keep doing what you were doing.

A conservative approach? Perhaps. But the thinking has already been done. There’s no reason to re-evaluate all over again.

(Don’t follow this advice if you’re ever on a TV game show.)

James Patterson Inc. - NYTimes.com →

I’ve never read anything by James Patterson. I should say that right upfront, because after reading this article it’s unlikely that I ever will.

I’ve heard the name. I knew he was another Grisham or Dan Brown but not quite as big. But I’ve seen piles of his books in WH Smith at the airport (where else?); books where the author’s name is 3 times the size of the book’s title; books with a half-sinister, half-cutesy nursery rhyme title that you just know is about some evil sadist’s evil deeds and the race to bring him to justice; books illustrated with figures and landscapes that are somehow garish and muted at the same time. Shit books, clearly.

So it’s fair to say that without reading any Patterson I already didn’t have much time for him. But reading this article, Patterson doesn’t have much time for his audience. Sure, he talks a good game - give the people what they want, he says; all those millions can’t be wrong - but these appear to be mere platitudes as he orchestrates his publishing plan from up high.

Literally. Now in his 60s, for a typical novel he types a summary, hands it down to one of his team of jobbing young authors, who works it up and passes it back to Patterson for him to apply a bit of spit and polish before being dispatched to his fans. He does this several times a year.

We recently lost JD Salinger, a true man of (very few) letters, and here we have an individual who treats writing novels as mere workflow: just another system of production and delegation to be greased and made more efficient and improved upon. He is more executive producer than author.

Perhaps it’s the frustrated writer in me that takes such offence. Or else I’m just being snobbish. Either way, I’m sat here on my arse waiting for inspiration to strike me before I set pen to paper, and in the meantime Patterson has probably signed off 3 novels. But for me, part of the beauty of writing is in its mystique, and conversely, the mystique is in the beauty. Patterson takes this and basically writes a Lifehacker post on how to do it. It rips the soul of the fucking thing out.

mikemonteiro:

via msnbcmedia.msn.com

I couldn’t help it.

"It’s like taking away his Pipe Smoker of the Year award but saying he can still smoke pipes."

Danny Baker, on the removal of John Terry as England captain and the resulting tedious press coverage.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years →

Peter Norvig on our how-to culture:

Here’s my recipe for programming success:

• Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
• Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
• Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, “the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.” (p. 366) and “the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.” (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.

Adaptation →

Not to belabor the point, but this fits in with the “adapting slowly” tenet. When the first iPhone was released, it wasn’t nearly as fast or as slick as the iPhone 3GS of today. When I first used my iPhone 3GS, my very first thought was “this is finally the iPhone as the iPhone was intended to be”. On iPhone v1, I couldn’t copy and paste, I couldn’t shoot video of my dog, I couldn’t play cool games or know what song was playing in a store. I couldn’t ask it where I was on a map. But that did not detract from its magic. From v1, I could have an email come in with a phone number in its body, I could tap that number and add it to a contact and that number would be in my computer after my next sync. I had never had a phone that could just simply do that before. The point being that yes, hardware will always improve. You will always be tempted to wait for the next iteration of hardware. If you’d rather wait until further iterations to experience the bulk of the magic that already exists in the current iteration, it’s your choice. It’s a lot of money to be putting down for something you’ll resent for its eventual obsolescence. But if Apple were to develop a product “to completion” before releasing it, holding off until it had all of the features that it thought that people wanted rather than just the ones that make it amazing, Apple would not be Apple, or Apple would never release products. That’s the point of evolution. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it necessitates, by design, deliberate response to the demands of the environment.

You should read Adam’s entire post.

Facts About Projection on Vimeo

Anything with Wes Anderson-style use of sharp edits and Futura captions is ok with me.