David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
From the new Windows version of Konfabulator’s Stock Ticker Widget:
Delete Microsoft Corporation? You bet!
Alas, it meant “Really Stop Getting the Stock Quote for Microsoft Corporation?” What a tease!
I’m using an amazing new program called Quicksilver to use Mac OSX. Download it and use this tutorial to familiarize yourself with Quicksilver.
What’s so great about it? Imagine this:
Instead of using a mouse and opening your browser, then navigating through your bookmarks menu to access your weather bookmark, you could press the Quicksilver hotkey (by default, Control+Spacebar), then type the first few letters of the word “weather,” Quicksilver searches through all of your Safari bookmarks, finds your weather bookmark, and when it does, you press enter, thus launching Safari on the page indicated on your bookmark. More than anything, Quicksilver is great for launching applications.
The process saves time and repetitive stress, and can be used in this same manner for many of your tasks throughout the day.
Download Firefox 1.0 now and kiss IE goodbye.
I don’t know when this happened, but today I noticed that Craig Kroeger’s miniml.com has gone from a Flash-based interface to a more accessible, search engine friendly, standard’s compliant design. This is ironic, because the pixel fonts sold there are generally for use in Flash and bitmap images, but I think it’s always wise to keep text you would like to have accessible, remain as pure text.
I believe his work to be historically significant because it has taken aknowledgement of the limitations of screen display to the extreme. I also dig the (almost) ornament-free design.
I made a last-minute trip to Chicago this weekend.
In Millenium Park, I saw the Crown Fountain
Which displays images via LEDs
Stood underneath the Cloud Gate sculpture
And saw an exhibit of Jay Ryan Concert Posters at Columbia College
What’s the fastest and easiest way to manipulate the characteristics of your brush in Photoshop?
This will save you tons of time when using the brush tool.
You may have noticed that I now have Google Adsense ads on my site, and, of course, I have an Amazon Associates account. Of course, the objective of this blog is not to make money. There are certainly more efficient ways to do so. I want to organize my thoughts, share them with others, exchange thoughts with others, contribute to adding semantic value to the web, and hopefully have my thoughts read again many years from now.
That said, I worry myself sometimes when I make decisions that may not provide the best and most honest content possible, in order to have the opportunity to chip a couple cents out of my hosting costs. The main place this may happen, is that when I am talking about a movie that isn’t available on DVD yet, I link to IMDB, which I consider to be the best resource on movies, however, if the movie is out on DVD, I link to that item on Amazon, through my associates account.
I promise, this is as greedy as I will get. Now if I overnight happen to become an expert on real estate (“real estate” probably being a pretty high-paying AdWord string), then you know I’ve lost it.
I hope you find my remarks on books, music, technology and whatever other artifacts that may be linked to on Amazon as relevant and interesting as my comments on anything else. As a critic of Affluenza, I couldn’t, in good conscience, push products I didn’t feel were useful. I also hope that the contents of the Google ads are relevant and unintrusive.
Last week, AIA Omaha presented Amory Lovins, one of the authors of Natural Capitalism, who spoke about the concept of Natural Capitalism (the entire book is available online at the Natural Capitalism website).
Natural Capitalism recognizes that there are four types of capital in a functioning economy.
“Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, nonsustainable aberration in human development. What might be called “industrial capitalism” does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs—the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.”
Amory also explains that in the first Industrial Revolution, there was a surplus of resources and a shortage of people, and that in the next Industrial Revolution, there is a surplus of people and a shortage of resources.
I have not read the book yet, but I imagine it presents even more working models of Natural Capitalism than even Amory’s lecture did. One good example was Interface Flooring (yes the same Interface Flooring that I created my first carpet tile sample rug from). When you think about it, you don’t want to own carpet. You just want to use it for awhile. Apparently Interface is now providing flooring services. They’ve developed carpets that can be re-manufactured with no waste. They install the carpet, come back every few months and replace the worn tiles (carpet doesn’t wear evenly, of course), and re-manufacture those tiles. The result is much less impact on the environment, and its even more economically efficient.
Amory Lovins also has a house in Old Snowmass, Colorado that has no mechanical (heating) system. Oh, and he farms bananas in that house, and his energy costs are negative…with technology that is 15 years old.
He is a brilliant speaker, and is clearly brilliant in general and I look forward to learning more about his ideas. I will keep you posted.
One of my readers has pointed out to me a Chess game that shows you what it’s thinking. Check it out.
With one eye glued to your TV tonight, glue your other eye to this well-designed interactive map illustrating party distribution for the 2004 election. There are also graphics illustrating past elections, and the progression of approval ratings throughout the campaign. The graphic when you click on “electoral votes” above the map communicates very well.