ovidem blog

Using the Pomodoro Technique for more energy

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

An individual’s attention span varies depending on different factors. Originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, the Pomodoro Technique sets 25 minutes as an average baseline for focused effort and asks that you take 5 minute breaks in-between.

The rhythm of breaks

The idea of the using the Pomodoro Technique is that by taking consistent, rhythmic breaks, you’re able to maintain your energy throughout the day.

It avoids times where you want to put in extra energy to finish a task and then end up being worn out after. You can still put in that needed energy, but having taken breaks along the way, you don’t get as worn out!

Maintaining flow

And it turns out that it doesn’t interrupt your state of flow! The Zeigarnik Effect is a phenomenon where people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Your brain essentially does work in the background to remember the work in a similar way to how your brain processes while sleeping, and is able to pick up right back up where it left off after your break.

My own experience has been the same as when I first started meditating 10 minutes a day; it was hard to believe that it had any effect until I actually felt it after a couple of weeks of trying it out. And I now feel like it impacts my overall week, and even believe that it can help to avoid burnout in the long term.

Finding space for a new habit

2026-02-08T00:00:00Z

Forming a habit is known to take 21 days. This is actually a myth. It’s true that there is a point when your routine becomes a habit that no longer requires added energy to perform, but the amount of time varies from person to person and what the activity is.

So how do you help maintain the repetition needed to get to habit? Here are a couple of key methods that have worked best for me.

Utilize slow times of the year

Instead of going for a new year’s goal, start a new habit during times of the year that are slower. During the summer, or the winter holidays. During slow work periods. During a vacation.

This allows you to better find the space to do your habit, instead of when you have a ton of other things going on. You’ll also have the mental energy to be strict about doing the thing you need to do regularly.

During the winter holidays, I like to spend my time thinking about the past year and my goals for the new year. I also think about my current healthy habits and if I need to start a new one, or change a bad habit. I then start the new routine, and by the time the new year starts, I’m already on my way and I feel better about focusing on my new year’s goals.

Fit it around other activities

When I wake up, before I get out of bed, I think about my day. As I do this, I have made it a habit to also journal about my previous day. I’ve also made it a habit to meditate to help calm all the various thoughts going through my head and start the day in a more relaxed state.

In the afternoon, after work and before dinner, I do my walk and cardio exercises. It’s a good way to reflect on my work for the day and I sometimes end up jotting some notes on my phone for the next day. By the end, I have a good appetite for dinner and can relax for the evening, feeling a sense of closure for the day.

And before going to bed is when I do my personal hygiene routine: shower, brush my teeth, floss, use mouthwash, and wash/moisturize my face. It feels good to go to bed having cleaned off from the day, and signals my body to get ready for sleep.

Doing these habits during select times of my day fits with how I normally go about my day and the mindset that I’m in.

2025 year in review

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

This year has certainly been tumultuous! For me personally, this included a car accident. Still, I continued working on Blocks Edit's expansion to web things, as well as a couple of Indie Aisle features.

Work

For Blocks Edit, we expanded to editing forms, and websites. Along with the upgrades came a forms guide, a web design guide, and a web page components template.

And Indie Aisle introduced an approach to creator discovery, and an email newsletter list feature. Along with a guide on the indie web, and added templates.

Blog posts

Along with my posts on Blocks Edit, Distinctive Quality, and Indie Aisle, here are some highlights of misc writings this year:

Web design and the browser - in the introductory issue of Good Internet Magazine, I wrote an article on creating online
Physical and mental stress - learning to be more aware of the stress put on our body and mind
The benefits of walking - including mental health, and with creative thinking
The updates formula - the best way to update your audience
AI for generating truth - using AI to collate information and generate art for expression continues to raise questions

Videos and articles

Can You Fool A Self Driving Car? (video) - the state of self driving cars and how there is a right and wrong way that they're being implemented
1000 Players Simulate Civilization (video) - players are put on two islands and the story that unfolds is pretty crazy!
How to be more agentic (article) - court rejection, seek real feedback, increase your surface area for luck, and assume everything is learnable
Cults Like Us (podcast episode) - super interesting interview with Jane Borden, author of Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America
The impactful effects of alcohol (video) - Kurzgesagt on how harmful alcohol really is and why despite this, it's still such a prevalent part of our culture
The Problem Is Bigger Than Apple (video) - the right take on AI right now

Movies

The Wild Robot - one of my favorite movies of the year, be prepared to cry!
Superman - makes the case that with how cynical things are these days, being punk rock means being kind
Bad Faith - documentary on the Christian nationalism movement
Carol Doda Topless at the Condor - documentary on Carol Doda and her role in the 1960's sexual revolution
The Great Happiness Space - documentary on Japanese host boys, men who are paid to entertain wealthy women in exclusive nightclubs
The Fall Guy - fun action movie about a stuntman
Novocaine - fun action movie about a guy that doesn't feel any pain
Confessions of a Good Samaritan - the latest documentary from Penny Lane on organ transplantation, kidney donation, and the science of altruism
Spirited Away - the right level of odd, animated, Miyazaki vibes
House - a fun, haunting Japanese film about the consequences of past trauma
Silent Night, Deadly Night - the original 1984 version

Series

Creature Commandos - from James Gunn, of Guardians of the Galaxy fame
Wu-Tang: An American Saga - based on the true creative journey of the Wu-Tang Clan rap group, with some fun stories and great music!
Adolescence - tough to watch, but so well done
Pluribus - from the creator of Breaking Bad, if you haven't seen it yet, try to go in without learning too much about it!
The Rehearsal - Season 2 of Nathan Fielder's reality show is on the airline industry and the mental health of pilots
Dexter - always full of surprises, the series shows how far from black and white things can get
Gotham - a lot of fun as a Batman universe thing
Misfits - has great characters, funny moments, and uses its supernatural setup in fun ways

Video games

Avowed - really enjoyed exploring its richly-designed world and following its well-written story
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 - good storytelling and character development with a stylish original approach, and fun game mechanics
Talos Principle 2 - I watched a play through and enjoyed how it built on top of the first game, a great example of what good science fiction is capable of!
Mythwrecked - a fun, short weekend game about what ancient greek gods might be like today
Also worth checking out: Split Fiction, The Alters, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Doom: The Dark Ages

Comics

Slaughterhouse-Five - based on the Kurt Vonnegut book
Shadow Show: Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury - short stories from some of the many writers that Ray Bradbury inspired
The Legend of Korra: Patterns in Time - another good addition to the comic stories based on the TV show

Music

Skream! - an artist I listen to pretty regularly: Skream, an English DJ and dubstep and bass musician
David Byrne - of Talking Heads fame is still coming out with great stuff, his latest album has some catchy tunes that would stick in my head
RZA meditation - known for producing beats for the Wu-Tang Clan, this solo release is a guided meditation album that he released during the pandemic

To get my updates regularly, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter.

Physical and mental stress

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

At the very beginning of 2025 I was in a car accident. Another driver hit the left side of my car, causing it to run head on into a pole. All parties seemed fine as we got out of our cars on our own and waited for paramedics. Despite being able to move around normally, the paramedics told me that my body was running on adrenaline and I would feel pain within a couple of hours.

This turned out to be the case as by the time my brother took me to the ER and I was checked in, I had to be given pain medicine for chest pain. I was also told I had a concussion as I passed out for a brief period during the accident and had a CT scan done. This would only be the beginning of the physical and mental treatments I would have to go through for the rest of the year. Not just to recover from the pain, but from the stress caused on my body and mind.

Physical treatment

I would need to see a physical therapist for chest, back, and neck pain. The point of physical therapy is to manage pain in different parts of the body by doing certain exercises. For example, for neck pain, I stretch in certain ways to help with whiplash effects from the car airbag. To determine what these exercises were, my physical therapist would have me do certain stretches to see exactly where pain was.

During the time I went through physical therapy, I would not be able to do my regular exercise routine as those exercises would hurt too much. It would feel like I could no longer move my body the same as before. I would feel less pain over time but there would still be tension in parts of my body. I’m now able to do my regular exercises but there are days where I still wake up feeling like my body went through something rough the day before.

I’ve recently started meditating again after being out of practice for a couple of years. While meditating, I do a body scan exercise where I pay attention to different parts of my body and focus on relaxing any tensed up muscles. After a few weeks of doing this, I now feel better waking up in the morning. It’s as if I’m releasing tension that my body has been holding on to since the accident!

Mental treatment

Since I had no car after the accident, my girlfriend would take me places and I found I would have pretty bad anxiety with each trip. So much so that I didn’t think I could drive again. To help with this, I decided to see a mental health therapist. Talking to a therapist about it, I learned it was from going through a traumatic experience that my body is subconsciously reacting to.

EMDR therapy is used for traumatic experiences to help mentally process the traumatic event and reduce the anxiety around it. The therapist will have you tap back and forth with your left and right hands or feet, or use a device that assists with it. While people (like me) often mistaken it for hypnosis, it is actually more a form of meditation and stems from walking.

In an EMDR session, my therapist would put me in the mindset of going through the accident, trying to analyze what I was thinking in those moments. Doing this had quite the effect on me, both emotional as I would end up crying during sessions, and physical that I would feel lightheaded afterward. The effects would surprise me each session and over time I would feel less anxious being in a car. And I’m now able to drive again!

Physical and mental

To deal with my concussion, I needed to go through an MRI machine to determine the effects of the concussion. Thankfully, nothing extreme was found, but I had headaches and brain fog that made it difficult to focus on activities throughout the day. I would lay in my bed for hours, barely able to process thoughts and make decisions. It felt like I had no control over my own mind.

A concussion specialist determined that I have migraines and recommend taking some medication for them. It was pretty amazing how well the pills worked. At least to me, since I had never taken any medications for headaches in the past. Eventually, I no longer had to take the medication and would only get occasional brain fog symptoms when I woke up in the morning.

Each treatment affected me physically, mentally, emotionally, in unexpected ways that helped me learn about my body and mind, and how they worked together. And the aspect that was consistent to all of them was: stress. In the accident, to protect itself, my body tensed up, and my mind emotionally reacted to the trauma. And afterward, it was in a constant state of stress that needed to be worked out in order to properly calm my body down.

In learning this, I found a renewed appreciation for healthy, calming, habits. A daily walk, proper sleep and rest, meditating and journaling. Our body needs them more than we may realize.

The indie web

2025-05-10T00:00:00Z

Being indie means being scrappy and taking a lean approach to doing things, including being on the web.

The benefits of walking

2025-05-04T00:00:00Z

Doctors often talk about walking as a form of exercise for being healthier. For maintaining health, and as preventative for certain illnesses and diseases. Every time new studies come out, there are more benefits found for just how much it really helps.

If there was ever a simple magic solution for overall better health, it would be walking 30-60 minutes a day.

Mental health

But it doesn’t just stop at the physical benefits. Walking also helps with bilateral stimulation, which is what happens when both sides of the brain are actively engaged. This often occurs while we’re sleeping, with our eyes moving left and right. It is also used for EMDR therapy, for traumatic memories and reducing anxiety.

So walking helps clear your head and process your thoughts, and can be a form of meditation to help reduce stress.

Thinking creatively

The book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work covers the creative habits of 161 well-known creators. One common theme that stands out is how they use walking to help them think. From Aristotle, to Charles Darwin, Einstein, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, the list goes on. Research has found that creative output was increased by an average of 60% when walking.

Walking helps with the creative process, both during the walk, and afterward.

Email signature essentials

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

What to consider putting in an email signature and how to setup in your email client.

Blocks Edit for websites

2025-03-04T00:00:00Z

Use the visual theme editor to turn your HTML design into a content management system and collaborate on pages via drag and drop inline editing.

Email newsletter list

2025-03-02T00:00:00Z

You should offer an email sign up as an alternative method for your audience to receive updates from you.

Form essentials

2025-02-12T00:00:00Z

Collecting different kinds of information from your visitors.

2024 year in review

2025-01-04T00:00:00Z

This year, my work focused on expanding Blocks Edit functionality beyond email, and pushing out some initial Indie Aisle features. And I did a solid amount of content writing and blogging.

Blocks Edit

The big Blocks Edit effort in 2024 was towards expanding the visual editor from building branded emails, to also being able to build landing pages, using the same core technology we’ve been refining for over five years. And we’ve updated our pricing to offer a more affordable way for smaller teams to get started.

With the new landing pages upgrade came a lot of new informational content as the promo website got an overhaul. I also finished my email types series of blog posts I started the year before.

Indie Aisle

A few years ago, I had an idea for a new version of Indie Aisle. Throughout 2023, I posted a handful of blog posts on the concepts behind the relaunch as I worked on fleshing the redesign. This past year I dedicated my weekends to launch the first of its features: simple web stats, form spam blocking, and a couple of templates.

On the content side, I wrote five short best practices guides for creators: setting up a website, working with a web designer, using creator platforms, and social media, and maintaining an email list.

Blog posts

I continued posting to the Distinctive Quality blog. Here are some of my favorite web design techniques: how I organize my CSS, my layout setup, figuring out the best page container width, and modern email for web designers. Along with a couple of ideas I’ve started implementing on my sites: a follow button, and a links page of what you follow. And on the tech side: my experience trying out Apple’s Vision Pro, and some thoughts on all the AI hype.

Articles and videos

Universal truth of problem solving - "The definition-solving process is circular not linear. You can't fully define a problem without starting to solve the problem."
Is free will an illusion? - the idea of how our particles blindly follow the laws of physics, with every outcome already predetermined.
Deepfakes are too real to tell anymore - so how can we figure out if they're fake when we can no longer tell from looking at them? The only way is by deciding whether we trust their sources.
A talk about a McDonald's artist - by Cabel Sasser from Panic. You're better off going into it without trying to learn too much about it beforehand.
Even Apple can't figure out good use cases for AI - a good take on Apple's initial AI features and how they seem to be for "the stupid ones."

Movies

The Banshees of Inisherin - dark comedy in a similar vain as In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, and probably my favorite movie of the year!
Inside Out 2 - great sequel to a classic!
Oppenheimer - damn good, interesting all the way through, and well-crafted in the way it tells its nuanced story.
Casa Bonita Mi Amor - documentary on the pretty crazy story behind how the creators of South Park bought and renovated a themed restaurant in their hometown of Denver, Colorado.
Deep Web - documentary about the online drug market Silk Road, and the controversial arrest of its creator, Ross Ulbricht.
Hundreds of Beavers - a fun, unique indie movie!
Wicked, Part 1 - I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and am looking forward to Part 2!
Pitch Black - my new favorite Vin Diesel movie!

Series

Obliterated - one of the most fun series I've seen this year!
Slow Horses - a fun cast of characters that do a good job playing the underdogs.
The Curse - the best way to describe this series is uncomfortable and unsettling.
The Gentlemen - a great cast of characters with funny, dry, comedic dialogue that Guy Richie is known for.
X-Men ’97 - I was hesitant about this follow up to X-Men: The Animated Series, but it turned out to be so good!
Baby Reindeer - how complicated people can be, told with nuance and care.
Barry - somehow at the end of each season, things make sense, no matter how chaotic they get along the way!
The Penguin - kind of surprising for its subject, but great all the way through!

Other

Boxes: Lost Fragments - a nice weekend puzzle game with a simple concept, but executed with care and attention to detail.
Riven, 2024 remake - being able to fully move around in a game that was originally essentially a slide show is pretty awesome, as are the changes made to it which add more depth to the game.
Face It - I listened to the audio book, read by Debbie Harry herself.

This is my tenth year in review! For all previous years, check out the blog archive. And for more recommendations, take a look at my faves section.

Creator guides

2024-11-29T00:00:00Z

Short and succinct guides for creators to learn about best web practices.

Pages indie creator theme

2024-08-11T00:00:00Z

The Pages theme is designed for indie creators and the indie web.

Simple stats

2024-07-06T00:00:00Z

We’ve decided to design something simpler, narrowing down stats to just a few key metrics that we believe are all that are needed.

Blocks Edit for landing pages

2024-05-14T00:00:00Z

You can now use the visual editor for editing and building static pages, with the same simple interface and collaboration features.

Form submit to email

2024-05-13T00:00:00Z

Our second service is an extension of our form spam bot blocking, submitting your form to your email.

The AI hype is about how we dream to interact with our tech

2024-05-05T00:00:00Z

Getting the wrong idea of what AI can actually do because we’re trying too hard to put a human face on our devices.

Newsletter email essentials

2024-04-25T00:00:00Z

Newsletters are by far the most popular type of email sent out, meant to keep your readers in the know with news and updates.

Form spam blocking

2024-04-23T00:00:00Z

Our first service of the Indie Aisle model is now live: spam blocking for your website’s forms.

Modern email design for web designers

2024-03-30T00:00:00Z

Differences between web and email dev and coding an email based on the latest email design trends.

Engagement email essentials

2024-03-27T00:00:00Z

Loyalty program notifications, product recommendations, and triggered emails for keeping customers engaged.

Blocks Edit template format

2024-03-18T00:00:00Z

A single HTML page consisting of modules with placeholder content.

Helpful email essentials

2024-02-22T00:00:00Z

Providing instructions, offering support options, and asking for feedback on your customer’s overall experience.

Apple Vision Pro, a glimpse into the future

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

I’ve been using the Vision Pro for a week and it is as neat as everyone says, but it’s just too uncomfortable for my particular head.

Links page of what you follow

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

Beyond a blogroll, for all the updates you follow on the web.

A follow button for your site

2024-01-21T00:00:00Z

Allow your visitors to get your updates by showing them the ways you’re available, all presented on a Follow page.

Promo/e-commerce email essentials

2024-01-11T00:00:00Z

Sales and special offers for your customers, upselling, and abandon cart techniques.

ChatGPT is a scam: a bad product, built unethically

2024-01-07T00:00:00Z

How OpenAI uses AI hype, and fear, to cover up its harmful practices.

2023 year in review

2023-12-30T00:00:00Z

This year I’ve blogged less, instead working on some weekend side projects. I’ve started posting to Distinctive Quality, with posts focused on refined web design techniques. I'm still posting occasionally to Indie Aisle as I continue with its redesign. And other updates I’ve been putting in my monthly newsletter. These projects have been a great way to explore and experiment some design, some code, some writing.

Blocks Edit

Blocks Edit dev has been mostly quality of life improvements this year. We’ve been preparing for a pretty big step in the product which we’ll have the results of within the next couple of months. Along the way, I’ve been working on various updates to the promo site, and an extensive new template of email components.

Electric car six months later

It’s been about six months since I bought my Nissan Leaf and it’s been working out great. Regular urban driving is perfect for it and it’s felt nice not having my errands include stopping by the gas station, or doing an oil change. Electric vehicles are better on surface streets than the freeway for conserving energy as they use very little energy standing still in traffic and even add energy with generative breaking. For gas cars, it’s the opposite so a lot of gas is wasted just sitting on the road in traffic!

The AI in the room

You couldn’t read the news this past year without having heard about how AI is affecting everything we do. While it is a significant technology, many of its effects are blown out of proportion. It’s still early days. We’re still figuring out how to best interact with it, it's often limited and just plain wrong, and it uses other people's work without their permission. So there are some kinks to work out! And we’re nowhere near actual artificial general intelligence.

Here are some of the best videos I’ve seen throughout the year that cover how AI works well: its implications on art, its implications on music, and a fun take on the different types of AI.

Articles and videos

We will fix climate change - a hopeful look at what we've been doing to fix climate change and how it's affected things for the future.
Social authoritarianism - a Twitter thread on how ideas are treated by different groups of people in recent years and the potential consequences.
The internet is about to get weird again the fallout of social media platforms is going to lead to a web reminiscent of the early days where people put up their own websites and blogs.
CSS as a design tool - CSS has evolved in the last couple of years, with updates so significant that there's a trend where designers that can also code CSS have been designing directly with CSS as they run into limitations with using traditional design tools.

Books and comics

Make Something Wonderful by The Jobs Archive - a collection of speeches, interviews, and emails by Steve Jobs on his views on making products, design, and life pursuits, the most interesting is his thoughts on leadership and running a company.
Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford - offers a good model for analyzing your positioning (a fancy marketing term for talking about your product in a way that your audience understands its place among other products) to use throughout all aspects of marketing.
The Neil Gaiman Library comic collections by Neil Gaiman - a series of short stories by one of my favorite writers, turned into comic book form and collected into three pretty, over-sized, hard cover books.

Movies

Tar - with an awesome performance by Cate Blanchett in the lead role, on the surface, the movie is about a classical music composer, but it's really about art, career, relationships, power dynamics, and much more!
Harriet the Spy - while not specifically a holiday movie, it's a feel good film that makes it feel like the spirit of the holidays.
Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls - as fun as the 80's horror comedies that it pays homage to!
Smile - if you want a really creepy horror movie, it's a good mix of psychological and disturbing and even pulls off some good jump scares!
Drag Me To Hell - one of my favorite spooky season movies this year, it's a fun Sam Raimi ride.
Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki's Delivery Service - two Miyazaki movies I've seen this year and I'm becoming a fan!

Series

The 100 - available in its entirety on Netflix, at exactly 100 episodes, The 100 is an interesting show in the sci-fi themes it covers and fun with the characters it develops.
Twisted Metal - somehow based on the Playstation 2 video game of the same name, but I'm guessing they elaborated on the story a whole lot, or probably completely changed it.
Castlevania - a nicely stylized, unique take on vampire lore.
The Blacklist - always a fun ride no matter how much its story arcs are drawn out, the series aired its final season this year.
Paul T. Goldman - a documentary series based on a story from a series of books that are based on a true story of Paul T. Goldman, that he wrote, and in which he stars as himself in the documentary. It’s as confusing as it sounds, but somehow told so well via the series.

Video games

Firmament, the latest game from Cyan, the creators of the original Myst series. The puzzles are so embedded in the environment that it feels like they are a logical extension of it and hardly puzzles at all! And its story is also told very well through the environment. It's a nicely interwoven combination of great visuals and environmental design, interesting puzzles, a clever interaction mechanic, and a decent story that keeps you engaged until the end.
Cypher 007 - only available on Apple Arcade, Cypher 007 has the classic original James Bond books vibe and is cool to be able to play on my Apple TV while using an Xbox controller!

Concerts and trips

The Chemical Brothers - at a beautiful venue surrounded by mountains in southern California, with awesome stage visuals that went well with the music.
The Crystal Method - part of a great smaller local venue EDM show lineup.
Hyper - my recent electronic music favorite!
Sundance - I got to see the premiere of Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, the indie horror comedy earlier this year and really enjoyed it.
Mysterium - a fan convention for the Myst video game series, in Spokane, Washington where Cyan, the studio that made the original Myst is located and opened up their doors to 250 of us to visit, giving us a tour of their unique office, and giving us a special presentation on the progress of the new real-time 3D remake of their most acclaimed game, Riven!

More of my favorites this year. This is my ninth year in review! Here are my previous years: 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015

Notification email essentials

2023-11-30T00:00:00Z

Before SMS and phone notifications, there were emails, and they are still the most effective way for your customers to get important, timely, notices.

Subscription and payment email essentials

2023-11-15T00:00:00Z

Important member management options and recurring payments.

The only share links you need

2023-10-29T00:00:00Z

Stop linking to social media platforms to share content on your site.

Confirmation email essentials

2023-10-12T00:00:00Z

Confirmation emails are some of the most widely read, and are often saved to be referenced at a later time.

Event email essentials

2023-09-25T00:00:00Z

If you hold an event, email is a great way to inform your audience about it and set their expectations.

Announcement email essentials

2023-09-08T00:00:00Z

If you’re launching something new, why not let your valuable subscribers in on the news?

Welcome/onboarding email essentials

2023-08-31T00:00:00Z

The welcome email has the highest open and click-through rates, use it well!

Why I got a cheap, used electric car

2023-07-30T00:00:00Z

About a month ago I got a used 2017 Nissan Leaf. I was excited that I was even able to get an electric car because they are all relatively expensive still. But its price and its history of reliability since it originally came out in 2011 is what ultimately made me decide to go with the Leaf. And I’ve learned that there are plenty of reasons an electric car is just better than a gas car.

Of course, there’s no having to go to the gas station! I’ve been mainly charging at home, from a regular outlet in my garage. A few times that I’ve charged it while out using a charging station, it’s typically taken about 20 minutes to essentially fill it, and costs a quarter of a gas tank. The driving range you get on that charge is shorter than the range of a gas tank though so maybe half the cost of gas is a more fair comparison. But if you just charge at home, that cost drops significantly, barely causing a dent in your monthly electric bill.

There is less maintenance that needs to be done than a gas car, including no regular oil changes to deal with. Overall, the cost of maintenance comes to about half the cost of a gas car over a car’s lifetime. Electric cars are about ten times less complex than gas cars so of course that comes with fewer potential issues and better reliability!

And sure, there is also the whole climate change thing too. But at the rate we’re going with buying electric cars, we may end up making a bigger impact on gas emissions by deciding to eat plant-based burgers instead of cows!

So what’s the catch?

The key issue with any electric car right now is the range its battery gets on a charge. Since I work from home, I don’t normally use my car a whole lot in a given week. Weekends going across town somewhere would probably be the most driving I do. And being how spread out Phoenix is, that can be a drive. The couple of times I took longer trips, I did end up having to find a charging station on the way back home.

Which is why the Leaf is a cheaper electric car (at least used). It has a limited battery size compared to other electric cars. And it’s why electric cars are currently so expensive. It all has to do with the size/capacity of the battery. Companies have gotten good at producing batteries on a smaller scale for our phones and they’ll eventually get better, and cheaper, for electric cars as well. Also, like phones, car batteries are replaceable. An electric car could have a very long lifespan since all it needs is a new battery to greatly prolong its use past the 100,000 miles.

How you much you use your car is something you’ll have to consider if you wanted to buy an electric car, but there are plenty of charging stations available now that you should generally be fine. A used Nissan Leaf is a great example of the promise of electric cars and their value!

You only compete with one thing

2023-07-10T00:00:00Z

A good take on why you shouldn't worry about the competition. Because you should be focusing on taking care of your own company to make sure it continues to run and grow!

The grain of the web

2023-06-23T00:00:00Z

Rather than fighting the nature of how the platform works, we can lean into each part of the stacks strengths.

Faith in eventually

2023-05-24T00:00:00Z

Remember that what you’re making is in a perpetual state of almost right up until the end. And it's never right even after.

Making Something Wonderful book

2023-04-30T00:00:00Z

A collection of speeches, interviews, and emails by Steve Jobs. His more well-known views on making products, design, and life pursuits, are all in there. But what I found most interesting is his thoughts on leadership and running a company.

Letting go of Outlook for Windows

2023-04-11T00:00:00Z

No more tables, no more VML, no more Outlook’s dirty code!

AI in a nutshell

2023-03-26T00:00:00Z

Comic strip that sums up a current use case for generative AI.

Social authoritarianism

2023-03-20T00:00:00Z

Those who identify with their ideas, care more about being right than truth, and never change their mind.

Into the Myst: the oral history of America's oldest surviving indie game studio

2023-03-15T00:00:00Z

The interesting history of Cyan, and the people that have kept it going for so long, as its game Myst celebrates 30 years!

The Court Watchers [video]

2023-02-15T00:00:00Z

A growing movement of volunteer court watchers is showing up and documenting what they see.

Hashtag Accessibility, by Everyone for Everyone

2023-02-06T00:00:00Z

For accessibility, hashtags should always be camel case.

Hex Colors Aren’t Great At Anything Except Being Popular

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

Why you should have an email content checklist

2023-02-07T00:00:00Z

And 12 essential items you should include on your checklist.

How to silence a microwave

2023-01-19T00:00:00Z

Best life hack ever: press and hold down the number 2 on your microwave to stop it from making the most annoying sound in the world when your food is done.

2022 year in review

2023-01-02T00:00:00Z

It was the year of getting back to normal from Covid times. And by back to normal, I mean people just got tired of following protocols and went about their lives. Though it is a kind of new normal where people are wearing masks when they feel is appropriate, and are more careful to wash their hands more often. Which should help with not only Covid, but standard flu, and RSV which has been going around pretty badly this season.

Within the span of this year, three of my favorite comedians died: Gilbert Gottfried, Amazing Jonathan, and Bob Saget.

My business partner Steve and I celebrated Blocks Edit's fifth anniversary with some major upgrades this past year including a visual template tool for making setting up templates easier, and review comments for better collaboration.

From the blog

A couple of posts for the year on what I've learned working with email design since starting Blocks Edit. How product design ideas come together. And why you should start sending emails.

From the Blocks Edit blog, my favorite post of the year which came out of a conversation with someone from the #emailgeeks community. And my series of posts on modular design techniques.

Articles, videos, and links

History of the web - a series of articles organized in a timeline of important moments of the early internet.
Being yourself online - social media has made us think that people aren't being themselves online. This article makes the case that the internet may be the one place where we are able to try and be as much of ourselves as we can be.
The longer - a good take on the motivation for doing something from Jason Fried of Basecamp and Hey Email. You also don't have to love what you do.
Hand tracking in VR games - the addition of hand tracking to the latest iteration of Myst is great for understanding a bit about how the process works. It makes perfect sense for the world of Myst and is an example of how much simpler of a user interface it is than using controllers!
AI art - a good overview of AI generated art and what it means for artists.
Gravity Falls and censorship - ever wonder what it's like to develop a cartoon TV show for Disney and work with Standards and Practices on what Disney feels is appropriate for kids? The creator of Gravity Falls shared his experience which is pretty hilarious!
Our capacity for fretting is endless - a great quote that hits me sometimes.

Movies

Werewolves Within - a comedy horror movie about how there's nothing wrong with being a nice person. And how people are generally good, but if you go looking for the bad in them, chances are you'll find it. Because you're the one creating the bad.
Listening to Kenny G - why do people like Kenny G's music while others hate him for it? The latest from the amazing documentarian, Penny Lane, is not what you might expect from a documentary about Kenny G, but you certainly won't be disappointed!
Miss Sloane - a great movie that takes a look at the world of government lobbying. It's more intense than you would think for what seems like a dry subject with something unexpected happening almost every scene!
The Rescue - a documentary about how twelve boys and their coach were rescued from a flooded cave.
Come From Away - a stage musical about the true story of what happened to the flights that were rerouted on 9-11.
The Woman in the Window - a great psychological thriller that also does a good job of portraying mental health.
The Piano Teacher - a rather dark exploration of kink and sexual identity.

Series

Station Eleven - a great limited series of a post-apocalyptic world that shows how treating each other with kindness works better than fighting over our disagreements.
Clickbait - a great take on the online world of dating and meeting someone. The limited series uses the episodic format well, with each episode focused on a different character. And it's able to pull off some great cliffhanger moments in-between!
The Investigation - another great limited series based on a true story of what seems like an impossible case to solve, solved (spoiler alert) in what seems like an impossible way!
The Tourist - a basic premise about a guy that has amnesia turns into so much more! It's essentially about how we affect each other, and are able to connect with each other in the chaos that we all are.
Sandman TV series - the acclaimed comic book series, my favorite comic book series, has finally been made into series. And it is good and true to the source material!
Moon Knight - a unique kind of Marvel superhero that's on the horror side with plenty of action, of course.
Peacemaker - following the recent Suicide Squad movie, it's a redemption story of someone you would think cannot be redeemed.
City on a Hill - about a corrupt FBI agent working with a lawyer in the Boston justice system of the late 80's/early 90's.

Specials

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special - my new favorite Christmastime thing to watch. With my new favorite holiday song: I Don't Know What Christmas Is (But Christmastime Is Here)
Taylor Tomlinson's Look At You - my favorite stand-up special of the year!

Horror genre, new and old

More from my horror kick these past couple of years.

From the 80's: Cellar Dweller, Basket Case, Wishmaster, and Little Monsters
Early 90's: Popcorn, Frankenhooker, Tremors, Eerie, Indiana
Recent releases: Crimes of the Future, Hocus Pocus 2, Scoob!, Glorious, and the Fear Street 3-movie horror series
Ash vs Evil Dead - horror comedy can be tough to pull off. But Ash vs Evil Dead does it well, with plenty of laughs, and plenty of blood!
The Munsters - fun fact: the series ran at the same time as the original Addams Family and both shows even had about the same number of episodes.

Video games and board games

I enjoyed playing Psychonauts 2 including exploring many of the side missions. And enjoyed watching a playthrough of the original Psychonauts along with the VR in-between sequel.
I also watched a playthrough of As Dusk Falls
I've been having fun playing some new board games that I was introduced to this year: Santorini, Munchkin, and Doomlings.
Worth mentioning, Riven, the sequel to the video game Myst is celebrating its 25th anniversary. I remember going to Best Buy with my dad to pick it up the day it came out, October 31st. In a lot of ways, Riven was Myst fully-realized in what the team was able to do with that format and still stands out today as the best game in the Myst series. On the day of the anniversary, the creators, Cyan, officially announced that they are working on a real-time 3D remake for VR!

More of my favorites this year.

Get specific [video]

2022-12-08T00:00:00Z

Every time I find myself procrastinating to do something, taking the next small step always helps move things forward.

A good overview of AI generated art and what it means for artists [video]

2022-11-23T00:00:00Z

A decentralized Twitter

2022-11-10T00:00:00Z

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the problems with Twitter. Is a decentralized alternative the way to go? And what does that look like? Mastodon is an example of a decentralized approach by running on multiple servers. But is that enough? What about making content available outside of its platform?

Utilizing the indie web

Having worked as a web designer, I’ve setup a bunch of websites with various hosting companies and on various types of servers. The process has gotten easier throughout the years, but it’s still not as simple as signing up for a Twitter account.

But there are newer types of static asset based hosts that don’t require advanced backend setup. And they have API’s to interact with.

Along with this, there are standard web technologies made for sharing content: RSS and email. What do static hosts and these technologies have in common? They can be used to publish content from an external source.

Putting them together

This means that an interface can be designed that looks similar to Twitter and other social platforms, but that publishes using these technologies for a social network that essentially models web standards. A user can sign up for a hosting account and connect their credentials to the interface that can then be used in the background to publish content on their own server, and shared as RSS or via email.

Their timeline of content is a collection of RSS feeds that they follow that come from the web. Their posts are output to an RSS feed that comes from their host where their content lives, including a public profile page where people can follow them based on their chosen preference.

Content can be posted as short form or long form, always shown in a timeline view (with longer form content getting a summary view). Each post gets its own page for reading longer form posts, and for sharing and commenting on any post. When sending out email, posts made can be selected and sent together as a digest.

Costs and incentives

What are the costs involved? Most static site hosts are free to start, with certain bandwidth limits that are more than enough for a standard account. The same goes for email sending. And the overhead cost for the interface is minimal since it doesn’t host any of the content itself, so it can also be free.

What would be the incentive to use this platform for someone that doesn’t care what happens behind the scenes? The goal is to make the interface simple enough that they don’t have to think about it. But as they think about how their content goes out to people, they see the potential in a wider reach as their followers can choose how they want to get their content. They don’t even have to be signed up for the platform to get updates.

I’ve been working towards turning this concept into a web app. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in potentially using, let me know, any feedback is welcome! You can also sign up to be notified when I have something ready here.

Do you have to love what you do?

2022-10-27T00:00:00Z

I've really been feeling this great quote lately. [tweet]

2022-10-11T00:00:00Z

Blocks Edit 5th anniversary

2022-09-28T00:00:00Z

How we got to the current version and how we're looking forward.

Creativity is a state that is amplified... [tweet]

2022-09-20T00:00:00Z

The best advice to keep in mind, whether you’re starting a company or making art [video]

2022-09-17T00:00:00Z

A good take on the motivation for doing something

2022-08-31T00:00:00Z

Start sending out emails

2022-08-28T00:00:00Z

Forget social media, push your updates out via email.

Is the internet the only place we can truly be ourselves?

2022-08-22T00:00:00Z

Social media has made us think that people aren't being themselves online. This article makes the case that the internet may be the one place where we are able to try and be as much of ourselves as we can be.

The evolution and implementation of hand tracking in Myst

2022-07-31T00:00:00Z

The addition of hand tracking to the latest iteration of Myst is great for understanding a bit about how the process works. It makes perfect sense for the world of Myst and is an example of how much simpler of a user interface it is than using controllers!

Product design ideas come from iteration

2022-07-29T00:00:00Z

We recently released a really cool new feature for Blocks Edit: a visual editor for setting properties that turn any email HTML into an editable template for building individual emails from. As we designed and made it work, it seemed to come together pretty seamlessly, taking just a few weeks of effort. The reality of it though is that it’s taken nearly five years for it to come together the way it did!

The original way the editing properties worked was based on adding HTML code CSS classes and attributes via the code itself. We had this in place since the very beginning, adding new properties and tweaking functionality along the way. Even though it’s a simple concept that works well, we still thought about ways to make it even easier to enable those properties. Whether through automation, or via a tool (or both). It would always be in the back of our heads as we evolved the editable tags approach. But we just couldn’t figure out something that worked.

This happens with all product features. Discussions are had for how to improve something as an iteration from a previous update. Sometimes there’s user feedback and using the product internally that something gets upgraded. Sometimes a redesign or code refactor feels necessary. Sometimes there are dead ends to ideas that are explored but end up coming up again later with a new perspective. Like in this case.

Features come from thinking deeply about the product and better understanding how it works over time. The process of ideation, design, and programming helps. As does talking about and presenting the final product to customers. It’s a virtuous cycle of a feature idea leading to design, then coding, then launching, getting feedback and seeing the response, and coming up with ways to improve it later on, or coming up with a whole new idea.

And after going through all that, sometimes you can build an entire visual template editor in just a few weeks. It previously would not have been possible because we simply wouldn’t have been able to come up with how to do it! If you want to see how the feature works, you can check out a 5-minute video of me going through the process of using it.

Blocks Edit made the list of the top most accessible emails sent out

2022-07-29T00:00:00Z

On Sarcasm

2022-07-21T00:00:00Z

Me using the new Blocks Edit template editor [video]

2022-07-11T00:00:00Z

Our goal with Blocks Edit was to make it as easy as possible to setup a CMS for any HTML email and today we're taking the next big step with a visual template editor

2022-07-06T00:00:00Z

Computer upgrade

2022-06-26T00:00:00Z

I've had my iMac that I primarily used for work for over six years now. I got it when it first came out with the Retina display. I just recently replaced it with the new iMac that came out last year. It's pretty impressive how long the old one has lasted me and was still working well.

But the new iMac and the new M1 chip definitely feels much better with every task! It's also crazy how simple it was to get from the store and set up. I easily migrated my files with iCloud and reinstalled the handful of apps that I use regularly. It only took a couple hours. Best computer upgrade experience I ever had!

The creator of Gravity Falls on working with Disney's Standards and Practices [video]

2022-06-15T00:00:00Z

Ever wonder what it's like to develop a cartoon TV show for Disney and work with Standards and Practices on Disney feels is appropriate for kids? The creator of Gravity Falls shared his experience which is pretty hilarious!

If it seems easy, it’s probably because a lot of work was put in to make it look that way!

2022-06-09T00:00:00Z

Undo and revision history: we’ve been working on this big Blocks Edit feature for quite a while!

2022-06-01T00:00:00Z

A nice take on the future of transhumanism. [video]

2022-05-22T00:00:00Z

As Apple is set to bring augmented reality to the masses with its rumored headset, there’s already research being done for a new generation of how we interface with technology.

Vangelis, famed film composer and synth pioneer, dead at 79

2022-05-19T00:00:00Z

The best part of the original Blade Runner was its soundtrack, and it’s still one of my favorite of all movie soundtracks. Its composer, Vangelis has died.

Gilbert Gottfried, the greatest comedian ever

2022-04-30T00:00:00Z

Gilbert Gottfried died a couple weeks ago. He was my favorite comedian. The best comedian ever, no hyperbole. I went to his standup shows almost every time he came to Phoenix and would laugh the hardest I ever had at any show.

One show, he did his infamous Aristocrats joke as part of his finale. The joke is considered the filthiest joke ever told, and he was the best at it. As he told the joke, he homed in on me sitting in the front row. Having that joke told at you would make anyone visibly uncomfortable listening to it. But I've heard him tell the joke a few times before so all I did was just laugh until tears came to my eyes. Since he didn't get the reaction he expected, he then moved on to a couple at a nearby table who did look uncomfortable, and just made it all funnier for the rest of the audience.

This post came out of a recent discussion I had with someone from the #emailgeeks community!

2022-04-17T00:00:00Z

Organizing your email design process

2022-04-14T00:00:00Z

3 steps towards systemizing your email’s production.

Gilbert — the funniest person of our lifetime is gone... [tweet]

2022-04-12T00:00:00Z

Blocks Edit makes the list of The Best Email Development Tools for Fast and Flexible Coding

2022-03-30T00:00:00Z

The amazing, Amazing Jonathan

2022-03-27T00:00:00Z

Amazing Jonathan died recently. He was one of the funniest comedy magicians, and even one of the funniest comics without the magician part. I got to see him live over a decade ago when he was still in Vegas. If you're not familiar with him, look him up on YouTube.

There's also a documentary about him worth checking out. I saw the documentary when it debuted and toured in Phoenix in 2018, which Amazing Jonathan attended. I got a chance to chat with him for a bit afterward. I was nervous at first, but he immediately makes you feel comfortable with his warm, welcoming personality, as if you were already good friends with him. His stage act is very much like that and some of his best moments are with audience members.

How Blocks Edit works with design guidelines

2022-03-23T00:00:00Z

Pain’s power... [tweet]

2022-02-21T00:00:00Z

A Blocks Edit customer story for DICK'S Sporting Goods who used Blocks Edit to produce more emails than they were ever able to before

2022-02-16T00:00:00Z

A new service from Blocks Edit, for helping build an email design system

2022-01-19T00:00:00Z

A clip from The EMU Podcast interview I did on email editors, and what sets Blocks Edit apart from them [video]

2022-01-18T00:00:00Z

What is modular design?

2022-01-11T00:00:00Z

A framework for more clearly defining the language around your design system and templating techniques.

2021 year in review

2022-01-02T00:00:00Z

This year sorta felt like 2020, part 2. The pandemic is still not over. We’re essentially in the same boat as a year ago: a new Covid variant to deal with, and increased cases because of the holidays. But things are getting better overall. The long tail of people are getting vaccinated and things don't seem as generally stressful as before as we seem to have adapted to how we go about our lives during a pandemic.

There was even a period earlier in the year where things appeared to be almost normal! My brother and mom took the opportunity to plan a trip to Romania for us to visit family. Things worked out pretty well while we were there and it was nice to be able to see family that we haven't seen in a few years. But as hopeful as things appeared to be with the pandemic coming to an end, coming back from our trip, things regressed as cases started to surge again for the summer and the number of people getting vaccinated slowed down.

It's been another decent year for Blocks Edit. We launched some cool new features, and a redesign/under-the-hood upgrade in November. We also worked with some great customers that we've recently started to showcase on the site.

From the blog

I did a review of Hey, a new email service, which was more about how to stop avoiding email as a form of communication and make it work as it was intended.

And from the Blocks Edit blog, my favorite post of the year: why visual email builders are bad at email design which is another Blocks Edit philosophy kind of post that shows how we do things differently than other visual editors.

Links to my favorite articles and media

I usually post these via my Twitter.

On climate change (video) - how nuclear energy is actually the answer
On cancel culture - interview with Jonathan Rauch on his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge about how cancel culture has affected free speech
On product design, a couple of tweets: Design decisions and design output
On how to think about our time and attention
On how we should use data
On work, another couple of good tweets: practice, and mastering something
On self-promotion and blogging
On business: competition and focus

Books and comics

Rework, reread - I started reading Rework again, following along with the Rework podcast which is dedicating an episode to each chapter.
How to Live - the new book by Derek Sivers is a collection of 27 perspectives on various ways to live your life, taken to their extreme. With a conclusion that helps you decide how to apply them all to your life. I won't spoil it, but it'll seem obvious by the time you get to it!
Blinkist - an app that features summaries of non-fiction books. Each summary is anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes and is available as audio or text. I decided to take my ever-growing list of books I want to read and look them up. The summaries work very well. There are so many books that don't need to be as long as they are!
A collection of Avatar: The Last Airbender comics - I bought them from a Comixology sale in the past and I finally got around to reading them. They felt like watching additional episodes of the original show which I haven’t watched since 2009, around the time it ended.

Shows and movies

South Park: Post-Covid and Post-Covid: The Return of Covid follows Pandemic Special and South ParQ Vaccination Special
David Byrne’s American Utopia - the live concert from David Byrne (Talking Heads front-man) that toured a couple of years ago and then ran on Broadway. I've been getting more and more into his music over the years and really wanted to go to this concert, so it was great to see they did a recording of it (and it was directed by Spike Lee!)
How To with John Wilson - while John Wilson documents New York and interviews people, he learns how to make small talk, improve your memory, split the check, cover your furniture, and more
Synchronic - From the same duo behind the movies Spring and The Endless, I kinda hyped Synchronic up for myself, and still ended up enjoying it. It’s kinda tough to describe it in a way that doesn’t make it sound not very interesting. It’s probably better to go into watching it without knowing anything really.
James Gunn's The Suicide Squad did not disappoint in its weirdness and fun!
The Mauritanian - what a powerful movie that came out in time for the anniversary of 9/11. It's basically about just how messed up the Guantanamo Bay situation is. Not just for the many innocent prisoners being tortured. And not just for the soldiers being ordered to torture people. But also because it shows how beyond ineffective the operation was at doing what it was intended for. And the fact that it's continued to run for so long is madness.
American Rust - I don't want to spoil it, but it leads up to a great finale
Leverage: Redemption - a comeback of the show Leverage, from the same original creators and pretty much the entire original cast too. It has the same charm as the old series while updating well to recent events that it bases some of its episodes on.

80’s horror movies

I decided to explore a genre that I feel like I've ignored in the past.

Pumpkinhead - has some of the standard staples of 80's horror movies, but goes deeper as a movie than you would expect!
Magic, which the creator of Chucky credits as inspiring him to come up with the Chucky character
Hellraiser, which I'm not sure why I haven't seen until now
Society was pretty entertaining
So was Bloodsucking Freaks (technically came out in the 70's)
Transylvania 6-5000 was a fun comedy
Vampire in Brooklyn was pretty decent also (technically from the 90's)

Video games

Mass Effect Legendary - a collection of the original trilogy with enhanced graphics and gameplay refinements that I played after around 9 years since playing the original. I was selective with my play-through experience, focusing on the parts I remembered enjoying the most. Man does it still hold up, with improved gameplay of the first one bringing it together with how great 2 and 3 are. The graphics quality makes it feel fresh yet still familiar, and having all the DLC included makes it feel more complete.
Mass Effect microsite - while playing, I put together a Mass Effect microsite of a lot of the in-game writing that expands on the world-building the series is so good at. It’s served as some good night time reading material.
The Forgotten City is a cool time loop game that dives deep in Roman mythologies and analyzes morality and how it should, or shouldn't, be enforced. I enjoyed watching a play-through of it and look forward to future games from this new studio!
Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines was a fun play through to watch

More of my favorites this year.

To get this kind of update every month, sign up for my monthly email.

Can you fix climate change? [video]

2021-11-21T00:00:00Z

How nuclear energy is actually the answer.

Design output... [tweet]

2021-11-19T00:00:00Z

Interview with author Jonathan Rauch on free speech and cancel culture [audio]

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

A powerful interview with author Jonathan Rauch on his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge about how cancel culture has affected free speech. Featuring Penn Jillette, Teller, Michael Goudeau, and Matt Donnelly.

Master something... [tweet]

2021-10-23T00:00:00Z

No one cares much about design... [tweet]

2021-10-05T00:00:00Z

Why visual email builders are bad at email design

2021-09-30T00:00:00Z

They have more options than you need, yet still have design and workflow limitations.

Wake up every day, consumed by You, Inc

2021-09-16T00:00:00Z

Getting into the practice of thinking about your own venture as a way to get better at doing it so you're better-prepared for when the big important decisions come along.

Hideyuki Nakayama's glass globe doorknob [tweet, photo]

2021-09-15T00:00:00Z

Do Something [tweet, photo]

2021-08-18T00:00:00Z

The difference between time and attention

2021-08-17T00:00:00Z

Curse of the bell curve

2021-08-01T00:00:00Z

An example of a bell curve

A few months ago as the vaccine for Covid was getting out and things seemed hopeful again, something curious happened: some people decided they didn’t want the vaccine. How could that be?

Some people said there was a conspiracy behind getting vaccinated and even Covid itself. Which can’t be true when you realize that with any conspiracy theory, if no one involved in such a conspiracy doesn’t talk, then there is no conspiracy as someone is bound to say something!

Some people said it was their right not too. But they can’t actually believe that when they drive on the same road as other people and they know they don’t have the right to drive drunk! Also, the government isn’t putting any metaphorical or actual gun to anyone’s head to get it.

Some people don’t believe the vaccine actually works and don’t trust it. But isn’t that like if there was a zombie apocalypse, and we decided not to kill zombies because we didn’t believe that shooting their brains out worked?

A man I talked to about this brought to my attention the bell curve. Things start out slow at the beginning, like when it took some time for us to roll out the vaccines to people. Then there’s a surge, like how we quickly got past half the population getting vaccinated. And now things have slowed down because we’re at the tail end of the curve.

As frustrating as it has been for someone like myself — who’s been vaccinated for a few months now — who has worked and stayed at home for well over a year — and who is itching to get out into the world again like never before — this is something that I can grasp! It turns out that we have to follow statistical facts. After all, it can’t possibly be the alternative that people actually believe any of those other things! Right?

Tracking links in email

2021-07-20T00:00:00Z

The most important of email metrics, maybe the only thing you need.

At the start, writing isn't writing... [tweet]

2021-07-15T00:00:00Z

Data VS intuition

2021-07-11T00:00:00Z

On how we should use data.

You should have your own place on the internet

2021-06-08T00:00:00Z

Almost every fruit and vegetable that we eat today has undergone hundreds or thousands of years of artificial selection by humans. [tweet]

2021-06-02T00:00:00Z

HEY for email done right

2021-05-02T00:00:00Z

It’s been over ten months since a new email service, HEY came out and I’ve been using it since, along with a Work version that came out a few months ago. And it has turned managing me email from a feeling of dread, to a feeling of joy, which is what email should be! While this is essentially a review of the service, I’m only going to focus on the unique aspects that I feel make all the difference to using email.

Emails are just modern-day letters. So in some ways, they should be treated as such. HEY email’s way of organizing your email seems to take that approach. Its core model consists of three options: put it in a pile to reply to later, set it aside in another pile, or send it to the paper trail for receipts, and other emails that you may need to reference. There’s also a Feed option for newsletters which gets automated as you designate email addresses to it. This form of interaction seems simple and obvious when you consider how you handle your paper mail (or used to — if you’re like me, you avoid getting mail altogether!): putting it in piles to deal with, or filing it. It’s ultimately made me feel less overwhelmed and more in control, as the emails that need my attention don’t get lost in the shuffle!

There’s no archive option in HEY which Gmail has made the standard way to handle email. Archiving email seems to have created the side effect of the need to get to “inbox zero” which doesn’t really make sense and only makes you feel guilty if you don’t get there. Instead, in HEY, you just let any emails you read flow and focus on the ones that need your attention based on those core filtering options. You can always just search for something later if you need to.

There are a couple of unique ways that HEY handles SPAM. It of course has a spam filter that seems to work well. But what do you do with those cold emails that sometimes feel like SPAM? If you have images turned on in your email app by default, many of those emails will track when you open them, without you even knowing it, and decide whether to keep sending you more emails! HEY handles this by blocking this kind of tracking while still showing the images. And, it requires you screen first-time senders so nothing shows up in your inbox unless you’ve previously screened them in. This also works well for blocking certain emails that don’t have unsubscribe options to because the sender considers them particularly important, even when you don’t.

The Work version of HEY is designed to work for custom domains with multiple accounts for your organization. It adds the ability to create aliases to forward emails to select coworkers (like support@), and internal team commenting around an email without having to reply to it. Even without the Work version, you can use custom domain forwarding which forwards specific email addresses from your host to your main HEY account and allows replying from it as well. The main difference is that the Work version takes over the entire domain and manages all email addresses without the need for a separate host. Having both options though is pretty great as I have various personal domains that I want to make sure I’m still getting email for and now they all forward to one account!

HEY costs $99 a year, and does not have a free version like Gmail. But that “free” comes with Google mining data in your emails (including attachments) to use for its ads. I’m more than happy to pay not to have that done with my data, along with all the added benefits above. The Work version is $12 per user per month. With how much we depend on emails daily, the price tag is well worth. HEY saves you wasted effort and no longer makes email a burden to deal with!

Neuralink - Monkey MindPong [video]

2021-04-08T00:00:00Z

Civilization - Correspondence [audio]

2021-03-26T00:00:00Z

The more you practice, the more... [tweet]

2021-03-11T00:00:00Z

An alternative to competition

2021-03-05T00:00:00Z

How competition works in business, from Basecamp founder Jason Fried, who recently launched an email service that competes with Gmail.

The history of nuclear energy [video]

2021-02-03T00:00:00Z

How to rewrite bad writing [tweet thread]

2021-02-03T00:00:00Z

Many product design decisions that /seem/ right /feel/ wrong... [tweet]

2021-01-27T00:00:00Z

2020 year in review

2021-01-03T00:00:00Z

2020, the year of a global pandemic, essentially makes it the shittiest of years in who knows how long. The year is over, but we still need to hang on a few months more because the thing that has made 2020 so shitty is not quite over yet!

These next few months could be the worst of all as the number of Covid cases have increased over the holidays. My parents got it a few weeks ago. They managed to get through it and are now doing fine with only a couple minor symptoms left, but my dad ended up in the hospital with pneumonia at one point which was pretty scary. I spent the holidays video chatting with them and going through photos of past holiday times.

As for the rest of the year, I spent most of it at home, needless to say, with my head down in work on Blocks Edit. We've recently hit some important internal milestones from our efforts. One of the big things we're proud of is getting to a pricing model that allows for a completely free version.

From the Blog

I only wrote one personal blog post this year, and of course it was on the pandemic:

The pandemic and plant-based - there may be more pandemics to come. And as it turns out, it's related to how we farm animals to eat. All of our infectious diseases, the common cold, all flu's, come from animals!
Thoughts on working remotely - As I've worked from home for many years now, and with more people starting to do so because of the pandemic, I decided to highlight the things I do that I found to work well.
An email design system for your thoughts - what a design system is and the point of using it. My Blocks Edit side project for the year.
Blocks Edit How To series - each post is an aspect of how our approach is unique from other visual editing tools: using templates, implementation, sharing and exporting, text formatting, and using images
Newsletter - most of my goings-on I now tend to write about in my monthly newsletter which I've been sending out for three years now! Here are a few highlights: Politicizing the need for caution, 30 years in the USA, and How I'm getting through self-quarantine
Tweets - Some tweets from others I thought were worth sharing: on inspiration, on interaction design and complexity, on our ability to choose, and on the time we have

Books and comics

I did not seem to have enough patience for reading books while self-quarantined even though that was the one thing I was hoping to do more of going into it. I did get some comic reading in though.

Expressive Design Systems by Yesenia Perez-Cruz - while researching design systems for Blocks Edit, the book does a good job of presenting how despite using a design system for consistency, it doesn't mean it can't also be used for further creativity.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Comic Book Archive - when the sequel to the original film came out in 1991, this comic series started out as an adaptation of the movie's script (which was a little different from the final film) and continued with some further Bill and Ted adventures.
The Story of God: A Biblical Comedy about Love (and Hate) and The Trouble with God: A Divine Comedy About Judgment (and Misjudgment) by Chris Matheson - from one of the creators of Bill and Ted, I listened to these both as audio books, read by the author. He goes through the bible and its stories with a hilarious characterization of what appears to be a very flawed God.
The Sandman - I also listened to a fully dramatized audio version from Audible that came out this past year while reading through the comic book series.
Anything That Loves - an anthology series of various LGBTQ comic book artists talking about their sexuality and how its perceived by the world around them.

Shows and movies

I also seemed to lack patience for watching movies this year (maybe from anxiousness from being stuck inside my house all the time?), so it's mostly been shows. I caught up on old ones along with some great newer stuff. And a bunch of random YouTube stuff in-between.

Homeland - seasons 6-8 on Showtime, concludes on a strong note, cementing it as one of the best shows on TV
Better Call Saul - season 4 on Netflix, Saul's path towards breaking bad continues, which is a vague description that doesn't spoil anything
Future Man - final season 3 on Hulu, a fun wrap-up to a fun show
Legion - final season 3 on Hulu, one of the better superhero shows right now, similar to Watchmen
Chernobyl - limited series on HBO Max, of how the real event happened
Steven Universe - all 5 seasons on Hulu and HBO Max, a fun show full of optimism that could help one get through a pandemic
War of the Worlds - season 1 on Epix, a nice take on the end of the world story
Boys State - documentary on Apple TV, on the game of politics
Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates - season 1 on Netflix, on how Bill Gates is saving the world
Bill and Ted Face the Music - via digital purchase, I made this a movie event, also rewatching the first two before, and it actually lived up to the excitement I had for it, making it a good follow up to the original films
Resolution - movie, via digital rental, not worth saying anything about to potentially spoil
The Endless - movie, via digital rental, best watched after having seen Resolution, but not required
Her - on Netflix, I felt an itch to rewatch it

Misc

Videogames - I watched play-throughs of games as they seemed like another thing I couldn't do this year, and I didn't have the right gaming setup for in some cases: Doom Eternal, Walking Dead: Sinners and Saints VR game, Beyond a Steel Sky on Apple Arcade
Music - here are some highlights of what Apple Music is saying are my top songs of the year: Don’t Fear the Sun by The Toxic Avenger, Grounds by IDLES, John Wick Mode by Le Castle Vania, Can't Anybody See? by The Toxic Avenger, Right Where You Belong by Blame My Youth, Visiondome by Highway Superstar, and Everybody's Free By Rozalla; and a couple more that for some reason didn't make the list but should have: Miss You by Trentemoller, and Cradles by Sub Urban
Poolside FM - music that can best be described as summer vibes in the 80's. If music that sounds like it's from the 80's has become a genre, this would be a sub-genre of that.
Two-Headed Dreams - a live online show with magic and variety acts
RIP Amazing Randi - I've attended his TAM: The Amazing Meeting conference a couple of times years ago as I got into the skeptism community. I met and hung out with some awesome people and even chatted with Randi while waiting in line to get one of his books. Here's a podcast interview with him that covers his career well.

Validation is a mirage

2020-12-22T00:00:00Z

Navigating a career can be a mindfuck... [tweet]

2020-11-19T00:00:00Z

A waking day is right around 1,000 minutes... [tweet]

2020-11-17T00:00:00Z

On the time we have.

Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

2020-11-08T00:00:00Z

Learn how to spot a deep fake! [video]

2020-11-01T00:00:00Z

I voted [tweet]

2020-10-23T00:00:00Z

Polls opened up this week in my area. I dropped my ballot off, but the setup for voting seemed pretty nice, everyone being very careful and helpful. As contentious as politics get on TV and online, it was a nice reminder that people in real life are very pleasant!

When Time Became History - The Human Era [video]

2020-10-06T00:00:00Z

How we evolved agriculturally and culturally.

Going to any website in 2020 [tweet]

2020-10-05T00:00:00Z

Making accessibility a habit

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Accessibility in email design doesn’t have to be an arduous task.

Impulse Tracker read as part of the Sample Central music podcast (at the end)

2020-08-16T00:00:00Z

A podcast about electronic music similar to the kind the story talks about, did a read of my short story and included tracks from the unofficial soundtrack.

How Cancel Culture Violates Intellectual Freedom, with Jonathan Rauch [video]

2020-08-07T00:00:00Z

We only have so much energy to give our attention and a lot of it is going to our phone’s notifications [video]

2020-08-05T00:00:00Z

The pandemic and plant-based

2020-07-26T00:00:00Z

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while now but never quite seem to have the energy. These last couple of months of self-quarantine I’ve felt particularly drained throughout the day. I guess my sedentary state has made me anxious. And the chaotic state of how the pandemic is being handled over something as simple as wearing a mask, has left me demoralized.

Then there’s this piece of information that I got from a podcast interview with Dr Micheal Greger on his book How to Survive a Pandemic: All infectious diseases come from domesticated animals. You know, like covid which came from a bat. And swine flu from pigs. Bird flu. Regular flu, also coming from birds. AIDS (from monkeys). Respiratory diseases from various animals. I haven’t read Dr Greger’s 1,000-page book, but it’s all in there (and probably the reason it’s 1,000 pages).

I’ve learned a lot about how we eat these last three years since going plant-based. How much healthier it is to our everyday habits. How most of the conditions we get when we’re older stem from eating meat and dairy. How drastically reducing factory farming can help more with climate change than basically anything else. And now that we’re familiar with what a pandemic is, it turns out it’s also about the survival of human beings.

And the worst part of it is that this probably won’t be the last pandemic we experience in our lifetimes. It won’t be another 100 years like the Spanish flu. As our population continues to increase so does the amount of animals that are farmed for food, leading to increased risks of disease spreading. We only got lucky that swine flu, bird flu, and others didn’t spread the way covid did.

The hope in all of this is that things are showing signs of change. More and more people are going plant-based. There are more options now than ever. Technology is allowing meat to be grown in a lab. We’re becoming more aware of how factory farming works allowing us to do more to prevent how diseases are caused. There’s still a lot of work to do but we're learning. Just like we're learning how to get through the pandemic. And wearing a piece of cloth to cover our mouth and nose in order to prevent the virus from spreading.

An email design system for your thoughts

2020-07-24T00:00:00Z

Using a design system helps you better analyze your emails, streamline production, and iterate on strategy for your campaigns.

WindowSwap - open a new window somewhere in the world [link]

2020-07-17T00:00:00Z

The Future is Unknown: Rethinking Planning During the Coronavirus [podcast]

2020-07-12T00:00:00Z

We all just need more naps [video]

2020-07-11T00:00:00Z

Our Ability to Process Information Is Reaching a Critical Limit

2020-07-06T00:00:00Z

Mysterious underwater crop circles [tweet, video]

2020-06-30T00:00:00Z

Removing tracking from the YouTube embedded player

2020-06-28T00:00:00Z

A guide to developing an email design system

2020-06-24T00:00:00Z

A reference tool for building an email design system

2020-06-17T00:00:00Z

Between stimulus and response, there is a space... [tweet]

2020-05-26T00:00:00Z

On our ability to choose.

Mental model: Tesler's law of the conservation of complexity [tweet]

2020-05-09T00:00:00Z

On interaction design and complexity.

That Squiggle of the Design Process

2020-05-02T00:00:00Z

Often—still, to this day—it doesn't even occur to product people, designers, or engineers... [tweet]

2020-04-19T00:00:00Z

How to Significantly Slow Coronavirus? [video]

2020-04-18T00:00:00Z

Masks may be a safer way to go out if we're going to do it anyway!

Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the internet?

2020-04-03T00:00:00Z

Thoughts on working remotely

2020-03-25T00:00:00Z

10 tips on working from home: being productive and staying sane.

I had no immune system for months after my bone marrow transplant. Here’s how I avoided viral illness, and how you can, too. It’s easier than you think.

2020-03-24T00:00:00Z

Advice on avoiding a viral illness from someone that has had to do it before.

This is why everyone is hoarding toilet paper

2020-03-24T00:00:00Z

Stephen Fry’s 7 Deadly Sins podcast series

2020-03-22T00:00:00Z

Tim Urban, creator of the blog Wait, But Why speaks about how "to not be shitty on the internet." [video]

2020-03-22T00:00:00Z

Clarity in messaging

2020-03-10T00:00:00Z

How to stay on brand, hone your content craft, and make your writing memorable.

The evolution of digital content editing

2020-02-25T00:00:00Z

Word processors, content management systems, and visual editors.

If someone makes something that feels unachievable to you... [tweet]

2020-02-19T00:00:00Z

A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

2020-02-17T00:00:00Z

My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

2020-02-17T00:00:00Z

What doesn't seem like work

2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

How you should pay attention to the things someone else considers work but you don't. Those are the things you have interest in, are good at, and can make a living from!

The how/why your taste/preference in foods can change to be healthier [video]

2020-02-06T00:00:00Z

Thinking and focus guide

2020-02-02T00:00:00Z

The increase of population growth and the myth of overpopulation [video]

2020-02-01T00:00:00Z

"You’re a bit like a room with a bunch of things in it—some old, some new, some you’re aware of, some you aren’t—but the room is always changing, never exactly the same from week to week."

2020-01-27T00:00:00Z

I used to think... [tweet]

2020-01-26T00:00:00Z

Igorrr - Very Noise (music video)

2020-01-18T00:00:00Z

Inspiration [tweet]

2020-01-02T00:00:00Z

2019 year in review

2019-12-31T00:00:00Z

We’ve made it to 2020, we’re living in what sounds like a made up movie future!

I started off 2019 working on a guide on focus and energy based on what I was reading and had read in the past. Essentially, an approach to staying healthier mentally, as a follow up to my physical health guide.

I moved in April and have been spending the rest of the year furnishing the new place, organizing things, and figuring out what to put up on all the added empty walls.

Blocks Edit turned two years old, and got some new features including: mobile editing, integrations, editor design updates, and an open source email template framework. We also had our first conference booth!

Blog posts

Highlights of posts I’ve written both on the blog and on the Blocks Edit Build Better blog. This year I also started adding links to the blog of the best stuff from my Twitter.

Attention deficit - how our phone is a distraction in not only wasting our time, but wasting our attention, and why we should be aware of how we transition our attention from one thing to another
Information overload - on how we process information
Having privacy online - maintaining online privacy and what it looks like to have privacy we have control over
Email editors - the types of visual email editors and how each works
Plant-based the lazy way - how I've been eating plant-based this past year and the habits I've developed

Books

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky - a bunch of tactics on concentrating on work that's most meaningful
Zero to One by Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters - puts in perspective what the point of a startup is and dives into the essentials that make one successful --from strategy and purpose, to the core team, to distribution and marketing
Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday - ways our ego creeps into everything we try to accomplish and how to keep it in check
Deep Work by Cal Newport - focusing on work that yields the most results in concentrated time periods
The Dip by Seth Godin - finding what makes your work/idea/product/service special and doing it so well/making it so good that you start to get attention for it, because everyone wants the best of everything
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - using marketing channels effectively by focusing on the ones that are most relevant to your product
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne - a very deep understanding of what it means to be free and how to analyze and realize what your own personal version of freedom

TV shows

I enjoyed more shows this year than even movies as streaming services continue to have more great things to watch.

Russian Doll (Netflix) - if you like Groundhog Day, Russian Doll is a fun take on essentially the same concept, and easily binge-able
Nathan for You (on Hulu) - a reality-style comedy about Nathan Fielder, who tries to help small businesses market themselves
Lunatics (Netflix) - Chris Lilley, known for creating and playing a range of funny, memorable characters doesn't disappoint as he plays six different people who are kinda crazy, but also unapologetically themselves
Perpetual Grace, LTD (Epix) - from the creator of Patriot, one of my favorite shows in the last couple of years
The Blacklist (Netflix) - good series for unwinding from work
Boston Legal (Hulu) - like Blacklist, also good for unwinding and also stars James Spader who you can not go wrong with!
The Jeselnik Offensive (Comedy Central) - Anthony Jeselnik’s show is no longer on, but man it was pretty great
Mindhunter, seasons 1 and 2 (Netflix) - investigators try to understand the minds of some of the most infamous serial killers
Legion, seasons 1 and 2 (Hulu) - a trippy series based in the X-Men universe
Fargo, season 1 (Hulu) - same approach as the original movie with new characters and (supposedly true) crimes
Space Dandy (Hulu) - fun, colorful, sci-fi anime

Movies/documentaries/standup specials

Rolling Thunder Revue (Netflix) - a documentary on an ensemble of musicians and poets lead by Bob Dylan that toured the country in the mid 70’s
Anthony Jeselnik's Thoughts and Prayers (Netflix), standup special
Bill Hicks's Relentless (Amazon Prime), standup special from the 90’s
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (Netflix) - great Orson Welles documentary
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (rental)
Hail Satan? (Hulu) - a documentary on The Satanic Temple, religion or political protest group
A Crooked Somebody (Hulu)
El Camino (Netflix) - a Breaking Bad end-cap movie
Dolemite is My Name (Netflix)
Ghost Stories (Hulu)
Us (rental)
Carlito’s Way (Starz)
To Live and Die in LA (DVD)
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Amazon Prime)

Comics

The Walking Dead, Compendium 4 - after 16 years and 193 individual comic book issues, the original Walking Dead story comes to an end
Gravity Falls: Lost Legends - it's like enjoying four episodes of the show, in comic book form!
American Gods comic adaptation, volumes 1 and 2

Videogames

I tried out the Oculus Quest, but ended up sending it about a week later as my head couldn’t take its weight anymore. It could use a couple more years of iteration to get lighter and more comfortable.

Oculus First Contact - on Oculus Quest, gives a nice intro to the sense of the visceral realism VR achieves
Genital Jousting - on my Mac, a fun online party game

Here's the full listing of things I enjoy that I update regularly. Along with a condensed list of my all-time favorites.

And for more of these kinds of updates on a monthly basis, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

The routines of artists and how to maintain energy [video]

2019-12-21T00:00:00Z

The similarities between artists and inventors and what they do on a daily basis to do great work. Spoiler alert: they have a routine for consistent progress, take afternoon walks, and socialize regularly.

Monty Python - I'm (Still) So Worried (Music Video)

2019-12-19T00:00:00Z

The fundamentals of email content production

2019-12-10T00:00:00Z

Like email being around for a long-time to come, so will these fundamentals.

Attention spans [tweet]

2019-12-08T00:00:00Z

One, Ten, One Hundred [video]

2019-12-05T00:00:00Z

A short online series about a video production company making the same commercial at different budgets: $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000, and what goes into each version.

Plant-based, the lazy way

2019-11-28T00:00:00Z

This will be my third Thanksgiving eating plant-based, having switched two and a half years ago (though the first one doesn't really count since I did end up eating some turkey). And as I think about what I’m going to eat this afternoon beforehand, as I do every food-filled occasion/event, I realize that I no longer have to think all that hard anymore. I already know: the side dishes. In fact, finding what to eat, at home, or when going out, has gotten pretty easy, even for someone like me who doesn’t cook and is lazy about any kind of prep work involved with eating.

Taste and habit

During my first year of eating plant-based, my taste in food had really started to change. I slowly stopped wanting to eat the things I did before. From chicken, to beef, to pork, to eggs, to cheese. Now even anything milky kind of grosses me out. I can’t even eat cereal with soy milk which I used to do almost daily a year ago. Now I just eat a banana in the morning. I think part of this has to do with gut microbiome that no longer has any remnants of those kinds of foods to crave them.

I don’t really think people believe me when I tell them how much our taste in food can change. I hardly believe it myself sometimes. But there’s a book I started reading recently on the research that’s been done around it called First Bite. It’s all about how we develop our food tastes which are influenced from when we’re babies, and in some ways even before we’re born!

Smell is a big factor in our tastes. I still enjoy the smell of certain foods I used to eat. Apparently, this is because most of the impact of our smells and cravings have to do with memories that smell triggers. So I still enjoy certain smells because of over 35 years of memories! But the cravings are completely gone.

Another aspect of the book is about how a large part of our eating is based on daily habits and cultural rituals. Which means we change what we eat by changing how we eat. And we change quite a bit without even knowing we're doing it. So doing it with intent could be easier than we realize!

Both our tastes and our habits help in keeping us lazy in our decision-making when it comes to eating.

Filtering options

During my second year of eating plant-based, after getting a better feel of my newfound taste preferences, I started seeing patterns in how I chose what I ate. I essentially got better at filtering out my options. It turns out that having a reduced amount of options to pick from makes it easier to be lazy and decide! But the truth of the matter is, that I think I did the same thing in the past, even before eating plant-based, it was just a different set of things I normally enjoyed, either out of the habit trap, or because I knew I couldn’t go wrong with my go-to’s.

At home, I buy essentially the same items, usually from Sprouts, or enjoy the occasional leftovers that my mom gives me to take home. And I’ve found that I’m happy with eating essentially the same things over and over again, especially for lunch when I want something quick and easy. There’s a story that David Lynch, of Twin Peaks fame, eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for lunch so he doesn’t interrupt his work with an involved process of eating. Not having to decide on what you eat all the time is definitely a great way to be a lazy eater!

At restaurants and parties, I look at potential vegan-specific options, then salads, then side dishes. Mixing and matching a couple of sides can easily make a meal. My latest thing is bowls which a bunch of places now have for anyone that cuts out empty carbs from bread (which I've been doing lately). At Panera a grain bowl with greens; Subway has a salad with guacamole; Taco Bell has rice and black beans with lettuce and tomatoes; even Filiberto’s will do a rice, lettuce, guacamole, pico de gallo bowl instead of as a burrito. Again, the things I used to get on a plate on the side.

And Thanksgiving is the best example of side dishes, there are plenty to still stuff one's self with: garlic mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, corn, green beans, roasted Brussels sprouts, candied yams, even pumpkin pie for desert. So now I look forward to Thanksgiving and all other food occasions the same way I did before without any kind of anxiety since I just eat in my natural, lazy way.

The bus ticket theory of genius

2019-11-24T00:00:00Z

Compounding time

2019-11-05T00:00:00Z

Instead of carving it up in pieces.

"Be useful then distinctive then lucky."

2019-11-02T00:00:00Z

"Einstein’s greatest skill was the ability to sift the essential from the inessential — to grasp simplicity when everyone else was lost in clutter."

2019-10-19T00:00:00Z

"Better outcomes come from applying your energy in a particular direction."

2019-10-19T00:00:00Z

Err on the side of action, to test theories

2019-10-08T00:00:00Z

Our first booth setup for Blocks Edit, at Digital Summit conference in Detroit [tweet]

2019-09-25T00:00:00Z

The Hard Work of being Lazy [video]

2019-09-03T00:00:00Z

How much effort goes into putting things off by keeping our selves unnecessarily busy, and how we should practice being still from time to time as a way of better figuring out our course.

"People want different things. Disagreements are often a misunderstanding of priorities." [tweet]

2019-09-01T00:00:00Z

The differences in email editors

2019-08-13T00:00:00Z

The types of visual email editors: simplified with template options, complex builders, and using your own custom template.

Penn Jillette Discusses Connected Tech and Video Gaming

2019-08-06T00:00:00Z

"Few exercises help clarify your thoughts better than writing." [tweet]

2019-08-06T00:00:00Z

The early internet is breaking - here’s how the World Wide Web from the 90s on will be saved [video]

2019-08-05T00:00:00Z

Fish: a tap essay [app, article]

2019-07-30T00:00:00Z

"What if the relationship between mind activity and meditation also applies to cyberspace vs realspace?" [tweet]

2019-07-07T00:00:00Z

Tribute bookshelf

2019-07-07T00:00:00Z

I’ve been organizing stuff at my new place. I used to have an entire bookshelf where I kept primarily books and comics. I used to have shelves under my TV in my living room where I kept CD’s, DVD’s and video games. I used to keep comic books in boxes in my closet. But then I started listening to music digitally. And reading ebooks on my iPad Mini. Then comics. And of course movies and shows are now streaming. Videogames are downloaded. Because it’s the content of the media that’s important, not its physical form.

Before I moved, I decided to do some Marie-Kondo-style cleaning to keep only things that “spark joy”. This lead to getting rid of around half of my physical media. My goal was to fit everything on my one bookshelf. And this is the result. Since I’ve been going fully-digital for years, the shelf is more of a tribute to the stuff that inspired me when I was younger (and still inspires me). I’ve been keeping track of the media that I enjoy, as I enjoy it, for the past fifteen years. But now, that database isn’t just a log, it’s a digital bookshelf.

The Chemical Brothers - Get Yourself High ft. k-os [video]

2019-06-29T00:00:00Z

Rethinking how technology uses our personal data

2019-06-12T00:00:00Z

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

2019-06-07T00:00:00Z

Sleep is your superpower [video]

2019-06-03T00:00:00Z

Build Your Own Fan Club: How to Use Your Email List [video]

2019-05-24T00:00:00Z

If you're trying to build an audience, email newsletters are the new social media. This video from Chris Zukowski shows how to build a fan club for your indie art product using an email list.

Using a specialized workflow to do better work

2019-05-15T00:00:00Z

Working together on a team based on maximizing the most valuable aspects of your skillset while allowing other team members to maximize what they’re good at.

Muse: designing a studio for ideas

2019-05-12T00:00:00Z

Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?

2019-04-08T00:00:00Z

Responsive emails: modularize to mobilize

2019-04-03T00:00:00Z

At least half of email opens now happen on mobile. So there’s no longer an excuse to not enhance your emails for mobile!

Information overload

2019-03-31T00:00:00Z

Too much information as an impediment for action.

Remy: Affluenflammation (Red Hot Chili Peppers Parody) [video]

2019-03-20T00:00:00Z

Why You Should Care About Email Design

2019-03-13T00:00:00Z

Thriving in a startup by finding others like you

2019-03-11T00:00:00Z

This year's Phoenix Startup Week theme is #ThrivePHX, for helping entrepreneurs grow by involving the Phoenix community in their process.

The use of brand in email

2019-02-20T00:00:00Z

Branding and design aesthetics can sound like a fuzzy proposition, but understanding their underlying principles can lead to strategic results.

Why newsletters beat social media

2019-02-18T00:00:00Z

Paul Jarvis explains why newsletters are actually better than social media.

Stop Wasting Energy On These 3 Undeniable Energy Wasters [video]

2019-02-15T00:00:00Z

Avoiding senseless multitasking, focusing your efforts, and surrounding yourself with the right people.

Life is NOT a Journey - Alan Watts [video]

2019-02-15T00:00:00Z

Why I ignore the design industry on purpose

2019-01-29T00:00:00Z

Busy is the new stupid

2019-01-20T00:00:00Z

Attention deficit

2019-01-12T00:00:00Z

Our phone is a distraction in not only wasting our time, but wasting our attention.

2018 year in review

2018-12-28T00:00:00Z

The big thing I've been talking about this past year is my switch from eating meat and dairy. I even put together a guide for eating plant-based that includes other healthier living tips. It might be worth checking out for ways to start off the new year! And while you're at it, here's an approach to take when starting new goals or projects.

The blog is now categorized into four themes: Art & Design, Marketing & Promotion, Tech & Culture, Growth & Craft. And there are featured posts at the top of each category.

Blocks Edit celebrated its one-year anniversary last month. I've been blogging on its Content + Code blog this past year as well, with posts mainly focusing on better email design. I've also blogged on the things I've been learning about marketing and sales while doing research to promote Blocks Edit.

I posted up my second short story this year. It's called New Sight and it's about an engineer on his way back from a trip to Japan, about to land back home in San Francisco - 20 years into the future. Along with the story, there are MP3 links to four songs that serve as a soundtrack while reading the story. The songs are all by Mick Rippon, who's music is hard to find and which you probably won't find anywhere else on the web! His music originally inspired the subject of my first short story, Impulse Tracker, which I've also added a soundtrack of his songs for.

And, did you know that this year marks 25 years since the release of both Myst and Doom? 50 years since 2001: A Space Odyssey. 10 years since Breaking Bad first aired. And, 30 years since the holiday classic, Die Hard, came out.

Recommendations and stuff

If you subscribe to my monthly email list, you'll know that at the end I highlight the good stuff of the books I've been reading, along with comics, what movies and shows I've enjoyed, along with videogames, and even music. Here are my favorites of the year.

Books

On marketing, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday has all the essentials of marketing that stand the test of time. And on sales, To Sell is Human by Daniel H. Pink will teach you about why sales is misunderstood and its importance on how we make decisions.
On design, a couple of great reads: The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero, available online in its entirety for free; and Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, a former Apple engineer who worked on the original iPhone and gives a nuanced overview of how design is more than just the way something looks.
On art, This is for Readers: The Wax and the Wane of Charles Bobuck by Hardy Fox. The free ebook is about art and life, and the art and life of Hardy Fox, one of The Residents band members who died this year.
For the actual way to live longer and feel better, The Idiot's Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition: Second Edition by Julieanna Hever and Ray Cronise will show you why eating plant-based is the healthiest diet along with practical ways to go about doing it for people of all ages, body types, and health conditions.
For introverts out there, or those who think they may have some introvert in them, Quiet by Susan Cain is an essential read that not only taught me just how introverted I am, but what it really means to be introverted! And a related book, The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is a deep philosophical look at the world based entirely on how we interact with each other.

Comics

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, retold in comic book form by Chaboute; a more digestible version of the classic book!
Casino Royale, another adaptation, based on the first James Bond book, though the original book is also worth reading!
The DC Universe by Neil Gaiman which includes a rare and unique Superman and Green Lantern story, and the infamous Batman story, Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

Movies

Nuts! — the true story of an eccentric genius who built an empire with his goat-testicle impotence cure, and Our Nixon — made of never-before seen Super 8 home movies filmed by Nixon's aides, two documentaries by Penny Lane that will change how you look at history!
Ant-Man, my favorite super-hero movie of the year, which I was reluctant to see when it came out originally and completely regret doing so! Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther were also good.
Roman J. Israel, Esq., The Promotion, and Marshall are movies you may not have heard of that are definitely worth checking out.
Jim & Andy, about the crazy way Jim Carey filmed Man on the Moon. (You don't need to have seen the movie to enjoy it.) And somewhat related, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise about another kind of crazy way an artist does his job.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, from excitement about hearing that there is a sequel in the works (another one)!

TV shows

Patriot, seasons 1 and 2 on Amazon Prime; one of my new favorite shows of all time!
Gravity Falls, a cartoon for kids that's not just for kids is a lot of fun. It's only two seasons and goes by quicker than you'll want it to. It's all on Hulu. Be sure to watch the additional shorts available on YouTube after season 1.
Breaking Bad, which I rewatched as part of its 10-year anniversary (it's on Netflix).
And of course, the latest seasons of Better Call Saul, Black Mirror and South Park.

Videogames

Red Dead Redemption 2 which is as good as everyone says it is. It can even be watched as a good TV series, which is how I enjoyed it via YouTube play-throughs.
A couple of fun, short games I enjoyed on my iPhone: Plug & Play and Florence.

Misc

A couple of newer podcasts I've been listening some episodes of that I might listen to more of: The Voluntary Life, and Time Off.
And the podcasts I listen to regularly: Penn's Sunday School, and Rework.
I've been reading the Farnam Street blog recently, with some good insights on thinking and learning.
For music, I've started a couple of playlists of songs for Patriot and Breaking Bad of my favorites while watching each show. And I've added my top five favorite Electric Six songs to my Faves playlist.
moonsix nylon belt — the most comfortable, convenient belt ever!

The complete list can be found in my Faves section of the site. And be sure to subscribe to the newsletter for more each month.

I hope you've had a great year and here's to an even better 2019!

The Art of Stillness

2018-12-27T00:00:00Z

Doom and videogames 25 years later

2018-12-23T00:00:00Z

Doom came out 25 years ago. Doom was one of the first videogames I was really into as a kid. Which is pretty funny, because another game I played at the time was Myst which also came out 25 years ago and couldn't be more opposite in style and theme. I remember playing both games in a dark room late at night, turning up the sound to fully immerse myself.

Both Doom and Myst are monumental videogames as art. While Myst shows the power of interactivity and storytelling, Doom is a display of the visceral experience of videogames. Its gameplay design and audio set a perfect fun tone. The 2016 sequel was a worthy follow up that was able to hit on that same feeling.

In fact, if you look at videogames today, you can almost categorize them as being either like Myst — an immersive adventure story, or like Doom — an adrenaline rush. Or, in some cases, a combination of both. And despite the advancement of videogame technology, it's those elements done very well in Myst and Doom, that makes them still fun to play 25 years later.

Bad Incentives: The impossibility of criminal justice reform

2018-12-22T00:00:00Z

2018 email design in review

2018-12-18T00:00:00Z

A big trend... is the shift towards using a design system for email campaigns.

Getting over the hump

2018-11-24T00:00:00Z

Basecamp Hill Chart concept (graphic via Signal v. Noise)

The project management tool I use for my work, Basecamp, released a new feature a few months ago called Hill Chart. It has really helped on the couple of projects I've used it on so far by providing a more accurate picture of progression.

What makes it so inspiring is how it visualizes a fundamental way we go through anything, whether it's work or personal goals: we start out in an upward struggle that feels difficult to get through, and as we keep pushing, we suddenly feel like everything comes together and becomes easier.

This is a constant pattern in design work where a big chunk of the initial work is understanding the underlying problem, researching and gathering notes, and developing a mental model, before even getting to any visual work.

A couple of my own more recent goals I've talked about before are also good examples: eating plant-based, and content marketing.

For eating plant-based, after getting through the cravings, one of the toughest parts for me was making my eating routine where I didn't constantly have to worry about it. That alone took almost a year until I felt good about it. Now it seems easy, it's become a natural thing for me.

On content marketing, I started out this year committing myself to writing 1–2 blog posts a month and sending out two newsletters each month (one for Blocks Edit, the other for ovidem). It initially felt overwhelming as I was barely doing a single blog post a month at the time, if that. But having practiced doing it almost a year now, I've developed a muscle for coming up with ideas regularly, keeping notes, and sitting down to write which now doesn't feel like the chore it was at the beginning of the year.

Using the Hill Chart as a tool, you manually plot a point of where you feel you're at on the hill with what you're working on and review it over time. Stress and anxiety comes from the unknowns. Having a way to put them into perspective I think greatly helps you alleviate some of the unnecessary worry and get past the hump.

Here are more personal growth posts. And keep updated with progress on my work via my newsletter.

How airport security should work

2018-11-16T00:00:00Z

Last week I went to a conference in San Francisco. I showed up an hour and a half early to the airport, because you know, the security theater one has to go through. And this time, it sucked even more than usual.

I was pleasantly surprised initially as the line before baggage check went by pretty quickly. I then proceeded to take off my belt and shoes, empty my pockets, and take out my laptop and iPad mini from the backpack I brought with me. As I was lead towards the scanner, I asked to opt out and get a pat down, which I've done since the very beginning of the scanners being added. In all the times I've done it in the past, the procedure wasn't too bad, and didn't take that much longer. This time however, unforeseen circumstances took a good 20 minutes before someone got to me.

After the security guy felt me up, and went through my stuff, he reported a positive reading on the swab results, with a message saying I had some kind of explosive device (I got a glance of the screen, that's actually what it said)! So, I had to wait some more as the guy had to ask another employee to do the screening again. This time, I had to go into a private room and my bags had to be even more thoroughly looked through, which meant shuffling through my (semi) neatly packed clothes and then stuff them back in the bag.

Another 20 minutes in, after being groped a second time, I was finally told I was cleared to go. I spent another 10-15 minutes packing up my clothes properly, and putting things back in my bag and on myself. As I put my laptop back into my backpack, I found one of those silicone packets that comes with new stuff. I had just ordered this backpack from Amazon a few days before. That's what was probably messing up their residue detectors and they didn't even catch it! All it did is waste a lot of everyone's time and make me rush to my plane for no reason.

Having arrived in San Francisco, I decided to go down to the Sunnyvale area to meet with a friend for dinner. Having a couple of hours to go before he finished work, I decided to stop by the Apple Visitor Center in the area. Because I hadn't yet checked into my hotel, I still had my bag of clothes and backpack with me. While there, I had a coffee at the cafe, toured the store, and bought a couple of things. I went upstairs to sit on the viewing deck area with a hot chocolate as the sun went down. I soon realized that my phone was almost out of battery and asked if there was some way I could plug it in to charge it. The Apple Store employee told me my best bet was to go downstairs and use one of the iPad stations. While down there, I told another employee what I was trying to do and they even pulled up a nearby stool for me to sit while I waited. I asked if I could use my laptop in the meantime which they were also fine with.

The key thing about this was how casual and open the employees were about me doing all of this. Especially surprising in this particular Apple Store, and especially when I had reason to appear suspicious as I went through stuff in my bags among all their untethered products sitting nearby. After a while, I noticed no one even asked me if I needed any help with anything. I took a look around the store, curious what kind of security they had. They obvisously had to have something in place. There were no cameras I was able to see anywhere. However, the sides of the store had a line of employees that wore sunglasses and didn't move from their spots. And they were generally a little bigger than the rest of the employees. They were of course watching everything that was going on and communicating with each other. This was the store's way of ensuring security while not interfering with the pleasant experience of store visitors. Even someone in my situation. (Which made me feel more comfortable having spent $40 on a t-shirt.)

Which begs the question: why can't airport security work the same way?

Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

2018-11-12T00:00:00Z

The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

2018-11-03T00:00:00Z

Email is back: on the state of coding email marketing templates

2018-10-16T00:00:00Z

Slide deck and notes from my talk on email marketing for web developers.

Plant-based eating and eating what you want

2018-09-30T00:00:00Z

We all love to eat. We all need to eat. Somewhere in-between is eating healthy. But what does healthy mean? Less chance of developing certain conditions? Having more energy? Living longer? Over the past year, I’ve transitioned to plant-based eating, eliminating meat and dairy from my diet. In the process, I’ve learned more about the way we eat than I expected to going into it. And plant-based eating checks off all three boxes.

In the past, I’ve often been told about ways to eat healthier, but always felt confused about what seemed to be like a lack of consistency. “Eat ‘more’ vegetables” (How much?); “Eat meat to get your protein” (Which kind? How much of it?); “Everything is fine in moderation” (What’s the amount of moderation?); “Have you tried the lemonade diet to ‘cleanse’ your stomach?” It all always seemed to fall short of any real, definitive answer to me.

Then I read a study in a scientific journal for geriatric medicine that essentially said: “People who stopped eating meat and dairy were able to reduce their health conditions and in some cases, even reverse them.” And there was my definitive answer: eating meat and dairy was the cause of these specific conditions as people got older and the way to not get these conditions in the first place was to not eat meat and dairy.

I should add for those who don’t know me, that I’m actually a 34 year-old, skinny guy. This was not a weight-related decision. Although the health conditions covered in the scientific journal are tied to weight and obesity, as is most nutrition advice you hear, the weight itself is not a correlation of the conditions. And as a skinny guy, I may have fallen into the “I don’t have to worry about what I eat” trap because of that. And a better understanding of that was the impetus which got me on the path to finally eating healthier.

But like all decision-making for big change, the deciding is the easy part, the actual doing is where things get tricky. And in those first days of cravings for my favorite foods and cringing of foods I always avoided, things seemed unattainable. I was going out with a girl that was vegan, and she helped me find things to eat initially. She also knew about the health benefits and our conversations on eating from that point forward is part of what lead me to a whole new way of thinking about food. She introduced me to documentaries like What the Health and websites like NutritionFacts.org.

After the first few weeks of cutting down on meat and dairy, I was surprised at the results: I actually felt better and had more energy. I felt fitter physically and like I functioned better throughout the day. It’s hard to believe, and if I were telling my past self this, he wouldn’t believe it. If learning about the health implications was the reason I started, my newfound energy and sense of clear-headedness was the reason I continued doing it.

Thinking and feeling differently

Along with feeling more energetic, I would continue being surprised by what I’d learn about nutrition and my feelings towards the food I ate. Here’s an assorted list of just ten:

There are plenty of plants to eat. Along the way, I decided to put together a list of over 100 of them.
Cravings eventually go away as you continue eating better and you will even start craving healthy foods when you’re hungry.
There is no protein deficiency issue with eating plant-based. The whole protein thing is overstated in general. Too much animal protein can actually damage the liver and lead to cancer.
A full transition can take time, sometimes over a year or more for your body to fully adjust.
As you become deliberate in what you eat, you start listening to your body and learn to eat when you’re actually hungry, not because it’s the time of day to do so. In fact, there are studies showing that eating less throughout the day allows you to have more energy as you body doesn’t have to constantly digest what you just ate.
Your taste changes which means the things you now think you can’t live without can change. If you want a quick way to see this in action, try a mono-diet where you eat just one thing for two weeks (like a potato), and you’ll find that everything you eat immediately after tastes good.
For someone like me who is pretty lazy when it comes to preparing food; making a salad for lunch (which should be a primary meal in the day) is easier than actually cooking something.
There is something to be said about what you put in your body, and not putting animal flesh or cheesy excrements. It only seems okay because it’s so ingrained in our mental image of eating.
If we look at other species of animals (including those closely related to humans), the ones that are meat-eaters have different teeth than plant-eaters. Their intestinal track is also different, usually shorter to more easily digest the meat. It turns out that both our teeth and intestinal track more closely resemble those of plant-eaters!
There is a correlation to gut microbiome and eliminating animal products from your diet that once out of your system essentially causes a certain level of disgust of meat and dairy!

And there are many more little things that you’ll discover yourself when going through the process in your awareness of your attachment to food.

Cultural habits

Initially, I would welcome special occasions when I had an excuse to eat the foods I had liked. Like burgers and hotdogs on Fourth of July. But by the time Thanksgiving came around, I realized that it actually wasn’t very gratifying eating the food and that part of me was doing it just because it seemed like the occasion called for it. Not to mention that it felt wrong not eating the food my mom spent all day preparing!

Food is very much ingrained in our culture. Eating is what we do for fun. And we’ve gotten really good at making it fun. From its range of tastes to celebrations where the food often overshadows the holiday or occasion it’s for. It doesn’t mean we can’t still have some of those occasions. But it also doesn’t mean we can’t do those same things with healthier eating. After all, we’ve figured out how make animal flesh edible! It was no longer fun knowing how it affected my body and mind. It’s the same reason I stopped drinking altogether. I don’t need things that mess me up to have fun.

Unfortunately, because of our current way of farming, not everyone has the option to eat plant foods. I went to visit family in Romania during my transition and found it difficult to find any food besides processed meats and dairy. Which is surprising considering that I stayed in a small town near farmland, where you’d think they would grow their own food. They do in fact (along with raising animals), but it’s difficult and expensive for them to do in abundance to have enough year-round. And processed food is made to last longer making it cheaper for them to afford. They also don’t have as many stores to offer the many options that are available in larger cities. We’ve gotten very good at gathering our food through animal farming techniques and processing foods so they are longer lasting. Now it’s time to we do the same for plants.

Which is starting to happen. The rate at which people are switching to plant-based eating is increasing. Among athletes, the percentage is tenfold to the rest of us. There are more vegan-only restaurants than ever before. And more regular restaurants have vegetarian and vegan options (like black-bean burgers). Even fast food places like Taco Bell have non-meat, non-dairy alternatives. The Impossible Burger has gotten a surprising amount of attention. And when you take into consideration the overall effort, cost, and environmental impact of farming animals, farming plants is comparatively much easier to do on a large scale.

A side note on vegan meals at restaurants: they tend to include a lot of oils for taste which can still lead to the same kind of weight gain as eating meat and dairy (which have the same oils for taste). A key aspect of eating plant-based is to get as close to eating whole plants as possible, processed foods lose a lot of essential nutrients.

Eating what you want

As you make the change you can set your own own pace and you’ll find that your preferences will change over time as you keep improving and refining. Penn Jillette at the end of his weight loss and transition to eating plant-based said, “Now I eat whatever I want, it’s that the food I want has changed.” The purpose of food is to provide our body with the energy we need. It turns out that as we optimize how we do that, we can also enjoy it the way we always have. And if you want to feel better now, feel better later, and live longer, then plant-based nutrition is the way to go.

If you’re considering eating plant-based, I’ve put together a guide that covers the essentials with additional resources for further reading.

Plant-based nutrition and healthy living essentials guide

2018-09-02T00:00:00Z

This past year I’ve transitioned to primarily plant-based eating, eliminating meat and dairy from my diet, along with processed foods, while reducing salt, sugar and oils. I’ve put together this guide during my transition to help me stay on track, and included other important health aspects to maintain like regular exercise, proper sleep and meditation/mindfulness.

Email's untapped potential for agencies and freelancers

2018-08-28T00:00:00Z

There is a resurgence in email marketing and an increased demand for marketers, copywriters, designers, and developers.

Friendster and Bex on World News Tonight, 2003 [video]

2018-07-31T00:00:00Z

The six degrees of Bex.

Efficiency and quality are both possible with some design thinking

2018-07-24T00:00:00Z

...design thinking is essentially both creative and analytical thinking working together holistically.

Email marketing's possibilities are a mindset we choose

2018-06-12T00:00:00Z

An email client is our canvas, HTML and CSS are our paints and the tools we use for our content act as our paintbrush.

New Sight

2018-06-10T00:00:00Z

My new short story is up with a free soundtrack of songs. It’s about an engineer who has just taken a trip to Japan and is unprepared for what he finds when he lands back home in San Francisco: a world 20 years into the future.

Buttons and switches

2018-05-21T00:00:00Z

The way the Myst video game series inspired me to write and take the time to clear my mind, there is another aspect that impacted me as a kid: the interaction of the worlds, leading me to become an interactive designer.

To begin with, the original game was developed using the Hypercard software. It allowed compiling a set of 'cards' to link between which is the basis of the entire game; you click on a certain part of an image and it goes to another image/card or plays an audio or video clip. I remember using Hypercard in school, fascinated by the possibility of what you could do with that simple way to interact. That model would later be used for the web we know today; you click on a link or a button or an image and it goes to another page or plays an audio or video clip.

But there was more to the interaction in Myst that lead me towards interaction design. Each button, switch, lever, handle, crank, etc, had a purpose and when you interacted with each of them, they made you think about what that purpose was. The way the buttons and switches affected these virtual worlds, made me look at my interactions with objects of the real world differently, or, more carefully. I distinctly remember as a kid taking a moment to think about the door knob of my bedroom door and how I would make it different.

And that thinking about interaction is what lead me to web design and eventually app design. If you think about how you use your touchscreen phone, you'll see that most of it is just buttons and switches (or swipes).

Email Template Guide

2018-05-21T00:00:00Z

I spent the last month writing and designing a complete guide for building marketing emails using a template system. Please pass it on to anyone you think might find it useful!

Myst meditation

2018-05-13T00:00:00Z

The Myst video game series is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a Kickstarter that collects the entire series in an awesome collector's edition.

I grew up with Myst, having played the original game maybe a couple of years after it originally came out. I remember asking my dad to take me to Best Buy the day the sequel, Riven came out a few years later in 1997. And I continued playing every game in the six-part series after that until the last title released in 2005. As I waited to play the final game back then, I put up a Myst fansite that covered the entire series.

My inspiration to later start writing fiction certainly came from the games, in part to the theme of writing in the game: the idea that you can create worlds with your writing, which in the game takes on a literal form. And as the crazy success of the Kickstarter shows, is an idea that still resonates with people.

But there's also another aspect that I think attracts me to keep playing the game from time to time (I've been playing a bit of the iOS version of a realtime remake of the original Myst along with Riven on my iPad Mini these last couple of weekends.) Over a year ago, I started meditating using the Headspace app on my iPhone. And I've come to realize that there's also a meditative quality to playing a Myst game. In the same way meditation gives you the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts, playing through a Myst game is similar as you explore worlds by yourself, gathering your thoughts and figuring out how to move forward.

Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking

2018-05-13T00:00:00Z

From marketing to sales

2018-04-30T00:00:00Z

Just how marketing is a way to present ideas, sales is essentially trading those ideas with each other and goes hand in hand with marketing.

The web of diminishing returns

2018-03-05T00:00:00Z

how posting your content on other websites is a bad idea

reposting may be okay

but ultimately keeping it on your website leads to increased returns over time

permanent urls that go to you from Google

Facebook usage is in decline; there's a new serious contender, Vero

if you intend to reach an audience, don't run after every channel available and let them control your message, own the channel and have complete control over your message; use your own website, your own blog, your own email list; don't give away your content to someone else to make money off of

copy to channels, but lead back to your site

Medium started out as a good platform that seemd to allow you to control your content and had the added benefit of driving additional traffic to your posts; that's no longer true; they used to have custom domain so you could point URLs to your own site, that's not longer available

Tumblr used to have a good ecosystem that allowed content to be more visible using their tagging system; that no longer appears to be true; they still have custom domains, but they make sure to plaster their branding on top of your content as much as possible; It used to be a place of endless discovery; Vero feels like what Tumblr used to be, for now.

Tips on moving your content to your site; an instagram photo that's part of your blog post, etc

Focus on having an email list as a direct connection with people to get your updates; social networks as secondary

Seeking Wisdom podcast and owning your audience/content; also Derek Sivers post: Use the internet, no just companies

Analyzing your email marketing workflow

2018-04-30T00:00:00Z

Break things down, understand each job, find specialized tools, connect them all together around your assets.

Detailed dreams blind you to new means.

2018-03-24T00:00:00Z

Now you're thinking with blocks – the modular mindset

2018-03-22T00:00:00Z

I'm going to guide you through using the power of thinking about email templates modularly, or in 'blocks'.

Creative Destruction [video]

2018-03-15T00:00:00Z

The phenomenon by which a new, innovative product or process must necessarily destroy the older way of doing things.

Notes on marketing

2018-03-13T00:00:00Z

...some of my notes on marketing-related presentations I’ve attended this past month.

This thing called Marketing

2018-02-28T00:00:00Z

I've been spending the last six months or so writing content for my startup, Blocks Edit, fine tuning the website to clearly communicate what the product does, how it does it, and who it's for, along with regularly writing blog posts to further promote the ideas behind it. And during this period, I learned what marketing really means.

Startup products and community

2018-02-21T00:00:00Z

Lifting my head up from work to hear other people talk about their startup journeys while sharing mine helps me be more mindful of the ups and downs of running a business, appreciating the things that work well and making the stuff that doesn't feel less frustrating.

The ideal way to edit content in your email template

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

It ultimately allows you to put together content in a way that feels more natural and come out with the best quality email each time.

Driving

2018-01-16T00:00:00Z

I had my first car for eight years, it was a new Honda Civic. I'm currently two years into my second car, a new Kia Forte. In about five years, I'll probably end up getting another new one. What would that look like five years from now?

Will it be a self-driving car? Or, would I even need to buy a car? Waymo, hit the streets officially in my city last December. And the first product they plan to roll out is a subscription service for your commute to work. If a car payment is $400-500 per month with insurance, even if the monthly subscription was around $100-200, it would sure sound a lot better. As would being chauffeured to work instead of dealing with the commute. And if you need to take a trip somewhere outside the city, you can always just rent a car to drive.

What's going to be most interesting about autonomous cars besides the overall safety to us all, is what a city would look like. With services like what Waymo would offer, fewer of us would need to own cars which will lead to less traffic on roads and less need for parking. Or there will be autonomous shuttle services in a similar vain. Toyota announced one they're working on at this year's CES. Imagine what a city like New York would look like with autonomous vehicles on the road!

How to spend less time in the email production trenches

2018-01-09T00:00:00Z

It may be time to revaluate your production process and spend less time in the trenches.

2017 year in review

2017-12-31T00:00:00Z

This year I've had my head down in work. I wrapped up my Lifehacks comic book series. And I launched Blocks Edit, my new web app startup for email marketers.

During this holiday season, as I've tried to take some time off, I ended up revamping my ovidem.com site. Some of it is visually noticable, but most of the work is under-the hood as I rewrote more than half of the code and switched the blog from using WordPress to a simpler flat-file system with no database. I've even added blog categories to better organize articles.

And as has become tradition, below are my favorite things for the year. The complete list is on my Faves section where I've also added my all-time recommendations for each type of thing (except movies which there are just too many of!).

Movies - The Nice Guys, Secretary, Miami Blues, A Face in the Crowd, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, What the Health (documentary), Kong: Skull Island, Dawn of the Dead Director's Cut, The Lego Batman Movie, Wonder Woman, Audition, Drone, Altered States, Season of the Witch, Gilbert (documentary)
TV shows - I started watching and enjoyed every season of Orange is the New Black this year, with another good season of Better Call Saul; Death Note was my fave anime of the year; and of course this season's South Park was good, as usual
Books - I managed to get some good reading in this year – The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Presto! by Penn Jillette, Baddass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra, Think Simple: How Smart Leaders Defeat Complexity by Ken Segall, Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly, and Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – were all great through and through!
Videogames - Trials of the Blood Dragon for the Xbox One was fun; the new Mass Effect: Andromeda also on the Xbox One was good; Data Wing on the iPad Mini was an enjoyable playthrough; South Park: Fractured But Whole on Xbox One was as advertised: like playing South Park; and a game I didn't play but enjoyed watching a video playthrough for on YouTube: The Talos Principle
Comics - I'm still enjoying the Back to the Future and Think Tank series and I've dived in to Alan Moore's Swamp Thing which I'm enjoying so far

If you'd like to keep track of your own favorites, be sure to sign up to be notified when the LogStuff app is available.

That's all for this year, happy 2018!

If you want to log your own favorites, check out the Log Stuff app.

Design Machines

2017-11-16T00:00:00Z

Great piece on how we present content on the web.

Horror movies

2017-11-02T00:00:00Z

George A. Romero, creator of 'dead' films and an inspiration to me, died yesterday. I'm glad I got to meet him last year at Mad Monster.

A post shared by Ovi Demetrian Jr (@ovidem) on Jul 17, 2017 at 1:50pm PDT

Since around 2009, during the month of October, I would decide to watch a handful of horror movies that I would preselect from a list that I kept adding to. Around that time I had re-discovered the horror genre after avoiding it for so many years and felt like I needed a way to catch up on what I missed.

What I think originally drew me into horror was George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I rewatched a ‘Director’s Cut’ edition of the film on YouTube after hearing Romero died earlier this year and I still enjoyed it like I was seeing it for the first time. During my October horror movie fest every year, I would always make sure to include one or two Romero films in the lineup. And this year, I finally watched the last one (of the ones he wrote).

Having covered all his films, here are my five favorites and what makes them interesting:

Night of the Living Dead – the original zombie movie and Romero’s first film; I rewatched it this last month while reading its original script which turned out to be pretty different in quite a few areas and ultimately turned out so much better the way it was eventually filmed. Romero’s original summary for the movie was something along the lines of, “What happens when a radical political form takes over.”

Season of the Witch (aka, Jack’s Wife) – rare and hard to find (I ordered the DVD on eBay), the film is the follow up to Night of the Living Dead, and is about a bored housewife that decides to become a witch. By the end of the movie you’re left wondering whether she was actually able to cast spells or if she just used becoming a witch as an excuse to do the things she wasn’t able to get herself to do.

The Crazies – similar to zombies taking over in Night of the Living Dead, the film shows us what would happen if a virus developed by our own government had started to infect people.

Martin – similar to the way Season of the Witch leaves you thinking about the main character by the end of the film, you’re not quite sure if Martin turns out to actually be a vampire or just a kid that’s kind of messed up. This one’s also hard to find (I got the DVD from eBay).

Dawn of the Dead – the zombie follow up to Night of the Living Dead, the movie Romero is most famous for, and probably still my absolute favorite. On the podcast, Penn’s Sunday School, Penn Jillette tells a great story about him and Teller after seeing the movie when it first came out and talks about its theme of how the everyday chores of life can slowly take over the things that really make life worth living.

Also worth mentioning are the other great movies I saw this past month: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (which I rewatched and still find it to be one of the creepiest movies ever), Audition, Rosemary’s Baby, and Altered States.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

My First Chip [video]

2017-10-16T00:00:00Z

Introducing Blocks Edit

2017-10-02T00:00:00Z

Blocks Edit is now live and ready for you to improve how you send out marketing campaigns.

RIP Flash

2017-08-28T00:00:00Z

Recently, Adobe officially announced it is discontinuing support for its Flash browser plugin by 2020.

Lifehacks

2017-07-26T00:00:00Z

My second comic book series, Lifehacks is now available in its entirety. Today, the digital edition was released via comiXology and featured as part of their New Indie Comics. The paper back is also available on Amazon. And you can read it for free online as a webcomic.

The goal of my first series, Hacktivity was to see if I can somehow make a comic book. Having gotten through the process, I found that I wanted to continue giving it a try and I decided to go for an additional three comics as issues for a full story arc. With Lifehacks, I planned it as a graphic novel from the beginning, releasing it as four individual issues.

My goal with Lifehacks was to see if I can continue writing well into the future, eventually making it into a career. And I challenged myself in the process to test my limits. While I do really like the overall theme and plot of Hacktivity (it still feels very relevant), there is a definite difference to me in how my writing for Lifehacks has improved. And as tricky as it was at times (it ended up taking longer than Hacktivity to finish), the writing process felt more natural this time around.

The series is my take on a detective story. I’ve grown up enjoying different kinds of detective stories; movies and TV shows like Columbo and Psych; and books and comics like Powers. (Batman is essentially a detective story too.) Detective stories are about solving a mystery, which comes from our inherent need to figure out and resolve things. So it comes as no surprise that I’m already in the early stages of my next series, having figured out something myself: that yes, I can keep doing this moving forward.

Check out my graphic novel Lifehacks about a hacker turned private detective.

How we change

2017-05-23T00:00:00Z

One of the things I have hanging on my wall is a print of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. A few months ago I noticed the artwork’s composition fit the golden ratio. It’s a common painting technique, I just hadn’t noticed it until I decided to take a few minutes and study it. Looking at it again also gave me a better understanding of what attracted me to the painting in the first place.

Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party with the golden ratio

I decided to look at the painting again after rewatching the movie Amelie where the painting is referenced. One of the main characters paints it over and over again, each time seeing something different in the process of improving his craft. Every once in a while I decide to rewatch certain movies that come to mind. Usually the ones that have stuck with me and which seem to come up because they relate to a particular mood I’m in. Like the character in the movie, I often tend to see something different when watching them again.

But I’ve come to realize that it’s not that there is something different or something I may have missed before (though that may certainly be part of it). It’s the fact that I’m watching them with different eyes. Whether rewatching a movie, rereading a book or comic or even listening to a certain song again that I may have listened to a hundred times before, my response is really just a reflection of how I’ve changed.

We all constantly change. Sometimes we don’t realize what those changes are. And sometimes we see the changes in unexpected ways. I decided to take another few minutes to look at the painting before posting this. And will keep looking at it from time to time to learn more about how I continue to change.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

The Transform app

2017-03-31T00:00:00Z

A client Projects that I’ve been working on for a year and four months now has finally launched this week. Transform with Chris and Heidi, an iPhone and Android app.

Mass Effect series

2017-03-18T00:00:00Z

It's been five years since the last Mass Effect videogame series ended, four years including its additional content and since I played it last.

There's a new game from the series coming out next week, Mass Effect: Andromeda. I'm looking forward to it, and to prepare I decided to watch 'cinematic' edited videos of the play through of the original series on YouTube. Even without the gameplay, it works as a season of a good TV show.

Parts 1 and 2 are still great after all these years, but part 3 really shines as a culmination of the previous two and how Bioware perfected the formula. It is a great example of how videogames are an art form.

2016 year in review

2016-12-29T00:00:00Z

For my blog, inspiration seemed to be the general theme of my posts this year which included: people’s rights, the work I do, music, governance, product design, and people. Along with trying to better understand my motivators.

And here is my roundup of favorite things I enjoyed for the year:

Movies – My faves of the ones I watched and rewatched this year are: Spotlight, Black Mass, Zootopia, A Clockwork Orange, The Martian, Chuck Norris Vs Communism, Spring, Martin, Repo Man, This Must Be the Place, Scream Blacula, Scream, Glengarry Glen Ross, Look, Back to the Future.
TV shows – Some great shows this year, especially Black Mirror, and all the seasons of Homeland. Definitely add those to your Netflix and Hulu queues.
Books – Didn’t get to read many books this year, but How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame was a good one.
Videogames – The ABC Murders on the iPad Mini was a fun play through as was Tormentum. And Civilization VI on my Mac which I’ve recently been playing is good. And I’m in the middle of Obduction on my Mac which I’ve been enjoying so far.
Comics – Got some more comic book reading in this year than last year. I’ve been regularly reading issues of the Back to the Future series. The Walking Dead Compendium 3 with the Negan storyline was pretty good. I’m also enjoying the Think Tank series (up to issue 9 so far). And Brian Michael Bendis’s Guardians of the Galaxy (collected in trades 1-4) were a fun read too.
Live shows – Somehow managed to see a good amount of shows this year: Piff the Magic Dragon who I saw just a couple of weeks ago. I also enjoyed Emo Philips who I saw earlier in the year. Then there was Bob Dylan. And of course, all the great performances during ScoopFest.

The complete list is on my Faves section.

To keep track of the stuff I enjoy, I use a basic mobile web form I developed. My goal for 2017 is to release a full-blown app version (developed by a real programmer). I’m calling it LogStuff. If you’re interested in keeping track of your own stuff, you can sign up to be notified when it launches at logstuffapp.com.

If you want to log your own favorites, check out the LogStuff app.

#Scoop16

2016-11-20T00:00:00Z

Last weekend I was in Las Vegas for ScoopFest, an event held for fans of the podcast, Matt & Mattingly’s Ice Cream Social. It was organized by the hosts, Matt Donnelly, Paul Mattingly, and Jacob ‘the Audio Guy’ Smith along with the fans themselves (aka Scoops). I had a blast. Everyone was really awesome. Here was the lineup:

Day 1: Part of The Bucket Show, Matt Donnelly and Paul Mattingly’s weekly improv show, a couple of Scoops did standup routines and additional performances included Spadoni, Charlie Starling and Benny Bonobo, Puppetry of the Penis (look them up), Jimmy Slonina, and RJ Owens.

Day 2: There was a live recording of the Ice Cream Social podcast which was really fun as far as watching three guys record a podcast goes. Afterward was a great performance by The Apple Sisters who I’ve been a fan of for a while and really enjoyed seeing in person. Then everyone went to Bally’s to see Fifty Shades the Parody which Paul Mattingly was the lead of and Matt Donnelly was the production manager for. The night ended in the same showroom with a karaoke after party.

Day 3: At noon was a recording of Penn’s Sunday School with hosts Penn Jillette, Michael Goudeau and Matt Donnelly which was originally where he started out before deciding to do the Ice Cream Social podcast. Being a regular listener since episode 1, I was excited to see it live after tuning in the last few years. Afterward, Penn Jillette performed a couple of card tricks and songs, Michael Goudeau juggled, and both Penn and Goudeau did a juggling routine.

And if that wasn’t enough entertainment, there was also a food truck picnic with a live band performing while we all got to hang out with the hosts. Oh, and in the evening, after getting together to see Penn & Teller, there was another after party that topped off the whole event.

You couldn’t ask for a better organized event. Like Penn put it, it was pretty perfect. And what really made it even more worthwhile were the Scoops and the fun we all had hanging out with each other and using Twitter to organize get-togethers that filled up the rest of our time around Vegas. What a great community of people.

Thanks to Kate and Stefan for driving the whole time. Thanks Mike for giving me a copy of the Spiderman/Deadpool comic written by Penn that I was able to get signed. Some of the people I enjoyed hanging out with included: Linda and Andrew, Melissa, David who filmed most of the performances, Rebecca, Nicole, Jessica and Joey, Sarah, Graeme and Amanda, Ian, Max, Brandon, Patt, Peter, Emily, Ryer, and many others.

Thank you for the fun time Scoops! FYITF!

Not exactly related but very appropriately related, check out this short, beautiful documentary/film, The Voyagers.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Watch machines make tiny springs [video]

2016-10-28T00:00:00Z

A Brief History of... Myst [video]

2016-10-24T00:00:00Z

An interesting look at the evolution of a video game genre, from the technological requirements to the creative constraints to the business needs.

Bullshit!

2016-10-19T00:00:00Z

I've been rewatching some episodes of Penn and Teller: Bullshit! on Hulu and man does that show still hold up despite running back in 2003 through 2010.

It's been refreshing to watch instead of the bullshit of this election season, like tonight's "debate".

It's worth checking out if you haven't seen at least an episode. Warning/selling point: pretty much every episode contains some kind of nudity.

The shift in politics and media

2016-09-28T00:00:00Z

This election is showing us how the Republicans and Democrats continue to make sure they are the only choices for president as traditional media continues to decline to media on the web. The televised debate on Monday is an example of this.

Third party Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was excluded from the first debate. The Commission on Presidential Debates stated that Johnson had not met the 15% poll requirement to be in the debate. He did meet that 15% in many polls, just not the ones the CPD counts. In fact, Johnson was polling better than Ross Perot when he was allowed to debate in 1992.

The CPD’s job is essentially to get attention for candidates by putting them on TV to the most viewers possible. And they seem to have done that with a reported 84 million viewers tuning in. I wasn’t one of them. I’m more looking forward to seeing this week’s new South Park episode on their presidential election candidates: a giant douche and a turd sandwich. The view of South Park’s creators on presidential elections seems to be that it will always be two candidates we won’t like because those are the only kinds of people that would do anything for the attention. With Trump’s ego and Hillary’s all-means-justify-the-end attitude, it sure sounds like they’re right.

Part of Johnson’s and the Libertarian party’s message is the aspect that we are witnessing the death of the Republican and Democratic parties who are clinging to all they’ve got to stay in power. Having an organization like the CPD seems unnecessary until you realize that it was founded in 1988 by Republicans and Democrats to essentially set rules that keep third parties out. Then you start to understand the real reason for its existence.

TV networks who televised the debates were happy because they got huge viewership for their commercials. But as the news media is shifting to the web, it’s beginning to matter less. Gary Johnson and Bill Weld got nearly 30,000 viewers on a Facebook Live event before the debates began. Imagine if they were able to organize broadcasting in different online sources besides just Facebook. Imagine how many people would watch a debate between two real candidates like Gary Johnson and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders and Johnson and their grass roots efforts have paved the way for a future where people will choose to listen to ideas, not bickering. And we’ll get their message from sources that don’t require a stamp of approval from the CPD. Consider this the last hurrah for a giant douche and a turd sandwich as they struggle to hold on to their practice of giving people a false premise that they are the only choices available.

Republished on The Huffington Post, Republished on Medium

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Being an Apple fan

2016-09-24T00:00:00Z

I'm an Apple user because I want technology to fade into the background of what I'm doing.

Letting motivators lead the way

2016-08-28T00:00:00Z

When I was a kid, like all kids, I grew up with a sense of wonder thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up. As I discovered the web, I immediately started making my own websites for fun. Because of this, when I began working, I essentially fell into a profession as a web designer. It made perfect sense, but throughout the years I started to feel like there were other things I could be doing.

At first, I thought it was freelancing on my own. But after doing that for a while, I would find myself going to networking events asking people what they did for a living. Not because it was the standard thing to start a conversation with, but because I was interested in what else was out there. As if maybe what I was doing was the wrong thing. Even when I would interact with someone at a coffee place or a restaurant, I would think about what it might be like to have a job like that. Look at the girl at the coffee shop, it must be so nice to work in a coffee shop. Look at that DJ, he seems so into what he’s doing. Look at that nurse, it must be so rewarding being a nurse. I would eventually stop thinking about a particular job when I would picture myself doing it and realize how incompetent I would be at it!

I then turned to reading about other people’s line of work and the reasons they did what they did and began understanding the importance of motivators. For example, when I started building websites, I would do both the interface design and programming. There was a point where I had to decide between a path of primarily design and a path of primarily programming. In order to decide, I found that I needed to figure out what my own motivators for my work were. Besides the fact that it’s very difficult to do both design and programming well, I never really had the patience to be a real programmer. Even though I understood programming logic from learning it in school and had an interest in it conceptually, I never seemed to be able to get into the deeper aspects of it. It was always a means to get a design I had made working.

Practicing the process of understanding my motivators has helped me figure out the things I should focus my attention on. The things that strike a chord with me. The things I feel the need to study and analyze. The things that are worth trying out and seeing where they take me.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Music discovery

2016-07-24T00:00:00Z

A couple of months ago I found three burned CDs in a box somewhere labeled ‘Mix 2005’. I apparently made them over ten years ago at a time when I listened to music on a portable CD player that played MP3s. There are about 400 songs on the CDs. Since finding the CDs, I’ve created an iTunes playlist of (most of) the songs on them. While transferring them over, I would listen to some of the ones that I haven’t listened to in a long time. A lot of which are admittedly pretty bad. It’s been interesting seeing how much my musical preferences have changed and finding what music has really stuck with me throughout the years.

It also got me thinking about the process I went through to gather my music back then. I used to spend hours a day downloading and organizing songs to develop the extensive library I’ve built up in the last fifteen years or so. But after using the Apple Music service for just a year now, I’ve probably already doubled the song count in my collection!

In keeping my list of favorite stuff, it’s apparent that music is missing. That’s because it’s difficult to decide on whether I like a song or not just from the first time listening to it. It usually takes a few listens and a period of time to decide whether it really has a lasting quality. But I’ve decided to give a favorite music list a shot. It’s a short list at this point, but I’m sure it will grow pretty quickly. If you use Apple Music, you can subscribe to the iTunes playlist.

If you want to log your own favorites, check out the LogStuff app.

35 Interface Innovations that Rocked Our World

2016-06-23T00:00:00Z

Compiled by Xerox, the company that invented the GUI.

Let's vote for sanity

2016-05-30T00:00:00Z

As a libertarian, I’m pretty excited about libertarian ideas being talked about more than ever this election season. Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s because the two main candidates for president this year, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most disliked choices in US presidential election history.

For those of you not familiar with the Libertarian Party, it’s the third largest political party in the US and the only other party besides Democrat and Republican that will be on the ballot in all 50 states this election. This past weekend was the Libertarian National Convention which chose their official presidential nominee, Governor Gary Johnson. Compared to Trump and Hillary, Gary Johnson is someone we can be proud of electing. When asked what his campaign slogan would be in a Libertarian Party debate last week, he jokingly answered, “Make America sane again.” Which I think really defines what we’re all starting to feel about this election and explains why Johnson is already getting so much media interest as a viable candidate.

Johnson’s opinion is that most people are “more libertarian than they realize”. If you look at the issues, more people are for legalizing gay marriage, legalizing marijuana, opening up the borders for immigrants, ending government wars overseas and stopping crony capitalism. And people don’t like what the NSA is doing and feel that there is generally too much government spending. The Libertarian Party and Johnson’s campaign agrees with all those issues. And having been governor for two terms, he has direct experience and solutions for many of them. As he puts it, just Google him and you’ll find out for yourself. He also recommends a website that lets you figure out which candidate is right for you by taking a survey on your views of the issues: iSideWith.com.

It turns out that libertarian ideas are very much for everyone. Whether you consider yourself Democrat or Republican.

Now, if you’re thinking that voting for him won’t be enough to get him elected, take a look at recent polls which show that 40% of voters don’t want either Hillary or Trump. That’s certainly enough to elect a third option. And if you’re worried that voting for him would take away votes from Trump or Clinton, it turns out that because Johnson’s stances on issues fall into both traditional Democrat and Republican views, recent polls have also shown that he’s actually taking support from both candidates equally.

But most importantly, voting for Johnson means you don’t have to vote for the lesser of two evils. You don’t have to vote for hate. You can vote for someone you believe in. And we can all make America sane again.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

How the sausage gets made

2016-04-17T00:00:00Z

It’s always interesting to see how something is done. I’ve tried to be conscious of this and show how I make my comics. On my Kickstarters and Patreon updates, I include concept sketches of pages that the artist puts together before the final pages. But that’s about all I got. The reason is because the rest involves writing. And showing how something is written is just boring.

It’s kind of like finding out how a magic trick works. You think you want to know how it’s done, but when you find out how simple it is, it sort of ruins the magic. Part of what makes a magic trick special is in letting it surprise you. I think writing is the same way. The only ‘magic’ behind the writing process that happens is that someone spends hours of their time coming up with ideas and figuring out the best way to describe them in a cohesive narrative.

But, if you want to see a good example of behind-the-scenes, take a look at what the team for the Keeper and the Soldier videogame are doing. They regularly post videos on their YouTube channel talking about what’s involved in developing an indie videogame and show how they make the art and design the levels for the game. They’ve also recently released their Steam Greenlight page that shows off their latest progress. If you’re on Steam, be sure to go vote for them!

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

The FBI vs Apple and our civil liberties

2016-02-28T00:00:00Z

You may have heard about the FBI demanding that Apple crack into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters. Apple has refused because they feel that it is a huge security risk to their customers. They have explained their stance on their website.

The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has also followed up with an interview with CBS News:

To me, there is something very wrong with the government’s approach to this. The FBI didn’t ask Apple for their help, they just filed a lawsuit. Apple found out about it in the news like everyone else. And, the FBI already tried changing the password on the phone before approaching Apple about it which messed up the possibility of accessing the data they were looking for. They are being reckless in their approach and careless about what they are asking for in respect to the tens of millions of users it would affect.

One of the central themes of my graphic novel, Hacktivity is about a government’s attitude that they are entitled to their citizens information regardless of their civil rights and potential unintended consequences. It paints a picture of a government that no longer stands by the principles that it was founded on. They just do things because, well, terrorists.

“Some things are hard. And some things are right. And some things are both. This is one of those things.” – Tim Cook

As the Snowden leaks on the NSA’s tactics have shown us, the government has been on this path for years. Which is why the case with Apple is so significant. Like Snowden, they are bringing wrongful actions to light and pushing forward public discourse.

“This is not a position that we would like to be in. It is a very uncomfortable position. To oppose your government on something doesn’t feel good. And to oppose them on something where we are advocating civil liberties which they are supposed to protect. It is incredibly ironic.” – Tim Cook

Designing interfaces and writing comics

2016-02-13T00:00:00Z

For the interactive design work I’m doing recently, I’m in the process of designing ‘screens’ for a mobile app which is what you would see on the screen of your phone depending on what you’re doing in the app. We went from rough sketches and notes to black and white wireframes of the elements that would appear on key screens, to high fidelity designs and now I have all the screens in a design prototype where I am able to tap regions of a screen to take me to another screen, giving me an idea of the flow from screen to screen.

When writing a comic, I start out with rough notes and ideas. I then start developing an outline of key scenes and plot points. After that the script is written, scene by scene, panel by panel. The artist I’m working with reads the script, asks any questions they may have and puts together ‘thumbnails’ of pages which are essentially rough sketches of the panel layouts and character shots based on the dialogue.

As you can probably already tell, the process for writing is very similar to the process for interface design. Essentially, ideas are fleshed out into a visual form of storytelling. In a comic, the actions happen through reading as you go from panel to panel. In an app, the story is interactive, told through the actions that you take tapping your way from screen to screen. On some level, I think these similarities are ultimately why I have an equal interest in doing both kinds of work!

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

2015 year in review

2015-12-31T00:00:00Z

At the end of every year I go through the list I keep of various things I enjoyed and pick out my favorites. Here are my faves for 2015:

Movies: A bunch of good ones I saw and re-saw this year including: The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, Nancy Please, Nightcrawler, Citizenfour, Mad Max: Fury Road, Tomorrowland, the Back to the Future series, Inside Man, The Big Lebowski, Night Falls on Manhattan, Super, Hackers, The Martian, Inside Out, Jurassic Park.
TV Shows: The shows I enjoyed most are the final season of Mad Men, Bojack Horseman season 1, and Attack on Titan seasons 1 and 2.
Books: A couple of great books: Man’s Search for Meaning and Monkey Mind.
Videogames: This year, I mostly played games on my iPad Mini along with some indie games on my Macbook Air. One good iPad game is The Executive and an indie PC game, The Cat Lady.
Comics: The new Sandman: Overture collected trade by Neil Gaiman and another older comic of his, The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch. I didn’t get to read enough comics this year!
Live Shows: I had a fun time seeing The Book of Mormon again, this time with my parents and brother.

For the complete list of stuff I like, check out the Faves section on the site.

If you want to log your own favorites, check out the LogStuff app.

Past, present and future

2015-11-22T00:00:00Z

This year, fans of Back to the Future celebrated the year of the future based on a date in the second film in the series. The date, October 21st, 2015 was arbitrarily set thirty years out to serve the film’s story. I think the date’s celebration and part of what makes the Back to the Future movies so great comes out of our connection with time and marking certain dates of significance that have personal meaning to us.

For me, this month marks the ten-year anniversary since I started my freelance interactive design company, Distinctive Quality, back in 2005. Tomorrow marks the five-year anniversary since I launched my ebook publishing startup, Indie Aisle, in 2010. And around three years ago, in 2012, I started writing stories.

This evening, I’m going out to dinner for the thirtieth birthday of a wonderful girl I met recently and it will be another moment in time that I’ll look back on in the future.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

The virtues of being lazy

2015-10-04T00:00:00Z

Laziness is viewed as a negative characteristic. It’s something I’ve always struggled with myself since whenever I felt lazy, I would feel guilty and often force myself to try and do something about it. However, these last few months I’ve learned to stop letting it stress me out and just let the feeling come and go. Here’s what I’ve learned from being lazy with a purpose.

When I’m lazy and I don’t want to do chores, I get pretty good at figuring out how to do them more efficiently in order to spend as less time as possible having to do them on a regular basis.

When I’m lazy, my mind starts to wander on random things. Those thoughts end up being there for a reason and I should pay attention to them, further explore them, and think them through. Ignoring them will not make them go away.

When I’m lazy and take the time to think about things, I tend to reconsider some things I’m doing or how I’m going about them. There’s a time for action and a time for analyzing the motives behind your actions.

When I’m lazy and I can’t focus on thinking about things, I let the thoughts go through me without stressing out over them. I hear this is what meditation is basically about: letting go of your connection with your thoughts as a way to relax your mind and to possibly see things in a different light.

When I find myself stressing out over having a bunch of work to do, taking a break to be lazy on purpose helps calm me down to figure out how to deal with everything properly. The work seems to come easier as I’m more clear-headed.

Being lazy is just a cycle. Sometimes you feel like you can handle everything the world has to offer, and sometimes you feel depleted with little enthusiasm for doing anything. Stressing out over it only makes it worse. You might as well take the time to relax.

I was going to post this up this morning, but you know, I got lazy. And there’s nothing like enjoying a lazy Sunday!

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

A website, a comic and a video game

2015-08-29T00:00:00Z

Avagate:

Steve Douglas from Avagate and I recently launched a new marketing site for the web consulting agency he started. I’m really happy with how clean and straightforward the design, functionality and messaging turned out. I’m also excited that we’re able to share a little info on the Avagate project management system that we’re working on.

Lifehacks #2:

The script for Lifehacks #2 is (finally) done and Jen has started sending me back artwork for pages. I’ll be posting a page a week from it on lifehackscomic.com as well as the Patreon feed which will include some behind-the-scenes stuff.

Keeper and the Soldier:

I’m now a writer on a new project, a video game! Keeper and the Soldier, a ‘2.5D platformer’ based on a concept by artist Jessica Fong and produced by Jumpbutton Studio. Here’s the summary:

You play as Emi, a lonely young girl growing up in a world ravaged by never-ending war. Emi is about to fulfill her role as a soldier, when she meets a mysterious creature, an A.I. designed to safeguard mankind’s forgotten history. Desperate to survive, the Keeper puts its fate into the hands of a child and shows Emi that there is always beauty to be found in the world, as long as you keep looking for it.

I started writing seriously about three years ago this month. I looked it up after going to a concert for Limit Club’s 10th anniversary last weekend which made me think about it. And this month also marks the 40th anniversary of my favorite magicians, Penn & Teller. 40 years doing their thing! I hope to still be writing and working on awesome projects 40 years from now!

Check out the kind of trick Penn & Teller do after 40 years. One no magician has probably actually done: pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Making it work

2015-06-13T00:00:00Z

This post is basically just a bunch of links that promote my comic-writing effort. It’s all the ways I’m trying to do one essential thing: make more comics.

Kickstarter – with backer support, I’m able to complete a 24-page issue every four to five months
Patreon – the ultimate goal with my Patreon supporters is to put out an on-going series consistently, every three months and eventually even every single month
Updates stream – a simple subscription to all digital comics and page by page posts in one place

Additionally, all comics are available to buy digitally on various stores and platforms. And in paperback to order online or to pick up from me at the next local comic con I’ll be at.

You can also get infrequent updates on new releases via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr.

That’s my plan for making this comic thing work independently.

Check out my Hacktivity and Lifehacks graphic novels.

My Soylent experience

2015-05-15T00:00:00Z

You may have heard of Soylent by now: the meal hack for geeks. If you haven’t, it’s basically a meal replacement drink designed to give you the nutrition your body needs while making it easy to prepare and consume. Beyond that, the vision of Soylent is in some ways like the film the product is named after. It’s a solution to the resource-intensive process of how we gather and produce our food. It may not seem like a problem now, but before we know it, it’ll turn out that Charlton Heston was right and the world is ruled by damn, dirty apes.

Let’s look at the practical use case. I have a hard time getting up in the mornings. It’s not because I’m not eager to start the day. It’s because I’m apparently hesitant to end the previous one and end up going to bed around midnight. And I wake up around 8 am because I need a full eight hours to function. As I get ready for the day, it’s turns into 9:30–10am by the time I get to work. I start by going through email which can be a time suck. When I finally get to doing actual work, it’s past 11am. An hour and a half later when it feels like I’m in the flow of productive work, I have to drop everything to have lunch.

This is the primary reason why Soylent works for me. Because it helps deal with the interference of the day that lunch can be sometimes. Since starting on Soylent at the beginning of the year, I no longer feel like I have to schedule things around a lunch hour. I just go on with my day and start drinking Soylent around noon, on and off for about 2–3 hours. (I’m finishing up today’s meal as I write this.)

Many people eat their lunch in a hurry, it’s one of the main reasons why fast food exists. As Soylent can replace the bad food choices we make when we’re in a rush, it can be a healthier option. I would go even further and say that Soylent is even better than a meal considered on the healthier side. When you think about it, getting the right combination of a balanced meal is a complicated process that requires having a good understanding of nutrition and properly preparing the combination of components needed. Soylent packages it all together for you in a calculated way that covers the spectrum of what your body needs. It’s essentially how astronauts eat!

It’s also a cost-effective alternative. For me, I’ve found that it replaces roughly $80–90 worth of groceries. The cost of my Soylent plan is $70 per month. Not huge savings right now but as the formula evolves, the cost goes down. A couple of weeks ago, the product went from version 1.3 to 1.4 and eliminated the need for having to add canola oil to the mix. Because of this, I I was charged $10 less for this month’s supply. And besides hard costs, there is a bunch of time saved from getting those groceries and preparing meals.

The most common reaction I get when I talk about Soylent is why would I want to stop eating food. Well, I’m not completely replacing food. I usually drink Soylent for lunch and still enjoy a nice dinner. Or, if I decide to go out to lunch with someone, I save Soylent for dinner. I’ve noticed that doing this actually makes me appreciate food more when I do eat, including the social aspect of it. Which is how I think Soylent works best. Not as a complete replacement for food, but as a source of energy for when your body needs food, while still allowing for times when you can enjoy food.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Winamp

2015-03-22T00:00:00Z

During the early days of MP3s, WinAmp was the best Windows MP3 player around. It had a simple interface that you could even change the look of by downloading 'skins'. I even made a couple of skins myself back then.

Winamp history

2015-03-22T00:00:00Z

During the early days of MP3s, WinAmp was the best Windows MP3 player around. It had a simple interface that you could even change the look of by downloading ‘skins’. I even made a couple of skins myself back then.

Chores

2015-02-22T00:00:00Z

Teller, of Penn and Teller fame has been known to say that the things you’re most passionate about you do when all the chores are done. (I couldn’t find a direct quote because you know, Teller doesn’t talk.) This feels very true to how I eventually decided to start writing. But man, sometimes the chores seem to never end.

2015 has started out with so many things going on for me that these last two months just flew by. Among them: I found a new day job, got a new car, and attended the first comic con of the year. And none of these things came easy.

Through all these chores, I did manage to finish the script for Lifehacks #1 which I had intended to wrap up over a month ago. I had it basically ready in December but it needed a good amount of details work. And as often tends to be the case, the details can take forever. But now it’s completely done and Jen is getting artwork made. I’ve even kicked off the webcomic.

The upside of doing chores is that when you go back to doing the work you’re passionate about, it feels like you have renewed energy for it and ideas seem to come easier and seem clearer than before. Because your thoughts on what you feel you need to do never go away, they’re always there in the back of your mind. And taking a break to let those thoughts formulate is sometimes part of the process.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

Jeffrey Lim's Blog: 20 years of Impulse Tracker

2015-02-22T00:00:00Z

I never programmed any music myself, but I sure listened to a lot of MODs when I was a kid and I’m sure a lot of them were written with Impulse Tracker.

A look at my past publishing things on the web

2014-12-28T00:00:00Z

Growing up, I've always enjoyed making things. As a kid, my favorite toys were Legos. I would draw all the time and wanted to be a animator when I grew up. It's no surprise then that I immediately got into computers as a kid, especially when it came to using a computer to make things.

As soon as my dad hooked our family up to the internet and I discovered there was a way to make my own websites, I did it. By high school, I was making fan sites for movies and was pretty successful at it.

By the end of high school, the skills I developed lead me towards a job as a professional web designer. And for the last ten plus years, I've helped many small businesses get their ideas, products and services up on the web.

About five years ago I started working on what eventually turned into a tool for authors to self-publish their work as ebooks. And a couple of years ago, I finally sat down and started writing my own stories.

The web is a communication medium, made specifically for getting things to other people. Reflecting on things this time of year, I've realized publishing things on the web is the common thread of why I do the things I do. And why I will continue doing them.

How Indie Aisle works

2014-11-25T00:00:00Z

Getting your promo page setup to start selling is super simple.

New kind of ebook reading experience

2014-10-08T00:00:00Z

One thing that makes Indie Aisle unique is the reading experience. It's designed to make it easy for your readers to start reading right away and give them options for reading the way they are most comfortable with.

Connecting online and In Real Life

2014-09-16T00:00:00Z

My view from Saboten Con 2014 at Artist Alley booths

I’ve recently released my first graphic novel. I decided to go the self-publishing route with it from the beginning which also meant I had to figure out how to self-promote it. One of the best ways I’ve found to get it out to people so far has been to take the hardback book to sell at comic book conventions.

I live in Arizona where it turns out there are a bunch of comic-related conventions, which is surprising since just five or six years ago there was basically only one: Phoenix Comicon. Now Phoenix Comicon is huge, comparable to the size of any of the major comic conventions around the US with a bunch of smaller conventions throughout the year that are related to comics in some way. The last one I went to was actually geared primarily towards anime fans (a niche market of its own) who also enjoy comics. The point is, these conventions were essentially non-existent just a few years ago.

So what caused this sudden surge in comic conventions? Is it all these Marvel movies creating new comic fans? Maybe but the anime convention I was at hardly had anyone dressed in superhero cosplays. Sitting at my booth watching people walk by, I remembered growing up a fan of the Myst video game series and how I almost went to a convention/gathering of fans that was based solely around the game. It was the fans themselves that organized it, and they did it all online. And then they met in person, probably for the first time ever after chatting with each other on forums for years.

And that’s how these comic conventions along with other fan conventions work. People who interact online about their favorite movies, TV shows, video games, etc, now have a dedicated venue to meet IRL, in real life. And it’s social tools like Facebook that allows them to connect with each other. Before this year’s Phoenix Comicon, there was a Facebook Group dedicated to preparing for the convention and then meeting each other at the convention, each person wearing a blue ribbon so they would recognize each other in the massive crowd.

Despite the point of view that people are becoming less social because of the internet, the opposite appears to be true: people are more social, including in-person because the internet is allowing them to connect in easier ways than ever before. Make a connection online and then meet IRL. Connect IRL and then keep chatting online. The internet is just a tool for us to continue being the social creatures we’ve always been.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

My first major writing work, out in the world

2014-08-02T00:00:00Z

I recently released the Hacktivity graphic novel, including the paperback edition. It represented a year and a half’s work in its final form.

The book includes an introduction written by Mr. Brian Brushwood. I became a fan of his magic show years ago and even got a chance to do some design work for him a few years back. I sent him a preview copy of the book and was thrilled when he told me that he not only enjoyed reading it but also agreed to write the intro for it!

A couple of weeks ago, I went to check out a local band called The Limit Club since the lead singer, Nick is a friend of mine from high school. I realized that they’ve been playing for quite a few years now (and I kinda felt like an asshole for not checking them out all this time). I really enjoyed their show and it was awesome catching up with Nick afterward.

Both Brian and Nick started doing their thing years ago and they’re still at it. It’s encouraging to see that as I continue doing more writing work, and plan on doing it for many more years to come!

Check out my graphic novel Hacktivity about hackers that take on the NSA.

Change for change's sake

2014-05-30T00:00:00Z

This past month I was in Romania visiting family I hadn’t seen in about 8 years. While there, I spent a majority of my time at a bar/cafe that my aunt and uncle own.

Being a million miles away from home, I started reflecting on things and eventually started thinking about big life changes that I felt I needed to make. However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I had to essentially throw away many aspects that were currently going well in order to make room for the drastic changes. It can be easy getting lost in what we should change in our lives for our goals and miss what we already have for them.

Realizing this, I started to focus on the things I could do with what I had to work with instead while leaving open the possibility for change when it made sense. Back from my trip with this in mind, I have a new sense of inspiration going forward.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

The state of Indie Aisle

2014-04-27T00:00:00Z

When I originally came up with Indie Aisle over four years ago, it's original goal was to make it easy for independent authors to publish their books digitally online.

My own Yahoo logo animated GIF

2014-04-22T00:00:00Z

Yahoo has recently started animating the logo on their site. It reminds me of their early days on the web. I was such a fan back then that I made my own animation of their logo. The animated GIF above has a timestamp of 12/26/1996, I was 12 years old at the time.

Doing the work itself is the result

2014-03-20T00:00:00Z

Tomorrow I post the final page of the first Hacktivity story arc. It’s been quite a year working on it, and while I’m ready to do more with the series, I’m going to take some time off from it. At least the writing part, there’s still a lot to do regarding trying to get it out to people!

Besides my writing, there’s another side project I’ve been working on almost four years now. It’s a web app for independent authors to publish ebooks that I call Indie Aisle. While it hasn’t been a business startup success story, there’s a lot that I’ve learned from working on it and have not given up on it yet simply because I still find the work involved interesting.

Now excuse me while I take a break and go kill some zombie Nazis in South Park: The Stick of Truth!

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet

2014-02-08T00:00:00Z

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell and why the Internet will never be the same.

Time to put in the log in blog

2014-01-28T00:00:00Z

I’ve blogged on an off in the past, but it was always about thoughts and ideas in the form of short articles. I seem to have missed the point of the logging part of blogging, so I’m going to give it a shot.

What I primarily want to cover is my efforts towards becoming a writer. Though I’ve attempted to write for years, I’ve only been seriously putting in the work for the past year and a half. So far, I’ve self-published a short story and am currently working finishing up a comic mini-series called Hacktivity.

This past weekend, I sat at a table at the Amazing Arizona Comic Con to promote Hacktivity to anyone willing to listen to me talk about it. I had some good conversations and met a bunch of great people. I’m enjoying doing the cons more and more and will hopefully be attending more of them in the future.

Earlier this evening, I watched “what.”, a comedy special by Bo Burnham. I’ll leave you with a clip of my favorite part from it.

Keep in touch and get updates on what I'm working on and thinking about.

David Karp, founder of Tumblr, presents Steve Wilhite, inventor of the GIF, with the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award [video]

2013-05-22T00:00:00Z

Impulse Tracker short story

2013-05-21T00:00:00Z

I’ve written a short story while ago that I thought I would share here. If you’re a follower of the blog, you’ll be familiar with some of the themes covered. Enjoy!

First website ever goes back online on the open Web's 20th birthday

2013-05-01T00:00:00Z

Twenty years ago today, the organization that created the World Wide Web made its underlying technology available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. To commemorate that occasion, the very first website is now back online at its original URL.

If Hackers Didn't Exist, Governments Would Have to Invent Them

2013-03-30T00:00:00Z

The hackers who dominate news coverage and popular culture — malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large — don’t exist.

Pirates of Silicon Valley trailer [video]

2013-03-07T00:00:00Z

The Machine That Changed the World documentary

2013-01-24T00:00:00Z

The Machine That Changed the World is a comprehensive documentary about the history of computing produced in 1992. Here are the highlights of the series.

Part 1: Giant Brains

Charles Babbage has the idea of the 'difference engine', the first mechanical computer while working with human computers who made calculations by hand.
100 years later, German engineer Konrad Zuse built the first functional computer using binary counting from mechanical telephone relays.
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer using vacuum tubes. They went on to start the first commercial computer company making computers for scientists.
Alan Turing's experience as a codebreaker lead him to build Colossus, the first computer that worked beyond calculating arithmetic. He later developed another computer that worked as a word processor. He compared the computer to the human brain and invented the concept of computer programs.

Part 2: Inventing the Future

IBM makes the first truly mass-produced computer, selling one thousand during the early 1950's. Even though it was slower than its UNIVAC competitor, it was easier to use.
Writing software for the computers to understand commands was made easier with programming languages. First, FORTRAN was developed for scientists and mathematicians to write equations. Then COBOL for businesses which was a very English-oriented way to write a program.
Computers start showing up in factories and Automation taking over people's jobs becomes a burning issue. But employment actually rises as new jobs and industries are being created because of computers.
The transistor replaces vacuum tubes in computers which allows them to be made much more complex and powerful. But wiring is an issue until the invention of integrated circuits in 1959. Even though they were far too expensive initially, during the next ten years, the cost drops to pennies while power increases a thousand fold.
NASA builds the smallest computer for its power using integrated circuits in 1969 for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. A new generation is born that never knows a world without space travel and computers.

Part 3: The Paperback Computer

The Xerox PARC research facility founded in 1970, starts to look at ways to 'humanize computers' for the ordinary user. Studying how kids learn from their environment with the intuitive senses of touch and visuals, the engineering team creates an 'illusion of reality' and develops the Desktop interface. They had a working concept called the Alto by 1973 but was never made into a product since it didn't fit into Xerox's business model.
The Altair computer kit comes out for technical hobbyists to put together their own computers forming clubs across the nation and growing large enough for a convention in 1976. Startup companies formed including Apple by fellow-hobbyists Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak. With the help of Mike Markkula, Apple turns into the fastest growing company in history.
The personal computer industry takes off with more people using computers, but because of its command-based interface, many find it very frustrating to use. In 1984, Apple releases the Macintosh, the first Graphical User Interface personal computer which Steve Jobs gets the idea for from visiting Xerox PARC and seeing their Alto concept.
As the software for computers becomes a crucial part of reaching new audiences, a new market is formed where programmers like Bill Gates and Microsoft make only computers programs for regular people to do many different things, all on the same machine.
Kids are able to quickly figure out how to interact with personal computers as everyday objects and are now a part of the culture of a new generation. Expanding on the use of senses, the documentary concludes by asking if virtual reality in 3D space would be the next natural user interface.

Part 4: The Thinking Machine

Making a computer see objects and move was harder than previously thought, requiring a lot of computational power.
Understanding language and talking to a computer was also attempted, leading to translations made by computers.
Eventually, the computer was used for very focused tasks which made it useful in expert areas that were often routine.
Machine learning was another approach to trying to crack the artificial intelligence code, by feeding the computer the information it needed to know.

Part 5: The World At Your Fingertips

Computers talking with each other, and digitizing information leading to all the information in the world stored digitally.
Connected to the world via the computer network changes the way we communicate with the world, like changing financial trading.
Scientists connect to share knowledge on interconnected computers they call the Internet.
All your information is now stored on computers, with sometimes faulty data. Employee monitoring also becomes a privacy issue.

Changing formats of video games

2013-01-12T00:00:00Z

Recently I did some cleaning for the new year. Most of it involved throwing away old stuff I no longer needed. Among the stuff were boxes from old video games. I'm not sure why I kept them for so long, I guess it's because there was the extra space and they didn't get in the way. Going through them, I realized how much the boxes for video games have changed throughout the years, getting smaller and smaller. Now they mostly just come in the same plastic cases as DVDs. And now, with downloading games digitally, there may not be a need for any packaging! In fact, most of the games I've played this past year I downloaded online.

An example of a game I have grown up with and ended up buying in multiple versions is Riven. Here's how its packaging and format changed throughout the years. First, the original large box which came with the game on 5 CD-Rom discs (yes, each had to be switched out during different points in the game). Then, Riven along with its predecessor, Myst came together in one larger special edition box along with some unique items. Later, another pretty large box with a trilogy of Myst games as part of its 10th anniversary which included Riven on a single DVD (no more switching discs!). Eventually the game was released as a download via Steam and Good Old Games. A while back it was also released for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. And just this week, a higher quality graphics version has been released for the iPad.

I ended up throwing away the boxes I had. Well, most of them, I kept a couple as mementos. I still have the various CDs and DVDs and their cases which came in the boxes. I wonder how long I'll go before letting them go too.

Re-Wired: Issues 4-6

2012-12-15T00:00:00Z

Wired Magazine has all of its articles archived online since its very first issue. Below is my highlight of articles to check out in issues 4-6. My overview of issues 1-3 is available here.

1.04: When Bandwidth Is Free - an interview with George Gilder about how fiber optics is the future of internet connectivity and all communications. Because of how fiber optics technology works, he believes that cost will eventually be so low that it will be free in much the same way transistor components are used for computers. Google recently launched its Fiber internet service in its first town which means we're on our way there.
1.05: Nowhere to Hide - since the early days of the internet and the information age, there has been the issue of privacy. But why is it really an issue and why should it be a cause of concern? The author makes some interesting points in this short article.
1.06: I could not find an article that was really worth mentioning in this issue.

Mod music faves

2012-10-06T00:00:00Z

Modular music, or Mods for short, are music tracks made on computers before the MP3 format turned into the de facto standard. When I discovered them as a kid I was hooked and downloaded as many as I could on the slow dial-up internet connection of the time. A few years ago, I converted some of my faves to my personal MP3 music library which I listen to every once in a while.

Below are a few tracks worth checking out from the guys that did one of the most famous Demoscene demos of all time. You'll need a player that could handle the various Mod file formats. I recommend using the VLC media player.

Purple Motion (aka Jonne Valtonen)

Unreal ][ was used for most of the Second Reality demo as part of their demogroup, Future Crew. More info on him can be found on his last.fm profile.

Skaven (aka Peter Hajba)

2nd Reality was used towards the end of the Second Reality demo and during the credits. Beyond the Network, a 30-minute track would go on to be used for the Bejeweled soundtrack along with new tracks that he did. His other soundtrack work can be found on his Bandcamp profile.

Necros (aka Andrew Sega)

Necros (aka Andrew Sega) had a very polished sound to his songs. It's no surprise that he went on to become a professional music composer for video games and produce two albums under his alias, The Alpha Conspiracy.

Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History

2012-09-09T00:00:00Z

The growth of the Net is not a fluke or a fad, but the consequence of unleashing the power of individual creativity. If it were an economy, it would be the triumph of the free market over central planning.

Hypercard & the invention of the web

2012-09-01T00:00:00Z

I remember using HyperCard as a kid at school, amazed by what I could do with it. Later I started building websites with the same enthusiasm and eventually became a professional web designer. Even though I only used it for a brief amount of time, I think it’s what inspired me to do what I would be doing for a long time!

25 years of HyperCard

2012-08-31T00:00:00Z

I remember using HyperCard as a kid at school, amazed by what I could do with it. Later I started building websites with the same enthusiasm and eventually became a professional web designer. Even though I only used it for a brief amount of time, I think it's what inspired me to do what I would be doing for a long time!

Demos: digital art for computers

2012-08-25T00:00:00Z

When I was a kid, during the early days of personal computers when my dad custom-built hardware to get the best performance possible, we would test his accomplishments with PC Demos (and eventually video games). Demos were audio-visual presentations that ran in real-time on a computer. They started as a way to show off computer performance, but quickly became an art form, mixing graphics, music and coding mastery into unique compositions. The video above is one of my favorites that remains engrained in my mind for years since I would run it as a real-time computer program over and over again. It's considered one the best of its kind, voted "Top 10 Hacks of All Time" by Slashdot.

Starting out in the late 80's, Demos were featured at Demoscene parties which were held in different parts of the world for hardcore computer enthusiasts who would carry their own large, heavy computer towers and CRT monitors and wait in line in freezing weather for hours just so they can be in a huge dimly-lit room filled with other guys (and maybe some girls) who shared their passion for tech and personal computers.

Demoscene events are still alive and gathering big crowds even today (the biggest event of the year took place just a few weeks ago). And Demos are still being made, in many ways with a higher degree of creativity as technology isn't as much a limitation as it was in the past. And it turns out that dubstep music is a great complement to its cyber-focused visual style!

Demographics: Behind the Scene [video]

2012-08-25T00:00:00Z

A short documentary about the Demoscene, a computer art subculture started in the late 80’s and blowing up in the early 90’s.

Steve Jobs Talk 1983 - Center for Design Innovation [audio]

2012-08-25T00:00:00Z

Some great insight into what computers will be capable of from Steve Jobs in a rare 1983 speech. He also gives the most perfect explanation of how computer programs work.

Re-Wired: Issues 1-3

2012-08-19T00:00:00Z

I've started reading early issues of Wired Magazine. All of their articles are archived online, starting with the very first issue back in March, 1993, though you won't get the cool visuals of the original magazine. I've been a Wired magazine subscriber for a few years now and I figured they would be a great source for learning about how the world viewed early personal computing and the internet in its early stages.

I've highlighted one article I found particularly interesting in each issue below. Articles range from education to politics to business and economics. I'm thinking I'll do this regularly every once in a while for more issues during the first few years of Wired's publication.

1.01: School's Out - How the coming information age will take over public schools with what the author calls "hyperlearning". He looks at a future where broadband internet will make all the information in the world available to everyone and how the only way to properly prepare students is be is by privatizing schools. This would allow for new ways of learning based primarily on computer software and better-prepare students for the growing knowledge-based work environment. There's a lot of interesting stuff here that still rings very true today, though unfortunately we haven't advanced as much as we could have, mainly because of the bureaucracy still tied to a school system of the past.
1.02: EuroTechnoPork - Examples of technologies backed by European governments at that time that failed, including a surprising one: HDTV. The idea being that the US government should learn from their failures and not promote similar policies despite the great potential of so many new technologies that could improve the economy. We see this today in the form of energy-based technologies that governments in both Europe and the US are investing very heavily in many of which have already failed. Failure happens with companies all the time of course, but the difference is that tax dollars are being gambled away when the companies could just fail on their own otherwise.
1.03: Post-Capitalist - An interview with Peter Drucker on a knowledge-based approach to doing business and what it means for intellectual property. We're getting the idea now with how we listen to music on iTunes, read books on our Kindles and enjoy our movies on Netflix.

No more hardware tinkering

2012-08-11T00:00:00Z

Growing up with computers, any fellow computer nerd that I knew would be proud to upgrade their PC's hardware on their own, getting the latest graphics card for new generation PC video games. My dad would always build PCs for my brother and I, so I was never into modding hardware as much as my friends were, but I would still enjoy talking about the latest developments. Besides being a good way to save on the cost of getting an entire new computer, or going to a hardware store and paying someone else to do it, it was a way to make the personal computer, more personal. Tweaking all aspects of it to make it work to the extent of its capabilities so it does more of what you want it to do.

In recent years, the buzz around hardware components has shifted to entire system upgrades. Hardware has become so much cheaper that it's just more convenient to get a new box or laptop every 2-3 years. Not to mention that circuitry has gotten so miniaturized that messing with it is getting to be impossible. And now with computers coming in different form factors like tablets and smartphones, even using the term Personal Computer is going out of style.

My nostalgic side misses the enthusiasm around customizing computer hardware. But, now that the hardware is commoditized, we can instead focus on how we customize the software to work for us. After all, computers are ultimately just tools, so the more they fade into the background to do just what we need them to, the better.