What I’ve got for you today: Break a rule.
This is the remix of a few things I’ve been reading lately. Really part of things I’ve been reading over the last year.
I want you to break a rule. This probably sounds familiar in some sense. Somewhere, someone once told you that there are always times to break the rules, and thats true and moral and well and good but not specifically where I’m going. When I say ‘rules’ I’m referring to cultural and repetitive boundaries, not the speed limit. The decisions you’re making today, no matter how many times you’ve said “I don’t care what other people think”, are based on some predetermined notion of “OK”.
“I’m doing X because I think Y will like it.”
“I’m doing X because I’ve seen Y do it.”
“I read in Y that this is how you X.”
Insert witty joke regarding rave drugs here.
What I want you to do is to wipe the slate clean and do something without thinking of any amount of repurcussion. Forget the text book, forget good advice, forget anyone has done what you’re doing before. Its that influence of “oh gosh am I doing this right” that can really sour your ability to explore, learn, and create.
When you’re going to tackle something, do it for the first time. No one before you has written a book, flown a plane, or used a fork. You’re the very first person to do it, and who knows, maybe the Wright brothers had it all wrong.
There is too much
There is just too much of it. There is too much of the good stuff surrounding every moment of every day of your existence that you could possibly come to appreciate in all of the time you’ve been given to do so. Moreso, there are far too many folks who look past even the things that are incredibly easy to get.
Look at your screen. Not just the bits that are displaying this text, but look at the seams, look at the case, look at the logos and the lines and the placement of all the screws. Every little piece of everything you know has been designed in some way to suit a purpose. Organics included, form and function are the direct results of some sort of thought. Whether it be at the hand of an industrial designer who decided that there needed to be a certain degree of curve on the edge of your monitor to provide an aesthetic smoothness, or that plants have these large broad things we call “leaves” that serve as landing pods for food and insects alike, which is the result of generations of evolution and necessity.
I’m not asking you to donate to a charity or find some sort of higher understanding of your existence. What I am asking for is that you take a moment now and then to stop just being a user and a producer, and become an admirer. The gold and blue cast of twilight, the crosshatch of the fabric of your shirt, the curve of a birds wing, and the texture of a piece of paper can all be wonderful things. Our creations and accomplishments are a stamp in history of our understandings at any given time, and the greater that understanding can be, the more profound and revolutionary the stamp becomes.
The Big Picture from The Boston Globe
If you haven’t been taking a regular look at The Big Picture, you really should. Its a project that started in May ‘08 by the Boston Globe’s Alan Taylor. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday he updates with press photographs representing the big stories.
While there are plenty of blogs that do somewhat the same thing, the precision with which these photographs are chosen is astounding. From election coverage to the paralympic games and rebuilding at ground zero, the photos never cease to be beautiful and moving.
As someone who stood in the crowd of a million people infront of the capital building two days ago, I felt the same emotions running down my spine viewing these photos as I did standing there that day.
Deciding when to snap the shutter and getting it right is hard enough, but sorting through the best of the best, and capturing the emotions of the world? Kudos to you, sir.
The Palm Pre, Something to be Excited About
There was a time when the only company to go to for in-your-hand organization and 
convenience was Palm. We all had, or know someone that carried a Treo like a badge of honor. Then the light faded and Palm couldn’t keep up with the competition. The likes of RIM Blackberry, Nokia and Apple were making leaps and bounds in the hand-held phone/organizer market while Palm sat in a corner with its hands folded waiting for the bullies to leave so it could go buy its milk without any hassle.
With the recent economy and the other manufacturers holding strong, we all knew that whatever ‘big announcement’ Palm had for the Consumer Electronics Show, it had better be something absurdly impressive. Something so incredible that we all take a step back and feel suddenly frustrated that the device we own isn’t good enough, and that deciding your next purchase is going to be that much harder.
We asked, and Palm delivered the Pre: A handheld competitor for everything we know and love.
Kicking off 2009 with Twitter hacks, and what it means for you.
This week we saw two different attempts to poke holes in the relatively small community (in comparison to the likes of MySpace 
and Facebook) that we’ve come to love in Twitter. First a phishing scam has folks clicking on innocent links and wind up giving their account details to an unauthorized website, and a day later some of the leading Twitter accounts lose access to their accounts, with a few of them posting some pretty surprising messages as a result. The big questions are: Were these attacks related? How did it happen? And what does it mean for me?
I’ve got the skinny, as well as a little PSA to the Twitter community. It’s time we started caring about our security the way we did before Twitter came along.
My iBrick, and Great Customer Service
There is a laundry list of why I love my Macbook Pro. One day, I’m sure I’ll share them with you, and you’ll hate me for it. Until then, I’ll keep it to this short anecdote about my broken iPhone. See, Christmas day, I woke up to a dead phone. The iPhone I had purchased a little over 30 days ago spent the night plugged into my laptop and during that time had lapsed into a deep coma. I spent the first hour of my day searching forums, researching symptoms, and drying hard resets and restores to no avail. My beloved device had become a brick.
I had to give in and schedule an appointment at the genius bar (since I was home for the holiday, no access to an Apple store until I came back to Pittsburgh) and hope for the best. I packed up everything that came with the phone in hopes I could do a straight swap, but being a seasoned veteran of pc tech support, I feared the worst.
Prioritizing search on Twitter and Le Meur’s Bright Idea
There’s a fair amount of hubbub going on as a result of Loic Le Meur’s response to Twitter releasing a very powerful advanced search. He asks for the option to sort search results by the number of followers they have, which may very well have its applications as an option to the search, but he makes his mistake in labeling the amount of followers you have as “authority”. As a result of this the blogosphere arrives at his door with torches and pitchforks led by the likes of Robert Scoble. To directly quote Scoble: “the number of followers is a useless metric”, that is to say that in picking through whatever data we have available about a Twitter user, the number of followers they have has little to no impact on the actual value of their postings as far as information is concerned, meaning it certainly is no “authority”.
The fundamental issue I see here is the farming of an idea that can cause severe damage to the way people look at and use Twitter, both relationally and as a tool. Requesting the feature is fine but to declare it as a way to establish a hierarchy of value is insulting to everyone. Read more…
The Internet became personal and all I got was this stupid nametag.
I’m guest blogging on Bricks and Boxes:
Some day last week I woke up feeling instantly distressed, wondering, for no apparent reason, what exactly had happened to Google Friend Connect. Two days later that, I found an email in my inbox saying that I had been white-listed as a tester for the service, my mind was then blown in the advent of synchronicity, and I’m still sort of scratching my head. More importantly however, I got to thinking about what the big picture of this sort of technology would be, seeing as Facebook recently launched Facebook Connect, and MySpace is working on MySpaceID, which I can only hope will let tweens implement flashing gif backgrounds on any website they choose.
Read the whole deal here.
Art Lebedev, You disappoint me.
Theres been a fair amount of buzz lately about the newest peice of industrial design to come out of the Art Lebedev studio. Yes, the same studio that brought you the most expensive keyboard you ever wanted. They’ve designed a traffic light citing a design problem of “prefect traffic lights.” Their proposed solution? Oh yeah, its golden. Let’s make them square. Brilliant.
Now, I’m all about change and progress and taking old things and rethinking them to make them more appealing, putting old tech in a new body and all that, but with all the resources this design team has at their disposal I’m honestly surprised at the lack of imagination and forethought that went into this design. To really point out what I mean, I’ll tell you what happens to this design when you set it in front of a civil engineer.
Why the G1 is so Damn Important
I can’t start any of this without saying that a ’smartphone’ is no longer what the latest cell phones are evolving into. We had our Treos, our Palms, Blackberries, and our plethora of Windows Mobile platforms. Those were smart phones. Then the iPhone was released and it turned everyone on their heads. Suddenly the smart phone wasn’t about checking your email to make sure you got that contract to the client on time, it was about making sure you knew where the drinkup would be tonight. It was about putting your media in a to-go box, expanding the social mainstream, allowing you to access any piece of the internet your little attention deficit-driven heart desired and doing it all from one cute little paper-thin package. The caveat with pioneering this new idea is that one needs to provide room for expansion from the community, and thusly the app store became key in the success of the iPhone. However, Apple put the brakes on free expression in applications by ensuring that every app that makes it to the store passes their quality control and proper use check. A while later, Google walks in the door and says they’ll take any refuse you want to put on their device. Good for tech? Yes. Good for Android and the G1? Maybe. Good for the iPhone? You betcha.