Yearly Archives: 2008

Welcome to patrickrhone.com 2.0

If you are reading this on the website, and you have visited before, you probably notice some changes. If you are reading this in a RSS reader, I invite you to come take a look at the website because the rest of this post will be meaningless to you otherwise.

I have been thinking for quite some while about how to take an already basic and minimalist design and further reduce it to the bare minimum of what I feel it needs to be. This was further inspired by this post by James Bennett that really got me thinking about blog design and what it most important (and what is not really important at all).

What I desired was a design that put the content first, above all else, and let the rest of the site elements mostly disappear. This also meets many of my deeper beliefs about simplicity and being in the present. What you see here before you is the realization of that goal.

Here is the new road map to help you get around:

* The front page contains only the most current post. That’s it. One post per page.

* Navigation to to the previous and/or next posts is directly below each post.

* Navigation to categories, a list of recent and popular posts, info about the site, contact information, etc., has been moved to the archives or info pages respectively. These are found at the bottom of each page.

* A link to the RSS feed is also in the bottom navigation.

* For those that care, I have also switched blogging engines from Moveable Type to WordPress.

* Comments have been turned off for now. I am still trying to come up with a way to do them that is in fitting with the new design and, more importantly to me, reduces spam (boy was I getting a ton). You can send comment to me via e-mail or Twitter for now.

Speaking of comments, I would welcome any that you have about the new design. Special thanks go out once again to my friend, web guru and all around Badass™, Michael Armstrong.

My Manifesto: Thrive in the Present

> _The past serves us only in having taught us the lessons needed to thrive in the present and strive towards the future._

I came up with this manifesto entry when I was going through a particularly rough period in my life. I wont go into details but let me suffice to say that every day seemed like a worst day than before it. I had very little motivation or desire to get out of bed, and when I did I regretted it or felt forced to and, therefore, resentful of existence itself. Despite the several reasons I gave to it at the time, what was the root cause for most of this malaise? Living in he past.

A lot of us spend a lot of time saying words like “if only” or “I wish” or “I could have”. All of these thought processes are natural but unhelpful because all of those thoughts are in the past. The past has happened. You can not change it. You can only learn from it. And most of those lessons have already been taught. We all wish that terrible thing that happened in the past – a failed relationship, a death, a lost job, etc. – never occurred. The question is, who has that made you today and how do you use that new found strength? What made that last relationship fail and how can you put it to good use in your current one? Same thing in the job. Death is inevitable and no moment in this life is guaranteed. Therefore, what can you do to ensure you treat each moment as if it is the last.

I know a lot of this sounds a bit obvious and perhaps even contrite. That being said, you would be surprised at how difficult most people find it, myself included at times, to not think about and second guess the past. By meditating on this entry in my manifesto, it helps me remember how important it is to use those lessons right here, right now to consistently become better.

Followup to iPhone Shifts The Paradigm

Thanks to all who commented on my last post titled iPhone Shifts The Paradigm. There were several items brought up in the comments that I feel require further addressing in more depth here on the main page.

First of all, I still have my last Newton MessagePad 2100. I actually owned every model of MessagePad at some point in time. I even have a wireless card for it. There is still a very active user community that continues to develop for it (including wifi drivers). I used it regularly until a couple of years ago. I would likely still be finding a use and purpose for mine today if the battery would hold a charge. I have been too lazy to get one off of eBay, and now, with the iPhone, likely will not bother. It is still all set up though. Plug it into power and I can still download e-mail, surf the web, take notes, etc. I can even sync it with Address Book and iCal in Mac OS X.

Here is a picture of my 2100, which was the largest of the Newtons made:

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It is sitting on top of the paperback edition of “The War of Art” which is, from a width and height perspective, a fairly average size for most current paperbacks. In fact, the original Newton MessagePad was the size of the smaller, older style paperbacks. Give me a suit jacket or cargo pants and I guarantee I can find a pocket that the 2100 would fit into.

I agree that there are still several things that the Newton MessagePad has that the iPhone (still) does not. For instance, in my original post, I made mention of the handwriting recognition. Well, the very same handwriting recognition technology in the Newton is actually built in, by default, to Mac OS 10.5. It has actually been there since 10.3. It is called “Ink” and it shows up when you plug in a drawing tablet. It is baffling to me why this was not built into the iPhone and, at the least, offered as an alternative to the built in keyboard. The first generation Newton was widely maligned for the handwriting recognition (which did “learn” and therefore improve with use, just like the iPhone keyboard). By the MessagePad 2100, improvements to the algorithms used as well as increased processor speed made the handwriting recognition near perfect out of the box. Since the iPhone runs Mac OS X, it is a mystery to me why, to this date, Apple is not leveraging this technology (besides the Steve Jobs “computers need keyboards” thing).

Oh, and speaking of computers needing keyboards, I agree that the iPhone would greatly benefit from being able to be used with the small and highly portable Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. Once again, seems like a no-brainer, easy to fix, sell a few more peripherals, move for Apple. Kind of strange that it has not been implemented. What I don’t agree with is that being a “must have” for most applications. I see that as a “really nice to have” if I needed to write things like longer blog posts while mobile. That is not a need I have but can see it being a killer application for those who do (and the paradigm shift will happen a bit later for those folks).

Oh, and don’t even get me started on copy and paste… Suffice to say that Apple already had the right way to do this on the Newton and there is no reason to do it any differently on the iPhone.