Category Archives: remainders

Items Of Interest #11

Further accounting of my travels through the vast ether. Reporting things of wonder you must see with your own eyes to truly be believed… Or something like that…

My friend Mike Rohde is celebrating the one year anniversary of the publication of his excellent Sketchnote Handbook with a giveaway of a whole bunch of stuff (including my book, enough).

Speaking of books, if you are a lover of libraries, bookshelves, and other things of a bookish nature, this borders on pornography.

Of course, you will need some light to read all of those books with. Why not use a portable, stylish, take-anywhere lamp that unfolds like a book.

While not a full book, an unreleased collection of J.D. Salinger short stories, including An Ocean Full Of Bowling Balls, which is obliquely related to The Catcher In The Rye, was recently leaked. As a huge Salinger fan, and one who is respectful of the late author’s wishes for privacy and secrecy, I will neither confirm nor deny that I immediately downloaded it from one of the many outlets it is now easily found. But I will tell you that Ocean is a very satisfying nugget of Caufield wonder.

Kindling Quarterly is a literary journal that explores fatherhood. I have recently discovered a love for such journals. I have read severaI. This one is very high on my Christmas wish list.

Finally, a reminder: You have now. It’s all you’ll ever have.

Random Notes and Recent Thoughts #2

I’m suffering from a horrible cold virus. My third or fourth in as many weeks (I’ve lost count). My thinking, during such times, is both hazy and exausting. Therefore, please accept some of these brief and imperfect ideas that warrant more expounding than I have the energy for right now.

  • We all write our own eulogies. We write them with the way we live in each moment. By our acts of kindness or the things we do that delight others. Those things that make an impression on those closest to us. For, if we were to pass tomorrow, it is these things they will stand in front of others to share and remember.

  • Those that claim to have no choice always do. What they don’t have is a choice they want. And those that are doing something they don’t want because they feel they have no choice have, in fact, chosen.

  • There is no such thing as good debt. No matter how many financial advisors will tell you otherwise. I wish I had learned this before the age of 35. For instance, believing that a mortgage that was less than the value of the home was an investment — "good debt". Or, that a student loan is somehow good debt because it sets you up for the possibility of higher pay or a better career (when the first 10-20 years of said job is spent paying back that debt). Does no one do the math and figure out the only ones making money from this equation are the people that write the paychecks and the people who service the debt? I think if the past several years have revealed anything it is this fundemental fact and the lies that prop it up.

  • On every task list should exist the following: One thing that makes your life better. One thing that makes the life of someone else better.

  • The more complex your tool, the more likely it is to fail you in some way eventually. And, said failure likelihood will scale in parallel to the added complexity. And, because one’s expectations for said tool also scale in the same parallel, the disappointment from the failure is compounded.

  • People who love what they do for a living don’t ever dream of retirement — early or otherwise. Why wait to start the life you want when you can build it now? And, those that call bullshit on this are either a) happy and don’t want others to be so they can feel even more superior or b) as unhappy as the rest and looking for people to share in their sorrow. The truth is that you build the life you wish to have by the choices you make and, if you build a life that makes you happy, you can do it until you die.

  • This guy gets up and does the work he loves every morning. So, your excuses are invalid.

Items Of Interest #10

I really like the looks of the new Doxie Flip scanner. My friend Mike Rohde posted a great review and video of it in action. That said, I’ve been using TurboScan for iPhone for a couple of years now to use the camera for essentially the same thing for a couple of years now. It’s not the prettiest app out there but it works really well and gets the job done.

With the recent end of the Enough Podcast, it was really nice of Robert Wall of Untitled Minimalism to put together an archive and torrent of all 225 episodes and make it publicly available. I’m seeding it as are many others. Grab it and listen to any you have missed

Designer and consultant Josh Gross exploring a really interesting idea he’s calling One Hour: "I’m making myself available for consulting one hour at a time, starting at $1. Each time someone purchases an hour, the price goes up $1."

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, the pseudonym under which J.K. Rowling wrote the book, is one of the finest whodunits I have ever read. I was engaged and locked in pretty much as soon as I started it. She has an amazing ability to sketch characters quickly and such confidence in her subject matter that you might swear she has written a hundred of these before. In fact, I would argue that the writing here is stronger than many of her Harry Potter books. Highly recommended.

Speaking of books, I’m really excited for Kevin Kelly’s Catalog of Possibilities: Cool Tools. As a fellow fan of the late, great, Whole Earth Catalog and a long time reader of his Cool Tools site, I can’t imagine not having such a valuable resource in my arsenal.

C.J. Chilvers reminds us of the many reasons why paper still matters. My favorite: "The benefits of holding your work in your hand is a pleasure digital workers are too often deprived of."

Mike Vardy reminds us of how much we can get done in only 7 minutes. Try sitting and doing absolutely nothing for even 5 minutes and see how long it feels when you are not regularly accustomed to doing so. I think we would all do a bit better if we had a better sense of the passage of time and the ways we can choose to fill it.

Finally, I really, really, enjoyed this piece by Jack Cheng on living for a time in a yurt and the insight it gives on the many lives we live.