Shanti’s Dispatches

Update: I can’t in good faith recommend Colibri at this time, after a more thorough review. It’s not quite useful enough yet (no indexing of folders like ‘My Documents’, etc) and I seem to activate it too often for no reason and always ended up disabling it anyway.

For those of us tethered to Windows operating systems (some or all of the time), a few prayers have just been answered with the release of Colibri.

I can see the more cynical blogger set complaining about Colibri’s similarity to QuickSilver. Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and QS is pretty darn close to perfect.

QuickSilver: The Original

One of the first applications I installed on my new mac mini was QuickSilver. The only real feature I use is the Application / File Launcher.

If you’d like to read about all the other neat things it can do, peruse the 43Folders QuickSilver archives.

With QuickSilver, you just hit ctrl-spacebar, type a few words, and QuickSilver guesses which application or file you’d like to launch. Keep typing if it hasn’t figured out which app/file you’d like to launch, and it should eventually find it. (as long as its in the QuickSilver index, which you can modify to include directories it isn’t indexing yet)

This time on How to Do What You Love.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

If you know me or have read this blog for a bit, you’ll know this is something I also feel passionately about (along with sleep schedules, that is :)).

On School and Tedium

The part on school being tedious reminds me of a story about a friend, now a member of the rock band Ludo, when he was in grade school.

He went to a Montessori School, and from everything I’ve heard about these new agey schools, I really wish I had had the opportunity to go to one for a while.

Andrew Volpe, for an entire month straight, simply counted to a million. When he went to bed at night, he noted down how far he had gotten. When he woke up, he continued on his quest to a million. I guess it took him about a month.

Not really sure of the point of that story, other than an example of doing what you love (or maybe just what you want to do), as opposed to traditional boring/tedious schoolwork.

I went to college with Andrew for several years until he finally dropped out and just went for it with his band, living out of their van and crashing at random houses on the road. You da man, Andrew.

On Prestige

Prestige doesn’t really appeal to me so much as Respect does. These days, especially in the webapp / Web 2.0 world, “respect, yo” as Ali G would say, is hard to come by.

The competition is just insane. Everyone and their grandma, it seems, are building a new whiz-bang Ruby on Rails / Ajax powered, social-networking whirly-gig.

On Money

I fall into this trap, too.

It seems like ages ago, but for a while there, I really thought that I was hot stuff for selling a website and having a fat chunk of stock in a publicly-traded company. Boy, how naive. (the stock was restricted at the time and is now worth next to nothing)

When you honestly believe you don’t have to worry about where the rent money / etc. will come from for the next 6-12 months, the feeling of freedom is incredible.

That’s when I started the networking group / Human Capital Investment Group, Menlo Park 2.0. It was fun while it lasted, and it’s still an idea I hope to revisit if the opportunitity presents itself.

What I’ve learned since starting MP2 is that idealism, ambition and dreaming big are one thing (they are awesome & a pre-requisite for ‘going big’), but, at the end of the day, unfortunately money still talks. Not to mention pays the bills.

SproutIt.com’s Suite of Web Apps: Enablers of Doing What You Love?

Only time will tell. But that’s what appeals to me most — the vision of a suite of hosted web apps for small businesses.

And of course, starting your own small business is all about doing what you love, no?

Over on Sprout’s blog The Big Act: Charles Jolley talks about Mailroom and doing what you love.

This looks interesting:

The Podcast Film Fest is an online film festival that delivers short film to any computer or handheld device via podcasting. Podcasting is the newest emerging technological trend on the internet and its growing fast. With over 14 million video ipods sold, this platform will become one of the largest content delivery channels for new media.

Link: Podcast Film Fest (2006)

Ok, what’s more evil –

Google allowing China to suspend all access to its search engine, by not complying with its censorship demands…

OR

Googling rolling out a google.cn censored by the Chinese government?

Via BoingBoing, etc.

Update: Jason Calacanis nails it on why it makes more sense long-term (and is the lesser of two “evils”) for Google to be in China. (censored results and all. like .0001% of results are censored, btw)

Just came across PowerISO tonight while working with some fresh BitTorrent downloads.

It’s a lot handier than burning ISOs and loading their contents from CD, which is what I was doing before!

From the Tao Te Ching translation by Stephen Mitchell:

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn’t mettle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

Truth.

Agiledox rake task -- add this to your Rakefile document in your Rails root.

Then run:
> rake agiledox

Assuming you've followed a well-behaved naming structure in your test cases (outlined here), you'll receive output like this:

security_controller should:
- redirect to page stored in session on successful login
- store user object in session on successful login
- redirect to page stored in session after signup
- store user object in session after signup

All this via Ben Griffiths, a former ThoughtWorker. Everytime I come across another ThoughtWorker's blog, usually just randomly, I'm always more and more impressed with their whole organization.

[+] Code hilighting above via the iG:Syntax Hiliter Plugin for WordPress.

According to this article, the earth may be about to catch a morbid 100,000 year fever.

It fails to mention that the only presricption is more cowbell.

Just tryin' to keep things light around here.

I just came across this link via del.icio.us/popular.

It has a nice little list that purports to be the top 160 paying search keyword terms.

If you've ever googled for anything related to AdSense or SEO, you may have come across various top paying keyword lists for sale (see the sidebar ads).

I'm not too proud to admit that in my more naive days of Internet marketing (oh, about a year ago), I had purchased one of these lists.

Boy, what a waste of money!

It really is true what they say about sticking to what you're passionate about. That's why Ajax Blog has done well, now with more than 1,300 daily RSS readers.

High Heels Blog has also done well, with a team of highly passionate bloggers on the case! (It's a pretty sexy blog topic, too, don't ya think?)

Or -- as I like to say (quoting some Zen dudes) -- Eat when hungry, sleep when tired.

Several months ago, there was a huge linkfest on the lifehack/43folders blogs about Polyphasic sleep.

While I had never really heard of this term before, it sounded an awful lot like a sleep pattern I found myself drifting into when I was doing my own thing for about 6 months, back a year++ ago. (No regular 9-5 gig or any set work schedule to speak of.)

The Edisonian Sleep Schedule

Basically, I found myself drifting into a very Edisonian sleep schedule consisting of lots of little naps combined with a longer rest every 30 hours or so.

Some people's biological clocks, I believe, are just not hard-wired for the 24-hour daily cycle that your typical 9-5 work environment demands. (I've written about this before but just wanted to revisit upon it... since running "virtual companies" via telecommuting & more flexible schedules is a topic I feel passionately about.)

People who do seem to be hard-wired for a set 9-5 schedule, or have possibly just conditioned themselves for this environment, cannot seem to understand the fact that maybe other people only need 4-5 hours of sleep at night, but might require some downtime naps (like Edison) of 20-30 min. throughout the day.

Out of Whack

The problem for Zen/Polyphasic sleepers occurs when you get out of whack with everyone else... and are waking up from your longer rest at 2am. Well, even if you try and get a nap in before the 9-5 rush... you're still going to be dragging when 5pm rolls around. Especially if the possibility of a quick mental defrag by laying down to rest is not an option.

If you're in NYC or Tokyo, you might be able to rent a sleep pod.

Of course, that's not exactly the same as walking fifteen feet into the other room and crashing, but I guess it could do in a pinch.

Steve Pavlina's Polyphasic Experiment

Steve Pavlina has reported back on his Polyphasic sleep experiment after 60 days. He seems like an incredibly disciplined guy, so I had no doubt, if it was working out for him, that'd he'd be able to pull it off. (unlike many others who reported that they tried and "failed")

Like Steve, I've found that once you get used to this schedule, It's tough to go back. In the future I'll have to try his suggestions of cutting down on the meat & caffeine. The biggest problem I've found is having the discipline and ability to time your schedule so that you can workout / attend classes if that's a goal of yours.

Sure, you can go for a jog 24 hours a day in many neighborhoods, but you'll have to be up at the right time to hit that Yoga class.

Postscript

While googling for the funny T-Shirt slogan, Alarm Clocks Kill Dreams to end this post with, I discovered that the once funny catch-phrase has been co-opted by the humorless Work Less Party.

It's not about the work, silly rabbit, it's about pursuing the kind of work you love ... in the way that you love to work.

[+] My review of Peopleware on All Consuming