Letter Never Sent

General / Personal / Religion/philosophy — Comments Off
08
May 07

Joy not happiness

We focus a lot of energy on being happy, or trying to be happy, but maybe this is the wrong way to look at it. If we want to have a good life, we should instead focus our energies on joy.

What’s the difference? To me, the concept of happiness implies a state of being, we either are or we’re not happy. Happiness is an elusive feeling that vanishes upon reflection. We are most happy in moments when we don’t dwell too deeply. The concept of happiness itself is passive. It comes from the Middle English word for “luck” and still carries this connotation of being a state or feeling that is visited upon you rather than a conscious state of mind. To seek happiness is to seek something out of your control and maybe beyond your reach.

Joy is a better word. It comes from the Latin for “to rejoice”. It carries that original meaning of appreciation and recognition of the good that is around you. Joy is a mental state of pleasure in what is. Happiness does not seem to have this same active meaning. When we seek happiness, we seek some positive internal change from outside ourselves, rather than change ourselves to adapt to the external.

As I was writing this I was reminded of a hymn they used to sing when I was a boy, it’s based on Isaiah 55:12. I found a nice blog entry on a similar subject.

General / Software / Internet — Comments Off
07
May 07

Prune your feeds

I subscribe to several feeds. It’s the main way I do any recreational web surfing since I don’t generally participate in social networking, forum posting, or whatever else people do on the Internet. I use the web in a mostly functional manner, either to look up specific information or to stay on top of some of the things that are going on. I’m one of the legions of asocial lurkers out there. Sifting through the dross to find useful information.

There are several sites that update 10+ times a day. Even if I enjoy the content, this is too much for me. I can’t keep up. I organize my feeds by category, but I also have one folder for my daily reading. These are my personal A-list bloggers. Everything else is read only when or if I have the time. With a couple hundred feeds, it’s a chore to try to keep up with them all, so I don’t.

The bloggers on my A-list have some things in common: the authors are smart, perceptive and insightful, they are not part of the echo chamber (In fact, they are often the source of popular blog postings elsewhere. They start an echo.), they have their own interests, and most importantly they post no more than 5 times a day. I have a feeling that many people out there are exhausted by the sheer volume of information posted to their favorite sites.

General — Comments Off
05
May 07

“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job”

Hilarious song any designer will enjoy: Make the Logo Bigger (mp3).

General / Technology — Comments Off
04
May 07

The problem with the GPS receiver business

GPS receivers are too expensive. The price point needs to be $100 instead of $300-500. At $100, everyone will buy GPS. Otherwise, they will wait until it is incorporated in every vehicle, computer, and cellphone as it will some day. The GPS manufacturers like Garmin could offset this lower cost by providing location-based advertising. When you get near a Starbucks, for example, the GPS receiver could display a small advertisement alongside your map with a special offer for coffee. It would be like AdSense advertising for presence.

Business / Personal / Psychology — Comments Off
03
May 07

Coffee vultures

No one likes to make coffee in our office and I think I know why. Today I set the coffee maker to brew enough for ten cups. I go back ten minutes later to get a cup and there’s one cup left. If there are 6-7 people who regularly drink coffee and each of them knows that someone will eventually blink and make coffee, the ideal strategy is to wait. In most situations in life, the person who acts first benefits first, but not so in the world of office coffee. The person who starts the coffee is guaranteed nothing. So, if you’re a coffee drinker and you’re running your life in the most efficient way possible, you will get your coffee at the optimal time, later in the morning, when it is most likely that someone will have given in.

General — Comments Off
02
May 07

Padre Island Debauchery

DSCN1722.JPG, uploaded by letterneversent at 1 May ’07, 6.16pm CDT PST.

This was my cousin last weekend on the fishing boat where we spent 8 hours. We all went down to Padre Island for his bachelor party drink fest / fishing trip. After two to three hours of sleep, we tried to get up and go fishing. It was grueling. Several of the guys were laid up in the ship’s cabin the entire time.

There are two types of people in the world: those who get seasick and those who don’t. I’m the type that gets seasick. I was sick the entire eight hours. I would get sick, throw some bloody squid parts on the hook, fish, then get sick again.

I caught five red snapper, but none were big enough to keep.

General / Society — Comments Off
01
May 07

A new way of living

Matt Haughey of Metafilter fame has started an interesting new blog called Fortuitous where he will be sharing tips on how to run your business online. He will be writing a new essay every Monday. It will no doubt be worth following.

The Internet is changing the way we live. Over the past couple of years web applications have matured and the Internet has expanded into every corner of our lives through smartphones and laptops, providing a new way to life for millions of people. A life where you can use technology to make yourself more efficient, more connected, and more mobile.

The great thing about technology is that is has benefited so many. In recent years, the number of one person businesses has exploded. With the use of the Internet, automation, and virtual assistants, one person can run a successful business anywhere in the world. As Timothy Ferriss says in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week: “Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but thatâ€™s just the beginning.”

If you really want to be free of the grind, you can do it. You have everything you need. You just need to go for it.

Cool Tools / General — 1 comment
25
Apr 07

Tumblelogs with tumblr

Tumblelogs are a good way to annotate and clip items from the Internet. Now, with a service called tumblr you can make a scrapbook like blog of interesting videos, photos, quotes, and links from your journeys around the web. Tumblr automatically pulls down your del.icio.us items and posts those, too, if you’d like to keep everything centralized. Check out the letterneversent tumblelog for an example.

Cool Tools / General / Technology — Comments Off
25
Apr 07

Cool stuff you can do with Google Spreadsheets

I’ve been using Google Docs for a while now. I love the concept of easy online document management and collaboration. I’ve tried to set up wiki-based solutions, content management systems, etc. for collaboration in the past, but Google Docs does exactly what I need it to do. It just works.

The only problem I’ve add is getting anyone else to use it. For some reason, no matter what I do, the people I work with find it too difficult to use. I’ll share a document with a coworker and they’ll never use it or open it. So, I’ve stuck to using it for tasks of my own or for people who work for me.

I use the word processing app, formerly known as Writely, from time to time, but I use Google Spreadsheets the most. I’m always finding new things I can do with it and since it’s online I can access it from any computer.

Here are some of the things I use it for:

Timesheets: I have a few freelancers I work with on a regular basis. It used to be that they would write down their hours over a few weeks and then submit an invoice at the end of the billing period. Now I just have them add their hours directly into a spreadsheet. It autoformats the various columns, calculates total hours and pay, and allows me to stay on top of our progress on various projects.
Asset logging: At work we often have to purchase equipment for our centers. I use Google Spreadsheets to keep track of all the various information related to company equipment: serial numbers, assignments, etc.
Invoice tracking: If you have invoices that need to be paid or invoices that you need to submit to your clients, an online spreadsheet is a good way to keep track of them. Just list the invoices with invoice numbers, amounts, and the date submitted and you’ll have an easier time following up on them.
Task / change requests: When you work on a project with other people you’ll often need to keep track of change requests or suggested revisions.

What kind of things do you do in spreadsheets?

the old stuff