Exercising these “option-erasing disciplines” comes with a sizable price tag: lost possibilities. When you choose a ritual, routine, practice or product at the cost of all others you are intentionally self-limiting your exposure to other options.
A simple bookmarklet “framework” I wrote for creating entries in Symphony. It’s best used for content like links (of the “linked list” variety) since it makes it easy to grab a page’s content (url, title, &c.) and then send it in to the entry editor.
Patrick Rhone:
Here is my short review having never laid eyes on this thing… It’s great. How do I know? Apple doesn’t do less than great. If you have a Mac that can run it, get it.
Time to start my backups.
AlwaysOpenOF is an AppleScript that always opens the OmniFocus quick entry panel, even when OmniFocus isn’t running.
Assign AlwaysOpenOF the same keyboard shortcut you use to open the OmniFocus quick entry panel. I prefer Alfred’s global hotkeys. When you invoke the shortcut, the script will check if OmniFocus is running. If it is, everything’s great, and the script lets OmniFocus take over. If not, the script will first launch OmniFocus and then bring up the panel.
Admittedly, I wouldn’t have had the idea for AlwaysOpenOF without Shawn Blanc’s OopsieFocus, which solves the same problem very well. The reason I wrote my own script is that OopsieFocus didn’t seem to fit into my workflow as seamlessly as it could have, in that it behaved slightly differently than OmniFocus does by itself. Specifically, it opens the main OmniFocus window (in addition to the panel) if not already running, and doesn’t return the focus to the previous app after the panel closed. AlwaysOpenOF addresses both. (OopsieFocus has a better name, though.) Perhaps more simply, I haven’t written much AppleScript, and this seemed as good a place to start as any.
AlwaysOpenOF is available in multiple formats:
My thanks to John Gruber for a few code snippets (noted in the source), and again to Shawn for the idea.
Marco Arment:
It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago.
And:
If you care about your online presence, you must own it.
I’m not sure what to make of Facebook and the rest now that Google+ is on the scene, with a strangely hybrid feeling of Facebook (find your friends!) and Twitter (follow people! share with everyone!). Since coming (late, as usual) to Twitter earlier this year, it’s become my favorite of the social offerings (at the time, just Facebook). Having tried Google+ briefly at the invitation of a friend, I’m hitting upon exactly the same issue Marco describes: what gets posted there? What stays here, on my website? Am I really supposed to be asking this sort of question?
When I first started designing this site, in February, I knew from the start it was going to be the only place I shared photos. (I never joined, or was even interested in, Flickr, because it felt like giving up too much control.) The site is hosted on Media Temple, albeit a shared service, but not on a proprietary hosted platform. It’s given me the flexibility to switch from one publishing platform (Jekyll) to another (Symphony) as I saw fit. It’s now the only place I share links, other than occasionally on Twitter, because it seems like a place to truly share things with others. Sharing: isn’t that the point of the social network?
The trouble is that when “sharing” something, whatever it is, with someone else requires putting content — my content — into someone else’s service, it almost seems like the potential for that content to be truly shared goes away. If Facebook goes out of business, or Google+ falls out of favor, where is my photo then? My link? It’s been locked in to someone else’s platform, and potentially impossible to share somewhere else. Potentially. It’s no longer mine, though. (I will, however, make an exception for Twitter, as Marco did, since it seems more like a communication platform than a social “identity” service.)
All of this is to say that I’m not sure how social networks figure into my online identity anymore. When there’s a choice of where to share things, where should it be? How should I decide? Shouldn’t I choose the platform where I feel most in control of my content, and therefore my identity? I think the answer to these questions is not only one of the most important for me to consider in the coming days, but also for the social networks, if they want to retain my use.
Kyle Baxter on Spotify (and indirectly Rdio):
I don’t buy that collections don’t matter anymore. Perhaps they aren’t what “define” us, but music isn’t as timeless when you don’t own it, when you cease to be able to listen to it the second your subscription ends.
I love Spotify’s convenience. I love that I can check out a new band and listen to their full album. But I can’t give up owning my music for that convenience.
This is exactly the reason I haven’t tried Spotify or Rdio yet. I’ve been meaning to try Rdio for a while now, but I’ve never gotten around to signing up. It’s not that I’m not interested in paying the fee. It’s just unsettling that as soon as I stop paying, my entire collection would be gone, excluding of course what I’d already purchased.
In every museum — art, science, history — it’s the same. Everyone’s looking at the paintings (less and less now), the sculptures, the exhibits, the floors, the maps, the cameras, the phones, but never in front of them, around them, at the other visitors, or the lines, or how people are walking. They run into each other, nearly walking right into the wall, coming too close to the Pollock or the Cézanne while staring at the picture they’ve just taken of the painting. It’s never the painting itself, just the picture. Then they shuffle away to the next sight, consulting maps and drifting down the hall as slowly as possible. The only ones actually watching are the guards, and they’ve seen it all before — the people, the maps, the questions, and the art, of course the art. How bored they become of the greatest masterpieces. Everyday, after all, they’re standing right in front of them.
Seth Sawyers on moving to college (mine, actually) from a very different place:
When I was 18, I left the skinny part of Maryland and woke up in a place paved over with asphalt, girded by concrete, nourished by it. I awoke fascinated by the mechanized hum, disoriented, wide-mouthed before the man-made angularity, the downtown steel visible from the top floor of the college library. I woke up that September in the middle of the great flowering of the American Dream. I woke up in the suburbs.
Incidentally I’m signed up for a writing class with him in the fall. I didn’t realize that before, but it looks like it promises to be a good choice.
Sarah Hepola offers nine lessons from five years of living in New York:
I learned how to live in 200 square feet of space. I learned not to blink at loud noises. I learned what pierogies were, what chicken biryana is, what an egg cream and tagliatelle and knishes and rice balls and fish cakes should taste like […], and that to give someone your full and undivided attention is one of the greatest gifts you can offer. I learned to avoid the subway at rush hour. I learned to tip cabbies and servers well. If you see something, say something. Buckle up. Stand clear of the closing doors.
We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is.