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Laura Vanderkam posted some excellent thoughts on making what little time we have more memorable. Basically, time is elastic. When we decide that we need to do something, we find the time to do it. Other stuff either doesn’t happen, or it takes less time, or it gets punted forward. Much other stuff turns out to be more malleable than we might have imagined. And so, of course, the key to time management is treating the things we want to do with the urgency of the things we need to do....

This article popped into my email newsletter feed this morning and is apropos to something that I was thinking just last Friday as I watched an attempted software release delay and ultimately cause many additional hours of work for developers who should have been preparing for a weekend of relaxation instead. https://world.hey.com/jason/watch-out-for-12-day-weeks-b4441874

The sad fact of these random attacks is that they are becoming more and more random and senseless. “This is jihadism as impulse, as excuse. It hardly matters, because the result is always the same: a pile of bodies, a world of pain and grief.” [via The New Yorker]

We, as American citizens, have an opportunity to put an end to mass surveillance. It requires some action on your part, however. Pick up the phone and call your congressional representatives now. More information can be found at Fight 215.

Jonathan Gourlay wrote an article on Bygone Bureau, Being and Nothingness and “Minecraft”, wherein he captures the essence of the Minecraft experience: No video game before Minecraft has presented the player with a world as simple, beautiful, and engaging as a box of random Legos or wooden blocks or loose change or sticks or shells… toys whose only purpose is to soak up human consciousness and light into being upon a human whim....

Dave Winer on the next evolution of “sharing”: It’s pretty obvious what comes next, via extrapolation—from past turns of the wheel in software. What comes next is an easy way for the generation of people who grew up on Facebook to create their own social networks, accessible only by the people they want to share it with. A somewhat easier to use version of what AWS is today will be the platform....

The beauty of the Internet is that it can open doors to content that in years past would have been inaccessible and perhaps permanently unavailable to large segments of the world’s population. The TED conference is one of the many doors that has been opened to the world at large. What began as an exclusive conference for thought leaders in many fields of study has grown in to a multi-faceted organization with numerous events that attract everyone from industry moguls to tech hobbyists and expert scientists to cabaret musicians Thanks to the TED Talks videos being made available online, we can share in the profound insights and genius of an engaged culture of humanity that continues to think inside and outside the box in a forum where we share because we want to make a difference in the world....

Back in the data center, the Linux operating system runs on a majority of my servers, but as Miguel de Icaza puts it, Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm. Even with others like myself attempting to adopt Linux full-time on the desktop, there are so many pain points that a normal user would be hard pressed to last 15 minutes on the platform before giving up. Miguel’s is yet another switcher story (YASS?...

Kevin Ashton published a breakdown of the manufacturing of a can of Coca-Cola and in the process manages to wax poetic about globalization. The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together....

I’ve always felt that kids should be immersed in nature regularly; let them play in the dirt, run in the forest, splash in the stream. In addition to the apparent benefits of reduced incidence of allergies, I believe that getting a little bit of the outdoors on a regular basis helps maintain a healthy life equilibrium. Though individuals with allergies lived throughout the study area, the authors found that allergies were tied to the amount of biodiversity around the teenagers’ homes; the more forest and agricultural land, the lower the prevalence of allergies....