This story about how a man sabotaged a FAA facility is terrifying and inspiring in how people worked together to overcome it, and also includes this unintentionally funny line, “He had worked at the Chicago Center for eight years, according to an FBI affidavit. The company has fired him.”
Category Archives: Asides
The Internet’s Most Fascinating Newsletter Writer, Dave Pell. Still one of my favorite reads, though I don’t look at it every day because it’d make me lazy about blogging and you all would get tired of seeing “Hat tip: Dave Pell” on every post.
Introducing The Players’ Tribune, a new media platform that will present the unfiltered voices of professional athletes, bringing fans closer to the games they love than ever before. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players’ Tribune aims to provide unique insight into the daily sports conversation and to publish first-person stories directly from athletes. From video to podcasts to player polls and written pieces, The Tribune will strive to be “The Voice of the Game.”
The Players’ Tribune, powered by WordPress. Here’s Jeter’s intro. Hat tip: John Gruber.
Our goal is to create a sustainable membership with a large enough base that it will fund reporting and writing at rates that are competitive with the best print magazines in the world.
You might not have heard of a Longreads Membership yet — you join for a monthly fee and 100% of that goes to independent publishers and writers. We’re announcing an update to the program to match every dollar in, so it doubles your contribution. I just joined Longreads at $10/mo, about what I pay for Netflix, and I can’t wait to see what comes out from the editorial team next.
Sarah Gooding of the WordPress inside baseball blog WP Tavern has an interview with me she titled Matt Mullenweg on Ensuring the Future of WordPress.
Gambino Mixtape STN MTN
The ever-creative Childish Gambino has released a new mixtape STN MTN (track by track) which is part of a longer EP Kauai that was just released on iTunes. Donald is a friend and an artist whose work fluently spans much more than music. And I’m not just saying that because, as Techcrunch noted, he shouts out to Krutal and I at the end of Go DJ.
All About that Bass
This catchy song has been making the rounds with my friends, see if you can listen and not move just a little bit:
New Diane Foug Art
Streak
You might have noticed there have been more posts around here lately. Actually until yesterday (Oct 3) there was an unbroken string of at least one post a day since August 25th, 40 posts in total. It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe:
https://twitter.com/cdevroe/status/504630581117063169
Until now I forgot it was only weekdays, so I was doing weekends as well. Friends know I like doing personal experiments just to question assumptions or ingrained behavior, other examples this I’ve tried this year are giving up drinking for a month, going without a smartphone for 40 days, and more recently training for a half marathon with my friend Rene. I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world.
The tools besides WordPress that I found super-helpful in this were Simplenote, which was great for capturing thoughts and drafts when I was on the go, and I’ve been using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help me schedule drafts and keep an eye on my progress. The Editorial Calendar plugin is useful but I don’t love it — I wish the calendar view moved week by week rather than replacing the whole table, that it was responsive or worked on mobile, and that it would take over your publish button so you could define a desired posting cadence (in my case every 24 hours) and it would put a finished post in the next free slot, or let you bump something to the front of the queue and push all the other posts back a day. There were a few missteps along the way with timezones but overall I’m happy with how the experiment turned out.
So what broke the streak? It was actually one of the other experiments: running. I’ve never considered myself a runner, and never really done it in my life, but a few months ago I started trying it and have been training up for a half marathon on November 16. (It’s also a great opportunity to take photos.) Yesterday morning I woke up early around 5 AM and as the sun started to come up, and the weather was so nice after I rounded the Bay Bridge (planned turnaround point) kept going to Crissy Field where I saw the Golden Gate from afar and thought it would be fun to cross it. After crossing I was starving by and figured 3 more miles would be a half marathon and also put me in Sausalito. The last mile or two was really tough, definitely beyond what I was ready for and I walked a lot, but I was very proud of the result, finishing in around 2 hours 45 minutes. But I hadn’t planned to stay out that long, and the rest of my day was full of meetings. I had moved my scheduled post for the day out so I could talk about the new Childish Gambino mixtape (post coming tomorrow) but the rest of the day was so busy and I got exhausted so early I totally forgot to post.
So achieved one life goal while breaking the streak on another, which is not ideal, but today is another day and I want to see if I can break the 39 day streak next. Everything happens one day at a time. 🙂
Derek Low on What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class [link removed, see end]. I’ve been on the Emirates First Class A380 with the shower before, but this looks like an entirely other level. I also must confess I think Emirates has rather gaudy design. The best I’ve seen design-wise is actually from Swiss Air, as you’d expect. Update: Apparently the original link borrowed pretty heavily from another blogger, so here are links to the original author’s posts: one, two, three.
Photo run through Stockholm
I went for a run this morning and ended up with a pretty slow pace because I kept stopping to take pictures of the beautiful scenery around Stockholm. Here’s some of the snaps from that run and afterward. Amazingly, all of those photos are from an iPhone 6+. It blows me away the images you can capture with it.
Ben Gillbanks, the co-author of TimThumb, says I No Longer Use TimThumb — Here’s What I do Instead.
I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
— Ernest Hemingway to Arthur Mizener, 1950 Selected Letters, p. 694.
I got it from Hemingway on Writing which is a short and pleasant read I’m going through right now. It turns out Hemingway was 64 years ahead of me in his advice about who to write for.
If you want to see some of the thought and care that went into the WordPress 4.0 release, check out Scott Taylor’s peek under the hood and Helen Hou-Sandi’s reveal of a 4.0 Easter egg.
During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t. Times when you hate the thing today that you loved yesterday. Times when what you had in your head isn’t quite what you’re seeing in front of you. Yet. That’s when you need to have faith.
Jason Fried writes Faith in eventually. Good to share with anyone who’s been working on something for a while.
Circa is how I get news on my phone every day, and they’ve just redesigned with some slick new features. They’re an Audrey company, too.
Checky tells you how many times a day you check your phone, which Mary Meeker said in 2013 that we do 150 times a day. In a brilliant act of marketing, Checky is brought to you by the same people as Calm.com.
It’s happened every year for the past five years. Sometimes it sets in the afternoon I arrive home, like today. Sometimes it sets in after I wake up from the post trip nap (last year’s “nap” was 18 hours long, due to sheer exhaustion from too much fun).
Lori McLeese on the post-meetup Fog of Sadness.