Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

Retina 5k Mac

Apple, Personal, WordPress

imac-retina-step1-hero-2014 To me one of the most meaningful shifts in computing the past few years has been how the resolution of displays is getting higher and higher, and interfaces are starting to become resolution independent. I feel like when pixels disappear there’s less of a wall between people and the technology, it starts to blend and meld a bit more. It’s something I’ve been personally passionate about since the first retina iPhone, tirelessly beating the drum at Automattic to make everything we do shine on hi-DPI screens, or leading the WordPress 3.8 release that brought in MP6 project to make WordPress’ aesthetics cleaner and vector-based.

I’m sitting in front of a Retina 5k iMac right now typing this to you. (It was supposed to arrive on Friday but came a few days early.)

It’s the most gorgeous desktop display I’ve ever seen, breathtaking at first and then like all great work becomes invisible and you forget that there was ever a time when displays weren’t this beautiful. (Until you look at some lesser monitor again.)

I’ve been using 4k displays, the Sharp and the ASUS, with Mac Pros for a few months now, and to be honest they come close, but this takes the cake in every possible way, including the design and aesthetics of the computer/display itself which is laptop-thin at the edges. If you’ve been on the fence, and you’re okay with the tradeoffs an iMac has in general, get one. I can’t wait for them to do a 5k Thunderbolt display (but it sounds like it might be at least a year away).

P. S. If you’re looking for a gift for the iMac that has everything, consider a slipper to keep its feet warm.

Listen now . When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.

— Ernest Hemingway

Streak

Personal, WordPress

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. 🙂