People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
— Steve Jobs on focus (via Daring Fireball)
we turned al Qaeda into the biggest franchise since McDonalds.
— Ted Koppel (via What I Learned Today - “Quizno’s model - with a twist”)
Zero percent winners (As seen on CNN.com)
We’re only here for 80 or 90 years, we need to figure some stuff out before we pass on, and good movies are part of the learning-and-realizing process.
— • Hollywood Elsewhere • (via kottke.org). Yup and I would add that the same is true for any art form, so take interest in some if you don’t already :-)
There was some discussion today on Twitter regarding the first website made by people. That got me to look into my archives for the first one that I made. It was on Geocities and it doesn’t exist anymore, not even on the Wayback Machine. But the second one that I made was hosted on the servers at PSU and still exists on the aforementioned machine here. It was almost identical to the previous site and looked like this.
Click on the image to go to flickr and see it with notes describing the content. Share your first site.
For the last few weeks, I’ve had a new personal assistant, Sandy. I came to her after trying Backpack, Remember the Milk, Stikkit and others that I don’t even remember any more. She’s the best one I’ve had so far. She makes me want her more. So far my girlfriend is cool with that, even though Sandy lives right here in Portland.
This weekend I saw Helvetica. I got excited when I noticed that Movie Madness had it on their list but it was never in stock when I got there. On Saturday it wasn’t on the shelves either, but Liz suggested that I peruse the un-shelved DVDs and there it was. I’ve never thought about the history behind types. This film was enjoyable just for that. And there’s a lot more about typography and graphic design in there. To top it all, the film is set to a really cool soundtrack.
Yesterday, I hung out with Beer and Blog peeps at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne. The meeting was great. We touched on several topics and Justin has nicely summarized them. I’m looking forward to more such interactions. See photos here.
Lastly, if you’ve noticed an increase in my blog posts over the last few days, it can be attributed to some extent to the wonderful MarsEdit. It is a joy to compose and manage blog posts in it. I’m still trying it out but at this point is looks like I’ll be buying it well before the trial period runs out in about a month.
LazyEngine is a lazy search engine. If you want to do a search, consider for a moment if you need the results immediately. If not, then this is the search engine for you. This is probably a silly web application.
That’s the idea behind my new web app LazyEngine. Give it a shot. I hope you like it.
I’ve updated my website and moved the blog off to https://blog.samgrover.com/. I will update this feed to splice in more stuff at some point in the future. I’ll let you know when I do that. You may want to move to the blog only feed now or later.
I tried Movable Type over the last two months and didn’t like it much at all. So, I’ve migrated the blog to use Wordpress. Wordpress has a lot of community support and plugins that make it a great choice. It also seems simpler to use and maintain. I continue to support OpenID for comments.
I’m gonna work on tweaking the look and feel of the website over the next few days so come back to check it out later. I’ll also be expanding its focus.
The result of a little informal poll I did after Super Tuesday. There were 151 responses. Mitt Romney has since dropped out.