I like friendly competition. I told Alexander that he’s allowed to adapt or improve on any features that he things Penzu would also benefit from. The act of private journaling isn’t something I want to own… the more people that build tools for it, the better, in my opinion.  And I also believe having someone who’s working on the same stuff as you and keeping you on your toes is good for everyone involved.  Of course, they’re a lot bigger than I am, but that’s good because I’m not ready to move servers again.

Anyway, it’s just a test in keeping things sustainable.  Curious to hear what other people think.

Coming soon:
2010: Son is born

Would be interesting to dig deeper into these 30ish events to see how they relate to one another:

• Which ones were intentional, versus accidental?
• Which ones had high immediate impact, which had high long-term impact?
• Which one had intended consequences versus unintended consequences?
• Which things am I proud of, which am I ashamed of?

Another thing to consider, as I am currently 33 years old, how many more things will be on this list?  I started this list in 2005 (it was the bio on an old Typepad account), and only just now updated it to include the last 7 things.  Will the list continue to include about 1 item per year?  Will I add things to the past that I don’t currently know are high-impact events?  Will I remove things?

Does it do any good to reduce life life this?

In my wanderings I’ve found two other great private journaling tools that I want to tell you about in case they are exactly what you’re looking for.  It doesn’t matter to me which one you like best!

Ommwriter

Ommwriter is a beautiful Mac application.  It is an immersive that takes your full screen and your full attention.  It has subtle imagery, sounds, and effects to help tame the wild monkey of your attention and to just write.  It’s like a log cabin in the woods without the log cabin and the woods.

Pros:

• It’s got an immersive quality to it that I haven’t seen attempted by anyone else.  You really have to try it to know what I mean.
• It stores all your writing on your computer.  No need to export or fear privacy of your writing.
• It’s free.

Cons:

• Mac only.  Well, that’s actually a pro in wolf’s clothing if you ask me.
• If you don’t always do your writing on your own computer, your writing might get fragmented.
• No password protection or other kinds of security to keep your pesky roommates or others from digging through your writing.

I like the way that it takes the writing environment as seriously as it does.  I’m jealous that they can pull off a full screen mode that web apps can’t do (at least, not without the help of Plainview).  It feels like such a strong writing tool that I downloaded it and then tried to think of a good reason to work on a new novel.

The creators of this app are blogging and Twittering about their features pretty frequently, and it seems like they’re well on their way to growing the product.

Penzu

Penzu is also awesome in its own right.  They’ve hit a home run on one feature in particular: post encryption and security.

At first glance they have a lot of similar features as 750 Words: auto-opening a page to write on (they don’t even require an account), auto-saving, auto-scrolling of the page when you get to the bottom.  And then they’ve got a lot of features that I don’t have: multiple entries per day, public entries, attaching photos, and a Pro version that gives you extra security, a rich text editing option, and other advanced features.  I was most impressed, however, with their security… you can set a password on each entry that double encrypts your entry with an encrypted version of your password and is basically permanently irretrievable without that password.  And of course there’s no password recovery option because the entry itself is encrypted with the password.  It’s pretty impressive and definitely the place that I send people who want to be absolutely sure that their secrets never ever see the light of day.  I am going to implement my own encryption as well, but because of my desire to be able to parse and analyze text I most likely won’t ever go the full route of 1-way encryption.

Pros:

• Very secure.
• Easy to use.
• The Pro version is well-priced and offers about all the features you could possibly ever need if you wanted to write a private journal.
• Free.

Cons:

• I think they’re trying to differentiate themselves on the private journaling front, and yet they offer lots of ways to make your entries public, to share them, etc.  It seems to dilute the purpose of the site a little.

They’re also very active bloggers and Twitters and seem to be doing a great job of making a business out of private journaling.  They seem very responsive and friendly to everyone who writes to or about them on Twitter.

But does it beat a physical notebook?

It’s difficult to beat the notebook on aesthetics and ease of use.  That said, I think the two options above are significantly better than writing in a physical journal: Ommwriter because it doesn’t require you to scrawl in your ugly handwriting and come up with your own writing mood music, Penzu because it’s super secure and free (even a notebook costs money).

The important thing in all of this is that the fruits of private writing are only as good as the fruits of the writing that you do and the insights and self-knowledge that come from that.  The tools might kick you in the right direction, but ultimately I’d recommend using whatever tool resonates with you most, and gets out of the way and lets you just do your writing.

That said, the most important aspect of private journaling is feeling safe in the environment that you do your writing.  It’s important that you aren’t paranoid of people finding your words (either because of secrets or maybe just the sheer pettiness of your thoughts (if you’re anything like me)), and trust that you can really dump it all out.  In my experience it’s only then that you really get the full reward that private journaling promises.  Once that’s achieved, I think it can really improve your life in a noticeable way.

Facebook login misunderstanding

Tumblr stealing the pitchfork account

The last thing Sarah Palin said

Whatever you want

I think this post from Ryan at the Barbarian Group, The Buzzkillers, does a great job of stating the phenomenon in clear terms.  People on the Internet are becoming more and more outraged by the day.  The things to be outraged about has not increased over the last year (I would argue that they have gone way down, thanks to another target of some outrage, and the general leveling of the universe to sanity), but the tools of outrage are clearly blossoming.  Twitter.  Hi.

Even John Stewart felt compelled to comment on the matter.

I feel like we’ve been exercising the outrage muscle for the last few years.  I suppose George W. Bush got us hooked.  And the media likes outrage because… well the media likes what it likes.

Just like the best way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise frequently, the truth in this case is less than interesting.  Truth is boring.  Most of the things that we’re getting outraged about don’t deserve the outrage, and one of these days the boy who outraged about the wolf is gonna learn his lesson.  But it’s not going to be for a long time, and it’s going to be boring when it happens.

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?

The lizard brain.

via Seth’s Blog: Quieting the lizard brain.

I’m in total agreement with Seth and Merlin Mann in regards to the quiet, mysterious, and often counter-productive power of the lizard brain.

I like how Seth has given the power a name: The Resistance.  The Resistance is what makes you do things other than what you really want to do.  The Resistance works through almost every aspect of our reasoning and emotions, from fear to really good excuses.

I just bought The War of Art that both Seth and Merlin recommended in their recent podcast. Reading books is something that The Resistance loves to do, as it serves as a form of procrastination.  Well I did it anyway.

One point for The Resistance.

What I got right:

1. It’ll be called the iPad
2. It’ll have a 10? screen (9.7, close enough)
3. It will run a new version of the iPhone OS, and come with a new SDK
4. It’ll have a new version of iTunes on it
5. It’ll sell books, magazine subscriptions, TV shows, and movies through iTunes
6. The App Store will offer a selection of iPhone apps (I assume we’ll need to re-submit our apps to be compatible with the Tablet before they show up)
7. No webcam
8. Yes geo-location
9. Some new multi-touch gestures to wow us
10. It will have a screen keyboard and an option for a bluetooth keyboard (actually, was a keyboard dock, but close enough)
11. It won’t have Bing as the default search engine
12. It will be available for pre-order, but won’t ship until at least March (no pre-order yet, but I’m assuming soon)

What I got wrong:

1. It’ll be something like $999 and have some way for a phone company to subsidize it if you sell your soul to them (was actually cheaper than I thought, so didn’t need the phone company subsidy)
2. There will be multiple carriers offering 3G connectivity, not just AT&T (I heard something about it being unlocked, so there’s hope)
3. The same will be available for iPhone users
4. It’ll have some drawing on the screen, or handwriting on the screen, capability
5. It will support Flash (I assume not, since they didn’t explicitly show it, but could be wrong)

Not bad, really.

I did get really excited about the possibility of creating a new “web content store” for people to sell subscriptions and issues of their own content… but that’s seems to have been an innovation entirely owed to the creative brain-turnings of Apple fans.  It’s interesting to think about how innovation can happen when we try to guess other peoples’ innovations.

Anyway, back to work everyone!

1. It’ll be called the iPad
2. It’ll have a 10″ screen
3. It’ll be something like $999 and have some way for a phone company to subsidize it if you sell your soul to them.
4. There will be multiple carriers offering 3G connectivity, not just AT&T
5. The same will be available for iPhone users
6. It will run a new version of the iPhone OS, and come with a new SDK
7. It’ll have some drawing on the screen, or handwriting on the screen, capability
8. It’ll have a new version of iTunes on it
9. It’ll sell books, magazine subscriptions, TV shows, and movies through iTunes
10. The App Store will offer a selection of iPhone apps (I assume we’ll need to re-submit our apps to be compatible with the Tablet before they show up)
11. No webcam
12. Yes geo-location
13. Some new multi-touch gestures to wow us
14. It will have a screen keyboard and an option for a bluetooth keyboard
15. It will support Flash
16. It won’t have Bing as the default search engine
17. It will be available for pre-order, but won’t ship until at least March

Those are my guesses!  Totally uneducated, as they are all based entirely on rumors, hear-say, hopes, dreams, hype, and out of this world expectations.

I also fully hope that there’s something that is cooler and more amazing than all of those predictions put together, because as I can currently imagine it, it’s still not something that I would necessarily buy right away.  And I want it to be something that changes the world (more than the Segway).

We’ll see, nerds!

What’s difficult is taking a good idea and a good execution, and running with it.

In this way, someone with two all consuming passions is less fortunate than someone with one all consuming passion.

It’s easier to run with something when you’re only trying to get to one place.

And now recently I’ve been obsessed with the idea of private journaling.  Mostly because I think the habit of writing privately is something that the world of social networking addicts is sorely missing.  Our brains need time alone to spin and process and create meaning in our lives, unattached from the pressures of the world.  The content of a private journal… personal thoughts, the makings of true introspection, unfiltered fears, desires, subconscious bubblings-up… are perhaps the richest soil of our selves outside our neurons themselves.

Because of the magic of technology, we can in many ways strain information out of the unfiltered words of our stream-of-conscious thoughts.

I’m beginning to explore all of the ins and outs of this data on this new Explore page.  But I’m trying to think of more… if anyone can think of other ways to harvest information out of text, I would love to hear about it.

From what I can tell, the Primary category is for very physical, basic, almost animalistic concepts, sensations, instincts, and passions.  The Emotional category is for the emotions of course, but more like the moods that we go through throughout the day rather than the initial reactions to everything.  And Secondary is all about rationality, thought, cognition, abstract thinking, etc.

It takes a text file of any sort and parses out the words to figure out which categories (and the magic comes from the subcategories, like Icarian Imagery), the text is heaviest in.

You end up with percentages of the top level Primary, Emotional, and Secondary categories, but you also get a lot of information about how the text scored in all of the subcategories.

A few of my favorite subcategories include:

• Primary -> Need -> Sex
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Timelessness
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Icarian Imagery
• Secondary -> Moral Imperative
• Emotion -> Anxiety
• Emotion -> Glory

Someone was even helpful enough to port the script to Ruby. I’ve got a plan to put this into use on 750words.com in the next couple days.  It’s gonna be pretty awesome, I think.

1. Search – you can now search your writing in case you want to go back and find something you wrote about on some other day.
2. Export – you can export your daily writings by month.
3. General stats
   1. Timer – You can see how long, on average, it takes you to write 750 words during a given month period.
   2. Speedometer – You can see how many words per minute you write, on average, to get to 750 words
   3. Streaks – you can see how many days in a row you’ve completed your 750 words
   4. Scoreboards per month – go back and see who won on any month that you did some writing
4. Customize – you can change the font color, font size, font family, and background color of the writing page to suit your aesthetics
5. Extra point for writing in one sitting – added an extra bonus point if you finish your daily writing in one sitting in less that 30 minutes
6. Last 10 completed pages – you can see who the last 10 people to complete their pages were, and how long it took them.
7. Tab – you can now tab from within the textarea that you’re writing, in case you want to indent or format lists that you’re writing.  All these little tweaks that make it feel more like a real writing tool are super interesting to me.

This is a silly project, but I’m finding that it does have a noticeable effect on my mental state and productivity (on things other than working on this project) when I’ve done my daily writing.  Which is why I guess I’ve been doing it on and off for 4 years, when I needed some forced brain purging.

Anyway, I’m getting a kick out of this.  I hope you do too!

It’s a simplification but we are simplifiers at our cores. We reduce things in our brains to their basic utilities, and have ways of unfolding those basic understandings into more well-rounded personalities, relationships, and people, but then folding them back up when we aren’t focused on the complexity of a particular person at a particular moment.

What’s been on my mind recently is how we come to some kind of understanding of ourselves, and our own capabilities, and our own self-worth.  How we know if we’re doing what we should be doing.  We think of ourselves as bags of capabilities for the most part as well.  We have strengths, we have some weaknesses, we have our common uses, our rare abilities, our surprise tricks.

Subconsciously, I think I’ve been on a life-long mission to increase not only my bag of capabilities, but the awareness of my capabilities.  It probably stemmed from years of being unpopular in school but knowing that I was capable of more than people thought I was.  Having a very large bag of tricks… which I would only make known to people who bothered to get to know me.  It was safer that way.  But as I grow older and have a more public persona, I rely more on my “reputation” as a source of self-worth.  I don’t think that’s necessarily a healthy thing, but it’s the truth.  I suppose that some parts of my self-worth are still wrapped up in my personal understanding of myself and my intentions, but more of it is out there.  Not necessarily with any one person or group of people, but spread across different groups of people who know different things about me, etc. My bag of capabilities is largely public. Whatever new capabilities or strengths I display are usually discovered by other people around me at the same time that I become aware of them myself.  Starting a bar, for example, or building an iPhone app, or the upcoming parenthood project.  I learn these new things publicly, and as a result largely determine my success at them based on public reaction.  Is this screwed up?  Am I a freak for saying that my sense of self-worth is tied so strongly to the opinions of others? I’m not sure.

Approvers can be anyone who notices that my bag of capabilities have increased (at least in their conception).  If that noticed improvement also matches with my own personal understanding of myself, then that act of attention and approval results in an increase in my own sense of self-worth.  Of a job well done.  If it doesn’t match up (I already knew I could do what I am gaining recognition for doing) then it doesn’t really increase anything other than a sense of dissonance between me and others.

If, for example, I find out that I can be a good parent, that will be a big deal to me. Because I don’t know it yet, or, I haven’t demonstrated it.  If I find out that I can run a successful business for iPhone apps or something else that I haven’t done yet, same deal. However, once I’ve learned that these new talents are a part of my “bag of capabilities” something interesting happens.  I no longer thing it’s a big deal to get attention for such a thing, and I also have an even bigger set of capabilities that I’m expected to work with for my next project.

Approval leads to raised expectations because of an increase in capabilities to work with.

Anyway, that’s my tangential thought for today.

Here’s the breakdown.

Most likely, this won’t be that interesting to anyone but myself, but I looking it over I feel like it does a good job of capturing the people, places, and actions of the year.  It’s a slice of a single minute in the day, but when it’s done consistently over a period of time, that slice can in many ways represent the whole.  I guess that’s been the point of the project from the start.

I love this project.

“Stars are not important. There’s nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important because they’re very so rare. As far as we know there are only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys!” – Terry Pratchett on religion

Wow, and just realized that the complete collection of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is available for instant play on Netflix!

The site’s called 750 Words, and the premise is simple, to write 750 words a day. 750 private, unfiltered, unplanned, words full of tangents, spelling mistakes, inconsistencies, repetitions, lost trains of thought, etc.  It was highly inspired by a thing called Morning Pages from The Artist’s Way (read a PDF excerpt of the Morning Pages passage here.)

I think this kind of writing is different from the kind of writing that we’re doing more and more of on the internet.  Different not only in audience (yourself instead of someone else) but also in character.

I think public, edited, thoughtful writing is self-expressive in nature.  It condenses ideas, it summarizes thoughts, it explains complications, it offers opinions.  It takes the world and creates a lens that you can see it through.

Not so with private, unfiltered, unplanned writing.  This kind of writing is entirely different.  It’s self-investigative in nature. It opens up messy drawers of thought and lays everything out on the table, it takes a 99% completed thought and tears it apart into its inconsistencies. It is short on manners, etiquette and practicalities.  It dismisses entirely valid trains of thought for no reason, and dwells on nit-picky details that seem to be entirely solid.

We need both kinds of writing. They go well together. The private writing becomes fodder for later public writing. Just like our secret inner thoughts are fodder for our more simplified public personas.

Of course, writing used to be private by default. The entire world couldn’t read the notebook in the bottom desk drawer. But they could read that blog post that had as as little thought put into it.  But, after 10 years plus of writing online, and going through the first dozen major lessons of writing online, I feel like I’ve slowly edited out the crazy spontaneous and unruly voice of my subconscious from my writing. And, through neglect, I’ve slowly given it less and less attention, all the while hoping that it would produce the same gems of thought and creativity that it had back when it was given more fuel.

So, 750 Words. Yes, online, because that’s the only way I can write anymore, given that I’m on any of 3 or 4 different computers at a given time.  And because my hand has forgotten how to write long hand.  But, private.  Because it’s more about writing than reading, I’ve used a few tricks to make the writing process more enjoyable:

• Break open the text box. Let it take over the whole page, like a Word document sorta, but I like to think of it more like a typewriter.  The page automatically scrolls as you get near the bottom of the page.
• Let it auto-save. No need for a save button… you didn’t need one in you paper journal, why do you need one online?
• Count the words. Paper has a size, the internet page doesn’t. So, count the words, and know when you’ve gotten to 3 pages (the magic number).
• One entry per day… no need to title it, tag it, open it, close it, categorize it, preview it, post it, date it, or anything. One entry a day, no more no less.
• Motivate. We all need motivation, even for things that we want to do.  Even more so for things that we know are good for us, but that take work. So I added a bowling-inspired point system that rewards writing several days in a row, but not so much that it breaks your heart if you miss a day. 3 days in a row is a turkey.

I’ve been doing my version of 750 words in a private wiki for the last year… and at current count only wrote on 81 of the last 300 days.  Even that has been a great benefit to me though.  I hope to continue the practice for the foreseeable future, as long as it continues to benefit my days.

I thought of building this little tool (let me check my wiki) on December 11th. I was still thinking (and writing) about it on December 12th, so I bought the domain.  On December 13th I used one of my stub Rails site bundles to get the basics up and running (Facebook Connect, jQuery, Compass) on my shared server, created a few models, and looked up a few jQuery plugins I’d need.  Tested it on December 14th, launched on December 15th.  When the idea’s there, and the tools are there, things can happen fast.  But having those 1.5 days to brainstorm about it before taking action were what really made it happen and made me confident that I could build it without distracting too much from my other work.

Anyway, I’m going to use it. If anyone else finds it useful, that’s great! I’d love to hear any feedback that people have, too.

Generally speaking, if you wake up one day and aren’t sure what to do with your time, do something small that helps someone else. As a nice side benefit, you’ll probably feel better as well.

via The Art of Non-Conformity » Annual Review: 2009 Life Lessons.

I think this is true. When at a loss for something to do, think about the people in your life and try to think of something nice that you can do for one of them. And then don’t mention anything about doing it.

It’ll all backfire if you expect credit or congratulations or even attention for the favor. For favors to work as self-medication, they have to be rewards in themselves, private to yourself, and with no residual expectation of pay-back.

Is that possible?

We should all ask our friends and family if there are any favors we can do for them. It’s a win-win.

“No God?…No Problem!” proclaim the ads, featuring an image of several smiling, Santa hat-clad individuals. The ads will kick off in Washington, D.C. in time for Thanksgiving weekend, running inside 200 buses, fifty rail cars and on the side or tail of twenty buses. The campaign will continue with ads appearing on select buses in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting in early December.

(Read the press release)

I’ve been reading about these guys for the last week and really dig what they’re doing… as controversial and potentially offensive as it is, I think it’s a responsibility for us non-religious folk to be at least somewhat interested in making our beliefs more acceptable in the world.

Anyone else out there identify as a humanist?

I don’t know what my problem is. I get enough sleep, I wake up, I take my vitamins, I eat my breakfast, I stare into the blue light for 15 minutes, I write 750 word of morning braindump to try to clean out the neurons and get to the good stuff, I go on a walk, I have my own space free of distractions, I close down all the social networks, I make lists, I have projects that I like, both short term and long term, I exercise several times a week, I turn on calming thinking music, and yet.

I can’t concentrate. I don’t have the energy or the focus to do more than the mindless tasks of preparation and maintenance.

I try something new each day. A list of things I am grateful for, write out imaginary ideal futures that might plant hooks in me to pull me forward towards them.

I relax, I meditate, I go to yoga, I draw pictures.

What’s wrong with me?

My best guess is some kind of seasonal energy problem that my Vitamin D and blue light treatments haven’t kicked in yet. Crossing my fingers for some placebo effect as well.

Or maybe one of my last glasses of wine killed off the queen bee neuron of my creativity brain cluster.

The same person might have different specializations in different social circles. In one group, a person might be the comforting one while in other they might be the distressed one.

I’m interested in this for a weird reason. I’m particularly interested in how some people specialize as being good or strong or stable. They are the ones that people can expect to more often than not keep it together during a problem, be fair during disputes, take care of others when they’re in distress, etc.

The side effect of social specialization is that when one person specializes in the direction of a strength, it sometimes becomes a cue that others can be less strong, more dependent, etc. And this is a disincentive for the strong person to continue playing that role, as it in some ways makes the other characters less strong. Are they being taken for granted? And then who will be strong for them when they need it? Parents, I’m guessing, might run into this conflict when trying to decide how protective they want to be of their children… does one shield them from all turmoil at the risk of sheltering them too much and leaving them unprepared for the eventual arrival of “real life”?

Does the person who always picks up the tab disincentivize the others to make more money? Does the person who is patient disincentivize the others from having better behavior? Does the person who always cleans disincentivize the others from picking up after themselves?

In a way, social specialization seems inevitable, and in many ways productive to a social group.  We would never have evolved into multicellular creatures unless some cells decided to specialize and take over functions from other cells.  Similarly, society has to specialize in order to grow and evolve.  We can’t all grow our own food and improve technology and raise children and build roads and govern the states and transport mail in equal amounts.

Of course, the rational answer is that we should balance specialization with giving others an opportunity to grow in their own ways. Balance strength with encouragement to grow. But at the core of the question is an anticipation of what society might be able to evolve into if it were to go whole hog into the idea of social specialization.  How many cells got left out of the first multi-cellular animals?  How many species didn’t provide something of value to the whole and therefore disappeared into the world of independent single cell outcasts?

This train of thought is creeping me out.