Adam Betts is at it again. He’s just put out a cool little hack to add custom dividers to your dock.
This week’s Album of the Week goes to the new Anberlin album, Cities.
It’s not a huge departure from previous albums but it definitely rocks harder.
Favorite tracks so far are Adelaid, Hello Alone, Dismantle.Repair., and slow-rocker Inevitable.
Group Recipes - A social network revolving around food. Yum!
Check out some killer toys at Fugitive Toys.
So the little hamsters have been hard at work designing the new site that you now see. There are still quite a few rough edges and I know some browsers (specifically IE 6) just plain don’t work with this site. But do know that I’m working on it.
One major thing to make note of is the change in link structure. I’m dropped the usual blog structure of year, month, and day and just went with a simple post id and article title. Make for much neater URLs. The negative side is that all previous links are dead…but since there aren’t a ton of incoming links to specific posts at this point…it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Hope you like the new goods!
I’m an idea machine. Not a week (or, a lot of times, a day) goes by that I don’t think of some new site or web application that’d I’d love to see come to fruition. I’ve got an entire Backpack page overflowing with ideas should I ever get bored.
In 2006 I tried my hardest to actually build a lot of these ideas out. I had over a dozen different personal projects on my plate and some were even extremely close to being finished.
The predicament I found myself in was that I was killing myself trying to manage, design, and develop so much stuff in addition to managing, designing, and developing client work.
So what did I do? Right after the holidays I sold and dropped all projects that I either didn’t give a rip about or had been around for 6 months and hadn’t made any money or showed no signs of making a significant profit soon. That left me with only active (or almost active), profitable projects that I was still really excited to be a part of.
Since shedding all of those projects, I’ve found myself much more relaxed with work and a lot more productive. Projects that run themselves still require a certain amount of mental space and the amount of mental space my projects were taking up was more than I could handle.
Project shedding applies to much more than just business related things. Life in general can get far to full to enjoy. I highly recommend evaluating both your work and personal lives and, if anything, temporarily let go of some things and see how much your quality of life improves.
This month I finally made the leap to the Intel side of Apple and snagged myself a juicy little MacBook Pro (little = 17″).
Now that I’ve got the MBP, I no longer need my G5 or the iSight (since Apple laptops have cameras built in).
So, I’ve put both items up for sale on eBay.
The PowerMac G5 is a beast with a Dual 2GHz processor and 5GB of RAM and the iSight is in mint condition.
Get your bid on.
So it’s been a bit of a whirlwind the past couple of months and as you can tell, I haven’t posted in about a 3 billion days. And by 3 billion days I mean about 90.
I’m moving business towards the content creation side of things…meaning I’ll be writing more here.
Most of my writing has revolved around Apple stuff at The Apple Blog but I figured I really should start posting non-Apple stuff and here seems like the perfect place.
So stay tuned to more ranting on business, design, lifehacking, coding, and just plain awesomeness.
Booyah.
A year ago in July of 2005 I married the woman of my dreams. We moved out to Denver, CO as a newly married couple fresh out of college with no jobs, no plans, and not knowing anybody. Within a matter of a couple of weeks we both had great jobs and were really settling in. I had the exact job at a fantastic interactive firm that I had always wanted and got that job within a couple of months (not years) after college. I was blessed to say the least.
But after working there for a mere 7 weeks I had become extremely unhappy with the job. The people I worked with were great and I got to work on some huge projects for major companies, but I hated it. Why did I hate it? Because I was working for someone else. Everything that was put out had to go through a total of about 10 people…10 opinionated people. When any project was finished it was rarely something I was proud of and really was hardly even my own work after all the revisions. Sure…that’s just the industry, but why did I have to put up with it? I ultimately made the decision to work on my own from home. And here we are, one year later, and I’m still alive.
The past year has proven to be one of the greatest years of my life. From a business perspective, going freelance was a fantastic decision. I doubled my “salary” while actually spending less time in the “office.” It has been very successful to say the least.
Was the decision to quit a “stable” job hard? Sure. I had a family to support and no real work lined up. But it turned out to be the right decision in every way.
Maybe you’re in the same spot I was a year ago and aren’t sure if you should give it a go. I’ll say this, it’s not for everyone. Working for yourself requires and truckload of discipline and perseverance. It can get a tad boring sitting in a room by yourself all day. But ultimately the payoffs really are great.
So if you’re thinking of taking that step, do some planning, weigh your options, and go for it!
Glen at LifeDev just made a really encouraging post about Patti Brotherton’s 90-Day Rule.
Basically the theory is that whatever you do today really shows it’s effects 90 days from now. So say you ran a mile everyday. 90 days from when you start that, you’ll start seeing the effects.
A more relevant application is blogging. I’ll take me as the subject. My goal is to make atleast one blog post here on SpottedWalrus per day. The idea is that in 90 days I’ll start seeing more traffic, more comments, and ultimately just a more successful blog.
This theory can really be applied to anything though. So, I challenge you to put some effort in to something routinely and then in 90 days reflect on that. Chances are you’ll be better off than when you started.
