White’s of Henry Lane

My iPod is an aging 2nd gen 20G model I bought dirt-cheap from an aquaintance who is a first-adopter if there ever was one. I’ve been using this thing non-stop in the years I’ve owned it, and a result my library had grown a lot of cruft. Thanks to AllOfMP3, my iTunes library recently surpassed my iPod’s capacity. I started noticing that when I synched, I wouldn’t get all the tracks in albums, or odd stuff would start creeping on like operas or bits of Christmas music, both of which I keep off my iPod.

Last night I got sick of this state of affairs. I made playlists for each genre of music I wanted on my iPod, and then hand picked exactly what albums I wanted on there. I deliberately selected albums that hadn’t seen heavy rotation for whatever reason, and omitted stuff I had become sick of. All told, I moved about 2.5G of music on to my iPod.

This hardly qualifies as a hack, but wow: I never would have thought such a simple, common sense process could increase my enjoyment of my iPod so much. I’ve been using the incredible Pod Player to listen to these hidden gems all day. I’ve even caught myself stopping to give a closer listen to tracks, or replaying tracks. Usually by about now I’ve killed Pod Player and am listening to Creation Steppin’ or Ragga Jungle with Media Player Classic. Instead, I have a whole new love for my iPod, and my library.

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How about “Smart Quotes”?

One of the most limiting misconceptions you can have is the belief that there are idea people and there are people who can’t have ideas. The reason some people believe this is that they think the only end result of having ideas are things like iPods, coffee tables that double as dining tables, or ad lines that stick in your head. That’s bunk. Having ideas, creativity, problem solving; these are things that everybody does everyday. Pull a menu together from the limited food in your fridge? Drop a function from 80 lines of code to 20 lines? Sheet-hitch your shoelaces so you could walk home? Ideas, everyone of them.

The key to going from little ideas to big ideas is the same as developing any other skill: practice.

Probably the best work on building your creative muscles is a 50-page booklet by Advertising Hall of Fame inductee James Webb Young called “A Technique for Producing Ideas“. This book may be hard to track down, but try in college or marketing-focused bookstores. (Alternatively, try “How to Get Ideas“, which is essentially a more verbose version of “Technique” that has illustrations.)

Young puts forward a five step process for getting ideas that is so common-sensical, most people will completely discount it.

1. gather raw material (by reading, experiencing, watching many varied things)
2. think about those raw materials a lot, and go deep in them
3. go do something else for a while as this stuff marinates
4. be open to the idea when it suddenly appears
5. implement it, working out the hidden flaws you didn’t see during the “eureka” moment

Obviously I paraphrase. I really hope you track down this book and read it for yourself.

There’s one part of “practicing” that Young left out: having lots of ideas. The more ideas you have, the better you’ll be at having them, and the more of them will be winners. Realizing this, I came up with a little hack. I call it “Ten Things Today”, because I was able to doodle up a little logo for that in my sketch pad. The goal is this: write down ten ideas every day in a notebook. They can be about anything at all, and they can be as daft as you want. You can write down the missing link in cold fusion, or you can think of the practical applications of a chocolate settee. Just as long as ten things are going in that book every day. Keep these things, and watch the progression in the quality of your ideas.

Don’t worry about having a paper trail of ridiculous ideas. Apocryphal tales abound about superstar CEOs who show up to every meeting with 100 ideas, 99 of which are terrible. It only takes one!

As two minutes skimming the Flickr Blog will prove, the big thing on Flickr seems to be the photo memes. They take off pretty quick, people just tag a couple of photos with the meme name, send it to their friends, then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends …

There are two I am really digging. The first is the desktop screenshot meme. One of the nice features of Flickr is that you can use the flash applet to annotate photos. The desktop screenshots then become a valuable pointer to neat apps and GUI eyecandy. Its how I discovered Samurize and WKrellm.

The second one I really enjoy is “What’s in your bag?” inspired by a gadget site that used to ask cutting-edge-geeks that very question. This series is almost obsessively annotated, and its a neat snapshot of the photographer. I’ve also learned the following things are true:

• most Flickr users are Mac users
• most Flickr users have iPods
• a shocking number of Flickr users use floppy disks

Floppy disks? ~1M of easily-crushable storage? It really blew me away. I was shopping for a spindle of DVDs at Staples the other day, and they didn’t even have floppies on the shelves. You can buy a 128M memory key for just a bit more than 30M worth of floppy drive storage. I figure its generally students who are dragging these files around on floppies, but its alarming to think that institutes of higher learning don’t have (or possibly don’t allow access to) USB ports on their machines.

If you’re at all interested, I participated in What’s in your bag.

A little while ago I read an excessively blogged article on keeping your blog fresh. This blog is not staying as fresh as I’d like, so I’m going to follow some advice: “If you haven’t got anything to say, review something.”

I am the proud owner of two nearly-broken-in pairs of Blundstone boots. One is the Blundstone Canuck, the other the Blundstone Original.

Those who know me know that I’m no clothes horse, especially in the shoe department. I generally tend to buy whatever is on sale and half decent, and wear them until they rot off my feet or my wife threatens to leave me. Which is why its really rocked the world of my nearest and dearest that I would go out and buy two pairs of shoes in just over two weeks.

I’ve finally found the good-looking, hard-wearing shoe that I really want to own. The first pair broke in so nicely that I went back as soon as I could for the Originals. If you’re looking for a boot that looks good with everything shy of a suit, I can’t recommend these highly enough.

Do you ever read Slashdot? Chances are good you do, if your job is even remotely tech-ish. I generally read Slashdot via RSS instead of going to the site, which means that if I’m interested in a story I have to click through to the site. That, in turn, means I may be exposed to the “discussions” that take place on the site. Very little of worth happens in the discussions of Slashdot stories, with the exception of the odd “Ask Slashdot“.

I had kind of resigned myself to this being the level of discourse between techies; big-name bloggers excluded. This all changed when I clicked through to the current discussions at the Joel on Software forum. People there are pretty intelligent, and seem to honestly want to help posters, not just show off their leetness. I wanted to share this quote with you. Shakespeare it ain’t, but it sums up pretty well my career in the web:

If you aren’t working on something amazing, chances are you are working on something stupid. There is not that much middle ground in software.

Made by an anonymous poster, no less.

If you’ve got time to kill, and are a bit of a computer wonk, I’d really suggest you check out the Joel on Software forums.

Perhaps I’m a bit thick, but I’m finding the current WordPress template development articles wanting. I have an idea in my head of what I want to do, but its not coming to me. I have to admit that I’m not really spending as much time on the task as I’d like. What I really want is a plain-vanilla template that’s thoroughly annotated so I can pull it apart, and make it look like the pictures in my head.

Until that time, lets all pretend to love my brutalized Kubrick, ‘kay? Thanks.

Excuse the reversion-to-Kubrick. I’m just futzing about with WP1.5. I like it so far, except for the ugly css problem on the admin side that people have been complaining about.