Hi! I'm Nate. This is one of those blogs that get updated quite sporatically and with no particular theme.
But Jeff Atwood told me in a YouTube video to Embrace the Suck and Do It In Public. And then Austin Kleon told me in a book to Show Your Work. Oh, then Casey Neistat taught me that "perfection erases humanity." And then Tom Sachs did that Space Program thing, and I was reminded of an insight that I had a long time ago.
I was turning in a magazine assigment in elementary or middle school. My professional graphic-designer dad had helped me desktop-publish a decent National Geographic parody about mushrooms. I was proud of the work we had done. And I was about to scoff (silently, internally) at the work of a fellow student, when I realized that the reason mine looked so good was because of all the help I had from my dad. The content was all mine, and the National Geographic cover was my idea. But the well-done presentation of which I was proud, was all him. This other student had done all the work himself.
I realized that if I had tried to do the magazine myself, even if I had gotten the National Geographic cover looking good, I would have run out of steam before I finished the magazine. I imagined a 3rd grader's crayon-rendered magazine. If it had a beginning, middle, and end, it would be superior to my "excellent" beginning.
And so, I make an imperfect website.
My pal calls it a “Bike Shop”.
Other ideas are coffee shop and neighborhood tavern.
This is not a new idea, but doing it as a service might be new.
Point your camera at everything in your room and Thing Classifier will learn what you have and make suggestions about how to store and organize it.
Remember that time when we put a stake in the ground and the ground swelled up and the lunch area flooded at the park where the charity event was happening?
Long ago, I started my first job as a sixteen-year-old. I was selling pagers at the mall. A family friend was the general manager of the local office of the paging arm of a Regional Bell Operating Company doing business as “PacTel Paging, A Pacific Telesis Company”. I was working my very first shift at the mall when the phone rang.
Yesterday I was having routine maintenance done on my car. My lovely wife dropped me off to pick up the car and, as she drove off to get the kids from school, I realized I had left my phone in her cup-holder.
Just sitting with kids on a Saturday morning. Libby has established a pattern with these kids: as soon as their room is clean on a Saturday, they can “have screen time” without an artificial time limit. (Week days they only get an hour after homework and chores are all done.)
Many times a colleague will have a good idea – a good solution to a problem. As soon as they try to implement the idea, they run into road blocks:
Last year I decided that I wanted a personal computer mostly for editing photos. (Mostly I’d been doing my editing and other personal work on my work computer.) I decided to get a small computer with a good graphics card – this would allow me to have a nice, portable machine and if I wanted to hook it up to a bigger monitor I could.
I dreamed at least two dreams last night. The first (or rather, the last – I usually recall dreams in reverse) was a heist movie. It ended with the bad guy looking for where he could plant the big explosive charge. It was in a building where some function was going on. Before that he dropped off me and Libby and Dottie on the street as a diversion. It was hard to tell if we were hostages or if we were under cover or if he was betraying us. I think we were all FBI agents and he turned out “dirty.”
The ThinkPad is close to 10 years old. It has a few advantages over the Alienware. One of them is soft-touch material. I think the material on the inside of the ThinkPad is a nice touch. I like the slightly sparkley finish on the outside – but I think I like the feel of the material on the outside of the Alienware better. However, that might be due to the age of the ThinkPad.