Educaction
Education Is Obsolete by the Time We Are Taught - This Is Not a Political Statement About Who Pays What. →
The Masters program I participated in was obsolete the day I started it. 1 of the 12 classes was pertinent - Business Ethics.
Innovation Hub podcast on education with guest Seth Godin
Constriction and Compression
Lately, I feel like many things in life are suffering from constriction or compression.
The action of making something narrower by pressure or of becoming narrower; tightening.
Time: Time is a precious resource. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and yet there never seems to be enough of it.
Attention: Commercials, ads, limited time offers, act now. All ways to capture your attention for the benefit of someone else.
Money: As prices go up there is a compression/constriction on our wallets to use the same amount of money to buy what we used to but we can not.
I think many people are aware of the first three, they are probably the most common, but as I look around I find more everyday ones.
Aisle width: Ever notice how aisles in most stores and markets are getting smaller so they can get a few more aisles in the store. Sometimes two carriages can not even pass each other.
Packages(shrink fla-tion): Have you recently picked up what used to be a lunch-size bag of potato chips? It now holds 4 chips for the same price.
Photos: If you have ever uploaded a photo to Instagram or Facebook you know how compressed these images are. I understand its for the company to make them fast and save space but some of the compression routines destroy the images.
Streaming Services: Much like out photos the TV Series and moves that we watch are also very compressed. Some of the services offer a special 4k tier but it is truly not 4k.
Store Layouts: Stores squeeze you to the back of the store for the one item everyone wants.1 Large stores create a maze you have to get through so you see everything2. Forcing you down the maze.
Does anyone else feel this way?
Write Plain Text Files →
NO DEPENDENCIES
If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them. You are dependent.
But if you only use plain text, you can use any program on any device, forever. It gives great flexibility and peace of mind.
I just converted my blog to blot.im for this very reason.
via Derek Sivers
Changing Platforms
I have been writing this blog on and off since 2007. It has been through many iterations and voices as I try to figure out what mine truly is. When I first began writing, it was on Blogger, as I am sure many other people started as well. After a year, I moved to TypePad. I was there for a very long time and was super happy. When it began to feel like the feature set was not growing fast enough, I moved to Squarespace. I had heard all the podcast ads for Squarespace and again jumped in with both feet. There was an awkward upgrade process from version 5 to 7, but the service was rock solid. I think I have built 30-40 other websites on Squarespace for friends and customers.
A few years ago, my company decided to use WordPress for the corporate blog, which made perfect sense. I moved my site to WordPress for my learning since the maintenance fell under my responsibility. I loved the ease of writing posts in Markdown. WordPress continues to evolve with blocks and patterns. These are great, but I often fought with the toolset or was distracted by the next bell or whistle. I also realized there was so much more overhead for the number of posts I write. Hosting costs have also increased drastically. Most providers offer you a good first year, and then the prices rise drastically, perhaps because they know the pain of moving a site from one platform to another.
I was interested in a relatively simple static site generator. I looked at Hugo and Jekyll, and I am sure I could have figured them out. But then I remember reading Nicolas Magand site and loving how simple, clean, and fast his site was.
One of his recent posts mentions using Blot.im. I remember seeing Blot some time ago, maybe shortly after it launched in 2014, and decided to see where it has progressed. Blot.im is based on Markdown files stored in Dropbox, Git, or GoogleDrive and then synced to Blot servers. There are several templates you can use, or you can build one from scratch.
I signed up for a month to try it out and see if there were any features I would be missing. It is great! It’s fast, easy, has plenty of features for what I want, and really by its nature, asks you to concentrate on your writing, which I hope to do more of in the coming weeks.
iPad Growing Use List →
I love when I am out and about (now that it is a little easier) and seeing the iPad’s being expanded in everyday uses. I remember the commercial where a repair technician was using an iPad on top of a wind turbine to check the systems. I thought cool use case but most of us will never do that.
iPads as POS devices have grown tremendously, reducing the costs of renting the traditional and expensive cash register systems. There is a good chance you may have seen similar setups in coffee shops. Recently, I saw a new system at a gift store. I inquired with the owner about how it is working out. She told me that the system not only rings the sale, sends information breakdowns to their accounting software, but also manages their inventory of what is available in stock. She could not have been happier.
A few weeks ago, I went to my dermatologist for an annual skin checkup. They use iPads for the patient intake as well as storing my medical records for the Dr. to review. After the Dr. reviewed my last visit and my checkup, he asked the assistant to take a picture of a mole he wanted to remove. This might be the most novel use of “iPad Photography”. He had a picture of the spot before it was removed for him to review in future visits.
This may seem like a shortlist, but it continues to grow, and that excites me for the iPad platform.