silencematters

Am I trying to solve a problem with a formula more complicated than the problem itself?

This originally comes from Thoreau’s Walden (1854), via an opinion piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg published last week titled, The Cost of Smarts..

“ferns and bells” - Photo by silencematters

Juliette and I live right next to the Brookyln Botanic Gardens, and each weekend we try to make it out to see the slowly changing expression of plant life on display.

Last night I handed my feeds over to feedburner after I had recommended the service to @xfreemarko. It really is one of the best ways to manage your feeds, and get a handle on the type of traffic and readership your feeds are getting. You can also set it up to continue to serve your feeds from your own domain, avoiding the jump to a 3rd party page.

I am still not 100% sure I got this working correctly, so do let me know if you see anything odd/broken. My feed URL seems to still be at the feedburner location, and it is not clear if that is the best that it gets.

A few weeks ago, my hard drive on my MacBook crashed, so I have been going through and re-installing all of the firefox plugins that I had, plus a few others I found in the process. It has actually been kind of enjoyable using this as an opportunity to re-think some of the browser plug-ins that I use.

FireBug
Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is essential.

TypeGauge
Type Measuring for Firefox

Foxmarks Bookmarks
Synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. Includes a feature to access your bookmarks from any computer.

GrApple
Helping Firefox to look a little better than it does out of the box.

PicLens
This is by far, one of my favorite plug-ins that I use. I originally came across it in this article by John Markoff, and now I can’t live without it. I use this daily to browse images both on Flickr and Google.

Sxipper
Sxipper accurately fills in forms, manages passwords and your OpenIDs. (i love this!!!)

ScribeFire
There are far too many links and posts that I bang out, and most of the time I would like to not have to login to WordPress to do it. This is the answer! It is a little clunky, but really super convenient.

User Agent Switcher
Perfect for switching your broswer to another user agent. I use it to test out iPhone apps I may be working on.

Web Developer Tool Bar
I used to use this more than I do currently. Firebug now handles most of the features I need on a daily basis. However, I like that I can specify that I can Disable Cache on each load of a page (which I always have set) and that i can turn styles off on any given site. It is still a must have.

GridFox
Adds a customizable grid overlay to any web page. The nice part about this grid solution is that it doesnt rely on code in the web page to function. The only downfall is that it is not easily activated through a key command.

Hyperwords
This looked interesting. I am going to give this a try.

Blue Organizer
Also looked interesting enough to download.

ThumbStrips
I thought this might be along the lines of the PicLens browser, but for your recent history. Doesnt look nearly as savvy.

iMacros for Firefox
There has to be repetitive tasks that I do from time to time where this would come in handy.

Clay Shirky’s article on our society’s surplus of cognitive thought is a really great read. ( via @om) It really helps you take a step back and remind you that we are really at the start of (and part of) a great transformation in our society.

[If] you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

I recommend watching the video over on blip.tv. It’s truely fantastic.

I just found Eric Case’s Blog through twitter, and have been enjoying it tremendously. I immediately found a number of posts that resonated with me, and I added them to my google reader shared items - especially the ones about the proliferation of Open ID, which I’m really in favor of.

Yesterday, Boing Boing posted an interesting diatribe on their comment moderation policies. Someone obviously got frustrated moderating comments and had to voice it. It is similar to posts I have seen on City Room and the Caucus.

All in all, these posts say a lot about the state of discourse on the web, and offer up clear examples of where the limitations currently are in constructing more focused conversations.

I thought you all might take solace in reading that other bloggers also face the good and the bad of on-line discourse. I have my hopes that the means of constructing a better conversation will only become better with time.

This is the perfect camera stabilizer, and it is extremely portable as well!

There was a fantastic article in today’s New York Times, by Gina Kolata, about overcoming your mind to maximize your performance while running. Now, I am not much of a runner - or I should say, I would like to be more of a runner than I am. I have running shoes, and run about 50-60 times/year, with in these 3 month bursts of found discipline.

Anyway, this article got me thinking in more ways than running… read more…

Casa de Hormigon, (Concrete House) - BAK Architects - via Monoscope and BlueAntStudio

I am adding this to the list of places that inspires the house that I will build some day. It seems to be really inspired by the Don Judd works, which I recently saw in Marfa, TX.

Fred No. 23 by Louise Ma - This little drawing is part of a series called One Hundred Views of Fred.

Hello Louise would like you to meet Fred, 100 times over. I feel like I know him already, and we have only met 23 times.

It has been labeled as “The Safest U.S. City”. Sounds like a rare anthropological find. I bet there are all kinds of creepy American values to be found there. - via All-Terrain

So I have been looking for the best way to keep up with my feeds while on my iPhone, and recently, I have come across 2 really interesting ways to go about this. read more…

Upon leaving BAM, in the stairwell there is a nice looking wall with a E positioned smack in the middle - see the flickr entry

The lady and I went to BAM this weekend and saw The Darjeeling Limited. Now I am huge Wes Anderson fan and love all of his previous movies, but this one didnt really get anymore exciting than the poster. It is a shame. The poster didnt move, so I guess the movie had it’s benefits. It was a visually appealing movie.

One thing I do like about seeing these eye candy movies is leaving the movie with the feeling that you are in a movie, and everything around you is perfectly lit, and timed to fit. For this reason alone… I love seeing movies.

“An opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation” - likemind.us The first NY event is Friday, Cctober 19 at 8pm (map).

I couldn’t help but read every word in this article with wide eyes and a captive imagination. “Death special: How does it feel to die?” from the New Scientist - (via Kottke)

Chris Fahey’s “Googlepulse” has slightly accelerated.

After many years on hiatus, Fray.com is starting back up again. Fray was, and now is a community story telling experience, originally started by the ever talented Derek Powazek and Heather Champ from SF.
read more…

I recently tried out the Installer.app on my iPhone, and have been really impressed. Not only was this install extremely easy, but so were all the smaller apps it helps you to install onto your iPhone… and it does it all without a Finder. Isnt it great how changing a form factor and limiting a few resources can greatly improve a process that we thought was easy enough to begin with? read more…

There is music aboard the Voyager 1 space probe thanks to Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. (via - CP)

“Containing photographs, natural sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from all over our world, the record was intended to preserve something of human culture beyond what an intelligent extraterrestrial, encountering the craft at some far-distant time and place, might infer from the spacecraft itself” - NYT