verdino bytes

My daughter loves playing "office", a game that generally involves the employment of some kind of robot to improve productivity and profitability. While I'm sure she would have played with this when she was a bit younger, I have to agree with Gizmodo's assessment that this toy (basically a toddler version of the corporate drone workstation) is a pretty depressing concept.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't always wear my seatbelt. OK - Amanda nags me about this constantly - I rarely wear a seatbelt. This PSA from the UK is pretty damn effective...

NY Times chart represents the big topics and trends over the past 10 years, all in one handy-dandy infographic.

From Steve Martin:

Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. Sure, a writer can get stuck for a while, but when that happens to a real author -- say, a Socrates or a Rodman -- he goes out and gets an "as told to." The alternative is to hire yourself out as an "as heard from," thus taking all the credit. The other trick I use when I have a momentary stoppage is virtually foolproof, and I'm happy to pass it along. Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don't, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else's work -- unless you're friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there's usually no jail time.

Love this. And I can attest that the drinking part is true. Thanks to @jquig99 for sending the link my way.

Cross-posted from my main blog. Full post here: http://bit.ly/kSxTP

If you’re like me and have an embarrassment of digitized music in iTunes, here’s a fun thing to try: The College Years Smart Playlist. Here’s how to make it.

1. Create a new Smart Playlist (File: New Smart Playlist). I called mine “College Years”.

2. Select “Year” and “is in the range” and put in the year you started college “to” the year you graduated. (If you didn’t go to college, use another date range that’s meaningful to you.)

3. Optional: Omit any song that you skip a lot. Click the plus icon, select “Skip Count” “is less than” and put in a small number (I picked 5). Make sure the top says “Match all of the following rules.” In the end, it should look like this.

4. Click “OK” and enjoy the sounds of your formative years.

My playlist turned out to be 9 gigs of awesome and embarrassing musical throwbacks, heavy on the early hiphop and flannel rock. It’s kept me smiling all week.

What’s on yours?

Happened across this blog post -- sounds like something I'd try just to see to what degree I've held onto some of my bad musical taste from high school and college.

Interesting thoughts about the similarities and differences between how we measure out offline lives and how we measure our online lives. Click the 'via' to read the original post that this graphic comes from.

Never heard of the movie this poster advertises but it's a good stat to keep in mind... especially when you're feeling thirsty.

The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. "My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die."

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

From the Wall Street Journal (click the "via" link above) and well worth reading and reflecting upon: a manifesto for slow communication -- and more broadly slow living. Looks at the way our need for speed and always-on lifestyles may be doing as much harm as good.

Is graffiti the original wall post, status update, tweet? 11 awesome bits of graffiti in the post but this one evokes a nice parallel between real 'posts' on walls and Facebook wall posts (and I'm just a social media nerd.)

Accent lighting for geeks.