Business

 Unschooling has been getting a fair amount of press lately and, as a result, has become not quite fringy enough for my tastes. In thinking about this mainstreaming of Unschooling and what it means to our families elite fringe status, I have decided that it is time to introduce the world to my long loved and nurtured brain child. World meet UnJobbing. UnJobbing is a way of working that doesn’t mandate or prefer benefits, salaries, desks, meetings or artificial deadlines(amongst other things). UnJobbing focuses on process and passion, but does not supplicate itself to protocol. UnJobbing is about transcending the 9-5 grind. It aims to alleviate the artificial and detrimental effects of grubbing for a raise or promotion, office politics, and the back room deals that errode our actual productivity. ...

I just set up a Patreon.com page. If you haven’t heard of it yet, patreon is a service that allows content creators, artists, and musicians to accept the generosity of their adoring public (that’s you). The concept mirrors the ideal that Amanda Palmer talked about in her awesome TED Talk. Do what you do for love, then ask for help. I suspect that this idea is as old as art, but AFP puts a new spin on it by making it distributed. ...

When I was younger (let’s just say I was 10) my uncle would entice me to row him across what seemed like an endless [Muscongous] sound to Loud’s Island, by making up silly stories about a fellow named Barfoolean Farkwar. Barf would do things like set out to sail without a sail. When he realised his blunder, he would split all of his underpants in half, and sew them together to make a stinky sail (Barf wasn’t much for hygiene). ...

I’ve always known that there is a flow to life. Swim with it and you move quickly towards your destination. Swim against and you may get where you think you want to go, but man do you have to work for it. After a year an a half of cruising, I was well positioned to stay in the flow, but it was surprisingly difficult to maintain my conviction in the sleepy months surrounding the holidays. The city was all but dormant, there were no jobs posted, no real professional meetups, and I was starting to think of forcing, and leveraging. In other words, I was getting desperate. ...

I just got done reading Ashley Ambrige’s new e-book You Don’t Need a Job, You Need Guts. It’s an inspirational piece in the same vein as Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides. Both authors encourage their readers to do whatever it is that they are passionate about (though Ashley claims to be weary of the term passion). Every time I read one of these books I think, yeah, I can totally kick ass in that self motivated, self promoting, me against the big bad world way. Really, I’m perfectly wired for it… until. Until I start trying to figure out what I’m passionate about. Ashley recommends putting your passion right up in the subtitle of your blog. What I have up there is the definition of the term “forge over” which, when it comes right down to it, is probably about as close to a concise statement of passion as you are going to get from me. [UPDATE: I have changed the subtitle since this writing] When I start thinking about what I’m passionate about I get nothing but paradox. Let’s delve: ...

3 days to go. I can’t remember ever being this excited for a trip. I haven’t packed a thing yet, but I spend every spare second thinking about what to bring (and perhaps more importantly what to leave behind). The anticipation of the people I’m going to meet and the places I’m going to see is nerve wracking and thrilling and overwhelming. I’m buried at work. TED related activity, on both the TEDIndia and Jill’s Wish front have created a maelstrom of tasks and objectives. Beyond that I’ve got new and old projects coming out my ears. Come Friday, I will have to find a way to let all of those things go so that I can be free to lose myself in this experience. ...

In a recent comment my buddy Dave asked: “Okay. I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask, even see if you would write a blog post on it. This seems like an opportune time. Why Twitter? I don’t get it. Am I not understanding something fully? It seems like one more digital distraction in my day. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. But the rate at which people use it makes me think its not going away as fast as I once thought. Please note, I’m not trying to put down twitter or those that use it. I’m just curious what you find so useful about it and what you use it for.” ...

Bruce Schnier has given a similar talk in years past that I just loved. This one is Dan Gilbert talking at TED Global on the topic of how our ability to estimate risk/odds/value/etc. in our modern context just sucks. I don’t easily stoop to using other people’s content on my blog, so please do cut me some slack on this one. Its just too important to paraphrase!

UPDATE: Based on feedback from @reese and Victoria, and my general sense that I was just doing this to avoid writing about something more interesting, I have removed the Snap plugin from this site. Phew. Read on if you must… …I am trying out snap.com’s snapshots. Snapshots add seemingly cool mouseover popups to my links. . I’m interested to hear what my readers think? Is this intrusive, annoying, helpful. Please comment!

Okay, I’m going to come right out and say this cheesy thing that sometimes runs through my mind. I am a radiant being. This is not to say that I am radiant and some other people are dull. I suspect that we are all radiant. In any case, that’s not the point of this post. This is the point. I want to believe that what I do for money is just one aspect of who I am, and what makes me valuable in this life. ...

I put this Title in my drafts folder on June 12th. Its been sitting there taunting me ever since. Then on Wednesday I attended a session at OSCON titled “Programmer Insecurity & The Genius Myth”. Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick talked to us about how our fear of looking like an idiot or not being taken seriously, or hubris, prevents us from admitting failure. The following are my thoughts on this topic, which have recently been influenced and enhanced by Ben and Brian. ...

This week Amazon pulled a surprisingly ironic move. It removed an unauthorized version of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal farm from all connected Kindles. Its important to note that these books were uploaded to the Kindle Store by a company that did not own the rights. Regardless, the move angered and frighted Kindle many users. There are countless newspaper articles, blog posts and tweets on the irony, legality and fairness of this move, so I won’t say more about that here. What I will do is provide a solution to this problem. I’m not using (or supporting) Windows anymore, so this solution will only work for you if have a Mac or Linux box. ...

Thanks to the fantastic Global Translator Plugin, my site is now available in 42 languages. You can have the site translated to your language by appending your country code to the domain, or clicking one of the flags above. For example /es will give you the homepage in Spanish. The first time a page is translated it takes a while to build, so Global Translator gives you the google translation page while you wait. A Dutch speaking friend verified that that translation looked okay, if you are fluent in one of the 42 languages, I would love some feedback on translation quality (and mistakes).

I love my Kindle. I knew that I would, because I borrowed my friends for a few weeks and read a book on it. I was worried about the lack of a “Kindle Public Library” and the whole loaning and selling Kindle books thing until I rediscovered Project Gutenberg, and Feedbooks. To be honest, while I knew about Project Gutenberg before, I didn’t really have a use for it until I had a dedicated reader. I mean, who wants to read a book at your computer. Even on a laptop its no fun. But with a svelte, light, non-backlit reader in my hands, the out-of-copyright and CC world are my oyster. ...

I often have trouble coming up with good color palettes for my themes, icons, and applications. I think I have a good enough sense for what looks good together and for finding tones and hues that match the mood of said app, theme, or icon, but it always takes me hours to identify the colors on the color wheel or spectrum. Last night, quite by accident, I found a solution to this conundrum that may make my life quite a bit easier. ...