Junk Drawer

My Dissertation 100 Hours at a Time

A while back I wrote about several 100 hour projects I would to do at some point to basically be a happier person. I just wondered how I could start given the black hole of time and effort I’ve believed my dissertation to be. I’ve been psyching myself out with self- talk like: “I hafta finish my phd” “I don’t have time to do anything but this dissertation.” “I won’t have much time for eating well, adequate sleep or quality time with family.” But none of that is true. I wish I’d realized that years ago. I might have been finished and a much better person. And while life has been good these last few years I would’ve have had the good sense to cherish it and be in the here and now instead of regretting the past and dreading or daydreaming of the future.

But life is about learning and growing and this time is helping me to identify things to improve my character. I have new perspectives on life that I could not imagine gaining had I not gone about my graduate studies that way I have.

I’m almost finished listening to “The Now Habit” on Audible. My main takeaway so far is that I can a live a fuller life right now and still make time to do this very hard thing. There will be more to come on this, but this is a good start I hope. And that’s what counts, that you keep starting until it’s good enough.

Revealing Mac OS X's Hidden Single-Application Mode

minorjive:

(via hiten)

Cool, trying it now. This should help with singletasking.

Reblogged from minor jive

New camera promises to capture your whole life

verbadjectivenoun:

randyhaddock:

A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer’s disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create “lifelogs” that archive their entire lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

Reblogged from verbadjectivenoun.

Is there an automated way to import all the feeds of the all tumblrs I follow into google reader?

roomthily:

The ghost in the field – BERG

LEDs highlighting the radio fields from a RFID tags and readers.

It always interesting to see the unseeable.

Reblogged from roomthily

Bilal will release his first official album in 9 years on Plug Research | FWMJ's Rappers I Know

reavesy:

I was wondering when the plot would thicken….FOR 3 YEARS I WONDERED

I felt the plot’s been pretty thick the past 2 years. It’s just that so many issues have been resolving themselves so quickly.

Reblogged from like DW's brother

“

Big numbers fuzz our brains, and that is just as true in business as it is in public policy. Speaking in “millions” and “billions” is like your second year of Spanish: You’ve memorized the vocabulary, but it’s hard to think in the language.

— Dan & Heat Chip on how to make data matter and actionable via Made to Stick | Fastcompany

“

We convinced the NSF to make a ruling that NSF money would only be used in grant requests for networking if they used TCP/IP. Now you can call this a gross intervention of the federal government in the private sector, picking winners and losers. But without it, we would not have the Internet. So this was a great lesson to me, that there are moments when the government needs to call the question, say this is the national policy, and then allow the market to adapt to it.

— Calit2’s Larry Smarr on the Origins of the Internet, Innovations in IT, and Insights on the Path Ahead