Sam Harrelson

We really do forget that Easter isn’t just a day but actually a season in the liturgical Christian calendar. It would be like assigning all of Lent to Ash Wednesday. There’s a reason Easter is the longest season in the church calendar… practice resurrection.

I don’t remember when or why but about 2 years ago we threw this sticky blue ball onto the ceiling of our dining room. It’s been there ever since fighting a constant battle with gravity and friction thanks to the miracle of modern polymers. It’s also become part of our family and dinner routine. It’s going to be a sad day when it falls.

It’s part silly, part therapeutic, and part philosophical but I like to tear down my bags and carry items every weekend and make sure I have what we need and I know where it is. It also helps to process what we don’t need and take those items out of the tins, packs, and bags that make up our daily carry and supply lines. Good metaphor for life. Biblical even.

And most important of all, citizens must hold companies and governments accountable for the commitments they make, and demand that both respect the web as a global community with citizens at its heart. If we don’t elect politicians who defend a free and open web, if we don’t do our part to foster constructive healthy conversations online, if we continue to click consent without demanding our data rights be respected, we walk away from our responsibility to put these issues on the priority agenda of our governments.

Source: 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb? – World Wide Web Foundation

That’s what Peach is for. It is a place to be real with people who’ve chosen to be real with you. It’s friendly, it’s therapeutic, it’s cathartic. It’s necessary. When it’s not around, those of us who use it go a little bit mad.

We’ve come to lean on confessing out loud. And there are no priests left who can be trusted any more. The only thing we can trust is benign neglect.

Is that the next phase of the web? The web that hardly works, where no one’s paying attention because no one really cares? (Except your friends, including strangers, who somehow care so much?)

Source: kottke.org – home of fine hypertext products

Yep.

How can we transition to a gender-balanced world, if these biases remain part of our vernacular?  ELaN Languages, an independent translation organisation in Belgium, wants to tackle our unconscious bias by updating their online translation tool with a new feature: ‘the unbias button’. The plug-in offers unbiased translations of biased words. Making us aware of our unconscious bias by translating bias words, such as job titles, into gender-neutral words.

Source: A NEW PRODUCT FEATURE TO BREAK GENDER BIAS – J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam (news)

This thing is pretty AND amazing.

Today starts the liturgical season of Lent. Around 12:03AM this morning (or last night, depending on your biological sense of time), I committed the ultimate mind crime of deleting my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. Well, I began the process of deleting them since each of these advertising companies give you a 30-day “grace” period for you to “make sure” that you really want to disengage from the machine.

But, it’s time.

It’s time for me to stop making excuses about where I put my time and attention. It’s time for me to stop making excuses for participating in systems that I don’t want to encourage or necessarily be a part of even if there’s the offer of exposure and connections. It’s just not worth it.

Jump from the hook. You’re not obliged to swallow anything that you despise.

If you’ve met me IRL, you’ve probably noticed I have a notebook either in my shirt pocket or in my hand (or a stack of index cards tucked away somewhere). All of them make awkward appearances when I hear a good quote, someone has a question I need to look up, if I was trying to record a student’s robot time trials, or if the spirit moved me.

I’ve long been a doodler since my time in Mrs. Hinson’s 3rd Grade class where we learned that sketching helped with creativity (I might have made that up… but it stuck). When I got to Wofford College, my mentor Larry McGehee kept that alive by talking about his doodling process during staff meetings and other such nonsense. That was inspiring to me at the time, but his tips and tricks on the doodling life hack helped me survive countless staff meetings as a teacher myself as well as Board meetings and team meetings and all the meetings we have to go to when we decide to throw ourselves into grown-up world.

I’m at the point in my life now where I don’t have to attend so many mandatory meetings and for that gift I feel blessed (looking back, I do feel some regret for how immature/bored/inattentive/distracting I was during teacher staff meetings… I’m sorry Dear Administrators, but I do feel that I added spice to our gatherings by throwing out bombs to get everyone riled up and awake such as whether cursive was really necessary in Middle School). But with that gift comes a clear place of loss in my creative process. I have to make time to doodle now. It’s weird how you spend years thinking “Oh great, another meeting… it’s Doodling Time!” and then you find yourself secretly giddy because you know you’ll have 4 extra minutes to sneak in some surreptitious doodling while your toddler finishes their breakfast. But here I am.

So I’ve been thinking a good deal about my paper notebooks and my doodling and my journaling and all those Instagram posts that I heart on a daily basis displaying some young person’s admirable bullet journal or Panda Diary or a Mom’s Moleskine Menagerie (wow, that’s a great name… Moleskine can run with it… I’m just the idea guy). I’ve spent too many hours thinking over this issue and watching YouTube videos comparing GoodNotes and Notability on the iPad Pro while jogging off the extra weight I gained sitting in meetings and doodling and reading blog posts that compare paper journaling to “digital” journaling.

The issue is complicated by the fact that I’m typing this on an iPad and I do love this form factor and device. The iPad Pro really has become my main computer when I’m not chained to a laptop working on a piece of code or having to review artwork in Adobe Illustrator for a brand client (but the iPad is getting there!). I’ve always been the “digital” guy or “techy teacher” or the preacher that preaches with an iPad (I’ve also preached from a Blackberry, a Palm T5 (loved that thing), and a Palm m100 over the years), or the consultant who has all the fun tech toys. So when I show up with a paper notebook, it’s a little jarring to some people and frequently leads to a conversation about my note booking style or journaling preferences or the types of pens I prefer. I’ve bonded with many clients over the benefits of a Pilot G2 Extra Fine 0.5mm refill cartridge compared to the competition.

But year after year I go back to my paper notebooks when it’s time to put the days to bed on another year. This year is going to be no different it seems. I’m an old man stuck in his ways, what can I say? “I’ve got my drip pan, ready for my nap” as Lightning McQueen says at the ends of Cars 3 (again, I have a toddler). But there is magic in opening a new journal and getting ready for the year while looking back at all the collected thoughts, doodles, dreams, failures, completions, incompletions, interceptions, and incantations from the previous trip around our closest star. It’s really magical in a self-serving and privileged way to pull down a notebook from ten or fifteen years ago and do the same. There is probably some magic in doing the same with a backup file in Dropbox of a PDF exported from GoodNotes in 2013, but magic, like notebook and pen preferences, is subjective.

So my prayer for me and for you in 2019 is… Blow up your tv, throw away your Twitter, go to the country, find you a home, eat a lot of peaches, try and find Jesus on your own… and do some doodling.

We have a spare unlocked iPhone 6 Plus (cracked on lower right but otherwise in good shape) with an Otterbox Commuter case… let me know if you or someone you know would put to use (just needs a SIM card if you want cell service).

I can ship in the US for free as well.

Via Photogrammar

Foxes and I go way back… from Lollards to Wendell Berry.

Nice work by Twitter to have live video of local press conferences and local news up top of the feed (as we wait out the slow arrival of Hurricane Florence here in Columbia). I’ve always used Twitter for live news and updates in text form, so it’s interesting to see them move more into the mobile video side of things…

“I participated in the Heart Study too. Like Perlow, I forgot about it for long stretches. I’m fortunate that I didn’t receive the sort of alert Perlow did, but in September, Stanford sent me a notification that my participation in the study was ending. It turns out that over the course of 188 days, Stanford collected 1,743 heart measurements from me. Multiply that by the thousands of people in the study, and the potential the Apple Watch has for medical research is remarkable, while at the same time helping individuals like Perlow one at a time.”

How the Stanford Heart Study App Saved Jason Perlow via MacStories

I too participated in the Stanford Heart Study via the Apple Watch (my stats above). Males in my family have a history of Heart Disease and Afib, so I was nervous but eager to see if this seemingly innocuous contribution to science using my watch would catch anything. I’ve also been trying hard to “get in shape” given that I’ve just turned 40. I’ve lost 24 pounds since May and continue to try to live healthier with food and drink choices.

I was sort of relieved the day I got a notification that the study had ended. There had been no updates to contact Stanford during the study. Evidently if the Watch app detected anything that was suspicious of Afib, you were patched through to a Stanford Cardiologist via FaceTime. While that’s an amazing technological experience, I didn’t want to participate in doing so for this situation.

So, it’s amazing to read the testimony above by someone who did have the experience of catching a very deadly condition early simply because they wore an Apple Watch. The device is certainly saving my life by the daily motivation to get healthy and stay that way, and I see a bright future where conditions will be caught early by devices such as these.