This is where I’ll be going medium to long form, and sharing things of a more personal nature.
From Aristotle’s De Poetica. via Lapidarium (via viafrank)
In the web design and consulting business, this is absolutely the most important skill you can have. Great communication is far more important than knowing how to design or program well. If you can’t explain your ideas, you have made nothing.
To provide great value to your customers and the technically naive, explain things in metaphors. They’ll love you and they’ll rave about it.
(via viafrank)
I wonderful speech from Steve Jobs at Stanford’s commencement on June 12, 2005.
(Source: swiss-miss.com)
As a former sound engineer, this made me laugh like an ass inside Starbucks. Sorry folks.
sometimes you just can’t contain your rock!
The drummer is pure magic. This might beat the little girl’s inspirational speech
Neil Young on a beach.
I was just playing a few tracks off of Mirror Ball for my son today. He noted that his guitar was angry.
I’ve felt much the same way about where all of this is going. Let’s hope.
Warming up
I won’t lie to you—it took two weeks with my iPad before I knew whether I loved it (or, to be more accurate, why I would inevitably love it). There was this uncomfortableness after the purchase. I’d known for weeks that it was to be a miraculous addition to my life. I’d enumerated why, publicly and obnoxiously. But part of the process of becoming an iPad user is that awkward period where you stare at it, and it stares back at you, you notice its relative heft and your indelible greaseprints across its giant touchscreen and you wonder to yourself just why the hell you’re in each other’s lives. So you put it on your nightstand and sleep on it.
And then it hits. The iPad is for the nightstand. And for the sofa, and for the places between where you stand in line and where you sit at your desk. That’s why every iPad poster and billboard features it on a lap or a knee. They’ve stopped short of showing it on a chest in bed, but that’s where mine gets its most use.
A new thing
My chest is where I first noticed that the iPad would make the most impact on me as a Video device. You see, despite Apple clearly signalling, by orienting its logo in portrait mode, that the iPad is for holding like a book or a piece of paper, it’s meant the most to me turned to landscape mode, where its dimensions replicate the video screen I’ve known my whole life. Turned to landscape, the iPad offers me the most comfort, the most passive participation, the feeling of Home.
The following may be a bit hyperbolic, but follow me: The iPad is the world’s first truly convergent TV/computer. It’s the device that’s been promised us for years, and its time has come, in 2010, within reach of a couple generations raised on TV and one raised on the computer. Yet it is neither a TV that computes nor a computer that shows TV. It is a new thing. The new thing, in fact.
![gregrutter:
thedailywhat:
Letter Of Note of the Day: Steve Martin’s hilarious “personal” letter to a fan.
[lettersofnote.]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3gmcg8CgG1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Letter Of Note of the Day: Steve Martin’s hilarious “personal” letter to a fan.
Simon Sinek on selling to people who believe what you believe:
People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with anybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.Here’s the best part:
If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, looking from the top down, what you see is that the human brain is actually broken into three major components … The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational, analytical thought and language; [O]ur limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It’s also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures, it just doesn’t drive behavior. When we communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior.This is where “it just doesn’t feel right” or where “it comes from my heart” actually comes from. The goal is not to have what you have, but to sell to people who believe what you believe. I’m sold.
Beck has put together a group called the Record Club and they have recorded some wonderful, unique interpretations of cover songs. The New Sensation by INXS cover is great.
