Son of a Pig Farmer

My inner-Ethnographer is reeling! Since I’m a bit of a craphound myself, I always find these things fascinating. Hoarding is a real mental illness, and it’s interesting to see the different types of things that are hoarded. Books, Disc Players, Used Shampoo Bottles, etc. I’m just wondering how much of this is DNA, and how much is behavior.

The BBC reports about 32 people dying when a steel ladle split, spilling molten metal on a group of people gathered for a quick meeting. Then, I was astonished to find the following fact at the bottom of the story.

Industrial accidents reportedly killed more than 127,000 people in China in 2005.

I totally get that they have a larger population, but still. Doesn’t it seem odd that that many people are dying in an industrially advanced nation? I wonder what the US number is.

I’ve had a post in my head for some time about removing all the excess crap in my life. Doing more with less and focusing on what’s important.

It was comprised of various parts of Getting Things Done, Small is Beautiful, Getting Real, Agile Software Development, Edward Tufte, Life Hacking, Minimalism, Small is the New Big, Plain English, The Millionaire Next Door, Punk Rock, Asceticism, Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity, DIY, Enough With The Hammers, Death to the Unitaskers and the Platonic principles of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

You know, easy stuff.

I had about 80% of the framework post written. Then, my computer died which proves the point that fewer moving parts is better.

This list will no doubt grow and change with time, but some of the broad themes are as follows:

• Less isn’t more, but it’s better.
• Let less stuff into your life.
• Simple isn’t.
• Findability drives value by reducing scarcity.
• Treat every resource like it’s pure gold. (time, attention, money, affection)
• Mindful disposability

I even had a nifty new term for my nifty new concept, and it was called “Spartanization.” Then, it occurred to me that creating yet another term for yet another concept would go against the very notion of what I was trying to do. Also, it’s not a new concept at all, but sometimes, I think people need to be reminded a bit.

There’s already a term for it that can be compressed into an elevator pitch: Simplicity.

About a week after this realization, I had the pleasure of watching a presentation at Yahoo! from John Maeda of MIT’s Media Lab, summarizing his new book, The Laws of Simplicity. From the first law, Reduce, I knew I was hooked. I’m about half way through it right now, but I gotta say that he’s framed the concept quite nicely. He periodically waxes simplicity on his <a href=”http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/”blog. Check it out.

So, in 2007, my theme will be Simplifcation. Many of you who know me are snickering; I can hear you from here. Knock it off.

Join me in this journey, won’t you?

The Devil Made Me Do It on Vimeo

Trying to finish up my holiday DVD, I stopped paying attention to Mayazilla for about five minutes. She is definitely my sugar kid.

As I was leaving this morning, Maya said, “Bye Bye Da Da.” Broke my heart to have to go into work…

Ted’s the man.

Now, an older one.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Today is June 6, 2006. That would be 6/6/6. I’m sure I’m not telling you something that you don’t already know. You know why you already know?

• Anne Occultier is releasing her new attack on the left with Godless: The Church of Liberalism. (I’m not linking to it because I don’t want to perpetuate that crap more than I already have).
• AFI is releasing their new album.
• Slayer is releasing their new EP, Eternal Pyre
• The Omen is coming out (again).
• Deicide is releasing their new album, The Stench of Redemption
• Sixpoint Craft Ales in New York is selling their food for $6.66 and will be tapping six varieties of Sixpoint beers from six different taps.
• The list goes on

If you’re gonna be having a baby today, that sucks a little. It’s worse if you have it at 6:06pm.

While coming into work today, I approached the 880-237 choke point, and traffic slowed to a crawl, as it usually does.

I was listening to Morning Edition when I heard a car toot it’s horn. I looked to the left, and I saw Bill Maxwell, who I used to work with at Netscape and is now working at Apple. If you recall, Bill was the person I was going to go to lunch with when I found out about Shari.

While he was in the “fast lane” I rolled down my window, which cued him to roll down his. Traffic was moving at a blistering 2 mph, so we proceeded to chat.

After some initial small talk, I launched into…

“Instead of getting the dual G5 tower, I think I’m gonna get a dual-core Intel box. I’d really like to run both Windows and Mac at the same time. How does that work?” I shouted.

“You have to run this program called Paralells that lets you do that,” Bill screamed back at me.

I had already known about Paralells, but it’s hard to be clear when you’re trying to not bump the guy in front of you while making sure you’re not lagging too far behind. I really wanted to know how well it performed, but you can only be so precise given the environment.

“Have you bought your quota yet this month?” I asked.

“Nope!” He yelled.

“Let’s do lunch!,” I said. “Great!,” he agreed.

Just as I said that, our cars veered out-of-sync as the fast lane became fast once again, and Bill jetted off into the distance.

And you people are concerned with me taking pictures while driving…

One of my side projects finally launched.