I can’t promise, but I plan to avoid all my usual political blogs this week. Hoping for bliss of a kind from this temporary bout of willful ignorance. Wish me luck or fortitude or something like that.
Details from the Ship
Taking a sail on the Privateer Lynx tomorrow afternoon. I visited the ship where it’s docked, in the Savannah River right on River Street. I spoke with several of the crew, and took a few photos. I liked this one.
Posted in Photography, Savannah, Travel
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No Mo FOMO and Making Decent Pancakes
Caterina Fake posted about FOMO from SxSW a couple of weeks ago. (Via Jason Kottke.)
I’ve been watching Twitter and Ditto feeds of people at SxSW, and, from a distance, I get a distinct sense of the social anxiety and FOMO that’s going on there. “FOMO” stands for “Fear of Missing Out” and it’s what happens everywhere on a typical Saturday night, when you’re trying to decide if you should stay in, or muster the energy to go to the party.
FOMO is all too often why we go online. Not that what we read isn’t of value. I try to read a decent variety of current affairs, news, and blogs; I try to look at quality photo and video; I try to follow technology, and instructional technology and higher ed issues, with some integrity; and I hope to maintain some currency with recent internet memes. We have many many other and better things to do online and off, but for many of us FOMO keeps us clicking on links to see what what we’re missing. But it’s not the only reason we spend too much time online. The other big reason is to distract from responsibility, from the stress and anxiety of obligations to ourselves and others. The promise to that we’ll only surf for a couple of minutes predictably goes beyond that. Distraction from anxiety can end up consuming so much time that we have little left to do what we need to, and then it’s usually not done well and almost as often it’s done past deadline. Thus we fulfill our fears that what we do won’t be good enough, and that circle justifies going back online to distract ourselves again.
We often attempt restarts like this. “This time will be different.” “It’s never too late to have a good day.” Merlin Mann’s take on resolutions, Stop Blaming the Pancake” is apt here:
[B]e clear about the sanity of the motivations underlying your expectations—step back to observe what’s truly broken, derive a picture of incremental success that seems do-able, and really resolve to do whatever you can realistically do to actually get better.
Trying to change things, he says, is like making pancakes. The first one always sucks, and it’s easy to get discouraged about it. We may not know yet what’s realistic. I do know I want to put more of my stuff out there, which means making at least a few more pancakes than I’ve made in the past. Some of them will suck. Got to get past that. Here goes.
Posted in General
Tagged caterina fake, fomo, jason kottke, merlin mann, navel gazing, pancakes
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“Bahamas, Baby.”
In a few weeks, we’re going to Nassau for a few days of much needed, much anticipated R and R. When we’re stressed out, we just say “Bahamas, baby!” to each other. The travel section of The New York Times and their “36 Hours In…” series comes up with some likely activities down there.
They have a nice slide show too.
Posted in Travel
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Online Medical Advice Can Be a Prescription for Fear – NYTimes.com
The gist: avoid the drug-company financed, poorly written, overly hysterical WebMD for the sound information at the Mayo Clinic’s excellent site, including their Symptom Checker.
If you’re looking for the name of a new pill to “ask your doctor about,” as the ads say, the Mayo Clinic Health Information site is not the place for you. If you’re shopping for a newly branded disorder that might account for your general feeling of unease, Mayo is not for you either. But if you want workaday, can-do health information in a nonprofit environment, plug your symptoms into Mayo’s Symptom Checker. What you’ll get is: No hysteria. No drug peddling. Good medicine. Good ideas.
via Online Medical Advice Can Be a Prescription for Fear – NYTimes.com.
Posted in Health, Technology
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Speed up Photoshop with these 5 performance tips
This seems an important reference to keep at hand. Thanks to OS X Daily, and (very likely; not sure) to My Apple Menu for the link.
Adobe Photoshop was running a bit sluggish on my Mac recently, so I set about to make the app run faster with a few tweaks. While these were done on my MacBook Pro, there’s no reason the tips wouldn’t work the same on a Windows PC running PS too.1) Quit Other Apps
Before digging around in the Photoshop preferences, quit any other apps that you are not using. This frees up additional system resources to devote to Photoshop instead.
2) Raise the Memory Usage
More memory the better! This gave me a large speed increase:
From Photoshop Preferences, click on “Performance”
Adjust the slider upward to use more RAM, the more you can spare the merrier
A quick note regarding RAM: Computers love RAM, and so does Photoshop. If you’re a frequent Photoshop user or you do anything else that involves significant memory consumption, adding more memory to your computer is a good idea. You can read my review of upgrading a MacBook Pro to 8GB RAM if you haven’t already, or find out if you need a RAM upgrade.
3) Set Scratch Disks
If you have multiple hard drives, use them for virtual memory:
From the Photoshop “Performance” Preferences go to “Scratch Disks” and add your additional hard drives
This is really only relevant to those users with multiple hard drives, so those of us on laptops generally can ignore this one.
4) Adjust the Cache Levels
Most users benefit from a lower cache level:
Open the Photoshop Preferences and click on “Performance”
Set “Cache Levels” to 1
Note that if you’re working with large single layered images like a high res digital picture, setting the cache level higher will speed up performance instead. Adjust this setting based on your current usage.
5) Never Save Image Previews
Caching image previews slows things down:
From the Photoshop Preferences, click on “File Handling”
Set “Image Previews” to ‘Never Save’
This reduces Photoshops RAM and CPU usage by avoiding the image previews.
While these tips are specific to speeding up Photoshop, the tweaks may apply to other Adobe apps that have similar preference options too.
What else can I do to speed up Photoshop?
Outside of app specific tips, the other things you can do to boost nearly any apps performance are getting more RAM and upgrading to a faster hard drive for your computer. In terms of hard drives, an SSD or an SSD Hybrid drive are ideal, there are plenty on Amazon to choose from if you’re in the market.
Walter Murch: 3D Will Never Work – Roger Ebert
In Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed, Roger Ebert prints a letter from Walter Murch explaining why 3D cinema doesn’t work. I’m not a fan, but I can’t say I’m convinced Murch will convince the studios and manufacturers. I believe (non-paying) customers will, though.
What You Do
You take your potatoes from last night’s dinner, see, and cut them a bit smaller while the onion is going all golden in the olive oil (smell that; mmmmm). You put the potatoes in with the onions and step out to the garden for a little sprig of rosemary.
Snip some of it the rosemary into them the potatoes and onions. Continue to cook, tossing them around in the pan to brown evenly and making sure to sniff appreciatively. (Rosemary especially likes to be told it smells nice.) Put a couple of slices of the rosemary bread your local market does so well in the toaster oven, and put your plate on top so it’ll be warm when you puts your breakfast on it.
Once the toast is done and the plate is warm, put the potatoes on it and slide it into the toaster oven while you gently scramble some eggs with finely chopped ham and some grated sharp cheddar. Not too done, you want some moisture in those eggs.
Assemble the whole thing on that warm plate and sit down by the window with a fresh cup of coffee and the book you’ve been reading (Patrick O’Brian in this instance). Enjoy. Feel grateful while avoiding smugness or complacency. Then go get some shit done.
Posted in General
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Warby Parker: Boutique Quality, Vintage Inspired Eyewear for $95
Warby Parker: Boutique Quality, Vintage Inspired Eyewear for $95.
Via the New York Times Parker: Boutique Quality, Vintage Inspired Eyewear for $95.
And Now We Are Monochrome
Today I changed the color scheme of the blog to all blacks and grays on the white background. Perhaps you noticed. You would, you observant thing you.
Posted in Design
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