This morning, I awoke to a white blur outside my bedroom window. As I put on my glasses, the white came into focus and I could see that snow was clinging to every surface in sight.

The heavy, wet snow of an early spring storm was stacked on every branch and twig; all of the horizontal surfaces had 6 inches of the sticky stuff on it. This happens only a few different times each year and it's always truly beautiful to behold.

Unfortunately, most of the time when I am greeted by this sight out the window, I'm getting ready to go to work or otherwise obligated to move on with my day. By the time my obligations are fulfilled on those days, the snow has melted in the spring sun and the opportunity to enjoy the scenery is gone.

This morning, on the other hand, was a weekend.

I showered, threw on my hat, coat and boots and grabbed my camera for a trip to the closest park: Lake Palmer. It's a combination of forest and wetlands that is just 5 or so minutes from my house.

This being Minnesota and above freezing, I wasn't alone in enjoying the park. However, all of that snow muffled all sound but my own breathing and the wet crunch of snow under my boots. That deep quiet emphasized just how noisy and chaotic life has been for the last 3-4 months.

I wandered for about a half hour, taking pictures as I followed the trails, leaving them whenever I saw something interesting.

The cattails were particularly interesting, with ice and snow layered over the exploded fluff of the tips of the plant.

That time alone with my thoughts, taking pictures of the natural beauty surrounding me was some of the best time In recent memory and a great way to enjoy the warm weather.

The photo highlights from that session are here.

A few weeks ago, I was staring at my browser which was presenting me the now ubiquitous receipt page after buying something online. That page was, as is so common, recommending that I "print this page for your records".

The thing is that I usually don't really want a printed copy of it, despite really wanting to keep a copy. As I was on my Linux laptop, I just printed it to PDF. That way, I have a copy of it in a form that matches what I would have gotten if I had printed it. I could have saved the HTML page, but like the single document approach of PDF for this.

On my Mac laptop, this is just as easy and on Windows not much harder. Both Ubuntu and Mac OSX make it really easy to have a PDF printer. However, what I noticed as I went to print this particular receipt to a PDF was that on none of my machines was this PDF printer the default printer.

Because of that, I was only getting a PDF when I saw in advance that I might want one instead of printing it for real. That sparked a bit of curiosity in me. What would happen if I made the PDF printer my default and sent everything through there first.

So, for the past few weeks, that's been the setup on all of my workstations. The results make it clear that I want to make this the default setup from here on out for a few reasons.

First is the number of times where I printed something to PDF, sent it to the printer marked up the printout and eventually dropped the paper into the recycling only to go looking on my desk for that printout a couple of days later. No problem, since the PDF was sitting in my PDF output directory.

It's also become a really decent way to save a web page article or snapshot of a document in an easily retrievable format. When combined with my recent JungleDisk installations on all of those machines and the automatic backups that include those PDF directories on all of the machines, I now have access to anything I've printed or wanted to keep, no matter where I was when I printed it.

While I still use bookmarking engines quite a bit for marking things to find later, it's happened more often than I am comfortable with that the page/article in question goes away by the time I want it a few months down the road: not the case with exported PDF's.

Finally, when you turn off your browser's headers and footers, you can easily use straight HTML or any of the online word processors for document editing and get nice PDF's for sharing by email, etc.

Given how I can quite easily write simple documents in raw HTML faster and make them look more consistent (with standardized CSS) than I can do the same in MS Word or OpenOffice, this is pretty useful.

Overall, pretty slick and handy. If you haven't ever tried setting your computer up this way, I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Photo: Iman Moradi

Every few weeks I seem to see clusters of discussions about "young people" and technology. Typically, it starts off as I notice someone doing a news story or just spouting off in a restaurant about how amazing it is that "kids today" are growing up with computers/cellphones/iPods and how amazed they are by how adept and sophisticated they are in using those devices.

Nearly always, within 1-2 days, I see another article or just happen to see an incident that points to just how wrong that generalization is. From computers ripe with thousands of viruses and bits of spyware to reports of college professors citing how poorly students grasp the very concept of citing sources and the simple basics of research, examples seem to point to a much more complicated picture.

It's clear to me that there seems to be a segment inside EVERY age group that seems to just "get" technology. Many of the sharpest technologists I know are in their 50's or 60's and some of the most clueless are 16-25. Of course, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but there certainly seems to be enough indication that the full spectrum from tech novice to tech genius exists in nearly all of the age brackets.

One of the criticisms leveled at the non-savvy portion of the younger brackets is how often they will pretty much stop at the first level of Wikipedia when researching a topic. It's so common that many colleges and Universities have had to put actual bans on citing Wikipedia in academic papers.

Given that I was told that the encyclopedia stopped being a valid primary source at some time in 8th grade, this troubles me like it does many others. Wikipedia and Google are starting points for exploring or researching a topic.

I've mentioned before how often I've been asked how/why I know something. That's been followed more than a few times by people asking how I manage to learn as much as I do about the topics that sparked the discussion in the first place.

As I recently used my "normal" process just recently on a topic, I took note of how I dig into a topic and I thought I'd share. This isn't an approach to writing a formal paper/thesis/dissertation. Rather, it's an approach to to satisfying curiosity, getting acquainted with a topic, and getting a dedicated hobbiest level of knowledge in a given topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Jackie

As I was growing up, I always had access to a big sandbox. When I was really young, it was a literal sandbox, usually something on the order of 8 or 10 feet on a side.

My siblings and I would build large cities, populated with GI Joe and Lego action figures all to be washed away by the giant flood that unleashing the garden hose created.

As I grew older and outgrew playing in actual sandboxes, I still had access to metaphorical sandboxes. My dad was, in varying percentages over the years, a taxidermist and a farmer. We always had workshops, tools, materials and opportunities for "sandbox" activities.

When you're a kid, you don't get the reasons a sandbox is so great. However, as an adult, you can see that a sandbox offers permission to experiment. In the sandbox, there's no fear of failure. If something you try to build doesn't work, you can try 10 times and then try something else without it being a problem.

Thankfully, my parents extended that idea of the sandbox into every area of life. My siblings and I learned about biology/anatomy, business skills, chemistry, electricity, engineering/construction, cooking, hunting, fishing, etc. by being handed the knife/hammer/airbrush/chemicals and told to give it a shot.

And, I most certainly ruined some stuff. I wasted materials. I cut myself, burned myself, got carbon monoxide poisoning, nearly electrocuted myself and otherwise caused minor injury. I made messes.

Along the way, I learned a great deal. That's because none of those failures were a reason to stop. They were a reason to try a different way, but they certainly weren't the end of the road.

When I got older, I started to realize what an opportunity I'd been given to learn those things and to experience the entire world being my sandbox. When faced with a new challenge or an idea that I wanted to try, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to do it.

That's not because my parents continually told me that "you can do anything you set your mind to". Rather, it's because they provided me with the environment to try and fail and try again.

I think that's one of the reasons I like working with computers so much. They're a giant sandbox, even if many of the people using them don't realize it. It always makes me sad to see someone who's afraid to try stuff with their computer because they're afraid of "screwing it up". 

Personally, I think the very best thing that could accompany each new computer is a DVD explaining how to make sure their documents and data are safe and how to start over with the computer. Most people would learn the rest on their own. Freed from the fear of failure, they'd try stuff. I'm sure they'd mess up. However, when you know you can start over, that's no big deal. Heck, that's why the "Undo" function gets so much use in most people's software.

There's a video from the TED conference that you may have seen (it got passed around quite a bit over the last few weeks) that emphasizes these kinds of ideas and how kids need to be provided with opportunities to do some of these "dangerous" things.

The speaker lists 5:

1) Playing with Fire
2) Own a Pocket Knife
3) Throw a spear
4) Deconstruct an appliance
5) Drive a car

I think those are a great start. And, once in that "mode", many of the other things that are related start popping up as well. Personally, I think that everyone should be exposed to and have an experiential knowledge of things like where their food comes from (both plant and animal), building something (doghouse, garage, playhouse), destroying something (remodeling demolition, etc.), making something that moves (go cart, bicycle maintenance) and lots of other stuff.

Kids need a bit of guidance and some boundaries, but otherwise learn tremendously from being allowed to and encouraged to make mistakes. And, when you learn those lessons, you're more likely to both believe you have the skills necessarily to tackle whatever you have the energy and desire to take on and to have the humility to believe that you're not somehow better than someone else for having crossed the finish line for a given task.

All in all, good life lessons for everyone to pick up.

Photo: guldfisken

Yesterday, I was listening to Dave Slusher talk about his incredulity at people wondering how he'd fill 50 years without a "job". He, like me, has such a long list of books he'd like to read.

I'm guessing that he, like me, finds the very idea of being "bored" or having "nothing" to do completely foreign.

At any rate, I felt prompted to take inventory of the books I've got lying around that I haven't read yet.

So, last night, I tried to tidy up my office bookshelves and group together the books that I haven't read yet, those that I want to revisit, etc. In doing so, I noticed some distinct patterns in the type of books that I'm drawn to.

They tend to be the kind of books that let me exercise my generalist/liberal arts orientation by tapping into a wide variety of fields. They're mostly non-fiction (about 7 or 8:1) and many are scientific or philosophical. They are, however, the kind of book that is written for people outside of the field to grok.

Jason Kottke recently called them "science and idea books", which is a category I think I like better than what I've heard the publishing industry call them: popular science. I like them because they tend to fire WAY more of those synapses in my brain that make connections between things.

When I read these books, I tend to feel those sparks of insight flashing back and forth in ways that much of the online equivalent doesn't cause. I'm not sure if it's just the longer form, the context in which I read them or the form factor that contributes to that.

However, I don't really care as the effect is obvious to me after years of self-observation.

Kottke's post linked to a nice list of the best of these kinds of books that includes some intriguing title.s

I really like the end of the year for producing lists like this. They serve a handy purpose in aggregating and filtering the total list of books published in a year into a manageable list that lets me read really good books without spending a lot of time finding them.

What was disappointing was that the list itself only included the titles and authors. I didn't want to have to click each title in turn and look at them all individually.

Fortunately (at least for this particular problem), I've spent the last 2 months DEEP in the bowels of the Amazon E-Commerce API and knew that I could quickly spit out a better copy of the list.

Sure enough, it just took a quick bit of C# and I had a much better format. I uploaded a PDF of my exported list, including the editorial reviews and New/Used pricing so I can look over the whole list much more easily than looking up each of the books. You can download it too if you want. The PDF itself was generated using the techniques I mentioned earlier this week.