On the Internet there is a weird user expectation that everything should be free. Over the past couple of years I’ve been bucking this trend and have determined that spending a bit of money on what is both a hobby and an integral part of my existence in our modern, connected world is something I’m willing to throw a bit of money towards. I don’t want to be the product; I want to be the customer.
The internet relies on DNS servers that do the dirty work of translating human readable domain names to something that makes sense to a device on a network, which is where you see four sequences of numbers separated by a period. I have been updating my homepage at andrewcanion.com such that it displays the three latest blog posts I have published by leveraging the RSS feed generated by Wordpress. RSS feeds provide a method for other sites and services to subscribe to the work of the site offering the feed.
I’m not one for new year’s resolutions but at the beginning of this year I decided to try incorporating mindfulness meditation into my life. This was an idea brought about by a feeling that I was living life in a semi-permanent state of anxiety; feeling the pressure of the now and the next thing to be done that was sneaking up behind that. I figured that some mindful meditation might offer a way in which I could carve out some time to intentionally slow myself down and try to alleviate some of that perceived stress.
While I’ve grown up on the Internet, I also remember the pre-internet era well and spent most of my formative years there. I was a kid who was able to get a modem and connect it to the text-only world of Bulletin Board Systems and Usenet (when Usenet was a service for discussion, not just binaries). I spent hours exploring these worlds, finding like-minded people, and expanding my horizons as to what computers could enable by way of communication and engagement.
I am not an American, but my father and my siblings were born and lived in the USA. I have visited the country a number of times. I have spent time in Virginia, notably Lexington, which is about 70 miles away from Charlottesville, the town that has been tragically in the news this past week. While I don’t have the level of connection to the place that a United States citizen has, I do watch with interest and feel that I have at least some level of understanding of the American psyche.
The corner of the internet that I inhabit has been up in arms about yet another app, Ulysses, switching to a subscription-based pricing model. From the perspective of the developers trying to build a successful business this probably makes a lot of sense. The business analyst in me applauds them for finding an approach that will smooth revenue flows and help fund future development. But changes like this can have unintended, or at least unforeseen, consequences.
Trying to run a business without useful and accurate performance information is like trying to drive a car without a speedometer. Sure, you will be able to guesstimate how fast you are going, and sometimes you’ll even get it right. You might even get away with a bit of speeding! Most of the time though, you will be driving at the wrong speed. You will either not be taking full advantage of the car’s performance or you’ll get a speeding ticket.
Entropy is the loss of energy in a system to the point that it is no longer available for doing mechanical work. It is the reversion to mean; nature’s effort to return everything to stasis. Entropy is occurring everywhere, all around us. It is a fact of our life. Companies are fighting entropy as well. Without concerted effort and capital being invested, and ensuring there is talent deployed throughout all levels of the business, the expectation is they will wither and die.
In a further effort to establish andrewcanion.com as a genuinely useful resource for all things pertaining to me, I have now included a page dedicated to showcasing my curriculum vitae. I was looking at my current CV a few days ago which still exists as a Word document based upon a custom design I cooked up about 15 years ago. Since it’s creation I’ve just continued to add to and tweak the design rather than build a new document.
So Day One has become the next software application to adopt a subscription pricing model. This app developer has monkeyed around with its price/product offering for some time, and Day One has always been towards the expensive end of the curve for what could harshly be described as a glorified text editor. I guess it was inevitable they would ultimately end up converting to a subscription model in an effort to smooth revenue flow.
I consider the two fundamental resources in work planning to be: The calendar The to-do list The calendar represents the hard landscape: events that are non-negotiable, time-based and require you to be doing a certain thing, at a certain time, at a certain place, possibly with another certain person. If it’s in the calendar, it’s a certainty. Calendar entries are commitments to yourself and possibly others. The to-do list is used to track tasks needed to be done to move the ball forward.
In the aftermath of Apple’s WWDC conference and an almost unprecedented number of new pieces of hardware have been released at what is theoretically a software development conference, I get to do some imaginary shopping. For the past 18 months, Apple’s hardware lineup has been so out of date (except for iPhone, of course) that I’ve not even wanted to buy anything with imaginary money. They’ve righted the ship now, but in doing so are almost listing to the other side.
A good tradesman values his tools, and generally has a preference for one piece of equipment over another. In my trade, the computer I use is my primary tool. My tool of choice is a Mac. I am able to be so much more productive on a Mac because it’s the tool I know inside out. Over years I have customised how the operating system works, added on various tools, and generally made it work even better for me than it does out of the box.
What is Kanban? Traditional Kanban boards are used in manufacturing and other production environments to help visualise the flow of work and bring to attention any potential backlogs or other issues that might impact upon efficiency or productivity. When I travelled to Japan a few years ago as part of a study tour on lean manufacturing, I witnessed all sorts of kanban boards in operation to help provide factories with necessary production information.
I’ve always been a money tracker. I still have ledger books from when I was 14 years old, with my handwriting tracking my money in and out. I would reconcile it to my bank savings account with little ticks. I think I learned this habit watching my Mom as she would carefully manage the family finances at the kitchen table.1 There was never enough money to go around (not that I was aware of that at the time), so much of my Mom’s job was timing cheque payments, deferring bills, and calculating how much, if any, might be left over for the week.
I recently worked with Asterisk Information Security on their Entrepreneurs' Programme Business Evaluation. Asterisk provide information security advice, services and infrastructure to other companies. The owners are dedicated to their craft and are really working hard to grow and improve their company. Through the Business Evaluation process we dug deep into their business model and identified a number of ways to improve the business even further. What’s more, is the Entrepreneurs' Programme also provided them with $20,000 of government funding to help make their plans a reality.
I was one of the first on the Gmail bandwagon. Back when the only way to get an account on the service was to receive an invitation code from somebody else already using it. I remember desperately asking around my networks, until I finally found somebody who was able to supply me with a code - I was in! Having an @gmail.com address was a point of pride. You were a cool kid with a cool email address, and not one of those sad hotmailers, embarrassing yahooligans, or a joker advertising your local ISP.
I have a vision of myself without the support of OmniFocus. I’d be wandering around in a semi-permanent state of confusion, wondering what the heck I should be doing with my time and trying to keep all the ‘to-do’s’ of my life active and remembered in my brain. The stress of it all would be horrible! Instead, I have OmniFocus. This application acts as my external brain, keeping all my various projects and tasks ordered, across all my areas of responsibility.
Following on from my thoughts about Setapp, and now having all this extra software choice in my life, is that I now have to confront the challenge of choice. For many, many, years I have been using OmniFocus to manage my life - keeping all my work and personal projects and tasks safe and sound. I was using OmniFocus before it was even an app - back when it was a series of OmniOutliner scripts put together by Ethan Schoonover to replicate this magical GTD (Getting Things Done) philosophy that had entered the world not all that long before.
Tonight I installed Setapp on my Mac. This service provides a wide range of full version software in exchange for US$9.99 per month. There is no escape from software as a service, and I appreciate the challenge that software developers face trying to earn an income and support a living with the old “full version plus upgrades” pricing model. A couple of the applications in the Setapp bundle I have been eyeing off for a while; some I have wanted but not enough to pay for; and some I’ve no use for.
Many years ago I started a Movable Type blog when the web was young, and doing such things was hard. Then a young upstart named Wordpress arrived, and I couldn’t resist its modern design and dynamic database structure. I transitioned, and spent hours monkeying with CSS to get things looking just right. Then the web became social, and I gave up on blogs. The big shift was to micro-updates and photoblogs and pseudo-conversations through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, respectively.