A beautiful, touching post about holding on to what is important, and letting the rest just fall away.

I’ve always been a collector. I love photographs. I compulsively capture links to sites I visit, in case they might be lost forever. I fill up my Instapaper account with articles I will never have the time to read. The thought of clicking “Mark all as read” when I am deeply in debt to my RSS reader gives me anxiety. What if I miss something?

So I click, I scroll, I link, I “like”. I skim over an endless sea of other people’s lives, rarely diving deep enough to find the treasure.

We stare into lenses and lie, if only a little, so that the record shows we were there, enjoying or not enjoying ourselves, in precisely the way we’d prefer it.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

If you’re looking for the next big thing, and you’re looking where everyone else is, you’re looking in the wrong place.

Funny to imagine those experts sitting Elvis down and telling him that he’s got to stop moving onstage. Shows you the problem with blindly following experts: They’re experts on the past. No one is an expert on the future.

Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?

Your vacation photos will be equally uninteresting to me whether you post them when you get home or while your footprints are still fresh in the sand.

Oh boy, this is about to get ugly.

In public, Adobe claims to “support” HTML5. On the private W3C mailing list, though, they’ve placed an objection to prevent the current spec from being published.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lighting to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.

Alex Payne, developer for Twitter, sees the release of the iPad as, potentially, the “Tinkerer’s Sunset.” I am keeping my fingers crossed for the perseverance of “openness”.

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents.

The release of the iPad is stirring mixed feelings in Steven Frank of Panic Software. In this article he tries to reconcile his understanding of the need for change in the pursuit of progress with his aging understanding of what computing should be.

I share his mixed feelings on the changing face of computing. I own an iPhone and love the ease and simplicity of it, but I grew up tweaking applications with ResEdit until they broke. I fear that by abstracting the machinery of computing away behind a shiny interface, people will eventually lose both the interest and the ability to use computers to their full potential.

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact. In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves.

Ultimately, sustainability means coming to terms with natural biophysical limits. So we have to get past this idea of planning around extrapolation of past trends. That the future may be different than the past is the first thing that we need to come to terms with.

On the surface, riding the train in a loop sounds like the actions of a crazy person, but I think I get it. It must be hard to work from home, and still have that sense of responsibility that comes from sitting in an office with a bunch of productive people.

I guess one way to add that back in, would be to get outside, sit amongst other members of the workforce, and maybe read the paper, as opposed to just shluffing over to the computer in your PJs.

When I first left a full-time job to begin freelancing, for a brief time, I would run, shower, dress, and ride the train in a loop from my apartment and back again to begin work at home. Ritual is important.