Matthew Lang

Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are the only things on the television I'll sit down to watch. Glad to hear there's more zombies on the way.

HT to Kurt.

Last night, round about 5pm, I closed down my work apps, shut the lid on MacBook and left my iPhone at my desk. I checked my son was doing his homework right and proceeded to get the dinner started for the rest of the troops coming home. Not much different from most weekday nights really. Other people had different plans though.

Last night Apple announced more information for their Apple Watch and a new MacBook, as well as a few other things I guess. Don't worry, this isn't a post analysis of the event. It's a few words about my increasing indifference to Apple media events.

I like my Apple products. They help me make a sustainable living, they make the daily grind easier, they make connecting with remote family easier and they can even go with me everywhere letting me capture those little moments in life that you always want to remember. I could buy alternatives to them, but the prospect of getting different platforms and apps talking to each other and working isn't something I want to do. I just want my devices to connect and work so that I can get on with more important things. That's all they need to do.

At no point last night did I feel the need to watch Apple's event or even read the flood of nonsense tech journalism that followed it. I skimmed through my timeline on Twitter and I saw a couple of hundred tweets mentioning the Apple Watch and about maybe twenty or so tweets mentioning the new MacBook. So the Apple Watch is a given, but I'm not interested in that in the slightest. The new MacBook was interesting though, so I checked the specs on the Apple website. Job done. It probably took me a couple of minutes to do that. I refused to spend any more time digesting the why and how of Apple announcements or read any of the associated articles with the luring headlines by technology news sites that at the end of the day just want people to click through to their site for advertising.

The reason why I'm becoming so uninterested in the actual Apple media event is that anything remotely Apple related is over hyped to the point where you would think that Tim Cook was announcing world peace on the stage. Last night's event announced information for a product that we already knew about and information on a new product as well as other minor announcements. If this was made by any other tech company it would have got a minimal amount of coverage at best, but because it's Apple we get flurry of tech sites falling over themselves to be seen to be reporting on the event. Live blogging the event, doing a post event analysis and then making their final predictions on whether the product will be a success or notand usually whether it will make or break Apple. It's too much and thats what puts me off them. Not necessarily the even itself, but the inflated media interest around it.

Next time Apple make an announcement, I'll do the same. Leave all my gadgets at my desk and get on with the rest of the day, because even though I've bought into the Apple world of products, I can catch up with the changes in their product line-up on their website and in my own time.

... carefully drawn up by Execupundit.

via FGGT

... you just can't ignore.

A little reminder that while we're connected in more ways now than we have ever been, our number of meaningful connections doesn't change at all.

The lesson to learn from Dunbar might be this: our pursuit of building ever-expanding and “influential” networks might be a fundamentally vain pursuit. Rarely, perhaps never, do our lives comprise of more than about 150 meaningful relationships. Although a digitally connective world might suggest that the size of our network is representative of our ‘value’ or ‘potential’ to have an influence on others, our human network capacity probably has not really changed at all.

— One Hundred and Fifty People: Revisiting Dunbar’s Number by Caesura Letters

In case you didn't notice, it's been real busy here at Lang HQ. Client work, side project work and volunteer work have been the focus of the week as well as one important family commitment this week. I'm hoping next week isn't as busy.

An Italian delight.

via FGGT

The trick, of course, is to choose the small tasks which Vilfredo Pareto - he of the 80/20 Rule - would designate as among the vital few; i.e. the ones which will produce the greatest beneficial results. If you don't set such priorities, then your time may be squandered by the successful completion of work which produces relatively little progress or which merely restores the status-quo.

— Small Tasks by Michael Wade

That one is going in my DailyMuse collection.

A very interesting idea.

Lazin-Ryder is one of a number of Twitter users who are using homegrown methods to make their tweets self-destruct. He says that having his tweets disappear automatically makes Twitter feel more conversational and casual, and less like a professional pressure-cooker.

— Meet the tweet-deleters: people who are making their Twitter histories self-destruct by Fusion

I love Ohio but it is cold. It is Ivan-Denisovich cold. It’s Jack-Nicholson-at-the-end-of-The-Shining cold; indoor-cat-who-became-outdoor-cat-glaring-at-me-from-his-blanket-in-the-garage cold. Never-warm cold. Feet-cold cold. Permanently-hunched-sholders cold. Kurt-Russell-in-The-Thing cold. It is colder than Robert Frost stopping by the woods on a snowy evening - he would not have stopped in this cold.

— That Cold by Kurt Harden

Thankfully Paisley in Scotland doesn't even come close to being this cold. I don't envy my fellow North American bloggers in times like this. The cold weather can get very wearing.

No spot comes close to YouTube when it comes to the number of dumb and vicious remarks in its comments section. Even bland videos, ones without an ounce of controversy, are ripped.

— Mean Magnet by Michael Wade

I'm just wondering if video is easier to consume than actually spending the time to read something and let it sink in. I suspect many of the comments on YouTube are simple knee-jerk reactions to each video.

These iPad sleeves make me want to buy an iPad, just to warrant the purchase of the sleeve. Ridiculous idea but these are great looking sleeves.

via Tools & Toys

Search for deeper understanding of approaches to programming that seem strange or incorrect to you. Don’t look for wrongness in what someone else is doing or what you’re thinking.
— Programming Advice for a Younger Me by Adam Keys

One of my biggest problems in my career has definitely been a lack of confidence in the code that I wrote.

Second Track bike of the year for Fixie Friday but I can't deny they are great looking bikes.

via PEDAL Consumption

40 rules for managing clients including this one:

Working weekends for clients: I’ll do it once if there’s a genuine emergency but, unless you pay me obscenely well for your inefficiency, I won’t do it twice. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

— 40 essential rules for client management by Bad Language

I'll be pinning this list up somewhere I can see it every day.