Matthew Lang

Absolutely fantastic animation. I would love to see this expanded further into a series.

via DBSW

Every year we miss the seasons moving from Summer to Fall in Canada and the changing colours in the trees.

On the wishlist today, to put back the summer vacation in exchange for a couple of weeks away in September/October next year.

How many times have you heard these or words to this effect?​

Keep both plates spinning​

It's really just another way of saying multi-tasking.When you do hear colleagues say this, remind them you're not a circus entertainer or even the love child of Andrew Van Buren. Plate spinning, multi-tasking​ or whatever you want to call it, is a productivity killer. Instead of focusing on one thing, you're given only a small amount of your attention to each task you are working on. What happens when you do this? Yeah, those plates will fall eventually. Trust me.

Instead, give each task your undivided attention and focus. Batch your work into related tasks and tackle them one at a time.​After all, multi-tasking is a myth and I'm not a circus entertainer.

Today's XKCD is amazing.

Enjoy.

Lifehacker has all the resources you'll need for using Markdown.

There's hundreds of apps out there that are prepared to lock in your data. But why sacrifice access to your data? Look at moving away from these apps that lock in your data and start using plain old text files for your to do lists, logging, writing and blogging.

Plain text and Markdown is much more flexible and you can use a wider range of tools to manage all your Markdown documents. Add a cloud storage service like Dropbox and you can have your files with you everywhere you go!

​I have a love hate relationship with email.I love having a medium that allows me to communicate effectively with others all over the world. Being able to send some thoughts to a family member in Canada, or thanking your mentor for that little motivational book they sent you in the post. Yip, it's hard to beat email as a form of communication.

Until of course you get to your desk at work at 9am on a Monday morning and the deluge of email in your inbox makes you regret that you didn't just phone in sick that day. Yes there are ways of dealing with your email on a daily basis that let you work smarter and more effectively by implementing filters and such, but that doesn't stop people sending email to you.You see, when you work in a team, department or in a small company, email is often that go to tool that let's one person tell everyone else about something. That's great, but when email becomes the standard form of communication for ideas, discussions and projects, that's when you're going to wish you never opened that your inbox again.

From my experience, I have found that email in the work place is an invasive form of communication that tries to grab your attention from the pressing, but productive work that you are doing. It aims to break your concentration. When you have processed that 'urgent' email, you then need to reset your focus and get back to what you were working before you were interrupted. Personally I can do without that kind of distraction.

So what's the solution? Well it's easy. Non-invasive forms of communication that let you see with others want you to see without distracting them from their work. Project and task management, customer relationship management, and intranets are all greats ways of communicating with others in your company without interrupting what they are working on. They let your team see the information they need to see and they can act upon that information in their own time.

And don't be under the impression that the digital world is the only place you can communicate.

The daily stand up is a great way of communicating with your team and shouldn't be thought as being for developers only. Anyone in a team, should consider the daily stand up where you want a status update from the previous day and to quickly plan what's going to happen today.

Kanban boards are another great trick I learned to use from my days working in an agile development team. An overview of the work in progress is a great way for everyone to see what's going on. It also increases verbal communication over work rather than team members continually pinging emails back and forward.

As a rule, email should be the last form of communication in any team, department or small company. There are so many other ways of communicating that are more productive and will also let your colleagues get their work done.

So next time you want to update the team on a project or want to discuss idea, find an alternative to the evil that is email.

I’m blogging today because computer nerds know how to make software, they tend to get exploited by people who don’t, and it is ruining America for everyone. Our economy is completely dependent on computers at this point, and I am astonished that so many of our “leaders” still haven’t figured out how to use Microsoft Outlook.

How many times have you come across managers who claim to be great at what they do, but lack even the most basic skills with a computer? Unfortunately I've come across this scenario more times than I would like. In today's world you need to learn work with more than people.

— The Programmer and the MBA by GusBook

I still want to go back here and watch the sun rise and set on the canyon. I only got to see the canyon during the middle of the day. Nevertheless, it is a breath taking place to see, no matter what time of day it is.

via Mme Scherzo

I just know my mate Mark would love this girl's style.

via FGGT

Never tried riding a cyclo-cross bike, but if I ever wanted one, then this Orange would fit the bill nicely.

via Singletrack

I wonder how waterproof it is?

via Kottke.org

I initially drafted this in August 2011, during my stint on
750words.com. Since then it's been sitting in a file waiting to be published, until now.

I've just had to run back up the stairs and console our 4 year old son who was scared that the aliens and robots in space would come down from space and get him. Poor little guy. He's probably the biggest fan of Star Wars I know, and he watches and plays with his Star Wars stuff everyday. Since we moved him into the larger bedroom though, he's become a little restless at night and he frequently worries about things coming into his bedroom.I was a kid once, and I remember going through the same thing. E.T. the Extra-Terrestial had just come out at the cinema and I think it was my birthday. As a treat, my mum and dad took me to the movies to see it. At the time I had no idea what the movie was about and at the start you are faced with this creepy little creature being chased through a forest.Now when you've barely just started school and you're not very wise to the world and everything in it, the first thing that springs to you're mind when a bunch of guys are chasing something through a forest is that whatever they're chasing, that thing is dangerous and should be caught right away. Eventually the guys give up and the creature finds itself, looking down on the suburbs of a sprawling American city.

After that experience I had plenty of nightmares about the strange little alien getting chased through the forest (who wouldn't at that age), but nothing compared to the thoughts I had at the last house that we lived in before moving back to Scotland.We had a nice detached house with bedrooms upstairs. I always remember being similar to the Elliot's house in the movie. The similarities don't end there though. Across the road from our house was a spot of wasteland and next to that was the dual carriageway. After that was a hill with trees dotted all over it. I didn't know what was on the other side, but I didn't need to ask. My imagination was running riot.Every night my imagination told me that there was a stranded alien over that hill and it would be my house it would be curious about. I think the worse thing was that my bed was at the top of the room and when I lay in my bed, I would look down at the bottom of the room, where the window was. What did my window look onto? The tree covered hill across the road.Now at the time, I didn't know why my bedroom window was open. Apparently it was too hot at night, so my mum would leave the window and curtains open slightly to let some cool air in after the house was baking all day in the summer heat.Now you might laugh and mock, but when you're a kid, there's no bounds to your imagination. You don't know about the physical constraints around the world. In your eyes, anything can happen. The cardboard box that your parents new television gets delivered in becomes a space ship, the back garden becomes the venue for an epic battle with giant robots, the stairs become the biggest mountain in the world, and you must scale it all the way to the top. Too bad most of us lose that imagination as we get older.

I think it's great my son has such a vivid imagination, he creates anything out of whatever he has and he loves pretending and using his imagination. Looking back at my episode in Calgary with E.T., I realise how much of an imagination I had. I know I had seen the movie and I simply lifted that scenario to my own world, but it was my first experience of really using my imagination. Since that chapter in my life, I've been a frequent reader of sci-fi and fantasy books, and I've started writing my own short stories. All because I freaked out over an alien that I thought lived in the forest across the road from me.

When my son is a bit older and wiser, I'll remind him of how great his imagination was when he was little boy and the things that he used to make believe about and be scared of. He would do well to keep his imagination fed with a genre of his choice. I know he's going to be a great golfer when he's older, but there's no harm in having a backup career in case that falls through.

The notes are for you. Don’t worry about your handwriting, the spelling, or what someone else will think. These are your notes. If a thought occurs to you, write it down, pat yourself on the back, and go about your business with a smile. Later you can leaf through your notes with a puzzled expression on your face until you stumble across that gem, that little something that has value, and feel the sense of relief and triumph.

— Scribble notes are nuggest of gold by Who Writes For You

Which is why I always carry my Moleskine everywhere with me.

While social networks might not be at the forefront of your worries, there has been a rising interest in Twitter recently. Tim Bray lists his reasons why people are looking at alternatives to Twitter.

I've found that I wasn't really getting much from Twitter and have decided to take a little break from Twitter over the next few months to see if I really do need it.

... by Elliot Jay Stocks. Blog posts grouped together by year with a description for each year. Easy to find a post in the archive you've already read, but also good for finding interesting posts you haven't read yet.

via Curtis McHale

... a long walk with the family, spending the time with your kids and their pastimes, a good book, preparing a large family dinner, catching up with friends over a coffee, a round of golf, a bike ride. Whatever your rest day is, make sure it is restful.

An impressive collection of books by Cultural Offering. Makes me wish I had a larger house for a collection of my own books. Unfortunately our pokey little house in the UK will only allow me to have a small collection of books next to my new office at home. Still, a small collection of my favourite books is better than none at all.

Might have to make a wee visit to the store when we visit the in-laws next year.

via The Verge

Another little gem that hit my inbox courtesy of Caesura Letters:

Sitting at the edge of the universe prompts me to ask the same questions I find myself contemplating as I look up into the starry night sky: How did this universe come into being in the first place? How did this mind-achingly massive void of nothingness get here first? What, precisely, is nothingness and how much of it is out there beyond our universe?

— Edge of the universe by Caesura Letters

Get your daily dose of solitude with Caesura Letters. It's the one thing that makes me want to open my inbox every day.

Defense is prepared. It is what we do with what the world throws back at us.

via Cultural Offering

The new Kindle range from Amazon is looking really good. I particularly like the look of the new Kindle Paperwhite. As a purchase though, it might have to wait a few months. I'm not done with my existing Kindle to justify purchasing another bit of tech for the sake of a few new features.

Give me Nicholas Bate's get real kit over the oh-so tempting one any day.

After seeing this posted on various blogs I'm subscribed to, I decided to list my five favourite books of all time.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - I've been reading this book every Christmas for the last 25 years. A classic piece of writing that restores my faith in humanity every time.
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson - The first adventure book I ever read and is responsible for my love of fantasy and adventure books.
• Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien - Fantasy is my preferred genre for reading most of the time, and this trumps everything I have ever read in the genre so far. The amount of detail and work that went into the book is just astounding.
• Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read - I never heard about the story of the crashed Uruguayan plane in the Andes until I was about 12. The story itself is a harrowing account of how far humans can be pushed to survive.
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin - Forget the HBO TV series that made this mainstream. The books in this series, still unfinished, are such a refreshing change from the usual books in the fantasy genre.So there you have it. I've nothing as deep as War and Peace here.

I tend to stick to the fantasy genre for most of my books, but I have been branching out into some more historical areas in recent years. Conn Igguldenn's Conqueror and Emperor series are both highly recommended and at the moment I have started reading through the Aubrey-Marturin series by Patrick O'Brien as recommended by Michael Wade.Instead of nominating 5 others to participate, I'm just going to leave an open invitation to you all to join in. Come on, get those 5 favourite books of yours listed.

Pretty sure that @andygumley will probably have his eye on this to compliment his road bike. Wouldn't mind it myself, especially since it's a titanium frame.

This would make a mighty fine addition to my Langster.