Matthew Lang

Some great moments captured from Friday night's fireworks over Glasgow.

For over a year now I've been writing my morning pages by hand. At first the exercise was all about moving away from the growing stack of digital tools I was using. It was becoming tedious continually sitting at a screen so I started handwriting my morning pages.

The exercise itself forced me to slow down a bit more and practice my handwriting. It's been going well and I've got a stack of full notebooks to show for it.

I use a Hobonichi Techo planner for logging a few things through the day and scheduling important meetings and work. It means I'm writing a lot more than I did in the past, and the time I'm spending on writing is growing. If I had no client work on then it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm doing client work most days.

Whether my morning pages are handwritten or typed, I'm know that I'm still getting the value out of my morning pages, but the time taken to type my morning pages is much shorter than handwriting them. To that end I'm typing my morning pages again on 750words.com.

I started this morning with a weekly review and will be using it just like I did with my handwritten morning pages, focusing on a particular topic for each day and just writing.

I love using pen and paper where I can. It's portable and flexible. There comes a point though when the digital alternative has clearer benefits and it's definitely the case here.

Who knew that so many positives can come out of big business?

For one thing, he says, big companies have the ability to create jobs. Under Armour now employs 15,000 people directly in its 26 global offices, and indirectly hires close to a million people across its supply chain. "There's upwards of three quarters of a million people making Under Armour stuff at any one time," he says. "That's going to grow 50% over the next year, and that means we're going to be able to affect a million to a million and a half people."

— Under Armour's Founder Makes A Passionate Defense Of Big Business by Fast Company

Nice prompt from NB to start reading again.

Read deep again. Read the original not the news article puffery. Read the classics. Read difficult stuff. Read Chaucer in the original and imagine a world without the sound bite. Spend days in a good library, pulling books from shelves and reading deep, deep, deeper. Read until synapses start to spark each other and you achieve simplicity the far side of complexity.

— [Read](Read deep again. Read the original not the news article puffery. Read the classics. Read difficult stuff. Read Chaucer in the original and imagine a world without the sound bite. Spend days in a good library, pulling books from shelves and reading deep, deep, deeper. Read until synapses start to spark each other and you achieve simplicity the far side of complexity. ) by Nicholas Bate

I have to admit, my reading progress has stalled in the last few months. Haven't picked up a new book in three months. Time to start reading again.

It's time to get out there.

"If you get out of your daily routine—which for most of us is being on social media, or your laptop and phone—and you get out with a pencil, pen, or whatever tool you prefer and just start looking around," says Kulik, "something you’re trying to solve in one part of your life might be solved by using your creative brain."

— This One Simple Technique Will Stoke Your Creativity Every Day by Fast Company

There's a lot of things I love about living in the UK. Beautiful scenery within an easy drive, great golf courses, bearable weather through the winter and easy access to the continent for holidays. There are lots of other benefits as well, some important, some not so important. There's one thing though that I envy North America for and it's already started this year.

It begins at the start of October and runs right through to the end of December. It's the mix of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all running one after the other. They all coincide with each other whether you're American or Canadian. The order might be different for Canadians, but they still celebrate Thanksgiving within this period.

We visited Jennifer's parents in October a number of years ago. It was the first week in October and people had already started decorating their houses with pumpkins, lights and other decorations celebrating the time of the harvest and the ghoulish night at the end of the month. It was great to see so many homes making a big effort to decorate their homes.

Then there is Thanksgiving. As you know the UK doesn't have any holiday like this. We have Guy Fawkes night on the 5th of November but I would gladly trade it for Thanksgiving day. The family around the table for a big meal and the NFL on the television through the afternoon and evening.

Finally there's the run up to the end of it all. Christmas. We've spent a couple of Christmases in Canada and both we're great, although I have to say it was much more fun with the kids around.

At Christmas as well there are a lot of houses decorated with lights and they definitely go into in a bigger way than we do in the UK.

We've got neighbours with relatives in Canada as well and with this common ground, the conversation at this time of year inevitably falls back to how it's better in North America at this time of the year.

It's not about any one particular holiday, just the fact that there's so much happening during this time of year and it also coincides with a favourite of mine, the NFL season.

Was I born in the wrong country? Probably. Jennifer often jokes that I would be more at home living in North American than in the UK.

I would love to experience the whole run of holidays through the autumn and winter but it would mean a major upheaval of the family. For now though, I'll just quietly be envious on this side of the pond.

I don't know about you but the Execupundit drive-time show trumps them all.

Another practice session at the driving range with Ethan. Glad to see him improving and still enjoying it.

I'm still finding my feet with consistent blogging but there may be something to what Patrick Rhone is doing with his Rhoneisms.

My personal site is just that. Personal. I don't blog for the traffic, the page views, or as part of some grand plan to build the next big thing in tech. This is my site and shouldn't be constrained to schedules and plans. I have other sites that do that.

This site should just be a steady stream of thoughts, links and images. The first two I've been quite active on posting but there's been a lack of image content here. I'm hoping to rectify that soon with my own take on Patrick's Rhoneisms.

I love Patrick Rhone's approach to his online writing.

Much like Henry David Thoreau had three chairs in his house, I’ve come to realize that I generally have three types of posts for my online writing — what I’m collectively and quirkily referring to as “Rhoneisms”.

— The Three Types of Rhoneisms by Patrick Rhone

This year's pumpkins went down quite well.

Love these. Especially the news page.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

The most obvious change is the redesigned keyboard. Removing the Touchbar creates room for a row of physical function buttons and, in a nice touch, an escape key. This isn't a perfect solution: the function buttons map to a confusing series of actions that can send windows flying around the screen with an errant keystroke, and the new physical off switch is too close to the backspace key. But it is certainly a huge step forward, and it will be interesting to see how software developers take advantage of this clever new feature.

— Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro by Maciej Cegłowski

The dust has finally settled from Apple's announcements. The world has returned to what it once was, but for a moment there it seemed that the drama was world-ending. Almost apocalyptic in nature. Only the release of an Apple product could have sparked such hype and drama.

So what was all the drama about then?

It was about Apple's new addition to the MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar. In case you don't know Apple have replaced the top row of keys on their keyboard with a touch bar. Kind of like a long and thin touch screen.

Looks good doesn't it? I thought so. And while I wasn't blown away from Apple's announcements I wondered how long it would be before I needed to replace my own MacBook Pro. Would the Touch Bar affect my decision to buy? That's a post for another day though. As a rule I don't buy brand new tech within a few months of it's release date. I do make exceptions, but not that often.

Anyway back to the point of this post. The Touch Bar and the lack of escape and function keys.

Most people will have looked at the new Touch Bar and thought, "Cool, I can see which emoji to use" or "My photo and video editing might become easier". Me, I just seen a new form of touch interface that may in time become useful. In fact, 1Password have already announced they'll be using the Touch Bar to enhance their password management product. Great stuff.

Not everyone was happy though. We developers are a fickle lot. If we're not jumping from one Javascript framework to the next we're arguing about which text editor is best. The world might be ending but by God we'll get our argument across as to why our text editor is the best before it happens.

And that was the start of the drama. The escape key is missing. Well not gone, just not always there. And that didn't go down well with a lot of people. Mostly people who are users of Vim and Emacs from what I could see. I say a lot of people, it's probably a small minority but on the Internet those that shout the loudest often get the stage for a longer than normal period of time. First it started with the tweets, then the blog posts followed. It was car crash television. You couldn't help but watch.

I honestly can't see what the problem is and here are two reasons why.

1. I rarely use the keyboard on my MacBook Pro

I have a laptop as it suits my needs to be mobile if I need to visit a client but that's not often. Most of the time my laptop sits on my Griffin Elevator Desktop Stand. I use a Logitech K811 keyboard and an Apple Magic Mouse for all my input needs. And yes my keyboard has an escape key. Here it is.

In fact I'm pretty sure that any developer who values their long time health will have a similar set up. If you're using a laptop all day to do your work then I would seriously question how comfortable that is.

2. I haven't used my text editor on the new MacBook Pro

When Apple were handing out the new MacBook Pro for field testing they must have missed my name on the list. Well, not really. They don't do that. In all honesty though I haven't used the new MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar yet so I haven't the faintest idea how my preferred text editor will work with it. It might work straight out the box, it might not. I just don't know. And neither do the band of dis-gruntled developers who are doing the complaining. Ask any of them if they've used it yet. I doubt it.

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The Internet has become the platform of choice to vent your anger, your frustration even your hate if you're that way inclined. Like a tabloid newspaper, the Internet loves drama and it thrives on it like a virus. It spreads quickly. Even the tiniest of arguments can blow up into a full on international shit storm. And with it comes the drama. People making assumptions that this company is doomed or that product is evil.

If I had a filter to block this shit I would. I would love too. I'm sure most of you would as well. But we can't. And it's getting worse. To the point where I'm considering scaling my back my time spent on social media. It's become counter-productive to use.

I can forgive the tech journalists for their sensational click grabbing headlines but even they didn't get all dramatic about Apple's announcements. They reported it, analysed it and made some conclusions. They might be right, they might be wrong, but they did their job. They provided some short form coverage of the announcement.

As for the rest of the Internet. Enough. Enough fucking drama. Unless you've used said product prior to it's release then save your attention grabbing, whining post until you have used the product.

Many might see the recent annoucements by Micrsoft and Apple as a win for Micrsoft and who can argue.

The company are finally interesting again and not just from a consumer perspective but from a technical and creative perspective. The flagship product of the Windows operating system is now having to share the spotlight with Microsoft's new line of hardware products. And while it's great to see Microsoft getting that innovative edge again I don't see it as a win only for Microsoft.

Their Surface products and open sourced software are now opening another front on the war between the tech giants. For too long it's been a two-horse race between Apple and Google.

Apple's line of hardware is different from Google's and that's where I find it hard to compare the two. Apple's traditional line of computers, tablets and phones are certainly different from the Chromebook and Chromecast dongles that Google sell.

Microsoft are now creating a name for themselves as a serious contender for those looking to make a new hardware purchase. And with the hardware purchase, the software purchases will pretty much follow suit. It's a model that Apple has run for years. Build great hardware and boost sales with software and service purchases. It's now Microsoft's turn to take a stab at it.

Microsoft have turned heads with their new products, but not just from a consumer angle but from a corporate angle. I wouldn't be against the idea of a few people at Cupertino who weren't quietly surprised by the new Surface Studio. Hell, they might even like it.

And that's the win for Apple. They have a new competitor on the horizon. A new front to battle on. A new chance to innovate again.