Matthew Lang

A study commissioned by Microsoft found that since the year 2000 – or about when the mobile revolution began – the average human attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds, which places us just below a goldfish, which tends to stay focused for an entire 9 seconds at a time.

— Slack Is Not Where ‘Deep Work’ Happens

Wow. In almost 20 years we’ve become less focused than a goldfish.

I get ticked off by Slack as a platform, but not for what it is, but how it’s used. Instead of restricting channels to specific actions or topics, Slack allows any channel to be openly used and abused without user’s even knowing that they are distracting others. Why have one firehose channel when you can have ten?

I do miss the days of freelancing where I could get in a few hours of deep work in the morning and then catch up with clients and meetings in the afternoon.

I would love to see Woods win at Augusta today. It’s taken a while but he’s finally back to winning form. As a fellow Brit, I would also like Poulter to win as well. He’s a Ryder Cup legend but he’s due a major win.

Throw Schauffele into the mix as well as I drew him out the hat for the pro shop raffle and I have a dilemna for the final day of the masters.

Whoever wins though, it’s going to be a great day for watching the golf.

This wasn’t intentional, it just kind of happened.

With a week off work, I’ve been doing other things rather than sitting in front of a screen. The boys and I have been enjoying a few days of golf. Drew has been going to a golf camp for the younger kids in the morning, and Ethan and I have been hitting the course this week. By the time afternoon rolls around, me and Drew are happy to leave Ethan at the club and head home for an afternoon of chilling.

The results have been a quieter than usual blog. It’s not been a bad thing though, because yet again I’ve been toying with the value of my blog and whether it’s worth continuing with. It seems that every few months I question this and inevitably continue posting. This time the decision is still the same. I’m sticking with the blog.

Regular posting should resume shortly.

Maybe it’s the books that I buy, but I don’t see many books with illustrations in them. In books the illustration is a visual indication of where the story is but in the case of older books, I would say the illustration is much more of a labour of love.

These illustrations for “The Tempest” by Arthur Rackham are a great example of this.

I only know of Arthur Rackham as it was his illustrations that were included in my edition of “A Christmas Carol”. There is something about his illustrations that set them apart from other illustrated books.

I would love to see more illustrated books in stores.

I’ve been making quiet and steady progress with Markcase over the last couple of weeks. Just minor changes here and there.

One of the bigger changes is the addition of individual pages for each bookmark so that you can see related bookmarks. These are accessible by clicking on the bookmark’s timestamp.

At the moment it only returns a handful of bookmarks from the same domain, but I am going to add more sections to this page to include related bookmarks by tag and date.