Matthew Lang

I would love to have seen the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth” exhibition in New York.

The picture depicting Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug was the first the image I seen of Tolkien’s books as a kid. I might not be able to get to New York for this, but it might be time for a re-read of the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

via kottke.org

Good advice from Derek Sivers on keeping a daily diary:

It works best as a nightly routine. Just take a minute and write at least a few sentences. If you have time, write down everything on your mind. Clear it all out. But if you miss a night, make time the next morning to write about the previous day.

— Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals by Derek Sivers

I also like his idea for topic journals.

For each subject that you might have ongoing thoughts about, start a separate “Thoughts On” journal. Whenever you have some thoughts on this subject, open up that file, write today’s date, then start writing.

— Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals by Derek Sivers

Just a little Commonmarks update for those interested. I’m working on the password reset over the next few days. By then I should have a working single-account version that people can deploy with a Heroku button.

After that I am going to then focus on a multi-account option for those who don’t want to host it themselves. The timeline for this is a couple of weeks, but I will have a limited set of invites for those interested. I’ll make the announcement on Micro.blog first.

With my day job taking me down the JavaScript route on a daily basis, it’s good to break out the text editor at night and write some Ruby code for Commonmarks. It might just be a simple Ruby on Rails bookmarking app but hopefully in time I can build a few more interesting features for it.

Recently, I’ve been scaling back on the number of newsletters that I subscribe to. Some are due to a lack of interest in the newsletter topic and some I just don’t read anymore.

Of the newsletters that I am sticking with though, I subscribe to them through Feedbin’s secret email address. Lately, though it feels like I’m merely scanning over my newsletters instead of reading them. I’ll star them to read later on, but most of the time I never do.

Stoop is an app for iOS and Android that allows you to subscribe to newsletters and manage what you have and haven’t read. I think this might just be the right tool for the job when it comes to newsletters. It leaves me to scan my RSS feeds as usual without missing anything, but it also keeps me away from my email. Sure it’s another app on my phone, but it’s for reading. So, that’s not really a bad thing.

Another benefit to the four day work week.

A four-day week, such as that proposed by Wellcome, could have a profound gender effect. Women at the company who have children will be free to spend one day a week with them and, crucially, remain on the same footing as the rest of their colleagues. And the radical change could extend beyond the Trust’s own staff: Men with kids at the company would be able to commit to a day of childcare as well, meaning that their partners would be freer to make their own choices about part-time vs full-time work.

— The four-day work week is fantastic news for gender equality by Cassie Werber for Quartz

Good news across the board it seems, however, the four day week is a hard-sell to many companies. I think it will be a long time before we see this gain traction across the wider global workforce.

After a week of using the open source Apple Music web player Musish, I’m still a fan.

The familiar look and feel to the native Apple Music apps as well as having the benefit of access to all my Apple Music data through a web interface means I can still listen to music while I’m working.

It also means I can conserve the battery on my iPhone and I don’t need to rely on a good network signal if I need to stream any of the albums I want to listen to.

Write it says our man in Arizona.

Gutted to see the Saints go out like they did last night with the non-call on Robey-Coleman’s pass interference. It definitely changed the outcome of the game from there onwards. Running up to that point in the game though, the Saints could have definitely handled a few plays better than they did.

I didn’t see the AFC Championship game, but I was disappointed in that one too with the result. It sounded like a great game, but I would have loved to have seen a Saints-Chiefs Super Bowl.

The Rams need to up their game for the Super Bowl. They took too long to get going against the Saints. The Patriots won’t be as forgiving.

I think it will be another Super Bowl win for the Patriots. 🏈