Brad Barrish

Young and Brilliant: Wireframes for Thinking

Young and Brilliant: Wireframes for Thinking

ninakix:

“wireframes” or “sketches” (the semantics aren’t important here) are really like writing out long division. If you’re trying to think seriously about a software product, if you aren’t sketching things out, then you aren’t really thinking about it. Yes, some details are inane (“Where should I put the login button?”) but many more are the details that make up the service: Tumblr linking to its six basic post types wasn’t a detail, it markedly effected the way the service felt and was used. And these are the little details that we start to see once we can start externalizing bits of our short-term memory to paper. 

As an even more general point, I’d say that confidence and fluency in sketching and diagraming is one of those things that can make us exponentially better thinkers. 

I love this and agree 100%. Sometimes I use paper and other times I use software, but if you’re not writing it out in some way, you’re not thinking about it. 

Habits Of Supremely Happy People

seanbonner:

  1. Surround yourself with other happy people
  2. Smile when you mean it
  3. Cultivate resilience
  4. Try to be happy
  5. Be mindful of the good
  6. Appreciate simple pleasures
  7. Devote some time to giving
  8. Let yourself lose track of time
  9. Nix smalltalk for deeper conversations
  10. Spend money on other people
  11. Make it a point to listen
  12. Uphold in-person connections
  13. Look on the bright side
  14. Value a good mixtape
  15. Unplug
  16. Get spiritual
  17. Make exercise a priority
  18. Go outside
  19. Spend time on the pillow
  20. LOL
  21. Walk the walk

This is a solid list. I would add meditation.

My sister asked me to speak at her wedding over the weekend and I talked about the pursuit of happiness. Sometime in my late teens, I made the conscious decision to work at being happy for the rest of my life. Make no mistake. It takes work. Some of that work takes the form of adversity and a lot of it won’t yield results immediately, but eventually it does. I continue to work every day to be a better, happier person.

And yet, to echo Kraus, I’d still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn’t want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. (There were local versions of the ad around the world, with comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb as the PC and Mac in the UK).

Heh, Jonathan Franzen’s essay on what’s wrong with the world is pretty all over the place, particularly this part about the “insufferable smugness” of the Mac platform compared to PCs. 

The Archie Bunker of the internet age is not Evgeny Morozov, as it turns out.

(via shortformblog)

Go home Jonathan Franzen - you’re drunk.

(via thisisviolence)

This is just too good.