What is the difference between these birthday posts and the year-end posts? The dust has settled on the new year reflections and this is a good time to think about my past year and the coming year outside of the context of holidays and resolutions.

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This morning Amanda and Charlie put out some birthday decorations for me. While Amanda was getting some balloons out, Charlie declared that he “will get the buses!” – His birthday was Wheels on the Bus themed, so that is what birthday decorations are to him. So sweet. While eating breakfast we played with little toy busses at the table. It was the best 🚌 ♥️

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I wrote this back in October, and it is still the main theme of my past year:

It has taken two years, but Amanda and I are starting to feel like ourselves again, with the added bonus of having a sweet kid in our lives. (Contrast that with mostly feeling like caregivers the last two years.) Our energy and sleep are improved, which helps give space for our interests, projects, and new ideas.

The toddler stage is completely different from the infant stage. Overall, things are good and Charlie is a sweet little guy, and I feel fortunate to be his dad. He is growing and learning at a rapid pace. I love how kind, curious, and affectionate he is.

Last year Zeldman commented,

One thing I did early on with Ava was draw with her, from the time that she could hold a crayon. In that way, I continued to make art (even if it was mostly deliberately very silly art), but my goal was not to make art, it was to make art with my kid.

We started doing this a lot more and it has been great. Family art time is something we all enjoy. Thank you, Jeffrey!

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Work overall is good. I have a great team and Automattic is a good place to work. Always juggling lots of projects, but there are three projects I’m proud to have worked on this past year:

• Preserving the Harvard blogs archive
• FeedLand
• A forthcoming link checking/replacement WP plugin with the Internet Archive

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Taking stock on last year’s vectors:

• Keep prioritizing quality, fully present time with Amanda and Charlie, and our family.
  • I can improve on this. I should put my phone down more. The days we go have breakfast together somewhere feel special and like a highlight, so we should do that more.
  • I also can do better about prioritizing time with just Amanda, such as being more proactive about finding a sitter so we can go on more dates. That has been challenging with Charlie’s recent separation anxiety, but something we should work through.
• Keep making things.
  • Getting back out in my workshop starting in November was great, and a big highlight the last couple months. I’m also really excited about the improvements I’m making in the workshop now.
• Keep improving our lives & surroundings.
  • This played a bigger part in the last year than I thought! The deck, my office, the attic, the basement, the shed, hiring cleaners, shutters, glass rinser, maintenance on the car and heater, and definite plans for the fence and garden in motion.
• Keep blogging.
  • I’m sticking with it and it feels good. This is a blog post!
  • I’m glad by domain longevity post is getting some traction. This is an important issue to work on.
• Keep fostering friendships.
  • One key mindset shift I made this year is realizing that adult friendships are different than childhood friendships. In childhood friends are brought together by circumstances mostly out of their control, you gravitate toward people similar to you, and don’t need to be intentional about them. As an adult you need to be intentional and can form friendships based on interest rather than being alike. This leads to different kinds of friendships. Friends don’t have to be all-or-nothing like when you were a child.
  • I think the investments we have made in friendships this year have been successful.

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So, what do I want my thirty-fifth year to look like?

Take care of my health. Read more, scroll less. Prioritize family time. Make things. Keep improving our lives & surroundings.

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Previous birthday posts: 33, 32

Since I’m working today, we celebrated yesterday with a day trip to Kingston and Woodstock, where we visited a bunch of indie bookstores and two restaurants I’ve wanted to try. It was a really nice day!

I think this year has gone by faster than any year in recent memory.

It has been a great year in many ways, especially compared to the three years before:

• Charlie is thriving. Paternity leave was very helpful for getting through the difficult infant days, and now that he is a toddler things seem like they are settling into a new normal. That means Amanda and I get more time for the two of us to spend together again, which we deeply appreciate.
  • I’ve been reflecting a lot on the last year and it is incredible to me the amount of growth that happens for a baby between 6 months and 18 months. This time last year he couldn’t crawl. Now he is running, climbing stairs, communicating, and very curious about the world. Amazing.
• Work is feeling really good. I’m in a new position with new challenges and responsibilities more aligned to what I like to work on.
• I’ve had more time after Charlie goes to bed (and during his naps) to do open-ended exploration. That manifested in major overhauls to this website’s functionality, getting into tiki drinks, and recently going down a weather station data rabbit hole.

One of the things I tried to follow this year is the idea that I should embrace what this season of life entails instead of wishing for an alternative. That helped me be more content with not doing things in the workshop or paddling on the river, and instead spend that time with Charlie. He won’t be a baby or toddler forever, and I don’t want to have squandered that time.

Taking stock on last year’s vectors:

• Spend as much quality time as I can with Amanda and Charlie. Help Charlie learn, grow, and explore the world.
  • I think I did pretty well here, but given how tired I was most of the time, I wasn’t as present as I could have been for some of it. I think that will improve this year now that we are all sleeping through the night.
  • One thing I need to get better about is reminding myself that Charlie is learning, and his learning often looks like meticulously testing where the boundaries are for everything. This is often difficult to keep in mind when he lands on the wrong side of those boundaries. My job is to steer him back and help him learn learn where the boundaries are, even when it is frustrating for me. Getting frustrated means my expectations are not correctly set.
• Read less news and social media; read fewer contemporary books and more old books.
  • I didn’t do great on the less social media part, especially toward the end of the year.
  • I think I slightly changed the percentage of older books, but not exactly how I had envisioned it. Too many contemporary books caught my attention, and I read less overall this past year than I would have liked.
• Make more art.
  • This didn’t happen. At the time of writing this I was excited about creating generative art, but once the nice weather hit I only wanted to be outside.
  • This year I think this might look more like sketching.
• Spend more time outside, tending to the garden, going for walks in the woods, and paddling on the Hudson. Get out in all weather, not just “nice” days.
  • I spent a lot of time outside, not much time on the water: Once on the Hudson river, once on the Croton river.
  • Going for walks with Charlie is wonderful. Even more fun now that he is so confident with walking and running.
• Make more in the workshop.
  • I made a couple things (dry vase, ring holder, peg people) and fixed a couple things (like the leg to Charlie’s train table), but made less out there than I was expecting. This is okay. I know this season isn’t forever and I’ll probably get more workshop time as Charlie gets big enough to play in the yard by himself.
  • I helped my friend Jon do some timber framing, which scratched a bit of this itch. I also worked on a lot of digital projects (mostly on this website), which fit my desire to make things with the constraint of needing to be inside frequently.
• Make some improvements around the house and yard.
  • I did a lot in the garden this year and put in new flowers, which were a welcome addition. In the house we did some childproofing, curtain hanging, made a play area for Charlie, put up new bookshelves in my office, and cleared out of some things we don’t need. More on the docket this year.
• Continue blogging regularly.
  • Success! Check out my weekly archive.
• Take part more in the local community in Peekskill.
  • Also a success. We made more friends with kids locally and have been getting out with them regularly. That has been very nice.

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So, what do I want my thirty-fourth year to look like?

Much the same as the last year. Keep prioritizing quality, fully present time with Amanda and Charlie, and our family. Keep making things. Keep improving our lives & surroundings. Keep blogging. Keep fostering friendships.

Check out last year’s post, Thirty-two.

I had a good conversation with Russell Hunter, one of my coworkers at Automattic. He mentioned some uses of AI like ChatGPT that I hadn’t considered:

• Using AI to “read” your writing and respond with Devil’s Advocate-type responses so you can make your argument stronger.
  • Apparently there is a Roam Research plugin that does this! I hope someone creates one for Obsidian, my note app of choice.
• Using AI to help you with mundane things like formatting citations and footnotes.
  • I suppose you could ask AI to go find you sources for a given statement, but I have ethical concerns about doing that. That would be confirmation bias or Texas Sharpshooter fallacy on steroids.
• Summarizing your work. I write a weekly post at work every Monday. What if I fed ChatGPT all of my meetings, meeting notes, emails, Slack threads, GitHub commits, and P2 posts, and asked it to summarize what I worked on that week?

That got me thinking a bit more afterward as well:

• OpenAI has Whisper, the video transcription engine. What if we feed a meeting video to Whisper, then pipe the output to ChatGPT and ask it to write meeting notes with actions items? If it works well, everyone can be present in the meeting instead of taking notes.

In general, I think people focusing on how “dull” or “mediocre” the ChatGPT writing is misses the point. The most important use-cases for AI are to help us be happier, more productive, and more effective by teaching us where we can improve, helping us get there, and taking care of all the boring stuff we don’t like doing so we can focusing on the things that bring us joy and fulfillment.

My friend Garrett Robinson asked me on Twitter, “What do you see as the advantages of blogging?”. Naturally I had to reply with a blog post.

I see two main advantages of blogging, both with secondary advantages:

1. Having your own place on the web to keep a log of your thoughts, musings, opinions, trials, and happenings.
2. Engaging with and increasing the knowledge of the world.

Carve out a place of your own

Platforms come and go. Buy a domain and set up a permanent space on the web where others can find and link back to you. I have no idea what I put on Myspace back in the day, but everything I’ve published on this site since 2008 is still accessible and the links still work.

A personal website is a digital homestead that you can improve, tinker with, and live in for years to come. It is a home for your thoughts, musings, opinions, trials, and happenings, built in a way that suits you.

From Frank Chimero’s post on digital homesteading:

Have you ever visited an architect’s house, one they designed themselves? It’s fun to walk through it with them. They have so many things, arranged so thoughtfully, and share the space with such pride because of the personal reflection the house required to design (not to mention the effort it took to build). It’s really quite special. I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.

That is what the IndieWeb is all about.

But why go through the effort of blogging at all? If you like to engage with the world of ideas, blogging is one of the best ways to do so. Writing and publishing forces you to solidify and clarify your thoughts.

Other smart bloggers on the subject:

One of the most interesting aspects to blogging is discourse – the idea that in order to write something you must think about it with a critical eye and that this process actually helps you clarify your thinking around it.

Blogging is my way of pulling together into a coherent form all the stray thoughts rolling around in my mind. Writing helps me sift the good thoughts from all the bad and fit them all together in a logical pattern.

Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It’s become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you’re thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.

And don’t concern yourself with whether or not you “write.” Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.

Why public? There is something about making your posts available to the rest of the world that holds your feet to the fire and makes you commit. I’ve tried dozens of times to keep a private ongoing digital notebook in Evernote, Devonthink, Roam, and Obsidian, but they never stick. But making my notes available to the world in my digital garden keeps me coming back and updating it daily.

Why a blog and not just Twitter? On a blog you have more space to make your arguments in your own words, away from the stream of noise. You can persuade instead altercate. Twitter is for shitposting, blogs are for thinking.

One of the things I have learned: mostly, use your own words, your own stories, if you want to influence people on your worldview.

Once you’ve been blogging for a while, having that searchable record allows you to follow your journey, connect the dots, and pick up stray threads years later. You can do that in a handwritten journal too, but things are much easier to surface on the web.

Sharing with the world

you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.

I’ve learned so much on the internet and enjoy giving back when I can. I often blog about my projects and problems I’ve solved, and these tend to be the posts with the highest traffic. I get comments and emails about them multiple times a month. If I had to look them up, chances are someone else does, too. Examples:

• Moving files to a Mac from Microsoft Remote Desktop
• CSS Confetti
• Responsive D3.js bar chart with labels
• How to pre-fill Google forms
• Let’s make a pie chart with D3.js
• Get the most out of your Kindle with these 4 tools
• Adding Homebrew MySQL service to your PATH
• Five things you didn’t know about the Hudson River
• Adding months to a calculated date in Salesforce

And from my cooking blog:

• Making hotdogs without a grill
• Infusing gin with rose
• Mocktails that don’t suck
• A year of kombucha experiments
• Starting a home bar

And this isn’t just for other people! I often refer back to my own posts. And multiple times a year I get texts or emails from friends who tell me they searched for something and found one of my my blog posts in the top search result. These kinds of posts have a long tail.

Because of this long tail, blog posts have more impact than newsletters or presentations, too:

I’ve noticed that people at Amazon have a lot of important things to say, but those things are rarely recorded. If you give a brown-bag presentation, or send a thoughtful email to some internal mailing list, you’ll have an impact, but it won’t be anywhere near the impact you’ll have through blogging.

Blogging has more of an impact on careers than most people realize. One of our secret sauces at Praxis and CrashArchived Link was getting our customers to show their work on a blog, which helped them land jobs. Blogging got me three of my four full time jobs post college. All three told me that my blog played a crucial role in their decision to send me an offer.

Showing your work in a place that is regularly updated is so much more powerful than a resume.

Keeping an intellectual journal is the main reason for writing my blog. My secondary reason is pure economics. Blogging is a loss-leader of sorts. Through this blog I market myself and my ideas to people who I hope to do business with eventually.

While the direct economic return to authoring a blog may not appear to justify the effort, the prospect of actively demonstrating one’s skillset for an interested public, many members of which work in talent-hungry organisations that pay real salaries, is an attractive one. Why waste time submitting CVs, when you could cultivate an audience of potential employers intimately familiar with your talents?

Here is blogger Tom Critchlow in 2015 on what blogging did for him:

I’ve been writing blog posts for 8 years. That’s not to say I’m any good at it, but here’s a few of the things that blogging has done for me:

• brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for Distilled
• helped me build relationships with future employees
• helped potential employees apply for jobs I was recruiting for
• secured speaking slots at conferences
• built lasting friendships and inspired healthy debates
• helped me get hired at Google
• took me to Staten Island for a family BBQ the first day I arrived in NYC with no friends

Similar to Tom’s list above, here is what blogging has done for me over the past 14 years:

• Landed me 3 of my 4 full time jobs post college (all three told me that my blog played a crucial role in their decision to send me an offer)
• Freelance work
• Speaking/presentation gigs
• Introduced me to people I otherwise wouldn’t have met, some of whom I now call friends
• Interviews by journalists who found posts I’d written
• Got my photography picked up in art shows and magazines
• Helped old friends stay in touch

Beyond my own blog, I learn so much from other blogs! I follow ~200 blogs in my feed reader and regularly respond to many of them.

What can I blog about?

Anything! You don’t have to pick a certain subject or stay in a given lane. The site is yours—make it a reflection of your life, work, and interests in all of their facets.

The posts don’t need to be long. Short works, too! From Dave Winer, father of podcasting and RSS:

Think of creating a blog as you would think of writing on a page in a notepad. Or scribbling on the back of an envelope and handing it to someone. It takes two minutes at most to create a blog at wordpress.com. And from then on, you have a “place” to post emails you that are post-worthy

My own blogging has changed through the seasons of my life. For a while I blogged mostly photos, then longer thought pieces, then short Today I LearnedArchived Link posts and tutorials, and now 80% journaling-style updates with 10% woodworking and art posts and 10% miscellany.

What do you wish you had found via Google today but didn’t? Write that.

Setting up a site on WordPress.com is probably the easiest way to get started (full disclosure, I work there!), but you can also self-host WordPress, like I do. I use Pressable, another Automattic product. Or you can use some other service like Ghost, Jekyll, or Squarespace. Just make sure you purchase your own domain name and use that for the site so you stay in control of your content. Owning your domain makes it easy to switch blogging services without losing readers or breaking links. You just point your domain to the new service, import your work, and you are off to the races.

The world needs your creativity, insights, and knowledge. Your future self needs the catalogue of what you are thinking about and working on this week. Go set up a blog and get started.

1. I used to want every new device and cool gadget. I watched keynotes, preordered things, scouted Kickstarter for the latest and greatest. Now my iPhone is 3 generations behind and I have no intention of upgrading until it dies. I’ve lost count of how many generation behind the iPad I’m writing this on is.
2. I used to beta test tons of software, including major macOS releases. Now I wait until the official public release been out for at least a few months before I’ll even consider upgrading. Reliability is important to my workflow.
3. I used to pirate software, music, and movies. Now I’m not even sure where to look for such things.
4. I used to spend lots of my spare time on social media and online in general. Now I spend as much time offline as I can.
5. I used to be dogmatic about DRM free content and open source software. I still prefer it, but I’m much more pragmatic now. I want things quickly and I want them to work reliably. For example, DRM free audiobooks require lots of extra effort to source and then load into a compatible audio player on mobile. Audible has a 25x better selection and works every time.

Why have I shifted in this direction?

• I think technology has reached a level of sophistication where it can do everything I expect quickly. Speed improvements don’t matter as much to me anymore when everything is fast.
• Cloud storage is ubiquitous, so I don’t run into space constraints on devices anymore.
• I value reliability over cutting edge features. My work requires fast turnaround and disruptions due to unreliable tools are very frustrating. I want things to work whenever I need them. I no longer have patience for doing work in order to make the tools work so that I can do the original work I came to the tool for.
• I’ve reached a level of income and workload where I’m willing to trade money for time. When I was younger, the opposite was true: I had more time than money.
• I feel like I’m in a different stage of life now than I was a decade ago. I value spending time interacting meaningfully with the world immediately around me rather than the online world. It isn’t that I didn’t want to interact with the world around me when I was younger, but it is definitely more of a priority now than it was then.
• Re: pirating – It used to be difficult or very expensive to get the software I use, movies I want to see, or music I want to listen to online. Pirating it was easier. Now it is so simple and relatively inexpensive to get what I want that it is easier than pirating.

On a recent episode of Office Hours, a listener asked about the purpose of social media. Isaac and TK recommended taking a pragmatic approach. Here is my take on what that looks like.

How I approach social media in general

• Consumption and projection, not discussion – I find things people share and share my own work and things I find interesting, but I very rarely participate in discussions. Meaningful discussion is very difficult online, especially on social media. I prefer to take discussions to more direct, personal mediums like Messages, Slack, and Voxer. I prefer in-person when that is possible.
• Sparingly and intentionally – I’m not a Waldenponder. I get a lot of value out of social media. But I don’t recommend indiscriminately spending time on it, either. It is designed to keep you there so they can serve more ads to you. It is inherently manipulative. Some (like Twitter) are so full of negativity that you’ll get worked up if you aren’t careful. Photo-heavy services distort reality and have the unfortunate effect of making you feel like your life sucks. Social media is a dangerous place, so make sure you engage sparingly and intentionally. Know what you want to get out of it. Put blockers in place so you don’t spend more time than you pre-determine is worth it for you. I recommend 1Blocker (Safari on macOS and iOS) and StayFocusd (Chrome). Remove the apps from your phone (best) or at least put in limits with iOS 12’s new Screentime feature.
  • I prefer to replace social media time with reading and podcasts as much as possible.
• Whenever possible, post from a third-party service – Most of my Facebook and Twitter posts come from Buffer. This keeps me from having to log in or have the service’s apps on my phone.

Here’s how I use the major social channels:

Facebook

I like Facebook less every week. I only hop on a few days a week now. The content there is mostly trash. I go on to keep up with friends from high school and college, as well as family. I rarely comment and I almost never engage in a discussion there. It isn’t as toxic as Twitter because you generally have closer ties with someone involved in the thread on Facebook, but it is still usually bad.

I think people waste too much time on Facebook unintentionally and would do well to delete the apps from their phones and only check it from one specific device that you use only as a secondary or tertiary device. For me that is my iPad. I keep Facebook blocked on my computer and my phone to reign in my unintentional time wasting.

Twitter

Twitter is my second favorite social service to browse. It is where I get a lot of recommendations, find out about new apps, and get my news. I don’t read traditional news outlets unless I find an interesting story linked on Twitter or a blog I read (see below).

I curate who I follow pretty regularly, so I have a pretty good “content to garbage” ratio, or at least one I’m willing to tolerate enough to check out during breakfast and lunch.

Mastodon

I still want something like Mastodon to take off, but I haven’t found any communities that are active enough to invest in. I prefer using the internet as a place to consume (find recommendations, keep up with what friends and family are doing, learn new things) and project (write and share my own stuff), but not converse. Most of the internet is a terrible place for conversing. It just isn’t set up for that. Perhaps Mastodon can fill that gap if I find the right community?

I’m trying out https://refactorcamp.orgArchived Link right now and having a pretty high hit rate of good content. Still not great for discussion, though.

If you have any Mastodon communities you recommend, I’d love to hear about them.

Instagram

I’m photographer. I love posting to Instagram. It is probably my favorite social service to browse, too. So much good stuff in my feed! That said, it is the one I’m most likely to waste too much time on because I like it so much. So I delete it from my phone most of the time and only download it when I want to post to it, keep it around for a few days with 15 minute time limits set with Screentime, then delete it until I want to post again.

Reddit

Oh, Reddit. I want to love you, but I can’t. The comments are so toxic, even in decent subreddit communities. Every subreddit I start getting involved in inevitably devolves to inside jokes, gatekeeping, and beginners asking the same question covered hundreds of times. (On the Kombucha sub, it is always “is my scoby okay?!?!). It gets tiring.

I love reading AMAs, but I never get there in time to ask a question. And when I did ask questions in AMAs a few times, I got banned for asking for a month because I asked the same question each time: What are you reading right now? Apparently that isn’t allowed.

Also, the search is completely terrible. There is probably tons of useful stuff locked away in threads that no one can find, forever lost to the ether.

I’m over Reddit. My RescueTime stats show that I visit the site less and less each year.

Pinterest

I don’t use Pinterest. I can’t reliably find anything in that awful sea of ubiquitous images. You have to sift through a pile of garbage to find one useful thing. I prefer to avoid the whole mess in favor of other services. I use http://Are.na as a personal pinboard.

YouTube

I only watch YouTube videos I find embedded elsewhere or that someone sends me. I can’t remember the last time I went directly to YouTube.com to just see what was happening. I don’t like the video medium unless I’m trying to learn something, and I tend to find those videos through search engines. I don’t watch YouTube videos recreationally.

Likewise

This is too small right now to be super useful, but I’m hopeful for it. A service dedicated to book, show, and restaurant recommendations. Requests for this sort of thing on regular social media tend to get lost in the sea of other garbage and algorithmic timelines, so people often don’t respond until days later. Likewise keeps these asks front-and-center. You should join me on Likewise! https://likewise.com/invitedby/5bbe223985965466d44255eb

Hacker News

Great tech news source. I don’t participate in the comments/community there. I’ll often click through to the comments section to get a tl;dr of the article or get hot takes on current events. I find a lot of products and tools here that I bookmark and end up using or recommending later.

Product Hunt

There was a period where I checked Product Hunt daily and found a lot of cool stuff there. Now I check it maybe once a week and only find a fraction of the cool stuff I once found there.

LinkedIn

I hate it. I refused to be on it for years. I have a profile now to set a good example for Praxis participants, and I may even cross post one of my articles there, but I get very little value from the service.

Quora

I went through a phase where I answered questions on Quora, but I got bored by it pretty quickly. I didn’t invest enough to get over the hump and get a large return, so it just felt like I was wasting my time. Plus, there are so many shitty answers on there by people who just spend all day answering questions they only know a little bit about. Costless question asking and costless answering lead to a pretty low quality of content. The early days were cool because it was costlier to be in a small community like that instead of elsewhere. But now it sucks.

Stack Overflow

I’ve never asked a question on SO, but I sure am glad it exists. I’ve had dozens, maybe hundreds, of questions answered by previously existing questions there. I have chipped in and answered some questions there, but I don’t make a regular habit of it.

Where else do I get media?

• Blogs – marginalrevolution.com – kottke.org – daringfireball.net – macstories.net – ribbonfarm.com – complete-review.com/saloon – stratechery.com
  • lesswrong.com
  • seriouseats.com
• Podcasts – Conversations with Tyler – Data Stories – Design Matters – The Knowledge Project – Longform – Mac Power Users – The Memory Palace – Presentable – Recode Decode – The Speakeasy – The Talk Show – Waking Up – Cortex – Hello Internet – Thoroughly Considered – Planet Money – This American Life – Office Hours – Serial – Accidental Tech Podcast
• Newspapers and magazines – I don’t read newspapers often, but I occasionally like to pick up a NYTimes or WSJ on the weekend and spend an hour going through it. – I like reading the short fiction in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. We don’t subscribe to them anymore, but I’ll pick one up at the news stand in Grand Central occasionally. – I read Lucky Peach for a few years until they shut it down. I loved it. I’m looking for a replacement. Any recommendations?
• Newsletters – Breaking Smart – Ryan Holiday’s Reading List – Studio Neat Gazette – MacStories Weekly – Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday

Sometimes you have to stop what you are doing and climb out on the roof to take a #ManhattanSkyline photo because the sunset is so beautiful. #nofilter

I’m very torn on jury duty. I despise politics, I don’t vote, I rarely follow the news, and I think that most laws should be nullified. I’d prefer to be rid of the whole business.

On the other hand, I deeply believe in justice and want reasonable, thoughtful people on juries.

I’ve so far avoided jury duty by being out of state at college when I was summoned. My plan if I ever got called again was to say some radical thing in order to get kicked out of the selection pool. That is no longer my plan. Now I think that I have an obligation to be the thoughtful, reasonable juror that I’d want if I were on trial.

They used to make elevators here. Now it is where they make NYC’s subway cars.

🌩🌩

Garden garlic! 👨‍🌾

I was having trouble connecting to my Karma Go device on my iPad. Wasn’t auto connecting to the website to authenticate. So I tried the old http://192.168.1.1 trick (happened to be the device’s IP) and it worked!

I jumped on-board the Medium Membership train back in March, as soon as I could. I was excited about it. I couldn’t wait to see the great content behind the paywall and to see what new features they were going to roll out just for members.

Well, three months later I’m cancelling my membership. Here’s why:

• The members-only content isn’t that good. The best stuff on Medium is already available to the public. I don’t care about the thinkpieces Medium features on a daily basis. I bookmark and recommend articles on Medium multiple times per week, so they have data to build a recommendation engine on. They need the archive of content there first, though. 
• The audio feature is too small to be useful. I check the selection of audio versions of articles 3-4 times per week and I only found one so far I was actually interested in. Unfortunately, the reader sucked. Huge letdown. I can get past it if there is a wide implementation and more articles I wanted to read were available in audio, but that isn’t the case.
• I don’t need an offline reading list. I’m usually connected. If I’m not, Pocket, Raindrop.io, or Evernote can save a copy.
• No new tools for publications or authors come bundled with Membership, or at least none that I could find. It would be completely awesome if Members could submit audio versions of their own articles.

I hope Medium becomes profitable and stays around. But unless they roll out more features and get some compelling content behind the paywall, my membership is permanently on hold. Gotta deliver value fast and keep delivering, or your customers wont stick around. 

Yeah, I know I’m n=1 and all that, but it is hard to see the real value add to a Medium Membership. It certainly isn’t worth $60/year to me. I wanted to love it, but it is a letdown.