Solomon Giles Design

I grew up in a suburban household with my mum and step father. It was a great childhood. On the one hand, I had a balanced and “normal” week-day life in a great little neighbourhood. And then, on the weekends, my super cool dad would come pick me up and I’d get to break all my mum’s rules. I’d eat sugary cereals and croissants, watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and be lavished with toys. My dad wasn’t rich at all, he just loves me like crazy and spoiled me rotten.

While my budget was never unlimited, I did experience a rather choice sampling of the 80s’ and early 90s’ toy spectrum. In fact, such was my dad’s generosity that I often had to talk him out of buying me a toy. Which to my credit, was a very conflicted experience. Even at that young age I was a total gadget whore.

The Nintendo Power Glove was one such near acquisition.

I was nearly blinded by the Cool the Power Glove had garnered from a guest appearance in the awesome 1989 video game themed youth-blockbuster, The Wizard. But, such was the obvious shittyness of the product that even its being declared “so bad,” in that reverse-litteral Michael Jackson sense of the word, couldn’t close the deal for me. I remember standing in that Toys-[backwards R]-Us aisle pouring over the Power Glove box, trying to glean some hope for the products value but finding none. The thing is, it really didn’t work very well.

Twenty-one long years later, that user interface antihero, Microsoft releases Kinect at this year’s E3. And it is everything the Power Glove wished it could have been. It works, and it’s just you and the screen no gloves, no wii controller. Nintendo released a glassesless 3D experience at the same conference. Technolgies are still in their early stages, and they’re segmented between providers. Change will only happen incementally. More than anything, what sticks with me these days is how much less we’re trying and how much more we’re actually doing. We’ve attained a level of results that is, wait for it… game changing.

The times they are a changin’
The nature of our relationship with the things we create is rounding a momentum-filled corner. Welcome to the days when our imaginations must play catch up with our technologies.

I just got played by a twitter hottie. But first, some background. If you follow my twitter stream, you may have noticed my three day Lady Gaga obsession.

Day 1: I discover Lady Gaga singing “acoustic” (i.e. her + her on an electric keyboard) and am blown away. Seriously, she can sing! Lord.

Day 2: In attempting to win over my Gaga hating (but nonetheless wonderiferous) girlfriend, I show her this video and then a few more “acoustic” Gaga songs. They’re awesome too. So I go and get her album.

Day 3: I listen to 2 tracks off the album and am very embarrassed to have publicly declared my love for the Gaga. I issue a twitter-retraction insisting that I do not love Gaga’s albums. Gawd. Gag me with a spoonful of mediocrity.

Day 4: I get a message from some twitter hottie saying I should retweet her tweet if I like these Lady Gaga glasses she’s linking to. Did I mention she was a hottie? Did I mention I’m new to twitter?

In fairness, I didn’t retweet. But I did think I’d made a friend and I went out of my way to peruse the website this company sent me. Now I have no idea whether that chick works there or if it’s just some big not-so-faceless company using some random gal’s face. But, I did feel like I was taken for a ride.

And I also realized that I’m way more willing to follow someone on twitter that is a hot girl. I’m not looking or anything. But I am a dude. And it seems that this dude, at least, abides twitter hotties. I’d wager I’m not alone.

The takeaway: the tools may be new but the same old tricks work for the same old reasons. Just remember that these days you’re stepping into a more personal sphere with those old tricks and, as such, you risk striking too close to home.

Whenever I get back into GTD, as I just have using the surprisingly awesome Todo for iPad app, I always run into the same quandary. It usually beings like this, with a new app and me all excited. Yes, I’m a geek and new toys, even purely digital ones, send my heart a flutter. I add all the important stuff, which essentially is a bunch of job related stuff that I absolutely must accomplish.

Then things get tricky. For example, my life has been a whirlwind the last few weeks and that combined with a lack of GTD methods in my life wreaked havoc on my once blissfully empty inboxes. The question is, do I add something like “empty gmail inbox” to my todo app? I know, this can be broken down into smaller tasks. But let’s start w/ the parent task, shall we.

I’m sure somewhere someone’s mulled this over in detail. But fuckit. I’m going to mull this one over for myself. Mostly because I can’t think of how to phrase the question to get an answer out of Google in the 30 second maximum time I’m willing to spend on thoughts like these. That and, I’m in a writing mood.

The Pro’s of adding the little things to a GTD list:

1. Checking it off. Let’s be honest, this is pretty much the entire reason we make check lists in the first place.
2. Getting it out of my head. This is one of the big GTD selling features and its why they say to write everything down. But I find that at some point this becomes tedious. It is simply not true for me that the benefit always outweighs the cost of writing things down.
3. Scheduling it. This one really gets me. If I schedule it, will it get done faster? Or, will I simply perpetually reschedule the task?

The Con’s:

1. Too many todo’s is overwhelming. I’ve found, in past attempts with GTD, that when todo lists balloon things get forgotten. And the lists themselves start becoming first a source of stress and, eventually, useless.
2. It’s not like I’m going to forget. I’m in my inboxes about 50 times a day, there’s no way I’m going to forget that they need doing.

This time, despite the odds being stacked against it, Con wins. It’s just not worth risking the integrity of the entire system to add things that don’t need to be added. And I think, for now at least, “does it need to be added” will be my rule of thumb.

My blog is rather spastic. It’s a business blog, a tech blog, an apple fanboy blog, a thoughts on life, an ROI blog, a marketing and SEO blog, a design blog, a … ok you get the picture.

It would seem on the surface that I am flying in the face of the current rhetoric. Over and over again, you hear top bloggers and thinkers in the online community saying that, in todays super-saturated blogosphere, the most effective way to get heard is to pick a niche.

It’s not bad advise if that’s you thing. If there’s a niche you fit into then own it and be the best at it. Become the number one authority on Czech Butterfly collecting and make your site a hub for all things Czech Butterfly.

The problem is, that tactic just doesn’t work for everyone. I’m not a niche-y fellow. I’m all over the place.

If I chose a niche, I’d lose interest and then so would you.

Pretty soon my blogging would get tired and inauthentic. In fact, coming from me niche topic blogging would be the very definition of inauthentic. Alas. What are we to do? So many of us poor ADD-riddled children of the future are not likely to make great niche topic bloggers.

Or are we?

Here’s the catch: there’s nothing that’s more of a niche than you. My all-over-the-place blog, this epitome of General, does in fact appeal to the most specific set of interests imaginable. This blog appeals to my interests. I’m blogging for me. And there’s nothing more authentic or specific than that.

Sure, there’s the risk that my specific interest soup is too specific a melange to appeal to others. But, I doubt it. I think our repective Venn diagrams of interest overlap enough that there’s a gazillion people out there who are into some 2/3 of what I write about.

At the end of the day, that 2/3′s is about the same ratio of stuff I’m interested in any blog, regardless of niche size. I say, write about what interests you, it’s going to interest some and not others regardless of how you position yourself.

Sure, it might be easier in the short term to rank for niche topic keywords if that’s all you write about. But that only works if your heart is it. Ranking in search engines is all about links. And people, by and large, link to great content. Long run, the best and most sustainable way to create great content is to speak from the heart and to do what you love.

I just googled around for a way to share your external hard drives in Snow Leopard over a wireless home network and couldn’t find a straight answer. But, motivated by my girlfriend using my iPad until I could get to the bottom of things, I figured it out. Here’s what I did:

You need to be using either,

1. Airport Extreme,
2. Time Capsule,
3. a wireless LAN created using internet sharing via OS X (this is what I’ve got)

It’s really simple to set up:

1. Go into System Preferences and open up the Sharing Pane
2. Check the box next to the File Sharing service.
3. Click the + icon under Shared Folders.
4. In the Dialog that pops up, select the external Hard Drive that you want to share over your home network. (Or any folder you can see for that matter).

To access your newly shared Hard Drive over your home network:

1. Open Finder on your Mac of choice.
2. Open the Shared tab in the left column of Finder.
3. And, you’re off to the races! I’ve even been able to stream video without a problem and my HD is connect over USB.

Hope that helped. Feel free to email me with any questions.

Growing up, I can remember my mom often insisting that I give people the Benefit of the Doubt whenever possible. In fact, being a little trouble maker, I was often the beneficiary of this generous outlook. It’s not any easy thing to allow, to believe in the goodness of people when there are always a million reasons not to.

Stepping back.

Whenever I get a chance to put some distance between my initial, often more judgemental, reactions to someone’s actions I almost always find that I was being too harsh. It will turn out that they were not, in fact, being assholes; that maybe I had misread the situation. At least, I’ll often find, that I simply don’t have enough information to assume the worst.

Nowhere is Believing the Best more important than online.

On the interwebs, we lose many of the hints that we can use to inform our assumptions in the “real” world. Not that these off-line assumptions are any less informed by ego or emotions. It’s just that online we lose tone of voice, body language and facial expressions at least to some extent. I often find people are really rude online. My initial reaction, I’m embarrassed to say, is to tear those cheeky so-and-so’s a new one.

So, probably more for me than you, I’m just wanted to put this in words: people are essentially good and I’m going to assume the best. I’m going to give people the benefit of doubting that they are jerks. Until I know otherwise, I am going to read the words I find online with a tone befitting this view. And, most of all, I’m going to do myself the good service of letting people be innocent until proven guilty.

Do it for the children.

We’re a community. A real community, not just some abstract metaphor but a group of people working and living our lives together. The alternatives to assuming the best are not places I want to live in. I’m done road raging at my desk. So, next time we meet you’ll have a reason to assume the best too.

Just read a brilliant article by David over at 37Signals called You couldn’t Pay me to work for Balmer. While there’s no real question that Microsoft is losing serious ground, David did a great job of showing this was a long time coming, and potentially all Balmer’s fault.

David also made the point the Apple needs some competition. I think they’ve got it in spades and it’s called Google. While two companies’ core businesses started out looking very different, we are increasingly seeing them overlap.

Take Android vs the iPhone and Apple’s return shot, the introduction of iAd.

What interests me most about this competition is that they employ antithetical business & innovation models, i.e. mostly closed vs mostly open. These models both have huge benefits to the companies that employ them and to the consumers that use their products. They also both produce knowledge and innovation in different manners, which when competing so healthily are actually very complimentary.

What worries me most is Job’s health.

Very few dictators in history have been able to pass the torch along. And let’s be honest, a dictator is exactly what jobs is. Benevolent mostly, but a dictator nonetheless. The problem is, I really don’t see another Jobs in the ranks at Apple. And, as you’ve so eloquently shown this could be a rather large problem for the consumer in the coming decade.

So I was going to include a photo of Jack Nicholson in the shining to compliment my post title. But then I looked up a photo of Jack Nicholson in the Shining and decided to spare you the horror of it.

I’m back, but not like Jack.

I was away for a couple of weeks visiting family in Montreal. My Aunt was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer and so I was home spending some quality time with her and the rest. It was a really wonderful visit.

Anyhow, I wrote a couple of posts on my new iPad while I was there. But WordPress for iPad really sucks and so I was waiting till I got home to publish them. I was up in the air about this, but I decided to publish them under the date that they were written rather than the date they were posted.

I’m excited to get back to blogging and tweeting. I’d say that I’m looking forward to hearing from you but short of email, I really put a kibosh on that by turning off comments. I’ve since decided that this was a stupid idea and will be turning them back on, as soon as I get my blog transferred over to a new CMS.

Sitting in the Amsterdam airport, eating a rather tasty, all-organic, free range, yadda yadda sandwich. Even the box it came in is fully biodegradable.

My dilemma
I’m about two thirds done and I am full. I find myself facing a familiar issue. When eating away from home, do I eat more than I need & want or do I throw perfectly good food away? Which is more wasteful?

The option I wish I had
I wish “take away” was less often a one-use concept. I wish this box resealed. Nothing fancy required, just a way to be sure the contents of my sandwich wouldn’t end up strewn about my bag.

The bigger picture
Try to consider as much of a product’s life cycle as you can. Then get out there and use your product, talk to others who are doing the same, and make it easy for them to talk to you.