Wendy MacNaughton, you are my new favorite. I should’ve known that you were behind that feature on Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List.
To-(Eventually)-Do List
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Category Archives: Miscellany
On Gmail configurations
While talking on the phone with Nic, a very important question came up: What is the most optimized gmail configuration? Multiple inboxes or priority inboxes? Multiple + priority inboxes? Horizontal or vertical? Chat on left or right?
We’ve decided that the tendency to rearrange inboxes stems from the lack of real furniture and the lack of physical space — and sometimes you just need to rearrange something.
What’s on your mind?
Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.* —Eleanor Roosevelt
What ideas are you thinking of right now? What are you reading?
Imagine if someone asked you these questions and genuinely wanted to know and engage you on your answers. How delightful and interesting conversations would be. Perhaps this is why I’m obsessed with Atlantic Wire’s Media Diet series. Take me out for a coffee and I’m sure we can talk for hours.
Anyway, I was listening to this piece on NPR earlier this afternoon about whether we should go on an ‘information diet.’ While I agreed with most of the speaker’s points, especially that we tend to read things that reinforce our own ideas, I would hesitate to suggest people to, for example, read the text of the ‘Stop Online Privacy Act’ to understand SOPA. I think an information diet should not only consist of straight up reading less crap, but that it should also consist of conscious consumption from credible (unintentional alliteration; I blame a lot of Maureen Dowd in my formative years) sources/editors/curators/whatever. Anyway, in the spirit of pithy bits, here is Clay Johnson’s Michael Pollan-style advice: “Seek. Not too much. Mostly facts. Eat low on the sort of ‘information food chain,’ and stick close to sources.”
In other, but related, news, I had a fantastic lunch with Derek as we made fun of ourselves for starting 80% of our conversations with “Have you read that article…?” and “I just read this article…”
*While on the food/consumption metaphor, I’d like to think of this quote as the outline for a conversation pyramid, as opposed to a hard and fast rule for being a great mind. We all need that piece of chocolate every now and then okay? Maybe some bread too. Plus, we’d all be boring philosophers (sorry, philosopher friends! Do I even have any of you?) if all we did were talk about ideas all day.
Hot tea in tall glasses
I’ve taken a liking to drinking hot tea in tall glasses. Sometimes I worry about the glass cracking, but after researching it a bit, it seems that there’s no consensus on which temperature of water will crack a glass because it depends on the thickness of the glass, the pace at which the glass is heated, etc. So, if you were curious, if you too have a preference for hot tea in tall glasses, pour slowly. You’re welcome.
Hardcovers
“Don’t you ever read small and light paperback books?”
I think I’ve found one of the answers to the battle between deciding reading seemingly “static” books and keeping up on current news: Read hardcover books.
This site is supposedly back
Human(s) curating content is back! Anyway, I think a good way to restart is to showcase what some of my friends are doing because nothing’s a better motivator than your friends being way cooler than you:
Nicole is currently interning at The New Republic (in DC! With me!), doing all sorts of neat things. Follow her here: nicolenguyen.com and twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen.
Hayes just started his new blog, At Water’s Edge, on foreign affairs and domestic policies/politics, with IR theory in the mix. But really, it’s an elaboration of his tweets, which are also fantastic. Also, he writes headlines like these: “Venezuela is basically the Lady Gaga of the United Nations” and “Syria Business: Syria’s FM Blames Everyone but Al-Assad for Syria’s Problems.”
Alex, my DC boyfriend, is always feeding me delicious Spats and pieces on NYTimes trend stories and Jon Hamm on The Atlantic Wire. Follow him online unless you’re lucky enough to have weekly date nights with him at MeiWah.
Seth just drove cross country from LA to Manchester, New Hampshire because well, Southern New Hampshire University was smart enough to woo him away from UCLA to work on their digital marketing. Follow him on Twitter, or his casually updated blog on media.
Andrew Roush is teasing with a relaunch of Reply Magazine and I have no idea when that’ll happen, so in the meantime, follow his angsty tweets about Thomas Friedman. He’s best during GOP debates though.
To be continued.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who has helped me reach my fundraising goal. I can’t thank you all enough.
My 2006 self. Gah.
Is it a low point or a high point when you begin to quote yourself? I am thinking the former… yes, most likely former. Double gah (but one space!).
As I’m sitting here working, I keep referencing the CSPA Stylebook for things like “5 a.m.” and “I before E, but neither leisured foreign sovereign seized the heifer on the weird heights”. Digression at its finest, my question is do we put one or two spaces after a sentence? After a bit of research, here is a very simplified explanation: I am going to continue to use one space because typographists have preplanned the width of the whitespace to accomodate the period. Unless you are using a typewriter or the monospaced or fixed-width fonts like Courier, I’d put two. Is it really worth it to put two spaces to improve readiability despite designers’ efforts to make a good type font with preplanned kearning already? Using two spaces is an extra wasted keystroke where a single space serves its function nicely. Double spaces are typically removed for typesetting prior to print publication and who needs more white space anyway? There is no reason that sentence-ending punctuation should follow any different rules from clause-ending punctuation. Capitalization of the first letter neatly signals the end of one structure and the next, so no other typography is needed. Finally, on the World Wide Web, double spaces get truncated into a single space unless you put a non-breaking space “ ”; however, some browsers even join those concurrent spaces into a single space! Looks like I am going to take a Typography class..
You can’t connect the dots looking forward
It’s been a little over a week since I wrote my last entry and started fundraising. Since then, I’ve raised my donation goal three times, from $400 to $500 to $1000. I also won a VIP Access Pass & a VIP Suite at the starting line of the marathon through a partnership between Crowdrise & the LA Marathon — their goal is to raise $4 million for charities this year. That’s only $160 from each runner (the race is capped at 25,000) and since Crowdrise includes runners as well as volunteers & anyone else involved, I think this is easily doable and hope they/we make it. It doesn’t seem enough to simply say thank you to everyone who has donated, not just money, but also just kind words and support. Without you, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to share, start on this project and challenge myself to raise more.
Anyway, the headline of this entry (and the tagline of my blog, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”) is from the 2005 Stanford commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, who had pancreatic cancer.
Currently and perpetually desired qualities
FOCUS & PATIENCE.
An aside: The latest Economist debate series argued the motion stating that the development of computing was the most significant technological advance of the 20st century. The side arguing for the motion won, but are we surprised? If you’re interested…
This is why I read Daily Intel
For collections on a certain sassy Nobel Prize winning economist’s blog. Paul Krugman, I’d take you over Niall Ferguson any day.
I especially appreciated, from July 2010: “If you don’t understand a brief post like this one, CLICK ON THE LINKS. I’m not putting them there for decorative purposes.”
Realizations about life #485
Everything is a race against time. When did everything become a deadline?
Back to writing my policy memo on Mexico. Sharing my sources:
- Mexico Under Seige, LA Times award-winning package on Mexico’s Drug War
- Schaefer, A. “Security in Mexico: Implications for US Policy Options.” RAND.