61: YOLO

August 26, 2014

Hello internet friends!

There are quite a few new faces around – so I either caught the tail-end of that Techcrunch newsletter article or you’re all friends of Bob Sherron[1] who noticed that my newsletters look nice in Instapaper. My HTML game is strong, indeed.
Hello new readers! Have a cookie.

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Lately – and mostly because my friends and me are a bunch of soon to be middle-aged, just slightly too nerdy to be hipsters[2] who like to make fun of “youth culture” – the concept of YOLO has been part of conversations around me. That and the rather related topics of sleep and the comfort zone keeps creeping up and to end those discussions (“I can sleep when I’m dead!” “You will be dead pretty soon if you keep not sleeping.”) here we go:

Dominik’s unified theory of ramblings on YOLO, the comfort zone and sleep.

  • Yes. One probably does live only once. There are religions that claim otherwise and maybe they are right, but as far as I can tell, we have one run at being alive and once it’s over, it’s over.
  • Yes, if at all humanly possible, you should live your life to the fullest. Carpe diem.[3]
  • Sleep is pretty bloody awesome. It’s not like being dead because I don’t think I’ll be riding firebreathing dragons over futuristic battlefields once I am dead.
  • As far as I understand my older relatives, sleep is not all that easy to come by anymore once you get older. So – sleep while you can.
  • The comfort zone is called comfort zone because it is comfortable. A lot of evolutionary work has gone into creating comfort zones. I don’t see a single reason to leave them. We[4] worked hard to create them and it would be a waste of a good comfort zone to leave it.
  • That being said: every person has their own comfort zone. If your comfort zone includes not sleeping and/or jumping out of airplanes – go for it! If your comfort zone includes gardening – enjoy! If your comfort zones are PUA forums on the internet – get help. Please.
  • It’s always a good idea to nudge on the borders of one’s comfort zone. How else to make it a bit bigger and roomier?
  • I kind of forgot what I wanted to say. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ YOLO!

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WordPress plugins will soon have fancy icons. I know that some of you have mad crazy icon skills – anyone want to donate an icon or two for my plugins? I quite fancy those that look inappropriate once you have a dirty mind but innocent to those who don’t.

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Well, sorry about all that. Have a good day.

Dominik

  1. If not, you might want to consider subscribing to his newsletter Periodically, too. He doesn’t ramble as much as I do and he has a regular publishing pattern, which I don’t.  ↩

  2. Sorry.  ↩

  3. A fancy way to say YOLO and a slight tip of the hat to the late Robin Williams.  ↩

  4. We as in: Humanity. The generations before us. Not necessarily us who write and read stuff on the internet.  ↩

60: In The Cloud!

August 25, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

A new week ahead! That means we’re all a week older, yay.
So far today, I had one cup of coffee, a glass of water and a pretzel. You subscribed to these emails for this important information.

Onwards and upwards: the US west coast had an earthquake on the weekend and this is how it affected sleep in that area – according to Jawbone sleep data.

At the same time, I watched some pretty clouds moving around outside my living room window.
I posted that video with “TW: Boring” on Tumblr and it didn’t take very long until I got an angry message, that I shouldn’t make fun of trigger warnings and that I am The Problem.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Constant source of amusement: Cloud to Butt Plus.

That’s all, maybe you guys saw/found something intrigueing during the weekend? Hit reply and let me know. (That might now look like some silly social media manager trick to “drive engagement” but I’d seriously like to know: all I did this weekend was trying to find out how to make those time lapse videos, watch the F1 race and sleep. So… my brain is not only wide open but actually yearning for interesting stuff.)

Hang in there.

Dominik

59: #smooth #move

August 21, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

I hope you’re all doing well. It’s Monday for me today, which is pretty convenient since it is Friday tomorrow – it’s great how that works when you take three days off in a week.
Well, it still makes today a Monday.

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For no apparent reason[1] I travelled in First Class[2] yesterday.
At the time of booking it was not such a big difference but it was amazing what a hugely different experience I bought for less than what I sometimes spend on coffee. I got on the train in Köln and it was packed. Seats were all taken, people were sitting on the ground, crying babies – train travel business as usual, I figure. Not so much in the part of the train where I had my seat – basically nobody was in there, there were actually employees of the train company around and they were friendly and kept giving me[3] candy.
It wasn’t quite Snowpiercer, but it was a pretty strange experience.

Of course I used my leisurerly time in the couch-like leather seat mostly to complain on Twitter about how the high-speed wifi on the bullet train that took me halfway through Germany in under four hours wasn’t working flawlessly all the time.

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I don’t know what to say about Social Media raffles that are based on using company’s hashtags. I guess some person can then tell their #boss that the #brand #engagement went #through the #roof? Yeah, that will sell a couple of €100k cars. #hashtags.

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Yeah, a big bouquet of flowers is going to fix that problem, buddy.
(Seriously: WTF?)

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Be safe out there.

Dominik

  1. Which is the nice way of saying “YOLO” I guess.  ↩

  2. Deutsche Bahn doesn’t mess around with their naming scheme. You’re either a first class or a second class traveller. No ‘Economy’ euphemisms.  ↩

  3. Not just me. The old man using his Surface Pro and the Yuppie family with the little boy and his iPad also got some. Yes, I recognize these devices. Nerd alert.  ↩

58: Dixie

August 15, 2014

Dear Internet Friend,

With trust, I faithfully write to you as I know this mail will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through my mail carefully as the decision you make will go a long way to determine the future of my business prospect with you.

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It has been a while since my last mail – mostly because I used every free minute playing OpenTTD and watching Vietnam war movies playing around with a bunch of APIs to work on my website.
You can look at it, it’s almost done.

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For the second time in a week, my iPhone decided last night that charging was too much work. So I woke up to an empty battery again.
It’s weird how I don’t know what to do between waking up and leaving the house without the ability to immediately check Twitter.
And if you can’t trust your phone to charge, what can you trust these days?

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Did I mention that I like Vox? (Not the German TV station, the explain-the-news website.) I generally like having things explained to me.

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Have a nice weekend everybody!

57: Push for email

August 6, 2014

Hello, dear internet friends!

I hope all is well with you.

Instant gratification is the best kind of gratification – says the internet. So here is Push for Pizza and here is an article on re/code on instant gratification.
It makes me slightly grumpy. Not because I am in the “In the olden days, we had to walk thirty kilometers through the snow to get a pizza! Uphill both ways!” camp that thinks hat instant gratification destroys all that is good and well but mostly because these things are probably not available where I am.
Here it’s Amazon Prime, two small food delivery services and a lot of “People, who don’t hunt and grow their own food, are lazy and being lazy is morally wrong.”

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Tina Fey is the best, we can all agree on that, right? Good. So here’s an old-ish article by her from the New Yorker: Lessons from Late Night
I like “Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.” – I know. Just tell them, they’re your internet friend and they’ll be happy.

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Remember when OKCupid experimented on people? Well, the good thing is that it triggered Tim Carmody to write this article on why exactly this is wrong and why it’s a problem with the whole social web these days: The problem with OKCupid is the problem with the social web
Related, if you want to hear the other side speak, here is the OKCupid dude on a (short, so just go ahead and listen, won’t you?) podcast: TLDR 32: An imperfect match. Lovely fella.

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Public service announcement: Everyone on the Internet does Venn diagrams wrong

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Have a good day, folks.

Dominik