In everything the middle course is best: All things in excess bring trouble to men.
~ Plautus
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Moderation →
Standing desk →
Long story short: I was given a very nice standing desk. I’ve been a long-time ignorer of these things. After a few weeks now, I am officially converting to team standing-desks. Yes, all the reasons you hear are true about them, but there’s one reason I’ve never heard mentioned which is the real reason I’m on board: Convenience.
From a chair, with my obviously finite reach, I am forever rearranging what is within reach. …now I simply half-step to the right—and all my books are at hand. …half-step left—all that office-supply and notes and note-taking stuff is in reach. Start writing—walk to something—walk back and finish writing my paragraph. Walk up, pick off a small task (answer an email)—walk back to mowing my lawn. I never realized how often I was sitting down and standing up, and how often I sat down only to get up to get something.
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Coregulation with Matthew Word Bain →
What is the relationship between creative mediums, human connection, and self-expression?
The creative process intertwines visual, auditory, and emotional elements to invite a relationship with the unknown.
What I’m intending to do is invite people into a relationship with the unknown.
~ Matthew Word Bain (16:24)
The conversation explores how creative endeavors, such as photography, music, and podcasting, serve as forms of recording and self-expression. Matthew describes creativity as an act of documentation and invites a relationship with the unknown through mediums that capture moments, emotions, or ideas. He emphasizes the fluid boundaries between visual and auditory art, such as pairing photography with poetry, and the layered nature of the creative process.
A significant focus is on human connection, particularly through co-regulation and its impact on creativity and communication. Matthew highlights the physiological and emotional benefits of co-regulation during conversations and podcasting, emphasizing how prosody and visual cues support nervous system resilience. These ideas reveal a deeper understanding of how creative and conversational contexts shape human experiences and relationships.
(more…)Progressive development →
Indeed, the grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older; Societies better.
~ Bovee
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Best practices for textual websites →
[…] here’s a non-exhaustive, highly-opinionated list of best practices for websites that focus primarily on text. I don’t expect anybody to fully agree with the list; nonetheless, the article should have at least some useful information for any web content author or front-end web developer.
~ Rohan Kumar from, Best practices for inclusive textual websites
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Zoinks! Just reading the few paragraphs in Kumar’s Introduction suddenly renewed my pride at being among the few humans who build web sites. I’ll go so far as to say: Insomuch as it is within my powers, I hereby declare said Introduction to be mandatory ready for anyone who types upon a keyboard anything which subsequently appears on the Internet.
Next I’ll point out—imagine I’m the tour guide with the headset-mic and we’re on the open-air bus touring behind the scenes of How the Internet Really Works—that this enormous article will show you just how complex a modern web site has become. But rather than panic, I take this as heartening. Having danced lightly through this page, each thing which I learned, helps me to do better going forward.
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Revelation →
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
~ Longfellow
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Discussion →
He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
~ Richard Whately
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Systematic abandonment →
To that end, Drucker recommends that executives routinely take part in “systematic abandonment.” Every few months, an executive should do a reevaluation of all the organization’s practices, looking at everything the organization is doing and deciding anew if the organization should stop or continue it.
~ Brett McKay from, Peter Drucker’s Question for Eliminating Practices That No Longer Serve You
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Drucker was writing explicitly in the context of business executives. McKay does a nice job of showing how those principles which serve executives so well, work equally well in one’s personal life. I didn’t have this process—this guiding principle from Drucker’s work—identified clearly in my head. But I have it firmly implanted into how I instinctively do things.
I’ve had more than one person make the joke, “Craig, how many clones do you have?!” (I like to jokingly reply, “Yes, I have several clones, but none of us can get the others to do anything we don’t want to do ourselves.”) I accomplish a lot. While I have a number of clear advantages—such as where I was lucky enough to start in the game of life, luck in biology, and luck in opportunities I was shown—those aren’t the truly magic ingredient. The magic ingredient is what I don’t do. It doesn’t matter what specifically it is that I don’t do; Each of us has to make those decisions for oneself. What does matter is that I am willing to regularly and often spend a prodigious amount of time examining what I am doing, and how I am doing it. And then ruthlessly cutting away things that I should stop doing.
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Judgement →
As climbers, we are inventors of our own goals, and must decide on our own how to achieve them. There is nobody else there. Nobody to control. We do extreme, dangerous things, and nobody else can say what is right or wrong. There is no moral loathing. We have only our instincts about human behavior, and in the end we are our own judges.
~ Reinhold Messner
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