Dead Ink Vinyl

I got to spend a few minutes with the new MacBook and MacBook Pro in the Oak Brook Apple Store on Saturday. Visually, the new laptops are stunning. When they are closed, they look sleek, yet rugged. When they are open, the screen is brilliant — crisp, with fantastic colors. The glass does have glare, but I was unable to gauge how bad it would be in practice. (In truth, I do very little work on my laptop outside of controlled — or controllable — environments, so the whole glare issue isn’t high on my list of concerns.)

My wife doesn’t like the black keyboard, but I pointed out that it matches the black border around the screen. I only performed a little typing on the keyboard, so I can’t report how well it would feel to use for extended coding or writing sessions.

The “trackpad-as-button” was far more intuitive to me than I expected. My reflex is still to press at the bottom of the trackpad where the button is located on my MBP. All of my existing mousing and clicking gestures worked flawlessly, so the migration would seem to be painless for existing Apple laptop users. I then played with clicking and click-dragging the new way, by just pressing my finger down in-place to click. This worked exactly as advertised and feels pretty natural. I believe that I would find it very intuitive if I were using an Apple laptop for the first time and did not have preexisting muscle memory for these operations. The new gestures enabled by the design feel far more ergonomic and comfortable, so I believe I will invest the time to retrain myself when I eventually get one of these laptops.

Daniel B. Honigman shared a bit of Sunday morning wisdom:

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you that you’re not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” — they may not be smart enough to say “yes.” (Keith Olbermann)

When I was younger, I believed that success = capability + luck. This implies that the more capable you have, the less luck your require to be successful. Since you cannot control luck, the rational path to success would be to build your capability. This is the reason parents send their children to college, right? Sure, there is some abstract notion of broadening horizons blah blah, but nobody pays $25,000+ a year (plus room and board) for “broadening horizons” — they pay $25,000+ a year so that their child will land a good first job.

Thus, an observation of successful people should indicate that the majority are exceptionally capable at their professions. But this reasoning has other consequences, too. If the role of luck is to be minimized, then failure is a reflection on the person, not the circumstances. Thus, failure is feared and the drive to avoid failure can easily overshadow the drive to be successful — and so we take the safe bets, work 9-5 jobs, take shelter in big companies, dread change, and avoid risk. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

However, my observations of successful people — entrepreneurs in particular — indicate that greater part of success is simply not fearing failure. The role of luck is accepted and managed by trying again and again.

Keith Olbermann is right. And his advice is just a coffee-cup-length, modern regurgitation of the timeless insight eloquently made by Teddy Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. (April 13, 1910)

All of us chooses to either be ruled by circumstance or to create our own. Each day, decide anew which is the right path for you.

WordPress.com has started to tick me off this weekend. I’ve lost control over the widgets that appear in the left and right menus. I’m investigating alternative commercial blog hosting solutions. The top two contenders are TypePad and SquareSpace.

Both offer paid hosting with domain mapping for less than $15 per month. I’ve signed up for the two week free trials on both sites. I’ve exported my WP blog, spent a couple of hours with StAX to clean up the output, and have successfully imported everything into both TP and SS. In both cases, I need to perform some manual tuning to get things the way I like them.

Quick summary of my thoughts so far:

• TypePad annoyed me a little by asking for my credit card number up front, whereas SquaredSpace doesn’t require it until I’ve made a commitment to join.
• For my needs, TypePad is much less expensive ($8 versus $14).
• TypePad is straightforward to use, but a bit painful. I need to mass-delete all 200+ of the custom “categories” it imported from WP and it requires a two-click process for each. Additionally, things are not quite laid out cleanly on the management side. Tabs within tabs kind of thing.
• SquareSpace takes a radically different — and better — approach to content management. It threw me for a loop at first, but it’s great once I got a handle on its metaphors. Switching to SS from Blogger, WP, or TP is a bit like switching to a Mac from a PC. It’s a new, scary, and aggrevating environment until you understand it, then it’s obvious and elegant.
• TypePad has an iPhone application already available. SquareSpace is still working on theirs.