Inspiring video by Honda. I'm really starting to admire Honda more and more these days, they're doing so many good things it's hard to keep track. Make sure to also check out the FCX Clarity if you haven't looked into this zero-emission vehicle yet.
This game reminds me of the excellent Rolando for iPhone, except it's for Mac and Windows, Wii and, when ready, Linux. Highly playable physics-style puzzles with humor and excellent game design. Only $20.
Two and a half years ago, back on my first blog, I wrote about Belief and elaborated on how important belief is in my life, and life in general. At the end, I alluded to the other integral characteristic by which I try to live my life: Change. I closed with saying that Change was a topic for another time, but in all two and a half years that time never managed to come—until today.
This week the United States of America swore in its 44th leader: President Barack Obama. He ran his campaign on the promise of change, a detail I referenced in my post looking ahead to 2009. Befitting to the symbolism of the week, I want to tell you why change is one of the most important concepts in my life.
First, I’d like to posit my simplified philosophy on change and time:
The past is set in stone, the future forever in motion: all you can do is bring change to the present to shape your future into a better one.
In Japanese Kaizen philosophy, a core tenet is that everything naturally “rots” from the moment of its creation: a product that’s innovative today becomes less innovative with each passing day that it remains the same. I am fully convinced that this principle applies to humans just as much: I went through a long depression in my life and one of the things that prevented me from getting out of it was the simple fact that I, as a person, was not changing. I stood still in the everlasting journey of life for around two long years, and whilst I was largely unaware of this reality myself for most of that time, it weighed down on me and kept me disoriented and unhappy.
Self-development is a crucial aspect of life, and a lack of it can have disastrous results on your personal mood and happiness. Standing still in your own growth while life catches up to you often brings only negative change to you, but if you embrace and welcome change in your life and actively find ways to change yourself, you’ll run ahead of life and be better off for it.
Always remember: to improve is to change.
In similar vein, if you’re trying to convince someone of something they disagree with or don’t understand, just trying to change their minds about the issue may not be enough. A beautiful moment that, to me, perfectly explains this can be found in the movie Music Within, which is based on the true story of Richard Pimentel. In one scene, Dr. Padrow tells Pimentel he might be wrong in his assertion that he needs to convince employers to think differently about people’s disabilities in order to get the disabled hired:
“You don’t need to change their minds about people’s disabilities, you need to change their minds about themselves.”
Often in life, you may find yourself convinced of something you didn’t believe in at first, or something you disagreed with, but a careful reflection may indicate that you don’t fully accept this new notion until you’ve altered your self-image. This can be as simple as an automatic result of being presented with the new facts, or a long and drawn-out process of internal refusal to really accept the change.
Whatever ends up being the case, change is the only way forward in life. Clinging to a past that has come and gone is clinging to the concept of erosion itself.
Politics and change
When Proposition 8 was passed in California, banning gay marriage again mere months after it had finally become fully legislated and approved in the first place, it was a huge step back for humanity but it spurred on a newly-invigorated movement towards (mutual) understanding. The strongest backers of Prop 8 were largely religious, but in simplified terms, the only reason they had to support something like Prop 8 is their strong, personal fear of change. They fear the changes that yank them out of their comfort zones and into the scary unknown, changes brought upon by the mere existence of people with different views, different lifestyles, different sexual preferences. These people like the world around them and want to control every tiny bit of change it might see.
But the world is changing well beyond their control, every day. And it’s an unstoppable force.
To resist change is to resist the future, thus, it can be argued, to welcome change is to welcome the future. Sure, the future may bring both good and bad, it may make your life better or worse… but unless you actively welcome change and adapt yourself to it, you forgo any influence you might have in making that change be a good change. If you resist change, resist the future, you lose all control over the change that isinevitably coming, and if you then don’t like what you get: tough luck! You decided against making yourself be part of the change, and only through making yourself part of change can you steer change for the better.
An important detail to keep in mind, and I’ll use Proposition 8 again as an example here: trying to fight off gay marriage by creating propaganda or supporting efforts like Proposition 8 is not “making yourself part of change.” The only way to make yourself part of change is to adopt it and interact with it, and then allowing yourself to adapt to it.
To believe in a brighter future, one must learn the lessons from the past, cherish the positive ideas of the present, and constantly adjust those ideas in the composition of the future. An eagerness to change is the most powerful tool you can have to shape your present into the most amazing future.
I will end with a quote by one of my personal heroes, Charles Darwin:
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
A couple of weeks ago, a new friend of mine presented me with the three words that may resonate in my inner being longer than any other words ever have or probably will in the future: Just Write It.
So simple, so elegant and so precisely to the point that you simply can't miss the thousand-word implications that these three words convey. Whether you write on paper or on a computer, write to share or write to save, write to practice or write to learn, write to tell or write to teach, it doesn't really matter because none of the things you're about to gain from this undertaking will come to be unless you damn well write it first.
One of the problems I've been dealing with in recent times is over-thinking things and wanting to refine things in mind before constructing them in tangible ways.
This problem was particularly prevalent in my blogging habits: I have about upwards of 30 ideas for big blog posts written down as Mail.app Notes, some with half the post written out in advance even. This all started out as an email thread to myself, for the simple fact that Mail.app didn't yet have Notes when I started doing this.
In case your Mac OS X release map didn't just spring to mind (really?), that means I've been doing this since before OS X Leopard was released, which was October 26, 2007.
Do you know how many of those ideas came to fruition as published blog posts?
Two.
In other words, my approach was fundamentally flawed, and I didn't fully understand the nature of its flaws until those three words were imprinted on my brain: Just Write It.
It took one more thing to fully immortalize in my very being, though: remembering Shawn Blanc's interview with John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame). In that interview, John spoke about finding his own writing voice and honing it; this was crucial for me to remember as I myself am trying to find my own writing voice, now that I have started this new blog somewhat recently with a more personal focus than my old one.
The combination of the three titular words and John's bit about honing and finding your writing voice led to the conclusion that was not going about it the right way at all. I was trying to figure out my writing voice in my head, or put another way, what I was doing was really just working on my thinking voice and deluding myself that it was a good effort towards my writing voice.
Sometimes the obviousness of my mistakes just hits me so hard that I can't help but smile at my own ineptitude. But, at least I smile with strengthened conviction and dramatically increased clarity of mind, formulating sentences and catch phrases in my head for the blog post wherein I solidify both my mistake and my progress.
And from now on, what follows after that step is that I just write it.
There comes a point in most everyone's life where their bed at home is sized to comfortably fit two people, but for one reason or another there is this span of time—it could be a couple of weeks, months or the majority of nights over a couple of years—wherein they sleep in it alone.
If you enter the stage of having such a bed while in a relationship and you start getting used to the bigger bed while sleeping with someone next to you, chances are you'll likely be sleeping on whatever side you started out with whenever you sleep in it alone. If you entered that stage while sleeping alone, you may be more inclined to dominate the center of the bed all by yourself. If, in case of the latter, you let pets sleep on your bed with you, they may finagle their way onto the center area and strategically urge you towards a side over time.
Now, hold on to that thought for a bit.
Sometimes in life, things don't go swimmingly. In fact, if my experience is anything to go by, it is much more accurate to say that every so often, for a certain period of time, things will not go very well for you. There may be stress, there may be sickness, a depression—a million and one ways exist to make matters just a tad bit worse for you. It's easy to start feeling like you're barely afloat on a raft in the midst of a turbulent storm at sea.
In some situations, like it has been for me, the cause of all the woe in your life is more alien than domestic, by which I mean the reasons behind it all exist primarily in the parts of your life you don't control, and not the parts you do. Being laid off from work during the recent economic hardships ailing so many companies all around; a relationship ending; friendships fading or tearing apart over differences—or distance: so much of what makes your life your life is, ironically, not in your hands. And now these things are having a significant impact on your life nonetheless.
That's when you need to change things.
There are two principal ways of going through life: controlling it, and not controlling it. I believe that every single person on this planet has at least a rudimentary power to control their own life and steer it in whatever direction they set their mind to.
Even for those who are skilled and capable of controlling their own lives to the fullest imaginable extent possible, it is easy to lose that control and get lost in the moment. Things go well for some time, then they go even better, then you're on top of the world…and suddenly it crumbles right before your eyes.
The tricky thing about life is that by its very nature, it is best lived. But do you notice the passive connotation there? The very nature implies that life leads you by its hand, takes you on a journey and shows you 'round the world.
Utter bollocks, as my British friends would say.
Life is the thing that you drive, that you lead; life is the journey you go on and you show yourself what life has to offer you. It sounds simple and it is, but it's equally simple to fall into the trap where you allow life to dictate things about you instead.
Taking control of your own life is a scary thing, which makes it perhaps even easier to let life lead you than the other way around. But if you find yourself in a situation where something is itching in the back of your mind, something is telling you that there's reasons behind certain dissatisfaction or unhappiness but you can't quite put your finger on it, and a strong introspective look at your life indicates that perhaps things that are out of your control are playing a more significant role in your life than they should be, it might be time for you to take back control of all the things in your life again.
It might be time for you to take back that center spot and reclaim the bed. Even if just as a metaphor.
How To Sync Your TextMate Bundles Across Multiple Macs Using Dropbox
If you're a TextMate user like myself who happens to have multiple Macs (say, one at home and one at work), keeping your Bundles in sync can be a bit of a hassle. Sure, you can stick to the Bundles from the GetBundles repository, but what if you want to have your own customizations? Keeping them in sync across all of your machines would be great—fortunately, thanks to Dropbox this is an easy and completely hassle-free possibility!
All you need is a Dropbox account, but since the service is free and extremely useful, you probably already have one. No? Well go sign up!
Here's what we're going to do: we're going to use the simple power of symbolic links (a.k.a. symlinks) to make sure you have all your bundles in sync on all your Macs. The only thing you'll ever need to do after this initial setup is hit the Reload Bundles command when you've added or edited a bundle on one Mac and are now switching to another.
First use the Finder to navigate to your Dropbox folder (typically found at ~/Dropbox/) and create a new folder in there named Bundles. You can give it a different name if you'd like but you'll have to adjust accordingly in the instructions further down.
Next, open Terminal and enter the following command:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/
If you don't have that folder you either don't have TextMate installed or your TextMate support folder is elsewhere — if it's the latter, you'll have to locate it yourself.
Next up:
open ./
This opens up a Finder window to the TextMate support folder. Look inside the Bundles folder (if it exists) and if you have any Bundles in there, move them all to the Bundles folder inside your Dropbox (or whatever you named that folder). After you make sure you have your Bundles stored in and uploaded to your Dropbox, go back to the Terminal, where you should still be located at the TextMate support folder, and enter this command:
rm Bundles
Since the Bundles folder should be empty at this point, you shouldn't get any error back from the rmcommand.
Now for the symlink:
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Bundles/ Bundles
This will create a new Bundles folder which links to your ~/Dropbox/Bundles/ folder, which in turn will automatically sync up and down any changes you make.
After you've done all this, you'll only ever have to hit Reload Bundles when changing from one Mac to another if you've made any Bundle changes.
Note: I've encountered some strange behavior by TextMate (a bug?) that sometimes comes into play with bundles I've already edited. If you find that a bundle isn't syncing, manually remove the .tmbundle file from your ~/Dropbox/Bundles/ folder while having TextMate open, then within TextMate open the Bundle Editor and drag your bundle from the Editor onto your ~/Dropbox/Bundles/ folder. After that, it should work just fine again.