Garrick van Buren – Page 41 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

One of My All-Time Favorite Tech Legends

“Retreating to his garage, he cut a block of wood to fit his shirt pocket. Then he carried it around for months, pretending it was a computer. Was he free for lunch on Wednesday? Hawkins would haul out the block and tap on it as if he were checking his schedule. If he needed a phone number, he would pretend to look it up on the wood. Occasionally he would try out different design faces with various button configurations, using paper printouts glued to the block.” – Alberto Savaia, Pretotype It

Be Your Own Business Cycle

“…to the extent that Etsy, Kickstarter, and other platforms can disintermediate the labor economy, we should be very grateful. Not only are these platforms beneficial technologies of resistance as Reihan emphasizes, they might be generators of macroeconomic robustness.” – Eli Dourado

I encourage you to read the whole thing. I especially found the employment = bond financing , self-employment = equity financing comparison very intriguing.

Dead Tree

“Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying.” – Tim Carmody

Anti-Free

“…avoid mom-and-pop projects that don’t take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.” – Maciej, Pinboard.in

Important!

“The problem isn’t the 100 messages but the 100 new responsibilities represented by the email messages.” – John D. Cook

Where Work Happens

If I’m not in the terminal then I’m not doing real work…I work in a full-screen terminal and don’t like to leave it. The world outside my terminal is filled with distractions, bright colours, and menus. My textual environment is where my real work happens. – Jesse Storimer

Eating the Free Lunch

“GMail is slow because Google can’t afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I’d have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how much time I spend in email, it’s kind of scary to think how much I’d be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better.” – Paul Graham

Coffee Lock-in

“The problem is that you bought yourself a shiny espresso machine that only takes pods distributed by the manufacturer. So even if you buy the hippie’s beans, you can’t make yourself any coffee with them because the machine won’t take them unless they’ve been shipped to the manufacturer and packaged into little special pellets.” – Reginal Braithwaite

Departing

“I recently deleted Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and Flipboard from my phone, and have been very happy with the result. Today, I am deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts. This is not a decision motivated by Lent, and I have no idea at this moment when or if I will reactivate them.” – J Ben Deaton

Being Honest with Yourself

“There’s one difference. Mine doesn’t save the page, it just pretends to. And that’s good enough.” – Dan W. on his Instapaper Placebo

Reminds me of a fantastic Twitter-esque service I thought of a few years back. It would have a ‘compose tweet’ box just like Twitter and when you clicked ‘Tweet’ the box would empty just like Twitter.

Except your message wouldn’t go anywhere.

Though, for an extra charge – the messages could be reviewed by a licensed therapist.