Short Takes: PDAs, Planet Argon, and Happiness

Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:10:00 GMT

Time for more quick little roundups of notes and followups on things I’ve mentioned before.

Life Without a PDA

This is random, but I now have written for an alternative weekly. About six months ago, a friend of mine who lives in New Haven and writes for the New Haven Advocate told me they were thinking of starting a personal tech column (think of a snarkier Walt Mossberg or David Pogue), and he wanted to know if I was interested. The pay would be low of course (this is an alt. weekly), but visions of free electronics swag kept dancing in my head. Thus, I wrote a few audition columns before Christmas. The column idea was eighty-sixed, but one of my submissions apparently lived on. And it surfaced for last week’s issue as Against Palm Pilots or How one man lost his religion and re-discovered note-taking on paper. In which I lay out my long-running problems with the Palm and the happiness I’ve found instead with Moleskines and the Hipster PDA (Merlin, they left out the credit, but know it belongs all to you.) I like writing for a more general public audience, and I hope I will get to do more columns in the future.

Are You Happy?

I realize I should also have linked to the original book on Flow. For those who want to read more recent discussion on the subject, Lifehacker highlighted some good recent treatments from FastCompany and Metafilter on the book and application. And of course, 43 Folders has a nice roundup of links as well as a related discussion on zanshin. Scott Berkun touches on how Flow relates to sucky software. And so on.

The point here is people are doing Ruby on Rails not because it comes within some whiz-bang IDE (it doesn’t) or it has a bunch of wizards and graphical builder dohickeys (it doesn’t) or even because it promises productivity boosts (they’re there, but as a result). Rather, they’re excited because with only a text editor and a copy of Pickaxe by your side, you can do some amazing things and get into that state. And that makes you happy. And that makes you productive, because you actually want to do the work.

Planet Argon Rocks!

Wow, I was wondering about an uptick in my readership, and now I know I have Robby Russell to thank! harrisj loves Planet Argon! Seriously, Robby and his brave and fearless crew are doing some of the smartest and most honest coding and writing I’ve seen, and you should definitely read Robby Russell’s blog and and book Programming Rails when it comes out. I would also like to point out the excellent blogs of Jeremy Voorhis, Dave Gibbons, Jason Watkins and the rest of my fellow Planet Argon inhabitants.

New Camera

One last thing. The Canon S400 that I revived through surgery died again thanks to an accidental coat check at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (the attendents seem to not so much hang coats as fling and kick them I guess). So, after a bit of a photographic drought, I now have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, and I love it. There is something wonderful about the feel of it in your hand, and it takes much better pictures at a fraction of the price and weight of Digital SLRs.