Monthly Archives: May 2014

Press for Orbital

Dev, wordpress

Two new reviews for Orbital bring a smile to my face!
WordPress Plugins A-Z gave Orbital a 4/5 rating:

This is a great feed reader especially if you are doing research for a post or if you are like many people out there who write additional articles based on what they read. This make it easy to get a pull quote from an article and drop it right into a post. While the layout and functionality is a little raw in its appearance it seems to work very well and to give it a good go I added it to my secret blog site as a place to test some ranting on article and stories. And it seems to work quite well..

That’s great feedback and I feel like I do need to work on the style and appearance – it’s tough and I need help.

Jeff Chandler over at WPTavern also reviewed Orbital, comparing it to Feedly and Google Reader. It’s a lukewarm review – he doesn’t like the interface and feels like Feedly plus PressThis is find for him. Still, he’s offered to help me by looking at revamps of the interface.

Being interested in something is not the same as doing something

Art, Pals, ,

Steve Lambert wrote a really good essay on the foggy artist phrase “I am interested in” and how that hides the lack of actually doing things.

It doesn’t matter what the effort changed, how many people it reached, what those viewers believe as a result, or if there is an outcome at all because the goal has been set so low and can be achieved too easily. When we state our intentions so ambiguously we’re cheating ourselves.

When goals are stated explicitly, it brings a sense of clarity and purpose. Goals give you focus. When you articulate to yourself and your friends and family in concrete terms “I am going to complete the Bay to Breakers Marathon this year” that is fundamentally different focus than saying “I am interested in running.” The former means you need to start training and if you don’t, you know you won’t be able to complete the run. Whereas, if the most you’ve said to yourself and others is you are “interested in running,” you won’t accomplish much because you haven’t decided you aspire to anything more ambitious.

It really resonated with me – I hear the same bells ring as when I read a book by Derren Brown (courtesy of Cyber Security Expert Robert Pritchard) that pointed out no one knows or cares what you are thinking or who you really are inside. All we know is what you do. You are what you do.

I am the good things and the bad things that I do. All the joy and sadness and bravery and fear that I feel is interesting mainly to me – it’s the things that I do that are who I am in the world.

For artists, being interested in things is easy – doing things is so much more important. Also for non-artists.

Pot and Spoon – for kids to learn about Occupy

Baby, Books, Politics, , ,

I read this story of a pot and a spoon that get impounded as evidence and a woman’s struggle with the state to get them back – and it was wonderful. I’m printing a copy for MAXIMUM LAZER.

Pot and Spoon, a true tale of Occupy Wall Street by Jerry Goralnick and illustrated by Ruthie Rosenfeld is available for free download on their site.

Pot and Spoon tells the tale of Madeline, a young woman who brought her pot and spoon to the OWS protests and had them confiscated by the Police. As Madeline tries to get them back we learn about flaws in the system, unhelpful public employees and police over reach. Pot and Spoon, locked up in an evidence holding warehouse, have a great conversation about social structure and the types of change the Occupy movement hopes to engender.

via Boing Boing .