fredleblanc

I went back to a smartphone after having lost mine for a period of months. I regret most of it every day. There are things I like about it. The GPS, the music, the podcasts, the camera; all in my pocket. It's just all the other stuff that it comes with — the notifications, the interruptions, the availability.

I know that's on me. It's a will power thing. But I'm only human. When I didn't have my phone on me, it forced me to really examine if I cared about something or if it was just fleeting. Like, who won the NHL MVP in 1978? If it was still a burning question the next time I was around an Internet connection, I'd look it up.

But 9 times out of 10, I'd forget. And wonder. And my life was better for it.

My current system is that I turn off all notifications except from my mother and wife. My email is not fetched unless I fetch it. I have no games on my phone. I've never had Facebook and haven't posted to Twitter in over two years. But with all that, it's still not the same.

I've relapsed at least twice since that talk. I have a phone. And it's still my boss. But I'm working on a bigger plan to abandon it all together. Whether I can get there or not, that's another story.

I gave a talk on burnout and "digital overwhelm" in 2015. It's a bit of my story and some tips on coping under the weight of the world. If you're interested: https://vimeo.com/147213533 — Slides are linked in the comments.

It looks like they might be doing something for the 10 year anniversary, as a new video was posted to the lonelygirl15 page today, the first in 7 years according to the comments: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qwklfIbSAgA

I met Allan at a conference a couple of years ago, and after meeting him, I recall skipping most of the sessions just to pick his brain about all things business — marketing, structure, etc. He's still one of the nicest folks I've ever met.

Months later, was connected with him again on Skype, and he remembered just about everything about our interaction, and once again, was super nice and helpful with all of my questions.

I also met Steven quite briefly at the same conference this year. Although we didn't talk for hours on end, he was also very kind, and very approachable.

Anyway, really happy for both of them. It's great to read that nice guys don't always have to finish last.

Adding my own me-too onto the pile of "I made something just like this:" https://github.com/secondparty/arrange — I built it out of curiosity, and have used it in my projects, (shrug emoji). These types of projects are fun.

In the demo, I had to click on the screen a couple of times to get the dot to start moving around. Then, it seemed to want to follow my mouse quite a bit as I moved and clicked.

I was able to greatly move the red dot when I say closer to the webcam, really opened my eyes, and moved left to right, but the action was flipped for me — looking left moved the dot right, and vice versa. (I'm using an Apple Cinema Display… I've had issues before where it automatically flips the screen around in some cases.)

Although not very accurate, it's certainly an interesting experiment.

Commas are used in PHP as a sequence of things, not multiple options. This single-pipe notation is already established as the further-up comments states.

One of the first things I learned about in my color theory class was how colors can change how they appear depending what other colors they're next to. In fact, some colors will fight visually when placed next to (or on top of) one another. Saturated versions of red and blue were the first example given for that lesson. And that's exactly what the author ended up with here.

That said, there are some good tips in here for finding colors. I once asked a designer that I worked with and still highly admire, "how do you pick color palettes for things?" His suggestion was to start with a color you wouldn't expect, and then try to match colors to it. (He also recommended palette sites like those mentioned in the article for us beginner color people.) But the pick a color you wouldn't expect advice has worked well for me.

Yeah, but the process to using "reachability" in my experience is always something like: reach for the button because I can totally make it, accidental palm-press on the bottom-opposite corner, undo mistake, try again with different hand angle, do it again, undo it again, then remember about reachability shortcut, double touch home button, reach button.

In my experience, it's not site designers making this decision. Especially on larger sites, many business rules come from other places that are more interested in forcing numbers to increase and don't think the whole thing through like a designer might.

And, let's not forget that UX as a thing is much more accepted as an important thing today than when this article was written. It's still a challenge for a lot of large companies, but there are many that are finally starting to catch on.

If it helps, I use Disconnect, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger as my blocking solutions, and although they blocked a ton of stuff, I didn't get harassed about ad-block and could see the whole page.

This time.

It turns out that watching YouTube videos of people seeing color for the first time can turn even the shittiest of days into a good one. I just lost 30 minutes down the rabbit hole. Interesting that it's not just color that I take for granted every day, but the fact that the world appears so sharp.

I've always thought if the Kindle Paperwhite was just slightly nicer spec-wise, it might be my perfect tablet. Batteries that last a long time, books everywhere, a better browser would be great, a way to take notes maybe, slightly more responsive screen. I don't need much more.

Good points all around. As a small web shop, and I'm currently overflowingly busy, as I have been for the last few years. It's probably partially luck, but I'd like to think that there a certain value that I, as a web person, brings to the table that makes it worthwhile for my clients.

And let's not forget that while everyone may not want a custom design for their sites, there are a lot of people out there that don't want to maintain their own sites, and would rather pay someone else to do so. When that happens, what's the difference between building something custom vs. WordPress and a nice theme vs. SquareSpace and their offerings? The value isn't the deliverable as much as it's the comfort in knowing your web stuff is taken care of and you don't have to deal with it.

I suppose at that point you're not talking about "web design" per se, but a "small web business." But I'm OK with that. Additionally, there is still room with those options to provide value more than just set-up and maintain. Writing good content and creating good IA is still a challenge for all of those products. To me, all of these things are part of being a small web shop, and from what I can see are things that won't be going away or automated any time soon.

Although the once automated, we'll essentially have robots (creating content) fighting robots (search engine spiders), which I think is something we can all agree on as being fun to watch with a drink in hand.

$360/mo becomes a lot more affordable with the scale of money self-employment brings. I looked into getting an out-of-house office with my last gig which was all-remote, couldn't afford any of them. (We also didn't have co-working spaces nearby; small town/5 years ago, things were different.)

If I got a real job again, I'm not sure that I could afford to have a $360 monthly bill.

I guess I picture an office as an actual office, not a room full of desks. I'm too old-fashioned. And maybe people prefer the atmosphere of co-working. I like having a place to go where I can have quiet, have music, but most importantly have focus without interruptions. That's what an office is to me.

Yes, open office environments with a culture of "interruptions are fine" doesn't help either. I guess what a need is a library that's also an office? I don't know.

I guess I'm the flip-side of this. I work for myself, self-employed, and my office is the best $360 I spend each month. I need separation of space. My 15 minute walk ("commute") adds to the separation of work from home.

The other thing is that there are two small children running around my house. I simply can't work there, or else I'd never get anything done. Our house isn't large enough to have a separate, dedicated office-space. I'd be constantly interrupted.

I like the concept of remote working, even in a shared environment, but if I were working at that company and I no longer had a free place to go do work, I'd be looking for another gig.

Huh, I love the Mistborn books specifically because I found all of the names so easy to pronounce and remember. There are cultures and different species in there, and those names all felt pretty similar in structure to me. (Kandra being the most obvious example.)

To me, the different feeling backgrounds of the names of normal people were something I attributed to the world being a big place, and although we were viewing people stuck within a class system, the naming was so "all over the place" because they're an assimilation of the entire planet.

Fast-forward to the newer Mistborn series and the names have seemed to align pretty well to names similar to the nobles of the earlier books. (Which may be attributed to the fact that many of the characters you follow are directly from that lineage.)

In contrast, I've had a harder time with the Stormlight series because of the number of characters, as well as the names of things and places and people. However, I've never been great at epic fantasy either. Maybe that's why the Mistborn books feel so different to me. Books with me in mind?

Woo! I worked with Will for a couple years and this is going to be a great pick up for Sublime. Nice guy, great developer.

It certainly doesn't seem like good long-term planning. I suppose our state traded the Olympics fiasco for this one.

Having spent sometime selling a bootstrapped product, your response here all sound really good to me. A problem we had was saying "yes sir, right away sir" to too many people. By the end, our product was more a mashup of what others wanted and not what we wanted.

If immediate crazy startup growth is your desire, maybe you need to hit up businesses. Otherwise, to me it sounds like you've got good growth going, albeit not yet paying full time like everyone would want. Sounds like you ace a lot of potential to become the 5- or 10-year "overnight success."

So anyway, good work sticking to your guns, as then say. Know what you want, and bring people what you think is best. You might not have people banging the door down to give you large sacks of cash, but so what? Growth is there, and with a couple more years it sounds like you could be living pretty fine if you kept it up.

Tons of money doesn't mean success. Your personal happiness does.

It seems like the distinction is between "Apple/Google/Microsoft" and "Apple/Google/Microsoft services." My gut reaction when I read it in the article was "so... not really ditching them."

Edit: someday I'll learn how to format text on here.

Man, the layout bails out of side-by-side columns at 1056px wide, and the on-screen-nav only makes it down to 990px.

Good use of Open Sans, though.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ indeed! The outdoor game is gonna be great.

My bad team that's not near me are the Avs, so I hate you out of necessity. I'm sure you understand. :)

Not that it's a great replacement, but I've really grown attached to listening to the audio-only streams through the NHL app. I'm pretty sure those aren't blacked out anywhere, and radio is still very entertaining. I especially love the crew in Ottawa and the crazy old man in Pittsburgh.

Of course, there's the whole weird, questionable business model world of hockeystreams.com -- which puts really high quality streams of all sorta of hockey games up live (not just NHL, but I believe AHL and others too), probably proxied in from other places that don't have all of the silly restrictions. Their site isn't much right now, they limit subscriptions and during the season it's all "use" mode and no "sell."

The current problem with all of these deals is blacked out games. I subscribe to the NHL GameCenter (same thing, different sport) and for the money you pay, the things you can't watch are ridiculous (it's worse than the NBA one). Only out of market games are allowed, no nationally televised games (always considered "in market," even if they're showing on obscure channels), and the NHL doesn't give you any of the post season. I follow an out of town team that's bad, so it works for me.

It's the weird straddling of "old model" and "new model," and the big players trying to catch up while keeping contracts happy. Up until this year, for example, when I watched my team play on their home channel, I'd get all the commercials too. So, same as being in-state. Now I just get a message about a commercial break.

The weird crux of it all is that you can watch many of the games if you want to wait 48 hours after the broadcast ends. However, in a world so connected, even not being on social media, even following a team 2,000 miles away from me, it's still hard to be purposefully oblivious to what's happening.

I was sorta hoping the next round of contracts would leap the content divide and make streaming a first-class citizen along the rest (I don't mind watching commercials while streaming, I'd assume that would just make those spots even more lucrative.) But it looks like we're still a couple years away from that.

A friend and I downloaded Signal to try it out, and just couldn't get anything to work. I'm on iOS 8, the app would just crash anytime I hit any button to make an action (send a message, even delete my account). On his end (he was on iOS 9), it said it connected to me, but his messages just got lost in the ether in between us.

I mean, I'm a technical guy. I don't understand what either of us was doing wrong. Have you seen anything like this in your experience?

On this, the writing app Ulysses for the Mac had my favorite trial. I think it was an 8-hour trial? But it was 8 hours of use. I remember coming back to it late in the day after downloading it and thinking, "crap! My trial." The timer hadn't ticked down at all, even though the app was open in the background. The timer only went down while I was typing.

I like a lot of the features of the app, but it would be a lie to say this trial thing didn't push me over the edge into a "buy."

Recently finding myself hating staring at screens more and more, I've dove pretty deep into the world of board games and its incredible. It reminds me a lot of the earlier days of the web — the group is still small enough to be niche, and there isn't competition so much as there's a general willingness for everyone to succeed together.

People create new ideas and then other games will iterate and improve the mechanics until you end up with some I pretty genius stuff. And if you try to create your own games (which I am), then you'll find another sub-niche of people that are even more awesome. Nearly everyone is friendly and really happy to set aside generous amounts of time aside from their undoubtedly busy schedules (because there are very few full-time game designers out there) to help you out.

It's the same feeling I used to get from Internet stuff.

As for the games themselves, they've come a long way from the days of Monopoly and Sorry, and they're not all games about slaying dragons or waging war. Check out games like Scoville, where you're a pepper farmer growing new peppers to aid chili recipes, or Camel Up, a game of racing and betting on a wacky camel race, or Tokaido, where you're traveling on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo trying to have the best experience along the way. Anything might make good game fodder, and people aren't scared to try it all.

Board games are so fun and low tech. It's a great way to get away from staring into a screen and to actually find a way to be social while keeping people of their phones for entire hours at a time.