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Sometimes, programming makes me think of what it must feel like to be a wizard… When my fingers are moving faster than I thought they could, and EMACS buffers are flying around, and files are opening and closing, and compilations are occurring, and reference documents are being foreground-ed and background-ed; all simultaneously and while listening to fast paced awesome music, I can’t help but feel like there’s a little magic involved…

Bansky on Advertising

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriends feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and the

Skydiving

Today, I went skydiving. I’m going to try and get something insightful out of my head while it’s still fresh, but I doubt that’ll work very well, considering the whole thing has been a blur from the second I got on that plane… My buddy Charlie and I have been sending videos of BASE jumpers, skydivers, and wing-suit fliers – pretty much anything involving terminal velocity, gravity, and a parachute – back and forth to one another, for the past 6 months or so. In print, it’s always been the next

Breaking Down Some Language; Because Mysterious Doesn't Mean Wise

If everything that is discussable can be defined as an instance of a concept, where we define concept as the encapsulation of many complimentary ideas into a consistently recognizable pattern, then the Zen idea of duality becomes definable. I came across this idea while reading Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. He talks about how the mind and body are both eternal and finite, simultaneously; he describes this phenomenon through a metaphor calling mind and body “two sides of the same

Flushing the toilet while you're sitting on it is like betting it all on red; it can go either way...

Workplace bathroom behavior would make for an awesome case study. We spend 7+ hours at a place where we carefully maintain our social interactions, trying to optimize for very idiosyncratic professional goals, but one thing we all have in common: we all poop. And given the amount of coffee that gets consumed in highly competitive New York firms, I imagine this reality manifests itself quite frequently. That being said, we don’t talk about it! I’m not trying to say that the topic should be the l

What Else Does/Can Google Know?

I wonder if Google gets enough private data from corporate users accidentally pasting snippets of proprietary information into their search bars, to come up with some sort of snapshot of a company’s private inner workings. Undoubtedly they do for individuals, but I imagine that information is much more comprehensive; for example, if I constantly search for glutton-free recipes, Google can likely infer that I, or someone I know, has a restricted diet for what can assumed to be one or a small se

Letter to Me

There is so much potential in the world. If you constantly demonstrate this fact to yourself, you will be forever happy. By realizing that anything we can “know” is founded on belief, which is itself subjective – in the sense that it varies from person to person – then you realize that there is no monopoly on righteousness, ever. All you can ever hope to do is be as happy as possible in the moment. Combine this idea with the realization that everything is in motion, and you come to understand th

Personal vs. Impersonal Relationships

There seems to be this implicit direct relation of a relationship’s quality and the closeness of the people involved, where the latter is measured through properties like the total amount of one-to-one interaction between people, the degree to which people are genetically related, or the actual amount of physical closeness (i.e. proximity) the people involved share. I’m starting to think this assumption isn’t as true as I once thought. For example, one of my favorite sets of musicians is Edwar

Thailand Notes (Part 4)

In hindsight, I still haven’t found the proper way for how to express this idea just yet, but you got to start somewhere… Competition and Self Reflection When you’re submersed in a population you’re familiar with, it’s easy to recognize so called “mistakes” other people make because it’s easy to see yourself in other people. What I’m learning is that when the opposite occurs – in other words, when you’re submersed in a population that completely clashes with your sense of normalcy – it’s reall

Thailand Notes (Part 3)

Slight backstory: since the music festival I went to in early June, I haven’t been drinking, making me sober for about a month and two weeks since the writing of this post. Since then, the decision has been both highly difficult to stick to and increasingly interesting to contemplate, especially as I make it further than I ever thought I would. By the time I got to Thailand, multiplied by all the other self-reflection I was doing, drinking became the topic of choice for a car ride brain-dump, wh

Thailand Notes (Part 2)

Everything Is Linked To Everything. That’s karma and I believe in it, but that doesn’t mean that every action has a significant correlation to every other subsequent action. Wishing something might happen and actually having that something happen may in fact have some (whatever little) correlation, but that doesn’t mean - all other conditions the same - if you didn’t wish for it to happen, that result wouldn’t occur anyway. There could be a much more correlated action tied to that reaction, and

Thailand Notes (Intro & Part 1)

Intro So while in Thailand, I did a lot of self-reflection; went through a lot of experiences that tested my endurance, both physically and mentally; and also spent a lot of time traveling in the car. Combined, these things lead to a lot of brain-dumps which – thanks to my Uncle Frank for his graduation-gifted iPad – I was able to write down. I think they might interest some people, plus I’d like to refine their grammar and structure, as well store the ideas somewhere more persistent than the i

Evangelizing Truth

Let’s say, hypothetically, a person becomes enlightened to the true nature of the universe and such an understanding frees said person from all forms suffering. This person is no longer blindly conditioned to respond to craving or aversion, and they have a comprehensive knowledge of human experience at it’s lowest level. They understand pure balance, live life in consistent peace, and see beauty everywhere they go. Fantastic. This is the type of enlightenment that I’ve heard wise people lecture

Osama

Being a brand designer and a marketer I have somewhat of a cynical and skeptical perspective on the validity of how large organizations are personified, both through their own efforts and the media – the U.S. government, definitely being on that list. It’s not so much that I think there’s always an intentional disconnect made between reality and how these organizations present themselves, but when a system becomes large enough, trying to pin it down with simple definitions or elegant equations j

Defining the Utility of Design

I recently went through some of my old work and reread a piece I wrote on my past influences in graphic design. The piece in its entirety was slightly arbitrary, having needed to meet certain requirements put forth by a professor, but the introduction I wrote for it seemed more modular than the entire piece and might be of interest to some other people. I also wanted to have it somewhere public where I could reference it in other work. It’s reproduced below: Design is an elusive activity to def

Revolutionizing Education

So there have been countless observations made about the failures of the current school system. Whether it be grading brackets crippling student motivation, homogonized material simultaneously boring and intimidating kids, or structured curriculum snuffing out creativity, the problemhas been articulated over and over again. What hasn’t been talked about so much is the solution, and today I believe I’ve found it; not thought of it myself, but literally found it: The idea, for those who didn’t