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WWLD? No. 4: Living Your Life

Our great friend, Leslie Harpold, passed away one year ago this week. In addition to being a swell pal and an old-school web mandarin, Leslie was an endless source of advice and opinion on practically everything.
To commemorate Leslie’s life and to help share her wisdom with folks who never got to know her, I asked our mutual friend, Lance Arthur to answer the question: What Would Leslie Do? Here’s part 4 of 4. — mdm

The biggest part of my life lessons from Leslie concerned those kind of things one doesn't often consider, but which exist all around you every day. I tend to get up and shower and check email and eat a bagel and get a latte and so on and so forth, day in and day out, every day like clockwork. Repetition and expectation. Leslie was very good at listening to the gamut of my life's little disarrays and annoyances and nail the bigger picture to the wall, and usually her advice was completely obvious once you heard her say it out loud. It just took her perspective to bring it into focus for me.

I often wished she would write a book of her life lessons, and now I wish she had dictated them to me so I could write it, so I'll provide you with four of her broadest pieces of advice for instantly improving the quality of your life, and let you figure out the rest on your own.

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Laying Pipes

pipes.gifSince I've been on an RSS kick this week, I wanted to pass along a tip about Yahoo Pipes, a pretty slick, albeit nerdy, "composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web." In a nutshell, it lets you mix, match, slice, and dice web searches and RSS feeds to your heart's content.

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TOPICS: rss, Yahoo Pipes

Drawing the future

Mark Joyner of Simpleology has apparently hooked up with one of my favorite visionaries, Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project. Together, this Monday, they're teaching people who can't how to draw.

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Friday links for 11/30

  • Where I Go [Chris Glass] - One of those old-school "home page" conventions that I miss most is the once-ubiquitous links page. In addition to being my personal muse on all things visual, Chris Glass also posts his highly clickable list of favorite sites. Need to make me one of these.
  • helvetica - ThisNext - Casting about for gift ideas for the Helvetica lover in your life? Not a problem.
  • Graphic Design and typography - Swiss Legacy - "...a collaborative blog focused on typography, swiss graphic design and grid." Grid pr0n, and that's okay by me. (seems to be down just now)
  • My personal war against Crackberry - "Here at the office, we’ve begun to make most of our meetings 'topless' (i.e. no laptops allowed). I’ve gone a step further by trying to ban any form of networked communication from the working meetings I put together." Good on ya, Todd.
  • And now it's all this: Shortened URLs with Quicksilver - Python script lets you build a fast Quicksilver trigger for generating (and copying) a shortened url based on the the front Safari window. Really useful. [via Daring Fireball]
  • What are the most intellectually stimulating podcasts? | Ask MetaFilter - I'm so overwhelmed by podcasts these days that I've pared down to about five, most of which are mentioned here. My single "don't miss" right now is "Radio Lab," which is kinda like This American Life with more science and less Yo La Tengo.
  • WiiHealthy - [via MeFi] - I wonder what kind of hideous freak I'm becoming by playing an hour of Wii Bowling each night while a 12-lb. baby is footballed over my non-dominant arm. That seems like the makings of a pretty odd workout when I think of it.
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TOPICS: Daily Links

Adventures in $40 eyeglasses

Glasses purchased online Last year, I stumbled upon a blog post about buying prescription eyeglasses online. It sounded too good to be true: you could get any frames you wanted quickly and cheaply, and the comments were filled with optometrists freaking out. Eventually, the author launched a dedicated blog for it called Glassy Eyes. When the site was recently mentioned on MetaFilter right around the time I was getting my 2-year exam, I decided to take the plunge myself and order some glasses online.

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WWLD? No. 3: Organizing your environment

Our great friend, Leslie Harpold, passed away in December of last year. In addition to being a swell pal and an old-school web mandarin, Leslie was an endless source of advice and opinion on practically everything.
To commemorate Leslie’s life and to help share her wisdom with folks who never got to know her, I asked our mutual friend, Lance Arthur to answer the question: What Would Leslie Do? Here’s part 3 of 4. — mdm

1. A place for everything.

This has been an especially valuable lesson for me. It's easy and common to toss your keys and wallet somewhere when you enter your home. If you're not tossing them in the same place every time, the next time you're about to leave and need your keys to get back inside, you may not remember where it was you tossed them -- or maybe you left them in a pocket without tossing them at all, but which pocket was it? What were you wearing, and where is that article of clothing now?

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Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

Scared Shitless

Merlin’s scared. You’re scared. Everybody is scared.

This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »