Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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iPhone apps to tune your instrument

One of my teachers used to say (minus a lot of removed swear words) If it ain’t in tune, it ain’t nothin’. With that in mind, two favorite tuners for the iPhone:

iStrobosoft by Peterson recreates their great tuner which used a strobe light and a spinning wheel to create a great harmonically rich visual display. This iPhone app is an awesome recreation and works superbly, giving you both fine and gross indicators as well as that awesome harmonic stack. You can calibrate it for accuracy, it supports capos and dropped tunings and other reference pitches, has a noise filter, an input boost, and some display settings.

The other is the polytune from tc electronic. Aimed at guitar players, it allows you to tune all six strings at once, a quick strum is all you need. Start fine tuning one string and the display switches to a finer display along with the pitch. It allows for drop tunings, a range of reference pitch (lots of folks don’t use 440 as the reference) and has a setting for bass players as well. there’s a couple of display settings for good measure.

Both of these guys support the mic on a phone so tuning an acoustic guitar only requires a somewhat quiet room.

Both are recommended and work really well. It’s great to have a such great tuners with me all the time.

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The problem with CSS pre-processors | Miller Medeiros

The problem with CSS pre-processors | Miller Medeiros:

I’ve been considering to use a CSS pre-processor like SASS, LESS, Stylus, etc, for a very long time. Every time someone asked me if I was using any of these tools/languages I would say that I’m kinda used to my current workflow and I don’t really see a reason for changing it since the problems those languages solves are not really the problems I’m having with CSS. Then yesterday I read two blog posts which made me reconsider my point of view so I decided to spend some time today studying the alternatives (once again) and porting some code to check the output and if the languages would really help to keep my code more organized/maintainable and/or if it would make the development process easier (also if they evolved on the past few years).

[This is one of those issues that pushes a to of buttons and I appreciate that MM went out of the way to try and not start a meaningless flamewar. That said, the piece caught my eye when he got to the postscript “PS: I love CSS, for me it’s one of the most rewarding tasks on a website development, it’s like solving a hard puzzle…”. I agree. It’s like solving a hard puzzle… and one that provides no business value. It feels like there’s a store room where I keep stuff I need to get all the time, but instead of a door, I pile stones in front of the opening. Each time I have to get something I have to unpile the heavy stones, get what I need, and then re-pile the stones. Over and over and over again. That’s not good is it? Anyone would suggest a door or moving the stuff somewhere that didn’t require all of that unnecessary effort. That’s what working with CSS feels like. Considering how similar the web looks overall, it seems silly that we hand generate so much CSS. And the tools being debated are more about making CSS more programmable because that’s the way developers think. But if you step back that’s not what we need and that’s what these preprocessors do. We need to get all this stuff back into the hands of the designers where they can do as they please. The point of collaboration would only exist when crafting something uncommon or unique.]

The diagnosis

The diagnosis:

I do not know all of what’s ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing. A changed mind and body. A new appreciation of time, and breath, and health, and life, and loved ones.

The gravity in this place is different. I’ve spoken to others who’ve traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can’t understand.

The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.

[So painful.]

a founder’s manifesto

a founder’s manifesto:

I know I am a hypocrite. Every day I fail to live my life according to my beliefs in small and large ways.  Sometimes I get angry when people fail, instead of creating a wonderful, supportive environment where failure is a part of the learning process.

[Amen. On point. All true, I do the same things, yet it doesn’t stop me. It seems irrational to keep failing and keep trying. Still, it might be the sanest thing I do.]
Source: the evolving ultrasaurus

3 Thoughts on Generosity

3 Thoughts on Generosity:

Generosity alone is not enough

Generosity is nothing more and nothing less than the foundation upon which we build. We won’t solve the big problems of the world just by opening our hearts.  That is a dangerous dream, because the stakes are much too high.  Yet without generosity too many doors are closed, too much judgment creeps in.  Without generosity empathy is not given a space in which to grow and we experience the terrible misfortune of undervaluing the gifts we have been given.  In so doing we run the risk of forgetting that each of us has something important to offer in creating solutions big and small.

To me, generosity is an active orientation towards the world and all its messiness.  It is a refusal to walk by, to shut down, to pretend that if we just keep our heads down everything will turn out OK.  It won’t, at least not without all of us.

[On point.]
Source: Sasha Dichter’s Blog

Freedom of Speech and Art: 3 Things to Know

Freedom of Speech and Art: 3 Things to Know:

There are other ways to watch what you are doing. If you want to read up on all varities of art law, you couldn’t do much better than Starving Artists Law. Or, if you are interested in learning more about the right to assemble and protest, this link is a great resource. If your voice is strongest online, it couldn’t hurt to check the Legal Guide for Bloggers.

And above all, don’t stop doing what you do best.

[It’s a far more complicated world than I’d wish for and work toward.]

New York City’s Digital Deficiency

New York City’s Digital Deficiency:

You are circling the block yet again, desperately seeking a parking space–and then you remember there’s an app for that. You whip out your phone and pull up Roadify, the high-profile winner of New York City’s second BigApps contest, which is supposed to provide a real-time list of parking spaces near your location. You watch as Roadify loads and quickly discover there are no free parking spaces within a 10-mile radius of where you are currently circling the block. This shouldn’t surprise you because there are usually almost no parking spaces listed in the app, rendering it fairly useless. Then, as you slam on your breaks to avoid hitting a pedestrian, you remember that driving while using your phone is difficult, dangerous, and often illegal.
And this is the app that won?
Undeterred by Roadify’s failure, the city announced the third installment of the BigApps contest in September, in which the city awards $50,000 in cash to the best app that uses city data. So far the first two contests have yielded apps that have received a fair amount of media attention but have lagged in user adoption. Sportify, another winner that garnered a lot of press, also relies on a critical mass of users to function. It, too, is a great idea in principle (find people near you who want to play pickup sports!), which has yet to catch on. All of this is the predictable result of the city’s approach to digital development, which focuses on plenty of sizzle, not much steak. It’s time for the city to deeply explore what New York’s citizens actually need, and the ways in which those citizens are likely to behave.

[How unsurprising.]

Steve Jobs in 1980 (and how schools still get this wrong)

Why do school kids have one computing experience at home and in their personal lives, and a completely out of touch, ancient experience at school? I’ll get back to that.

Steve Jobs in 1980:

Same vision. Same goals. What he was talking about then applies almost completely to what Apple is doing today. (Via Michael B. Johnson.)

[Gruber pointed to this video from 1980 and if you’re a student of Steve Jobs you’ll have heard these themes before. The condor & the bicycle for example was very common in his talks from those years. Two things struck me as I watched this.

Something struck me at about 10:18 in the video. Steve is talking about how different the experience is when there is one computer to an individual not, what was until then, common—many people sharing one computer. Despite our collective understanding of this, made clear by the shear number of computers available to schools so many of us, most schools have one computer shared by many students for short periods of time as a curricular addition. Gym, art, music, computers. Asides in the daily lives of students everywhere. This is clearly ridiculous in age of iTouches, smartphones, iPads, texting, tweeting etc. How could we possibly not have computers in the hands of students all day every day.

Some schools courtesy of some smart administrators are getting this right. Integrating computing into the curriculum at its base, not as a course of study. That’s key. The teachers must use them for their coursework. Homework, communication, the entire experience of school must be integrated. Don’t teach “computers” in the classroom, use computers in the classroom.

The second thing, an aside really, is that recordings will *not* be scarce in the future. Almost everything that someone does publicly will most likely have a recording made and available for the future. This can be good, and bad. The bad that I’m thinking about is that it might be harder for people to evolve if their past is so well documented. The good is obvious, that we’ll be able to study people in far greater depth, in the direct way that seeing an image of them provides.]
Source: Daring Fireball