Month: December 2013

Good habits: walking and meditating

Disclaimer: this is not a New Year resolutions post. I just want to take post about a couple of new habits that I have adopted for the last couple of months. Will they last? I hope so.

The first one is walking. Working from home can bring laziness to amazing levels. When I realized that I was spending too much time sitting and decided that I needed to move. We live surrounded by a beautiful countryside, so all I had to do was get to the door and start walking.

I have been using RunKeeper to track my activities (I can tell you that since November 1st have have walked for 168Km). I’m not trying in any way to make my walking sound “sporty” or competitive. It’s just walking for 4-5Km every day. I do admire a lot all my friends who run. But I just walk. I do believe that a gentlemen will walk but never run. ;)

The real challenge is walking every day when I’m not travelling. Even when it rains, like yesterday. So far I have been pretty good.

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The second habit is meditation. I had been interested in the subject for a while, then I followed a link posted by Loïc to an iPhone app named Headspace. I went through their free “10 minutes for 10 days” program, and I was hooked. After that I did “15 minutes for 15 days” and “20 minutes for 20 days”, and now I have just started the more advanced “Discovery” program. I’m pretty much recommending this app to everybody I meet.

Of course two months of walking and meditating can hardly put a dent in a life of laziness, fat, anger and stress, so while I can’t say that I’m seeing significant changes, I am enjoying the process very much. Which I guess it’s the whole point.

Color of the year

The color of the year for 2014 is Pantone® 18-3224 Radiant Orchid. Now you know.

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When I started working in graphic design, having a Pantone color book was one of my main goals. They were rare and expensive, back when Macs screens were still black and white and it was the only way to manage colors. And they were cool little objects, I think I still have mine somewhere.

Back then most colors fit in 3 digits numbers (I still remember how one of the first logos I designed used blue 300 and grey 428). At some point 4 digits colors started appearing, and they were kinda exotic. Amazing how we got all the way to “18-3224”. Looks like there’s still a lot of colors to invent.

Anyway, it’s good to see how Pantone has been able to modernize and be still around after all these years. These days I think that the Pantone product I use more is my coffee mug :).

Google: a lousy evil empire?

I’m a fan of every conspiracy theory as any other geek, but this whole narrative about google gaining control our whole life has a big flaw: Google Plus.

I mean: I have 4 active email addresses that I use every day, and they are all on gmail. I use google for every search, google maps, google calendar, google docs both on my Mac and my mobile devices. I use Chrome for most of the time when I’m on my Mac. And then they shut down the aggregator I was using, they force me to have a G+ account to comment on YouTube, in other words the pretty much have full control of my digital life, and still…

…they haven’t managed to get me interested to Google Plus. Nor any other of my friends, who in most cases have pretty much sold their own souls to Google like I did.

Now, I’m not saying that they are not evil… but surely so far it doesn’t look like they are very good at using all the power we gave them in order to control us.

Games of Drones

So, with PrimeAir Amazon is planning to deliver goods to our doorstep using drones in 2015.

By 2018, PrimeAir will reach us wherever we are, even walking down a street. In 2020 GoogleMaps RealTime will be deployed in major cities, and Facebook extensive network of drones will keep track of our friends like it never happened before.

A tiny blue Twitter drone will flutter a few feet behind us, giving a whole new meaning to the term “follower”. Some of us will deploy personal WordPress drones, which we will be able to customize with all kind of widgets.

I’m not sure about Apple drones… But you can bet that they will be über cool, and everybody will want one.