Dave Dash

The 30 day trial

2007-02-26T00:00:00-08:00

Occasionally I'll read Steve Pavlina's blog. If you're looking to improve some aspect of your life, it will serve as a good resource.

He has a post called 30 days to success which applies the idea of the 30-day trial to the real world. For example, instead of quitting smoking, try committing to only quitting for a month. If you like the results then you can quit forever. The idea is that you psychologically might be willing to accept a certain state of affairs if it's only temporary versus if it's a permanent life change.

I was intrigued when I read it and I had started a few blogs so I committed to writing a post each day on at least one of the blogs. It worked well at first. Great, I might add, but toward the end of the trial I started falling. It eventually didn't work.

That's not a bad thing. It was a lot easier to do that then to commit to writing a post daily for the rest of my life. Now I only feel like those 30 days weren't a success... not my entire life ;) I did learn a lot.

Sometimes inspiration doesn't hit at 5am every morning.
Writing on a schedule is a chore and therefore not fun.
Writing a post a day made quality suffer.

So I learned a lesson. Of course, I did end up not writing that much after the trial either... so it's important to know when to stop. I still like the idea of the 30 day trial, and plan on trying it again.

MarsEdit

2007-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]MarsEdit,software,blogs[/tags]

I recently read about the acquisition of MarsEdit by Red Sweater Software so I decided to check it out. I'm quite glad I did it does make my workflow a lot easier. What I had been doing up until today was this:

I'd come up with an idea.
Open up my writings project in TextMate
Open a new file and start typing ideas, etc.
Find the right blog to post it on (e.g. Spindrop, davedash.com, yumbo the reviewsBy.us blog or Metroblogging).
Login to the blog.
Cut and paste titles, categories, tags, etc.

It was easy to drop my blogging habbit ;)

Now, I can do this: 1. Come up with my idea. 2. Select which blog I want to post it in. 3. Write my idea. 4. When it's ready to go live, just hit submit to blog.

The one slight problem I have is I use a tags feature of wordpress in addition to categories (not sure why I don't just use categories, but that's another story), currently there's no easy way to deal with WordPress plugins' custom fields that I know of. So there's an optional 5th step of examining the post on the site and possibly adding tags.

Still, these 4 steps are easy and all done from one app. It also features a preview of your post that you can customize per blog with a custom HTML template. Which makes it easy to just drop your blog's style sheet and see if your post looks right.

Definitely looks like a keeepr!

Silicon Implants

1999-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

I'm getting silicon implants.

I have what is known as congenital ptosis in my left eyelid. Basically Ptosis is a drooping of the upper eyelid.

When I was four I had surgery which fixed a significant ammount of problems that I did have with my eyelids. Around last year I felt that it was time to have more work done on my eye.

I met with the very doctor who worked on my eyes 15 years ago and we scheduled surgery. The processis basically adding a silicon sling within my eye that will keep my eye open like normal.

The surgery will take place next Tuesday (3 Aug).