I guess thanks have to go out to the people who introduced me to such an epic tale and with such forcible suggestion, wanted me to watch the film. Thanks, and wow. This has changed everything. It’s such an enigmatic tale of self discovery, about finding the meaning of life, discovering what it’s all about.

I find it hard to pin down what I love most about this tale of adventure. In some ways it’s the spirit of adventure itself, having the freedom, going out on the road, actually just doing it, doing something with your life and not being afraid or deterred by anyone or anything. Knowing your vision, and actually going and chasing after it are two different things. But Christopher McCandless is an example of the latter. It takes a lot to do that, and though a lot of it is about the chase and the journey, I think getting there for him, getting into the wild, was the perfect prize. To sum it up in his own words:

And just remember, if you want something in life, reach out and grab it.

Everyone I come into contact with regularly probably knows I’m obsessed with this film, and I’m not going to shut up anytime soon. Just watch it. And if you’ve watched it, just read it, and while you’re reading it, listen to it. Then go out there and do it.

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Fittingly I sit here writing this in Starbucks, but nonetheless there are some wonderful take home points from this book that should be brought up. Firstly, I did not realise how bad a state Starbucks was in back in 2007. Literally had no idea it was that bad. This book explains them wonderfully, and Schultz’s writing style is fantastic, super accessible, but more importantly ultra informative. The lay-off and cuts sound terrible, real shitty, but at the end of the day they’re necessary for the business to survive and prosper in the long term. Which gets me to my (or at least the one that I discovered from Onward) first take home point:

…growth for growth’s sake is a losing proposition.

This book (and the company) is a wonderful example of why. Expanding on that point, and very much related, is the second take home point that I perceived:

From day one, I knew we could not transform the company if we did not excel and lead in our core business, and so a goal that began with Espresso Excellence Training evolved into innovative products and practices that continue to improve the quality and delivery of our brewed and espresso beverages.

Understand and build on your core competencies is probably the best way to put that. It’s so true.

Finally, the brief mention to the concept of Lean, affectionally put as:

…a nontraditional way of managing and working that claims to reduce redundancies and waste while making conditions easier for employees and improving products and service quality for customers.

is a fantastic little section, spearheaded by a guy called Scott Heydon. It outlines beautifully what programmes like this can achieve, or at least how they can be worked into practice. I’ve started reading Ries’ The Lean Entrepreneur, and i hope it will be as interesting!

A few more books have appeared on my radar, and they’re being added to my Kindle ever so soon, so expect an update on the reading list. Meanwhile, Michael Lewis has a great new(ish) Vanity Fair article.

A talk I discovered a while back on design and freelance work, and the role of lawyers and contracts is also very worth watching. F*ck You, Pay Me is the title, Mike Monteiro is the speaker, and it’s available here.

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I’ve tried narrowing it down to a few things, and so far my list is pretty short, but it has a few items:

• Dark afternoons – The clocks went back, making the mornings lighter (so I have to get up earlier for rowing) and the evenings darker, though the whole change is clearly putting off the inevitable. It WILL just get darker, this is the Northern hemisphere after all. Depressing? Yes it is, but festive it is also, in a fun way.
• Red cups – Utterly superficial and consumerist, but Starbucks do have red cups back again. Red cups (in the Starbucks sense) do only mean one thing, Xmas, and their Christmas blend, which is pretty exciting. Gingerbread lattes here I come.
• Plaid – Pretty American as far as Christmas things go, but plaid can be totally festive, especially red, with some green. Like Christmas tartan, but worse. Offensively festive. After being in Boston last week it turns out a lot of stores are disturbingly set up for the holiday season, with music, jumpers and that festive plaid all on show. It was a matter of time.
• Sufjan – (Stevens). This last one is probably just me, but for some reason, listening to Sufjan Stevens makes me all wintery and think festive thoughts. Especially the quieter more mellow albums, like Seven Swans, and now recently once I finally bought it, Michigan. Excellent, so hauntingly beautiful. I’ll need to find something else to listen to soon. I don’t want to overdo it.

There’s still a long way to go, but these little things are great to take comfort in.

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What I really relished from last year was each new meal. Not knowing where we’d be going, and the exploration and adventure that I would have to invest in each new dining experience to make sure that it was different, cheap and up to my fellow travellers’ (family…) standard (not that it was particularly hard to find something that they would like). I turned to Yelp for a lot of it. And it worked. I could discover these fantastic little (or large) places that I don’t imagine we would find if we stuck to the main roads or the beaten track. I think this is maybe what I miss most. I know Cambridge too well, and I know that however hard I look, I’m not going to get the same dining experience here as I did last Summer. Yes, there are some great places here, Alimentum for example, but in general Cambridge, and maybe the UK as a whole, is lacking some variety, some difference, something fresh and new. That’s what I want. To illustrate these little things, here are a few examples of the great places that I came across on my adventures.

Red Fish Blue Fish

Red Fish Blue Fish in Victoria was one of my ultimate favourites. It’s a supremely fresh fish joint housed in a shipping container and situated on the shore in Victoria. The food they serve is beyond excellent. Especially the tacones (I think I tried every kind) and the awesome slaw that comes with them. What makes it fantastic however, is that it’s like nothing else that I’ve been to. Where else would anyone have the idea to start a fresh fish and seafood place by the sea in a freakin’ shipping container. So ghetto, yet so awesome at the same time. Can’t someone start such a business in the UK?

The Naam

Secondly, The Naam. This place is a freakin’ institution in Vancouver. Open 24/7, and it’s been there for years and years. Vegetarian fare only, but it doesn’t stop it being scrumptious. I had a Golden Dragon Bowl (described on the menu as a delicious mix of cheese, Naam fries, miso gravy, steamed veggies, sprouts, carrots & deep fried tofu). Incredible. The best thing about it is that the people were were staying with in Vancouver had the saying: “A Naan drive-by” where you would drive by the place scoping out the queue (because there always is one…) before eventually deciding to go anyway regardless of its length. If there were such reasonably priced down to earth vegetarian restaurants like this in more places in the UK, then more people actually might become vegetarians. Meanwhile, at least in Edinburgh, you have Henderson’s, which just isn’t quite the same no matter how fancy they make it look.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, people don’t even know how to make sandwiches here. They have not a freakin’ clue at all. How can sandwiches ever be so thin, so measly, so wanting… North American sandwiches (I believe a far distant relation of their European cousin) have a lot going for them. From the outset they generally look better, they are larger, and the most important factor is that there is more filling than bread (purely in volume terms). This is a must. None of these small baguettes with a few slices of cheese, I want a bagel with a tennis ball size lump of Montreal smoked meat inside it (ahem). Even diners in the US can do better sandwiches than most so called ‘sandwich’ places here in the UK. Some places here are trying though, I’m a fan of Pret a Manger, they make great fresh sandwiches, especially their ‘Classic Super Club’, most likely the best sandwich from a big brand name this side of the Atlantic, but until there are a number of places serving the most amazing breakfast sandwich ever, I will not be happy.

These are just a few illustrated small points, and I understand my train of thought has changed from missing great eateries to bitching about the state of the UK sandwich, but I feel vaguely passionate about this, and I think it should change, even if I start up a café or a food joint myself.

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I got round to using the ever-so-old Olympus 35LC (1966?) from my grandad quite recently and have so far taken a roll of Ilford HP5+, developed it myself, and am currently in the process of making enlargements! They look unbelievably awesome and just so timeless at the moment! I’ll attempt to scan some of then and see how they turn out. Might even invest in a negative scanner (as there do seem to be some cheap ones on the ‘bay). Wooop! For now though I have a new roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 to use! Yay!

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Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking up a few things to do when I finish, or even start preparing now. I’ve bought some Ilford HP5+ film for my Olympus, which I’m intending on developing and processing myself. We’ll see how that goes…

But, more importantly, I’ve been using my Kindle more and more, and found some great things to go with it. I guess if you have an eReader, you’ve probably come across Calibre. It’s like a library tool, you could attempt to call it the iTunes on eBooks, except that it’s coded with Java and as such is 1) slow, 2) buggy and 3) so ugly. However it does work and can convert most things under the moon to .mobi (the most standard (if you can call it that) format that Kindle’s accept). It also has this other cool feature where it parses websites of various publications at regular intervals, and essentially aims to get the newest issue and download it for you. It doesn’t necessarily work, but it gets a nice cross section of articles (sometimes many of the same article…) and as such is a great idea, especially considering it’s free.

That’s all well and good, except that you still have to connect your Kindle via USB to get it. However, ReadBeam solves this. It essentially uses the Calibre framework on a server somewhere to get a small selection of magazines (I’m interested most in Wired and The New Yorker) and then send them to your device’s email address. So you can get your subscriptions anywhere for free if you’re on WiFi, or a small fee if you’re on 3G. However. I think it’s possible to go further. Granted it costs to receive documents on 3G, but you can still go on the internet and download documents for free. So my rough aim at the moment is to create some kind of personal repository of recent subscriptions of magazines on the web (probably through an email address) so I can actually get them anywhere for free. Yay! Pretty simple to implement I’m sure, but I’m focussing on working now, so it’ll have to wait.

I’m also thinking about getting my Arduino working again (it didn’t break, I just haven’t used it in a while) so I can try out some of the cool projects recommended in the most recent Wired. Anyway, just some thoughts for now.

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However, meanwhile, a few cool little things to look out for/expect/check out…

• I got a Olympus 35LC. It’s totally old school. Like 1967 old school. Frickin’ cool. There’s also a dark room here. So the fun begins once exams are over. Yay. This little guide looks cool. Plus the use of Helvetica is awesome. (btdubs, watch the film if you haven’t yet).
• Discovered this fantastic blog about coffee. It’s so exciting to read, and there are some freakin’ cool videos on there from Intelligentsia Coffee. This is almost up there with 147xxx for exciting coffee blogs. Almost.

Enjoy.

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I think a lot of the new Skype criticism, especially that from Lukas Mathis, centres around the fact that the UI has changed, both making it difficult for regular and professional users of the program (who before used to tile the windows to support multiple conversations etc.) and for casual users (who just got used to the last interface and are now faced with a whole new kettle of fish). The change in Awaken is similar in some respects, the interface has changed from a ‘conforming explicitly with the HIG’ kind of style (see this excellent talk by Gruber for more info) to essentially an iOS app ported to Mac, using the iOS standard icons, switches and colour schemes. Frankly it’s not the fact that the UI has changed so boldly that annoys me, that on its own would be interesting (the new UI is rather striking), it’s the fact that the program has changed so much, breaking some of the little intricacies that made it better than similar apps. Let’s look at this in more detail.

On the previous style of Awaken (looking at version 4.0.20 here, which was generally very similar to the preceding versions), the standard interface looked a lot like this:

Notice the use of the ‘standard’ 10.5/10.6 title bar and generally consistent (with the OS UI) buttons, checkboxes and text (even the ‘cog’ icon symbolising the traditional one button mouse’s right click features, taken straight (and rightfully so according to the HIG) from OS X). Furthermore when editing a given alarm, the action can be completed in a number of ways, double clicking, hitting return, going to Alarms > Edit Alarm, or through the ‘cog’ icon. As before, very traditional and conforming. Doing so, brings up this screen to change or add an alarm.

As before, all elements of this are uniform and consistent with the OS UI. There’s a touch of confusion with the setting of the volumes of the alarm, as they’re not present, but then again they’re all in the preferences. I think the best bit here however is the play button. It may not work as expected to some people, and frankly it shouldn’t necessarily have a play symbol on it, but rather preview or something similar (at the end of the day the meaning is essentially implicit), but it previews exactly what happens when the alarm goes off. Click it and get transported to iTunes where your playlist of choice will start playing. Simple. Even when the alarm is playing, the interface is alarmingly (no pun intended) consistent and understandable.

There’s perhaps a little inconsistency with the interesting blue button ‘Stop Alarm’, and the previous and next track buttons, but all in all, it’s pretty simple and standard. Notice the album art and track info graciously taken from your iTunes, and displayed simply in the Awaken interface whilst all the music playing is handled by iTunes.

Furthermore, little things in this version of the program that were worth noting are the fact that by just having the program open, and the little box in the preferences that says ‘Wake Mac from sleep’ ticked, your Mac will successfully wake up when required, nothing else needed. Additionally one could install Awaken Helper, an additional app to wake up and open Awaken at alarm time, if you had perhaps forgotten to keep it open. However this was one of those little menubar cluttering apps, that you had to keep open all the time for it to work, when you could just make Awaken was open when you were going to need it. I always felt that it was a little pointless….

Now with the new design, it’s all rather different. Admittedly I was a little excited when I realised that there was an update, and that there may be some cool new features, and I was initially pleased, though slightly surprised when I saw it. This is from Awaken 5.0.1.

First off, there are a number of differences. The whole UI has been uphauled and simplified. Half the buttons have disappeared, the light grey titlebar has gone, and all in all it looks a lot more like an iOS app. It’s also a fair amount simpler to look at, but at the same time harder to use. To access the alarms you’ve set, you have to go to the alarm section (in many ways the buttons along the bottom are just like those from an iOS device), where it will display all your alarms, a lot like this.

Now it becomes even more apparent how iOS like this is. Never before iPhones and iPod touches would you see the faux sliding on/off switches and the ‘>’ arrows (of which the functionality is lost on the Mac (what happened to double clicking)). I almost feel like I could swipe sideways across it to delete alarms (sadly I can’t). It also shows less information than before, now you have no idea when the next alarm is (you can click the date to give you a countdown however), or what playlists/actions alarms will trigger. Slightly annoying. However this isn’t the main issue with me. When I updated the software, I assumed (boldly) that it would function similarly to the previous one. Much to my dismay the next morning when my MacBook did not wake at alarm time to sound the alarm. What a shame. Apparently (after just a little delving in the preferences) that feature had been removed from Awaken and given to Awaken Helper (talk about modularity). So now I needed to have Awaken Helper run all the time for alarms to go off. Great. Just what I didn’t like about the previous version. Next big niggle coming up here, but first off, have a look at the great (no sarcasm here) alarm screen.

Personally I think it looks better than the last one. It’s more clear what is going on. You can see the album art nice and big, the track info, and even the buttons (now that they don’t even have to remote resemble OS X UI buttons) are clearer. Good effort.

But wait! Try pressing pause on iTunes to stop the music temporarily, or even change the music and you might realise that iTunes isn’t even playing music. In face Awaken has taken over all control of the music playback. Interesting. So now you can have two applications playing from the same library, at different times, all just because you pressed ‘play/pause’ on your keyboard to stop your alarm. I think this is really a step backwards. Admittedly it stops any issue from occurring where an update to iTunes will break the compatibility with Awaken, which has happened in the past I seem to remember, (but then again controlling iTunes from a separate app is fairly straightforward if it’s anything like Applescript), and all the new music playback code must have taken a while to write, test and implement. It also makes the whole thing a little less modular, much unlike the Helper app idea. Personally I think it’s a bit of a weird decision. However there’s probably a few reasons why:

• Mac App store submissions may not like you using certain libraries (which I believe is what they used before) to control iTunes.
• It may have been similar code to the iOS version of the software, and as such may have been easy to port.

However still, it seems silly to implement a whole new way of playing alarms when the last one worked perfectly.

So anyway, I feel like I should wind up this whole mini discussion of the changing UI and workings of Awaken with a little bit of a summary, and my suggestions on how possibly to improve the new interface.

The advantages of the new Awaken interface I see as being:

• Looks sharper – More shiny, and eminently more lickable.
• More iOS like – This might not be an advantage, but it makes it simple for iOS migrators to easily use the app.
• Version 5 is smaller (somehow!).

And the disadvantages:

• Awaken Helper – Why oh why do I have to use this stupid little app in addition to Awaken to make it function!
• iTunes non-integration – It worked so much better before, why change it.
• More iOS like – This isn’t an iPhone, this is for a Mac, people can double click, and mouse cursors aren’t stubby like fingers. Let the UI reflect that.
• Any reference to Awaken Helper is fairly well hidden – It mentions it once in the preferences (you do have to look though).
• Why the unnecessary animation with the window fade in? – Try using exposé (all windows) with Awaken 5 open. It doesn’t even show up, just a black space where it should be. Probably worth fixing, and not worth it just for the animation.

And my thoughts on potential improvements:

• Bring back the actual iTunes integration – It seems so much more obvious to users if the music comes from iTunes
• Do away with Awaken Helper – Allow Awaken to (do as it says on the tin and) wake up your Mac, suggest users set it to auto open at login. Keep it small and light so it can always be running.
• Find a compromise between the iOS UI and the old style UI – The iOS UI is great, but only on iOS devices. It has it’s limitations, and some tasks can be accomplished better with a mouse.

I’m interested to hear other opinions on the subject. Leave a comment, let me know…

Update: I’ve gone back to using version 4. So much better and a joy to use.

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Less procrastination done here, more like general time wasting, which is a crap strategy. Might have to sort that out. However, some none-the-less important things done…

• I read a wonderful little book (literally, well only in one sense, it was on my Kindle) by Joel Greenblatt called “The Little Book that Beats the Market“. Rather interesting perspective and super easy to get into, and totally only takes an hour to read, so worth checking it out. I’m following a select few stock on updown.com now just to see what the results are like…
• I made some fantastic cinnamon rolls (above…). Kind of like a cross between Cinnabon and Chelsea buns, though I believe the recipe expected more like pain au raisin to be produced. Oh well, close enough.
• Anyway, I’m back home now for a few days, with my awesome 5 (no .1) speaker system. I need to look into getting that sub. Still, it’s awesome listening to your music upmixed with Pro Logic…

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On the procrastination front.

• I started learning Ruby. Primarily with Rails For Zombies as part of Code School (p.s. Rails for Zombies is free!) which looks like a great idea for people who can’t be at all bothered to read books or do much else in the way of learning silly and unnecessary programming languages at the moment, so me. It also prerequisitized (sic) that I had some basic skillz (so to speak). This involved tryruby.org, which is also rather nice, and a fantastic in-browser idea. Anyway, for the moment I’m still plugging through with the Zombies.
• I made some sweet pizzas. Well this was actually a few days ago, and I’d been meaning to do it for a while (it had been open in Safari for quite some time). I made a half batch of this recipe which I found to be fantastic (I used half 00 flour and half regular bread flour with a little honey and olive oil) even after 3 days (with almost continual expansion) in the fridge. Made 4 pizzas out of it. 4 good lunches. Will be doing that again. Also, it takes like no time at all. So worth doing.
• On the same baking theme, I made some Rosemary Focaccia this evening. Using this recipe, which I’d used like 3 times before, and it’s excellent. Really is, and totally more-ish. Goes excellently with prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes, or even toasted with scrambled egg. Who knew rosemary and salt tasted so good together.
• I got new bike frame (a racing one this time!) off of a friend, and I managed to drain some serious time tearing it down to just the frame, forks and stem (which I fear may be stuck!!). It’s a early 90s Apollo (Halfords) frame made with ’300 steel’ tubing. Sounds like a dubious attempt to copy Reynolds 501, Google has returned little on the subject so far. However, it’s larger than my current orange fixie frame, and a different geometry, so I’ll try and build it up on the cheap, with 700c wheels too(!) and waste some more time.

Wow, I actually think that might be about all for these two days. However, judging by my revision timetable, I have a whole lot more time to work, and do exciting things when not working. Yay.

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