One of my biggest problems with Apple Mail (or GMail in the past) has been the inability to keep mail as unread until I'm ready to act on it. It's probably not the greatest GTD strategy to keep mail marked as "unread" in my inbox until I'm ready to process or address it, but I picked up the habit years ago as an Outlook and then Thunderbird user. I'm not sure if GMail ever remedied the issue with a Labs feature, but after a bit of googling-out-of-frustration today I found the Apple Mail plugin TruePreview from Christian Serving, LLC. It's free, quick, easy and works. After trying out a number of other hacks, I was so happy to come across this today and had to share in case there are any other wacko's out there who prefer to keep mail new until it's time to act.

Fantastic article on cultivating creativity in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

"Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions."

Amen. Made me tear up when I read that portion as I reflect on my incredibly inquisitive preschool daughter and her 1,000 questions-a-day rate compared to the resistance many of my 8th Grade students have to asking questions. I hope she never changes. Ever. Nullius in verba and all that. However, out of the ruins that have become our nationalized education system at large, I see tiny daisies of local promise sprouting up. We're on the verge of a major educational reform that will occur from the ground up. It won't be an overnight process, but my childrens' children will grow up with a very different system of education that is based on creativity, critical thinking and sustainability. Viva la revolution and here's to the crazy ones.

I'm working on our GriffinScience Text(s)book for next "year" (not sure why we call them school years...) and it's coming together nicely. We aren't going to be using a standard textbook for many reasons. Cost is one, but the assumption that science can be learned via a medium like a textbook is antithetical to the scientific endeavor. Instead, I'm writing everything (along with student work during the "year" that will be incorporated into the book) that will be the backbone of our class. Of course, the students will be doing most of the work and this is a labor of love to provide them with pointers. This isn't me emptying my head and asking them to memorize the facts I proclaim. Instead, this is more of a compass for their own studies of Physical Science. All of the excerpts in the book are from primary texts by scientists and in the public domain. This will all be public domain as well. I'll have it all out there on http://texts.griffinscience.com soon if you'd like to follow along and maybe learn a thing or two about your universe from the incredible young people with whom I'll be working. Here is the HTML outline that you can expand: > GriffinScience Textsbook Here is text file with the outline you can download:

> GriffinScience TextsBook.txt And here is an .rtf file you can open in Word or Pages or OpenOffice:

> GriffinScience TextsBook.rtf I'm also wrapping up on an mp3 version as well as an iPod/iPad/iTouch app (and hopefully Android as soon as I get into the App Builder beta since I don't have time to learn a new programming language after slogging through Objective-C this summer). I'll keep you posted on when those are in the App Store. More soon!

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

YouTube - Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

I've had the "samharrelson.com" domain since 2006 and I've used it as the primary site of my personal blog since that time. I've also had my personal email there (along with a set of paid Google Apps which I've just recently moved away from). However, I started considering whether or not I could move my family to some sort of .harrelson domain that would stay in our family's possession, complete with backend storage for photos, files and memories. That would eliminate my/our reliance on corporations promising not to be evil or companies willing to brashly make decisions for me. Also, I'm looking to do something along similar lines with student blogs/digital portfolios in my 8th Grade Science class over at Griffin Science. Basically, I'd like to equip each student with a subdomain that would have either a Wordpress install or point to a blogging/site service of the student's choosing. So, each kid would have sam.griffinscience.com for perpetuity (if they'd like) but they'd certainly be able to have a copy of their work for the year. So, I came up with the harrelson.fm (on a Media Temple server) idea as sort of a test bed for GriffinScience as well as a way to scratch the indy itch I've had about my family's data. On Twitter, Margaret made the excellent suggestion that .fm could be short for ".family" which I think is just fantastic. If you check out harrelson.fm, you'll see links to Anna, our daughters (and my parents in the coming days). They've each got a large web disk that's triple backed up online and offline, an email account like sam@harrelson.fm and they can either have a blog/site install or go with a cname pointer (which is what Anna did). We also have a family calendar up (nifty Webcalendar install) as well as a family photo gallery and a shared file for docs, budgets, etc. I also get to admin my parents' email and sites/blogs (hope they do blog). I'm excited to see how this works and eventually how it works for GriffinScience. I'm a firm believer in having a central (and independent... corporate free) hub of presence on the web. Hopefully this will be my answer. Now if I can only get in on Dave Winer's Scripting2 experiment so I can take things to a whole different level of blogging and presence! 04e149af6db14524b6ce47d8b22e9b84

I would love to see a similar study done with textbooks and school books:

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox): "The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability."

Even though I don't plan on buying another eBook anytime soon, I don't place much importance on this study (and I use that word loosely since the data set was 32 people and there were many undefined variables not nailed down). Nonetheless, some people will point to this as yet another reason print is better than an iPad or Kindle, especially in the education world. We can't necessarily do that with this information, but it will provide good tidbits for cocktail party chats. Also, it's just interesting to see the difference in reader experiences, even in a small data set. In my current opinion, print is optimal at this stage in our human story because of these points made so well by Nathan Schneider. As a Middle School Teacher, I'll gladly assert all day that speed means nothing when it comes to reading. The key to a reading platform's success or failure is its ability to provide interaction (or get out of the way of that interaction). Now if only we could gauge critical interaction with texts in a test format that didn't involve shading in bubbles...

I never want to buy another "e" book from Amazon or Apple again. Don't mistake my intentions. I have an iPad. I love it. I have a Kindle DX. I love it as well (although I'm falling out of love with it because I do most of my Kindle reading on my iPad or iPhone or Asus eee netbook or Macbook Pro). However, this post (essay) summarizes the rising tension I've felt in my heart and brain the last two years as I've began the slow and admittedly painful process of digitizing my own cumbersome library (this profile in serious need of updating):

In Defense of The Memory Theater | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review: "Until these companies take seriously the needs and, above all, the rights of readers (the human beings, not the machines), they deserve ruthless suspicion. Just because the Kindle and iPad might seem to work relatively reliably now, and because Google tells itself ‘don’t be evil,’ we shouldn’t keep from entertaining darker, more paranoid, even Orwellian fantasies."

Well reasoned luddite ranting aside, the essay is full of inspiration for those of us looking to creatively resist the commercialization and commoditization of our own personal data. I'm off to rearrange my bookshelves. I've neglected my own Memory Theater for far too long in exchange for the ease of a googled life.

Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica gives the most in-depth breakdown of Apple's iOS 4 I've found on the web today.

Ars reviews iOS 4: what's new, notable, and what needs work: "Despite its flaws, the iOS 4 update is certainly a solid one with enough new features to make it worth upgrading for pretty much everyone. Trying to live without even the most basic aspects of multitasking (notably state-saving) can be frustrating once you have used it for a while—during the time I wrote this, I continually switched back and forth between an iOS 4 phone and an iPhone OS 3.x phone, so I know from experience."

If you're upgrading it really is worth your read. I've certainly picked up a few good tips from the post.

Last October, I made a post saying that I was "bringing back home" all of my scattered data around the web to have more focus on this as my homesite.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been blogging regularly on samharrelson.me. I’ve also had my email hosted through an @gmail.com address, have been reading feeds through Google Reader, keeping my calendar on a free @gmail Google Calendar, keeping my documents dispersed through that associated Google Docs account as well as my Dropbox account, precious family photos on Flickr, Facebook, Posterous, Picasa and SmugMug and notes on Evernote.

That initiative lasted a solid month or two but then things fell apart. Here I am trying the same process again. This time I mean it (seriously). - I've moved my blogs (this one and adverb.fm) to a self-hosted account with BlueHost. Now that I have my OpenID setup with my domain (so I can sign in to comment or access apps just by typing in "http://www.samharrelson.com" without having to have a slew of logins and passwords), it's a win-win. - Like last time, I've primarily been using the sam@samharrelson.com email address lately. I still have my sam@adverb.fm account for adverb, my advertising blog and my school email (hosted by Google Apps) for school communications. But everything personal is going through that @samharrelson.com address and it's independently hosted (not through Google). Sure, I miss the Google Mail interface, but I've always loved Apple Mail's functionality (esp for high volume email), so that wasn't too painful. I actually enjoy being free of the Google chain there. I might run this mail through MobileMe's new interface, but not sure. I like SquirrelMail too much :) And if there's any problem with sending mail through Apple Mail, I've always got Loa Power Tools. - Speaking of being free of Google, I've also moved my calendars to iCal/MobileMe. This is incredibly painless since I have a Macbook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone. Being beholden to MobileMe rather than Google gives me a little more independence while still keeping things synced up across the board. - I'm back on OmniFocus for getting things done. Again, not difficult given the built-in sync via MobileMe and my predisposition for Apple products. - Documents-wise, I'm keeping most things in Pages/Numbers/Keynote via MobileMe so that I can have access on my Mac, iPhone or iPad relatively easily. I'm also keeping everything backed up via Dropbox and Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk. - I do most of my feed reading via the awesome Reeder app on the iPad and iPhone. On my Macbook I'm using NetNewsWire, but I rarely read feeds on the Mac anymore. The iPad is just an insanely good reading device, especially with Reeder. Of course, I also use Instapaper and Delicious when I have time to dig deeper. - Socially, I still use Twitter as my main conduit. Having been on the service for almost four years now, I find it just as useful and revolutionary today as I did back in 2006. I've pretty much moved off of Facebook but still keep a profile (with limited info) there just as a) a pointer and b) a way for friends and students to connect. I'll echo what I said last October:

I love the social web and the incredible apps that have come along these last five years. However, I also love my independence. There’s something to the “Coral Reef” idea that Dave Winer spoke of in regard to Twitter a couple of years back that appeals to me in terms of net identity. I like to think of samharrelson.com as my digital coral reef that provides the biosphere and anchor for all the species of web apps that make up my online content ecosystem. That’s the hope here.

That's still my sentiment. I'm loving not being chained to a Google account or another third party service for my digital coral reef. This time I'm planning on making that sentiment stick.