I recently discovered the gaping void blog.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Amazing.

This week I re-watched Fight Club. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but realized in the middle of it that one of the reasons I like it is because it forces me to question the reality that surrounds me. I like movies that do that because I think we all need it every once in a while.

There are so many messages fed to us, so many lies repeated continually that we begin to believe them. I need to buy this to be happy. That is what I need to do with my life. This is success.

If we don’t stop every once in a while and take a good hard look at ourselves and the decisions we’re making, and why, it’s easy to have our priorities upside down.

Stop. Question. Challenge. Think.

I love music and I love going to shows. I also hate paying ticketmaster fees, but it’s much easier to find a ticketmaster show than it is to hear about a show at the bar down the street, and this has frustrated me.

The idea of thesqueakerbox started forming when I thought, what if there was a place online where you could find local and indie shows as easily as you can find the big bands?

So I made one. Nothing too fancy, just local shows. Sign up, follow the bands that you like, and get an email when they add a show near you.

I hope you like it.

http://thesqueakerbox.com

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com

where have you been my whole life?

Dear Barcelona,

I showed up to the Detroit Bar on Tuesday night with little expectation, having never even heard of you before I arrived, but from the moment you started playing, I was impressed.

What I immediately noticed and appreciated was your level of musicianship, not to mention what went on when you weren’t playing (but I will). Your posture from stage was inviting and sincere instead of pretentious, you looked like you were enjoying yourselves, and your transitions went smoothly. Your combination of musical excellence, showmanship and professionalism really separated you from everyone else. (I also liked the light inside the kick, it added an aesthetic that fit your style)

Then I went to your booth to buy a cd. You guys shook my hand, talked to me for a bit, thanked me for coming, gave me a free poster, and were as sincere off stage as on. You simply did everything right. Thanks for an amazing show, you’ve won a fan here.

Jared

Here’s a great way to “give thanks” to God this Thanksgiving – buy a pair of shoes for someone living in a third-world country. If you sign up for the Soles4Souls “50,000 Pairs in 50 Days” Campaign, you can share the Gospel of “good news to the poor” for just $5.

Here’s how it works:

Go to 50000shoes.com.
A $5 donation buys two pairs of shoes. Everyone that’s reading this has $5, and everyone has 2 minutes. From start to finish, donating is literally three clicks. No fluff. No hassle. Anyone can donate.

Spread the word.
Use the widget code on the landing page to post a link on your blog. Email everyone you know. Join the facebook group. Ask your friends to do the same!

Win a trip.
Besides the fact that the blogging world can literally impact 50,000 people before the end of the year, one person (and their guest) will be chosen at random to hand-deliver the shoes they purchased on a Soles4Souls trip to Mexico. Imagine handing someone their first pair of shoes… ever.

Do the Math.
If 500 people influence 10 people to donate, and those people influence 5 more, that’s 50,000 pairs of shoes ($5 buys 2 pairs).

Get Started.
Sign-up at http://50000shoes.com/, donate your $5, and start spreading the word.

For more on this campaign, read this article by my friend Jeff Goins : Shoes, Social Media, and Justice

I’m sick. I hate being sick. I hate the coughing, the sneezing, the nose running and all the feelings that go with it. I hate what it does to my ability to focus, to multitask, to get things done.

I hate that it forces me to slow down. Then I realize that that’s exactly what I need.

Slow down.

When I slow down, I think about things more before I say them, if only because talking requires more effort. I think more about how my actions affect other people. I take time to just think about things. I am a do-er. I love to do. I often don’t consider that doing without thinking is pointless, really. When I slow down, I focus on what matters.

I need to take time to slow down every day, instead of waiting until I’m forced to.

I recently moved, and so I’ve been selling some things I don’t need on ebay. I noticed a cool feature today: Ebay will let you automatically donate a portion or all of the profit you make on your item to one of hundreds of non-profit organizations, and also give you a credit for seller fees. Check it out:

How cool is that? I’m donating my profits to invisible children, because they’re awesome.

Using growl, quicksilver, and itunes, I’ve got how I like to handle my music listening while I work down to a science.

First, controlling what’s playing. Quicksilver has these cool things called triggers. Triggers allow you to assign an action so a single key or key combination. The itunes plugin for quicksilver comes with a bunch of preset triggers, but skip forward, skip back, and play/pause are really my essentials. I picked three keys on my keyboard that I wasn’t using (F14, F15, F16) and assigned them to each of those actions, respectively. This way I can skip forward or backwards in the current playlist (almost always party shuffle) with a single keystroke, and without changing applications. This is especially great when itunes is open in a different space in leopard.

I also like to rate all my music and then use that rating for different playlists. The itunes plugin also comes with scripts for setting rating, so with 4 keystrokes (ctrl+space to bring up quicksilver, the number, and enter to apply) i can change the rating of the song without switching to itunes.

Last, growl comes with a nice little add-on called growltunes, which pops up a notification showing the album artwork, title, artist and rating when the song changes. I like the music video style because it stays at the bottom and isn’t distracting. Here’s what that looks like:

Sometimes I miss it, so I also assign one more trigger to show the playing track. This way if I’m listening to something new and like it, I can find out who it is, and then rate it, all with a couple quick keystrokes, and without changing applications.

That’s pretty much it, what do you think? How do you listen to music?

I just downloaded and installed itunes 8 last night, only to find that they removed two options that I rely on: disabling the links to the itunes store and hiding genre while browsing.

I don’t buy music from the itunes store, so why would i want to see three little arrows taking me to the store, esp to buy music I already have. I also completely disregard the genre tag of mp3’s. Partially because I have a hard time fitting music into genres anyway, and partly because its both subjective and irrelevant. What is one genre to me is another to someone else.

Thanks to these two macosxhints articles, you can have those options back and reject Apple’s imposing of store and genre on your music listening.

Shut down itunes, fire up the terminal, enter these commands, and restart itunes.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

done.

Quicksilver is hands down the mac application that I can’t live without. When I sit down at a computer, hit ctrl+space and nothing happens, it makes me sad on the inside. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining its usefulness. It can launch programs, manipulate files, and run scripts for you with minimum effort. Once you get in the habit of using it, you’ll wonder how you did without. Ask my friend Dane whom I introduced to quicksilver.

Frank Uyeda AKA “FU” once pointed out to me that you can use spotlight to launch programs as well. While true, spotlight is slower, often finds more depth than you need, and only lets you open those files; with quicksilver you can act on those files.

To use quicksilver, you open it with a hotkey (ctrl+space by default), then select an action, and then select a target action if applicable all with a few keystrokes. You would be surprised how much faster it is than your mouse Here’s some examples:

Trashing a file:

opening a file with a specific application:

I should note here that you can set quicksilver to scan certain directories. I set it to scan my home directory so i can access anything in there with quicksilver.

Lots of applications also have quicksilver plugins so you can access their contents with quicksilver. Say you’re itching for a song in itunes. You don’t have to switch over to itunes and find it, you can just use quicksilver:

Quicksilver also learns, so it gets better at guessing what you’re trying to do. Firefox is my most opened application starting with f, so to launch it, I only have to hit ctrl+space to open quicksilver, type f, which selects firefox, and then hit enter to launch it.

This is really just the surface. Here are some more articles and tutorials about quicksilver. Try it out, you’ll like it.

Next, I’ll show you how quicksilver an growl fit into my every day music listening.

Growl is one of those handy little apps that I love, but can used for evil or for good. Growl is simply a notification system that pops up little messages you can read, and then fade away after a couple of seconds. Lots of mac applications support growl, like adium, cyberduck, firefox 3, but my favorite use for it is when listening to music (which I’ll post on later).

It’s also very customizable. There are a bunch of built in styles for notifications that you can change the appearance of. I mostly use this one, called “smoke”: You can also choose different styles for different notifications coming from different programs form the preferences screen.. For example, I have notifications from important programs (like adium) at the top right of my screen so i see them. Less important ones I have slide up from the bottom. My brain has gotten used to it so much that I often miss/completely ignore the bottom ones, which is what I want so I don’t feel as interrupted. (That’s where I put my music notifications).

What I like best about growl is that I can get info without switching contexts. For example, If I’m typing an email and someone sends me an instant message, growl pops up a little notification with the message in it which I can read, decide if I want to respond immediately or not, and then either keep working, or decide to switch over and answer.

The evil in growl (for me) comes in the interruption. I used to use a plugin for Apple Mail called Growl Mail, which would pop up a notification when I received an email with the first couple lines of the email in there. Because of how I’m wired, as soon as I know about an email I start thinking about it and my response to it. In reality, there’s no email that needs my immediate attention. More urgent requests are instant messaged or phoned to me. Constantly seeing new emails roll in was really hurting my ability to focus on the task in front of me and be productive. I would start one task, receive an email which I couldn’t resist, stop working on my current task, and switch to responding to that email, work on that for a while, and then come back until another email came in. To be productive in higher level brain function tasks, you’ve got to focus. Since I’m often working on a task related to an email, shutting my email client off wasn’t the answer. Removing Growl Mail was.

The other side of that coin is sometimes you want to be interrupted. When I’m uploading a large file via ftp, I can go do something else, and then cyberduck will tell me when it’s done and I can take the next action. You get the idea.

LIfehacker also has an article on Growl with some pictures.

The bottom line: growl is awesome. Use it for apps when you want to be interrupted. Try it out and make it your own.