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.

Whenever I touch someone else’s computer or talk to someone else about their mac, inevitably I say something like, oh, you don’t use _? And they often say something oh, I didn’t know about that, thanks! And then they say, have you tried _? and I say no, I should check that out.

So, I’m going to write a few posts about different mac apps I like and use, like growl and quicksilver, and then I’m going to show you how I use them together during my day like how I use those two with itunes to listen to music or do my taxes or make me toast. I’m all about leveraging technology to make my life easier. I’m going to tell you how I do it, and then you can tell me how you do it, and then we’ll all be happier. My mom will probably read them at least. She likes telling me I’m cool and not a nerd.

P.S. I’m only going to cover mac things. Three years ago I bought my first mac (I had ALWAYS used windoze before that) and I’ve never looked back, except for when I want to play warcraft II (and now there’s vmware for that). It just works best for me.

The driver has to work harder than anyone. He’s the first to show up and the last to leave. When his teammates are all out drinking beer, he’s up in his room studying pictures of turns. You see, a driver must remain 100% focused at all times. Not only is he responsible for knowing every inch of every course he races, he also responsible for the lives of the other three people in the sled. Do you want that responsibility?

- Cool Runnings

Read it again but put “leader” in place of “driver.” Leadership is like that I think, and it can be lonely. Sometimes you just want to have fun instead of having the responsibility. Which is why you have to want it.