Hacking the Good days…

Spend your every minute as if it’s your last one.

You think that’s a cliche until someone you care might be leaving you for good.

Dave kindly spotted Kate Reider’s story,

I read a very sad story today about a young, female singer-songwriter from my hometown. Her name is Katie Reider. She developed a rare facial tumor that took away her ability to perform, her left eye, and eventually her voice.

Her brother, Rob, was a classmate of mine and a fantastic guitar player. He was one of the rare people that managed quiet confidence and self-awareness even in high school. I remember being really impressed when he won a local ‘best guitarist’ contest on the local hard rock radio station — when his entry was played entirely on acoustic guitar.

Anyway, this site is dedicated to exposing Katie’s music to 500K people in one year. I highly encourage you to go there, read her story, and download Katie’s songs for a small $1 donation. If you like Patty Griffin, The Weepies or The Swell Season you will like Katie. Her albums are also available on iTunes, just search Katie Reider.

I urge you to visit the site, scroll through the photos and witness how Kate fought her battle, listen to her music and ponder on what really means to be here and now.  I was profoundly moved – hope you feel the same.

I think it is in love with the weather man.

[Thanks E for sharing, super cheery, made my day].

Only parents can teach us how to love. It is the world that teaches us how to be tough. But it can never be the other way round.

- from a very very wise friend

It’s London Web Week last week, and I attended @Media where keynote speaker, Jeff Veen, gave a pretty enlightening presentation on digital visualisation – and brought out the importance of mapping ‘dry’ data to meaningful references that click with real people’s day-to-day schema. There are plenty of good blogs out there summarising the conference, but I particularly resonated with Jeff’s ending quote from Steve Jobs,

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

I might have found the wrong quote here but the gist is, when we’re faced with problems we tend to first arrive at a simple solution, which is usually the wrong one, and then we realise the magnitude and the complexity of the whole situation.  People usually stop here.  It is with perseverance and the ability to distill layers of dependencies, very few of us arrive at the core, ’simple’ solution.  It never comes easy.  But when it happens, you never feel any better.

/Staring at comment #33 on bugzilla…