Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

Technically it’s just weeks right now, but before — when I first drafted this — it really was months. It was, and remains, that a strange confluence of inconvenient facts keep me from regularly flexing my muscle in this space.

I could go into the details, but I would rather say simply that they are far more prosaic than profound, and that to the extent I find myself different in the interim, it is having gained a certain weariness with the machinations of modern living and certain lessening of my certainty that all will turn out well.

But there remains fantastic potential in each keystroke. A never-relenting possibility that though this sentence bores me in it’s writing, and likely you in it’s reading, I may soon stumble upon something that leaves the two of us astounded.

My greatest aspiration as a writer, a thinker, a seeker, and a person, is to find myself amazed at the clarity that can be produced in a single well-structured essay. It’s a rarity, and looking back a little on all I’ve produced here, even more of a rarity than I remember.

But it’s the reason that I find myself returning this screen from time to time, looking at this empty box, and hoping hard to be able to get back to it in earnest. I never tire of the potential that from my keystrokes, someday, my world may be altered forever.

We see language as a mere tool at our peril. Being literate is not merely about having a functional ability to make sense of things recorded in a different time or place. It’s about having the ability, by merely moving your eyes, to enter another world. It’s about being able to, with mere movement of your fingers create new worlds, or new visions of this world, for others.

There’s magic in the act of writing. A magic the endless drag of 9-to-5 can easily sap from your awareness. But it is real. And it’s real, even if your skills, like mine, are rather feeble.

This is something I need to remember. To keep with me. To bring me here more.

Sometimes you work very hard to reach a moment of clarifying insight. Sometimes they just fall into your lap.

Sometimes that clarifying insight quickly reveals itself to be illusory. To have been too simplistic. Or poorly articulated. Or wrong.

But sometimes you sit with that moment of clarity for a bit — spinning it around, looking at it from as many perspectives as you can — and it seems to be flawless. It seems like all the moments of insight that have come before grasped for this insight you now hold. The others weren’t wrong, but they weren’t quite what you’d been going for. But this one, this is the real deal.

Obviously such certainty can be revealed weeks, months, or years later to have been wrong. But in that flash, and the afterglow that follows, you’re sure it could never be different.

And so I feel about these three words: Be. Here. Now. Be here, now.

Be where you are, when you are. Be at the table having breakfast with your family. Be in your bed, reading the lastest Clancy novel. Be entering data into a spreadsheet. Be reading this entry on this blog.

Presence in any situation is no mere thing. Full presence in every situation is a very hard one.

It’s so easy to focus, instead, on what dread awaits you in the next day to focus on the serenity of this moment, sitting here, writing this. Reading this. To find, after snapping back to attention, that your mind had drifted off to the hubbub of yesterday or the joy that awaits that night.

But if you’re able, being here now is the most amazing thing you can experience. “Everything that exists,” when you’re able to focus on it,  “is beautiful.” “What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. “

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year in worry. Primarily about the material circumstances of my life. How I could pay for the things I needed, and especially those I wanted. How I could get from where I am to all the places I’d rather be.

And I can’t even put into worlds how freeing it feels to rediscover what I think I once knew: all that matters is the sequences of nows I’m currently experiencing. That I am doing my best within those is the best I can hope for.

Weeks have a way of getting away from me. Last weekend I was thinking I’d get a post up about my first WordPress plugin, a stand-alone implementation of the Kaleidoscope Mini Quilt, by Tuesday. Suddenly I look down and realize that it’s Sunday and I’ve not written such a post and not updated the plugin’s page beyond a goofy first draft.

If you’re familiar with Kaleidoscope, you know it’s most unique feature is the algorithm that takes the date a post was published and determines a color that, based on some vague ideas of what colors fit what time of year, seems appropriate.

My original implementation of that was a large quilt-looking series of patchs that you can find on my archives page. And while I do like that — and the fact that it gives post names as well as colors — it requires someone to create and click to an archives page to see the best use of the algorithm.

The Mini Quilt was a way that I could have the quilt-looking array of posts, but offer it on every page of any WordPress blog, regardless of the existence of an archives page.

Well, I like the Mini Quilt, and I got a few requests from people who liked it too, so I built a plugin to allow anyone to add it to any widgetized WordPress theme. If also features simple but useful controls that allow you to quickly change patch size, and the number of patches in it to fit any size and show any number of posts.

To use it, you just need to search for the Mini Quilt plugin from inside your WordPress dashboard and install it (still from your dashboad — you’re using WordPress 2.7+, right?). Once it’s installed, activate the plugin and add the widget to your sidebar. It couldn’t be much simpler.

If you’re looking for more information before you take the above steps, you can try the plugin’s page here at Ikiru Design, or at the WordPress plugin repository.

Are, in rough order of nobleness:

1. Because no one else has made anything like this before and I’m sure it’ll be awesome.
2. Because no one has ever combined these feature sets and the combination will be legen — dramatic pause — dary.
3. Because this platform needs this type of software.
4. Because my version will be way better than all the others.
5. Because building it will teach me something.
6. Because I can do it too.

Ian Fisher

Hey, you remember how people were talking about a series of photos about a soldier? And you remember how you didn’t look at them? Here’s your chance to correct that mistake.

(via kottke)

How Psychological Cold Reading Works

Lloyd does a great job explaining the way psychics and mediums seem to know you so well. The video that he mentions of Derron Brown running a Forer experiment is on YouTube, and he’s got a copy of the reading Brown used.

How the Blind Read

This shocked me:

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report.

The rest of the piece is a worthy analysis of what that fact means.

As Health Reform Stands

It’s pieces like this that make me love David Brooks. Telling us what we don’t want to hear, but need to. The jumping off point:

Despite the Democratic triumph that month, [Galston and Kamarck] noted, public distrust of government remains intensely high. Historically, it has been nearly impossible to pass major domestic reforms in the face of that kind of distrust. Therefore, they counseled, the new administration should move cautiously to rebuild trust before beginning a transformational agenda.

Sports Fan No Longer

I’d recently noticed that I’d almost completely stopped watching sports, so an article on the topic caught my eye. This was a large part of it for me:

You pretty much have to watch [sports] live. Sure, you can record a Sunday afternoon football game and watch it the next day, but the final score is harder to avoid than the twist in last night’s episode of Mad Men. Glimpse the back page of the local tabloid, and the game is spoiled. Even if your self-imposed media blackout does succeed, watching a day-old ballgame is like doing yesterday’s crossword. It just doesn’t have the same crackle. At the same time, other entertainment options are becoming easier to fit into my schedule. If I’m not in the mood for the TV shows I’ve DVR’d, I can always stream a movie on Netflix.

How GPS Works

For every kid who ever asked, “But when will I ever use this?” when learning about an esoteric math or science concept.

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day!

(via jimray)

What Long Tail?

The Economist makes (or made in November) an interesting point: it’s the middle of the road stuff, not the blockbusters, that are suffering a technology marches forward.

A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.

(via Marco, who pulled the quote that most likely explains the phenomona)

The Decade’s Worst Movie

Though I think that title doesn’t quite properly belong to Crash — this was the decade of Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, and many other terrible and unloved movies — this is exactly right:

Bad movies get made all the time. But what infuriated me about “Crash” was that so many people mistook it for something profound when it was truly the opposite. It shouts at the top of its lungs: “I’M SUBTLE! I’M NUANCED!” and [too] many people somehow agreed.

(Found like this: Jeff Goldberg linked to TNC, who linked to Postbougie who cited the title link. All of those links are probably worth perusing as well.)