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.

Exploiting Gratitude

Hyatt Hotels has started to give away seemingly random goodies — a free massage or night’s stay — to guests. The goal of the generosity is to inspire gratitude in the guests which psychologists expect will inspire greater loyalty than traditional points-based loyalty programs.

If a favor seems to be a function of the free will (as opposed to company rules), “you have more desire to reciprocate,” Palmatier says. Hyatt’s strategy of relying on the discretion of on-the-ground employees to provide “acts of generosity” is a pretty fair approximation of the gratitude-creation situation Palmatier says he thinks can pay off.

The He-cession

I apologize heartily for the cringe-worthy title. I bear no responsibility for it’s creation, merely it’s prorogation. But Reihan Salam, among others, thinks that men and machoness are unlikely to emerge from this recession unscathed. While part of me is screaming “bogus trend story,” I can’t condemn it as meritless:

As behavioral finance economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean memorably demonstrated in 2001, of all the factors that might correlate with overconfident investment in financial markets—age, marital status, and the like—the most obvious culprit was having a Y chromosome. And now it turns out that not only did the macho men of the heavily male-dominated global finance sector create the conditions for global economic collapse, but they were aided and abetted by their mostly male counterparts in government whose policies, whether consciously or not, acted to artificially prop up macho.

(via Idea of the Day)

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The Case for Preservation

In documenting a few of the freeway on-ramps, parking lots, and other monstrosities that have replaced some of America’s ornate original train stations, The Infrastructurist makes a cogent case for historical preservation (and the headaches that implies).

(via BB)

The Way We Love Now

Ross Douthat’s been on the editorial page of the New York Times for a few months, and while none of his columns have been out-of-the-park exceptional, most are rather good. Yesterday’s example:

When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage. Indeed, if you’re looking for modern-day Percy Shelleys or Mary Wollstonecrafts (to pluck a pair of Nehring’s romantic risk-takers), you’re more likely to find them in Middle America than among the environmental lawyers and documentary filmmakers who populate Tsing Loh’s depressing social world.

He’s exactly what I thought he could be — a Brooksian conservative who’s not afraid to venture deep into the personal, religious, and moral weeds that Brooks himself mostly avoids.

The Kuwait of… Oil

This is interesting:

Greenland’s [increasingly independence-minded] government, using US Geological Survey data among others, says that the mean estimates for its oil reserves is about 50 billion barrels. That number is a bit abstract, so I did some math: The island has about 56,000 people, and if things go as they appear to be going, it will be an independent country some time in the next couple of decades. That means each Greenlander will own about 900,000 barrels of oil.

That is more per capita than any oil-rich country you’ve heard of. But, it’s largely unverified — no oil has been found in Greenland — and is less than a fifth of the total reserves of Saudi Arabi. If these estimates are accurate, Greenland would be between Russia and Libya, a few spots down from Kuwait, in total reserves.

(via Passport)

There, I Fixed It

You’ve probably seen some of these photos elsewhere. Others are doubtless Photoshopped or just staged for amusement. But it doesn’t stop this site from being worth a little of your time.

(via DF)

Has Internet Television Arrived?

Perhaps hyperbolically, PC World points to a possible sign it has:

A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.

(via PSFK)

Balance California’s Budget

The LA Times has an interesting Flash thing (game seems too generous): devise a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to balance California’s famously troubled budget. For some reason I can’t seem to devise a solution that no one would be upset about…

(via Mr. Arment)