I’m back from a work-related conference. It was a wonderful learning experience and I’m exhausted. My conference registration included my choice of several books. I picked “Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys To Creativity,” which was especially sweet since I put that on my Amazon wish list a month or two ago.

If there is one thing I learned from the conference and from the book (so far, I’m halfway through it), it’s that I need to quit wasting so much time and get some work done. Nothing new there, but it’s nice to rekindle the fires every now and then. This annual conference strikes a match for me every year and I’m already looking forward to next year.

I’ll tell you one thing I need to do a better job of; recording the little things. Not just photos and videos (although I need to do more of that too) but little tiny bits of insight. I have a iPhone that lets me do, well, just about everything. I have no excuse.

I need to spend more time reading (books) and writing in my own words…for me me me.

Subtitle: Why do I remember Julian Sands?

So, I’m sitting in the living room some time around 10:30 on a Thursday night watching Castle on TiVo. This random guy pops up on the screen as one of the characters.

I squinted my eyes and thought for a moment.

“Isn’t that the guy that was in that movie Warlock?” I asked Julie.

“Yep, I think it is,” she said.

“Julian Sands. That’s his name, right?”

“Yep, I think so,” she said.

An innocent conversation, except I haven’t seen the movie Warlock in years. To give you a baseline, New World Pictures release Warlock in 1989. I was a junior in high school! This guy flits up on the screen for a few seconds and I can suddenly remember those details—the movie, a name.

Sands also starred in Boxing Helena, which costarred Sherilyn Fenn. Why do I remember this? Why haven’t I been on Jeopardy on something? Why doesn’t my brain work right?!

If this kind of pop culture drivel can bubble up at weird times, why not math genius or fluency in multiple languages? Why can my brain retain such worthless mental detritus but I struggle with algebra?!

I’m vexed, but I’ll probably kick your ass at Trivial Pursuit.

Note: Sorry for the random tour of Google Images, IMDB, and Wikipedia. I couldn’t settle on one source. Viva la Internet!

Second noteIs it just me, or does Julian Sands look a little like Rod Stewart with a little less rock and roll and a little more Burt Bacharach?

This is a great post by Anil Dash that illustrates the importance of just getting together with likeminded folks to just hang out together.

Communities of Creators – Anil Dash
At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging community. But in the seven and a half years since then, many of us have gone on to become entrepreneurs or creators, launching dozens of companies and products. Im still collecting names and companies in the comments on Flickr, but just a cursory glance shows founders from Blogger, Six Apart, Adaptive Path, Flickr, Gawker, Twitter and more.

A little more than a year ago I started going to church again. I returned to the church I grew up in, the same church my wife attended, the church where we first met each other during kindergarten.

Our familiarity with the church brought a certain amount of comfort with it. It was filled with old friends eager to welcome us back, but it’s a very traditional church. That’s not a bad thing, but we think it may be an improper fit for our family.

We visited another church this morning. The difference was obvious when we walked in the door. The majority of the church was young. Most of those attending the church looked like they were under 40, and man of those looked younger than 25. I enjoy the messages prepared by the pastor of our childhood church, but the leader of the church we visited this morning delivers a more contemporary message.

Julie used to attend this church and our children studied there for a while when they were much younger. Our middle children really enjoyed the youth group.

I’m enjoying church and particularly studying the Bible. It’s a fascinating book that brings up a lot of questions for me as well as a lot of ideas I don’t necessarily agree with. That’s why I’m studying the book. My family bought me a wonderful study Bible for my 36th birthday and I look forward to carrying it to the group we are meeting with tonight—a group dedicated to learning how to study the Bible.

For quite some time I’ve managed my focus by blotting everything from my desktop except for the application I was using. I did this with a combination of two things; using Isolator to black everything out and by maximizing each application to take up the entire screen. This way of working was featured on Patrick Rhone’s Web site Minimal Mac (which I highly recommend).

Apple Spaces

Today, I decided to mix it up a bit using Apple’s Spaces. I realized that I never get to appreciate a tasteful background or the large, high resolution icon replacements designed by Martin Goneau that I use these days.

I have set up 12 different Spaces and assigned one application to each space. The big change for me is that they aren’t maximized. For many applications such as Mail and Evernote, this actually works out better because the e-mails and notes aren’t spread across so much space making it easier to read longer passages. This is why applications like Tofu for Mac exist; to make it easier on the eyes to read long passages quickly.

My new desktop—well, one of them—dressed on the right with icons designed by Martin Goneau.

For now, I’m using one of the desktop backgrounds that came with Snow Leopard, but I’ll probably track down a few of my own photos to cycle through as my desktop background. It is just as easy to focus with this desktop layout and a little more peaceful than BLACK.

Nearly a month ago, I wrote a post titled Evernote Smackdown where I talked about how I prefer Evernote to DEVONthink Pro (DTP) for daily use, but that I was not giving up DTP.

Today, I finally got my DTP databases in order. When I first got the exclusive Mac program I dumped everything in one huge database. That got unwieldy so I split everything up into separate databases by topic, which was also hard to manage under version 1.x because it only allowed one database to be open at a time.

Version 2.x came along (it’s still in beta) with the ability to open multiple databases and that made it tons easier to manage more than one database, but the artificial intelligence—the program’s claim to fame—broke down because all of my data was split up so back into one database it went.

Well, almost one.

Now I’ve got three databases; at least for now. They are labeled “Research Database,” “Creativity,” and “Life.” Here is what they are for:

• My Research Database is the big boy. All of the smaller databases got cleaned up and moved into here. It mainly consists of two larger groups—Topics and Digital Library.

  Topics is my A-Z file where I dump in whatever stuff I want to track such as articles on productivity, philosophy, politics and some other topics that don’t begin with the letter “P”.

  Digital Library is my collection of works organized by author. It contains everything from digitized novels to magazine articles to transcriptions of college commencement speeches.

• My Creativity database is where I keep my personal work. Blog posts, articles I’m working on, and notes & ideas for future work (like the Next Great American Southern Gothic Novel™).
• For a record of things happening in the real world I have my Life database. It gets all of my financial information and household ephemera (cleaning tips, chore lists for kids, and ideas for local dining and entertainment options).

Enough tweaking now. DTP is ready to spit my collected stuff back at me in a logical fashion. Evernote is ever present to grab data for me no matter where I am; home, work, or on the road. Everything is ready and now it’s time to start. So on that note, I leave you with this bit from a wonderful article by Merlin Mann:

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.

President Barack Obama

Today is Labor Day, and President Barack Obama is scheduled to talk to America’s students when they return to school tomorrow.

[The prepared remarks have now been released]

My first thought when I heard about this was, “What a great opportunity for kids. They get to hear about the importance of their studies and how they can embrace the educational opportunities in this country from a well-educated and well-read president who has also been a college professor of constitutional law, a civil rights attorney, and a three-time U.S. senator.” I don’t think anyone can dispute that Obama is probably the best-educated president this nation as seen in decades.

Apparently, a loud group of parents in this country who don’t share my enthusiasm nor my opinion about the president’s plans. They fear his “socialist agenda” to “indoctrinate the nation’s youth” “just like Hitler did in Germany.” When it comes to matters like this, I often wonder if the number of opponents are really that large or if there are just a few really loud folks. Based on my experience as a journalist, I tend to believe the latter.

Disclaimer: If you can’t tell, I should note that I lean more to the left than the right and was no fan of President Obama’s predecessor. I should also say that I was not opposed to President George W. Bush, or any other president that preceded our current commander in chief, addressing the nation’s students. I believe it shows students and families how much our nation’s leader, whoever that may be, understands the importance of having an educated citizenry.

To put it in capitalist terms, an educated public leads a profitable nation. Without an educated workforce, America can no longer lead the world in industry, science, medicine, engineering, and every other area. In fact, we have already slipped behind in many areas and have been falling behind for years.

This country remains divided, and until we are united we will continue to spiral downward. I don’t have much faith that we can overcome the political divide in this country. I loath partisan politics and the ridiculous arguments it inspires and wish political labels could be stripped away and forgotten. When Republicans have a good idea, the Democrats strike it down as crazy. Then the tables turn and the Democrats present the same basic ideas and the Republicans reverse their opinion and shoot it down.

“So it goes.” —Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve seen politicians who couldn’t get elected one year because they belonged to one party, but after switching parties while espousing the same ideas they were easily elected. Same person, same ideas, different party. What difference does it make?

Why can’t we just call a good idea a good idea and elect the best people possible to take this country forward instead of sitting in a perpetual stalemate because of the capital letter by our politicians’ names.

As for President Obama’s speech? I’m proud of any president who openly emphasizes the importance of public education. It’s a shame some squeaky wheels are getting the grease and turning such a positive thing into a negative. I don’t know if my children will be watching the speech at school, but I plan to watch it with them that night so we can talk about the importance of education. They are our future, our presidents and politicians to be, and I thank our nation’s leaders who know how important they are to America.

Just for kicks, I’ve switched over to Circus Ponies Notebook to do some narrative journaling (which is different from the daily journal I discuss in a moment). I have several writing tools on my computer and I’m never sure which one I want to use. The only one that I’m dead set on is Textmate for blogging thanks to the blogging bundle and the flawless integration with WordPress.

When it comes to just dumping things out of my brain like I’m doing now, I’m just never sure where I want to put it. I know I don’t want to use a word processor; Microsoft Word and Apple Pages are just too much for what I’m doing and I catch myself spending way too much time fussing around with fonts and layout.

Hmmm, simple Helvetica or a more stylish Hoefler Text? Decisions, decisions…

Evernote has turned out to be perfect for my daily journal, which is a simple string of entries to record what I do every day. Syncing is what makes Evernote so great for that. I can maintain a seamless log from my MacBook Pro at work to my MacBook at home and everywhere in between on my iPhone.

However, for simple notes on my iPhone I use…SimpleNote. It’s more feature rich than the Apple’s offering of Notes (I have to plug my sophisticated wireless cellular device into my computer to sync my notes? Seriously?). Evernote is just a bit much to handle with that tiny virtual keyboard.

For research, I have to stick with DEVONthink Pro. Nothing is going to be better for dumping a bunch of stuff in and digging it back out. The artificial intelligence is terrific. I just haven’t ever been able to get the flow with DTP, but I’ve got a good deal of stuff dumped in there. Occasionally, I’ll go on a search to see how others use it but I’ve never found anything particularly helpful except that Steven Berlin Johnson has used it with great success to write his books (which I need to buy!).

This Notebook application has been lurking on my Macbook for a while now and I’m going to give it some use for a bit.

N.B. — This started out as a part of my personal journal and I decided I want to blab about it on my blog, so I moved it from Notebook to Textmate to slap some HTML into it and sling it up on the net. And actually, I’m partial to Arno Pro these days.

Full text from the New York Times. This excerpt caught my attention. More of us should be so brave:

Text – President Obama’s Eulogy for Senator Kennedy – NYTimes.com
“…[I]ndividual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in — and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves.”

This is just all kinds of awesome. Buckets of awesome. Really. You should at least click the link to see the awesome picture. Did I tell you…? Awesome!

Punctuation hero branded a vandal for inserting apostrophes on street signs | Mail Online
After enduring sloppy punctuation on the street sign outside his home for more than a year, Stefan Gatward could stand it no longer.The 62-year-old former soldier decided to launch a one-man crusade against dumbed down Britain, and picked up a paintbrush to insert a missing apostrophe.This turned the incorrect St Johns Close into the correct St Johns Close.