As it went,

It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They’re the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can’t tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that. (What you’ll wish you’d known)

Many things we teach in schools are going to be outdated in less than five years’ time. Some everlasting things got taught but some others did not. The modern schooling system made it inreasonably convinced that once it’s over the learning process is “over”, and with a clearly defined exit strategy (finish college, get diploma) it has became a behemoth.

I go with Jobs on this,

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older — yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school — none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s — that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t. (Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing )

Barker.js might provide a minute splash of glee. It also comes with a bookmarklet ¹. Click and tell:

Barker is updated with a jQuery-based replacement method (we added a lazy-loading mechanism with a callback) so now it works with Chrome.

Don’t quit your day job

Word. But maybe untrue.

People who think about software frameworks ought not use the same thought pattern against consumer and practical, applied software.

That’s why the dubbed “C on Rails” is outright a joke. We can’t live without embedded software, but things start to get awry when people obsessed with embedded software start dictating how applied, consumer software ought to be done.

Perhaps because I’m obsessed with applied software. Perhaps because I love prototyping, and am bad at mass-producing. Time will tell.

Factoring Estimations

By anectodal evidence, it takes me approximately 1 week to churn out a full-fledged design, but that week is often scattered within a span of 2 or 3. That means my turnaround is not “one week” but 3. Rule of thumb: multiply the budget, and the time it takes to finish everything by 3.

A designer friend of mine goes this way:

“Two monthes of cushion time to the estimation, always.”

Word.

Life of a modern creator

Get up, rinse and shower. Code. Make breakfast, have a round of tea. Do more design. Twit. Push some pixels. Email clients and customers. Do more coding. Checkout social networks. Twit. Occassionally meet people. Sleep.

Life, according to a junior

Get up, lie in bed. Twit. Code some more and twit, make breakfast while reading the Onion. […]

Generally speaking

Live according to the Maker’s Schedule if you want to ship stuff. Piss people off, play havoc with corporate drones in a non-offending way, or do whatever you could without risking your relationship with people… to fight for time you deserve for making your product.

Also, how to do what you love, emphasis mine:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.

Rework

Read 37signal’s Rework on Kindle.app on two shortly borrowed iPads separately, once skimmingly and once immersedly. That’s it: change somebody can believe in.

Be it good design, politics, or education. What turns out that, a wide spectrum-ful of subjects associated with liberal arts are at home with open-ended issues. Words are made not to persuade nor impress, but to self-ameliorate.

Words merely wraps more-banal misdemeanors. Pronunced and written stuff simply has more power, for we still believe in oaths.

ipso pseudo-facto.