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Perspectives in OmniFocus allow you to include additional task details like due date, defer date, flag status, and project status to customize your task views even further. If you wanted to see only tasks that are available to be worked on right now, require you to have access to your Mac, and are due next week, perspectives allow you to find the tasks that meet this criteria quickly and easily.

Without OmniFocus, I’m positive there are important things in my life that would not get done. OmniFocus helps me to forget about when to take the trash to the curb, when to pay bills, and when to change the oil in my jeep. It also helps me make sure that I’m making progress on all the projects I’m working on throughout the day.

While I’m at work, I have an OmniFocus perspective that filters out everything that’s not relevant that I’ve committed to working on today. Before and after work, I shift over to my “Today” perspective to see everything that I have on my plate for the day.

OmniFocus is an essential piece of software for me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels like they have more to do than they can keep track of. In today’s world, I imagine that’s just about everyone.

The book of Philippians is such a beautiful, and challenging book. This is what I needed to hear tonight:

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did no run in vain or labor in vain.Philippians 2:14-16

I admit I’ve done quite a bit of grumbling and questioning the past few days. On the next page, I saw I had this passage marked:

Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.* And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus*.Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there his anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me–practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.Philippians 4:4-9

• “… you shine as lights in the world…”
• “… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”
• “…and the God of peace will be with you.”

God of peace, guard my heart and my mind, and let me shine as your light in the world.

My daughter’s cheerleading coach passed away last night. What was first thought of as diabetes turned out to be an extremely aggressive cancer that took her after only a few months. She was only ten years older than my wife and I. Her family, and our community, will be grieving deeply for her loss.

I know my daughter loved her, and when those we love die they take a part of us with them. Our family has lost parents and grandparents, close friends and people we admire. The pain of their loss can hit any one of us at any time; triggered by a date, or an object, or a memory of how they used to enjoy one thing or another. Sometimes we long for the comforting sound of their voice so much it aches inside us. When they are gone we wish for what everyone wishes for, more time.

But, despite my skepticism, despite my scientific, rational mind that often cries out for reason, I have to believe that there must be something more than this, that when the shadow of reality shimmers away, as it will for all of us, our consciousness, our soul, lives on. While we are bound to our physical bodies in the physical world, we can’t see it, but it’s there, waiting for each of us. The Bible tells us that each of us is given a certain number of days, and no one knows what that number is.

Our life is so short here, and the human body so fragile. Every second that passes is a second we can never get back. No amount of work or bartering can earn us even a minute more of our life back. But… we can make the passing of our time more worthwhile.

The Bible says that to gain eternal life, you must believe that Jesus is who is says he is and did what he said he did. But after that, what does it say about the time between salvation and eternal life? It says to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. It says to love your enemy, and bless those that persecute you. It says that God is love.

If we fill our days with kindness and mercy, if we leave petty ambition and envy behind, if we forgive slights against us, and smile in the face of adversity, if we stand up for what’s right, if we are honest and true, if we leave laziness and sloth behind us, if we give ourselves over completely to the task at hand, leaving nothing behind, wouldn’t that be a life well lived?

How will you finish the race? How will I? When the end comes for me, will I be able to look back satisfied that I spent my precious seconds the best way I could? Or will I be filled with regrets for the things I did and didn’t do? Am I pushing myself to become what I was placed on Earth to be? Or am I stagnating, inventing excuses and becoming bitter about why I can’t do one thing or another.

There will always be things you’d like to do, but can’t. Hard decisions and tradeoffs for what you believe is best for yourself and your family. Make the decision, embrace it, believe it, and move on to the next right thing to make this one, beautiful, precious life worthwhile.

Learn, build, grow, love. Be kind, gentle, patient, and enduring. Find joy in the moments we have, because life is here for a moment, and then, gone.

Link

Restating, underscoring, or even strengthening those scientific results won’t solve that problem. The results already come from multiple fields, are reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, and have been vetted (extremely vetted, you might say) by several extended, multi-layered review processes. Collectively, we don’t know how to “know” anything more confidently than we know this stuff.

If someone chooses to simply reject those scientific institutions, procedures, and results, then piling on more facts is beside the point. It’s not about facts any more, it’s about the authority of the institutions.

I understand why politicians who get their funding from oil companies want to discredit global warming and research into climate change, what I don’t understand is why that willingness to disregard established facts trickles down to everyday republicans.

I’m starting to think that this has more to do with tribalism than actual beliefs. The right-wing tribe believes this set of ideas, given to them by their elected leaders, and nothing will change their mind about that.

Given that we can now safely refute any scientific research (biased), well reported news story (fake news), and even disregard things we’ve seen and heard ourselves (he didn’t really mean that), we have entered a dangerous era where a major section of the population has decided to make up their own reality.

How can we have a meaningful conversation when your loyalty to your tribe means more than facts, reason, or logic?

Link

You will never get any more out of life than you expect

Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t

Things live by moving and gain strength as they go

Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you

Looks like I’ve got a new podcast to check out.

Because the truth of the matter is that, however you go about it, you do need to build your capacity for hard, focused work. That is vital in an age of complexity, where we need to carve out a niche. Most of us aren’t making widgets anymore, and much of that work is being replaced by machines anyways.

Link

I’m not sure if I’m ready to drop $80 on his course quite yet ¹, but I completely agree with what he’s saying here. The ability to concentrate on difficult problems for an extended period of time is only going to become more valuable. Far too many people spend every spare second they have looking at their phone, literally falling down stairs so they don’t miss the latest snapchat alert.

tldr: If you have a Circle device and an Eero mesh network, plug the Circle into the Eero connected to your modem with an ethernet cable.

The router I bought last year just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Several times a day I’d have to turn off wifi and turn it back on again on my Mac, and I’d rarely see speeds over 12 Mbps, even though I’m paying for 100 Mbps from Mediacom. Part of it had to do with the placement of my desk relative to where the router sits, and part of it has to do with running my Mac in clamshell mode through most of the day. Whatever the reason, I was tired of it and splurged for a set of three Eero routers. Now I have one in the basement next to the modem, one in the office, and one in the kitchen, and I consistently get speeds around 70-80 Mbps from fast.com.

I was quite happy with my setup, until random devices on my home network suddenly stopped connecting to the Internet. First it was the Apple TV, then the Fire TV, then my daughters laptop, then my other daughters iPhone, then my iPhone, and when it got to my wife’s iPhone something had to change. Of course, I knew the culprit had to be our Circle from Disney.

The Circle is a little white box that sits on the network on controls access. It blocks content that we’d rather not have, and sets time limits, bed times, and reward systems for the kids. We have all the devices assigned to their owners and what we think are reasonable rules setup. For some reason when we hooked up the new routers I thought it’d be a good idea to move the circle out into the office; I guess I wanted to be able to see it. I sat the Circle next to the office Eero and assumed everything would be fine. It was not.

As I understand it, the Eero works by creating a subnetwork underneath your home network that is dedicated to the routers staying in contact with each other. Eero calls the software that manages the the system “TrueMesh™”, and it lets a device float between routers in the house without slowing down network speeds. The Circle works by using a technique called “ARP poisoning”, where the Circle becomes the default gateway on the network, allowing it to manage the traffic.

So, my theory is that when I set the Circle next to one of the satellite Eero routers, the Circle connected to the closest router and spoofed the default routers ARP address, which caused the router to not be able to communicate with the real default router, breaking the mesh network. Moving the Circle back to the basement and physically connecting¹ it to the primary router solved the problem.

I should mention that the Eero also has parental controls similar to Circle’s built in. I haven’t fully explored them yet, but from what I can tell they don’t quite have the feature set of the Circle. Future software updates might change that, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Overall I’m quite happy with both the Eero and the Circle. While expensive, the combination of the two gives me a fast, robust home network with detailed controls over who and what connects, what they have access to, and for how long. ²

It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.

…

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.

Link

Reminds me of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. “That the powerful play goes on, and you get to contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

In Nineteen Ninety-One, I was a freshman in high school, living in a tiny house in small town Montana. Just me and my mom. My family, like so many at the time, had fallen apart. We had moved around a lot, I felt odd and out of place. I was angry, full of teenage angst, and generally pissed off at the world for the hand it dealt me.

Somehow I had talked my mom into letting me have a TV in my room, and I used to stay up late at night to watch MTV broadcast the videos they deemed too weird for the standard days fare. It was one of those nights I saw and heard something new, something fresh and raw,Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. It blew me away. Apparently I wasn’t the only one either, because soon after I first saw it the rest of the world discovered Nirvana as well.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Nirvana had. They really were something different, at least to me. A melding of punk and pure rock-n-roll, three guys in a garage belting their rage into the abyss. To me, the kid that I was, Nirvana was the complete opposite of the popular butt-rock of the time. I mean seriously, look at these guys.

I remember offroading in the backwoods of Montana, my friend driving way too fast in his S10 pickup, playing Lithium as loud as it would go, and the both of us howling with delight as we launched the pickup over another hill.

Nirvana led me to Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Smashing Pumpkins, Blind Melon and so many more. They opened up the world of music to me by channeling what they felt through what they created, and I got it, because I felt that way too. Of course the lyrics of Smells Like Teen Spirit didn’t make any sense, but they didn’t have to, the world we were awakening to didn’t make any sense either. All we could to do was rage, rage, rage.

But not all the time. There were times of reflective introspection, easy, hopeful times of mindless joy, quiet times with the best of friends. A few years later, after the candle had burned so brightly, the light was put out.

Nirvana spoke to me in a way that nothing else did at the time. Nowadays I never listen to grunge, I mostly prefer jazz and classical. I also can’t say that the bands message is something I believe in now. I’ve moved on.

I’ve been thinking more about my defense of the Mac as a long-term computing platform, and I’m slowly coming around to understanding that at the base of my ideas is a type of willful ignorance that I should know better than to indulge in. The world is changing, computers are changing, and how we work and interact with them is changing drastically. To get to the root of this, let’s follow the five “whys” of why I need a Mac to work.

I need a Mac to get my work done. Why?

Because the Mac is a Unix based computer that includes the standard set of tools I use day to day, and it’s solid and reliable enough for me to depend on to work well when I need it.

Why do I need a Unix computer to work?

Because I’m a devops engineer, or automation engineer, or advanced sysadmin, whatever you’d care to call this job at the moment. I work primarily with AWS, and the best tools for building the automation systems for deploying our applications use the command line. Not to mention I often need to ssh into a server to troubleshoot it.

Why does the AWS environment use the command line?

Well, technically the command line is just one of the tools available, the awscli tools talk back to the AWS API, and AWS has SDKs available for popular languages. I could, and often do, write python code to accomplish what I need done. I suppose the real answer to this question is that there is currently no better interface for doing what I do.

Why is there no better interface for doing what you need to do?

Because designing human interfaces that make sense is difficult, especially with complex concepts. We need to be able to express logically that one bit of code needs to pull data from another bit of code which is pulling data from a database, all the while ensuring that the customer is getting the information they need quickly and easily.

Why are the systems you work with so complicated?

That’s a good question. Maybe they don’t need to be, or maybe in the near future they won’t be anymore. My work involves manipulating data, building websites that allow people access to upload and download data, and ensuring that the infrastructure these systems run on remains fast and available. How much of this is now being built into platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform? How much of what I do each day could soon be accomplished by machine learning?

What if you could ask your phone to generate a graph of Apple’s annual profit and loss, and be sure that the visuals it returned were accurate and reliable? What if I could tell an iPad to build a highly available, auto-scaling infrastructure for hosting the Python code in my git repository, and the iPad would just go out and build everything I needed? How far are we from AI being able to tell from looking at a git repo the details of the infrastructure it needs? In that scenario, what use is “devops” when the engineer is AWS? For that matter, how far away are we from telling the computer the logic of what we need and having it develop the code for us?

Possibly not far. A recent article in Wiredexplores this very possibility:

Traditional coding won’t disappear completely—indeed, O’Reilly predicts that we’ll still need coders for a long time yet—but there will likely be less of it, and it will become a meta skill, a way of creating what Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, calls the “scaffolding” within which machine learning can operate.

That scaffolding is where I’ve been aiming my career for quite a while now, but, it may not be enough.

In the long run, Thrun says, machine learning will have a democratizing influence. In the same way that you don’t need to know HTML to build a website these days, you eventually won’t need a PhD to tap into the insane power of deep learning. Programming won’t be the sole domain of trained coders who have learned a series of arcane languages. It’ll be accessible to anyone who has ever taught a dog to roll over. “For me, it’s the coolest thing ever in programming,” Thrun says, “because now anyone can program.”

Basic economics says that scarcity creates value, in a world where anyone can program the skill currently required would be drastically devalued. This predicts a move from “infrastructure as code” to “infrastructure as algorithmically determined”.

I need a Mac for what I do now, but if current trends continue I might not need a Mac for much longer to do my job. In fact, as the tech industry continues to evolve, it’s entirely possible that it will evolve to the point where it no longer needs me. When that happens, maybe I’ll finally open up that coffee shop I’ve been dreaming about for decades.