Category: life

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Alright, here’s a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:

  • 20% easy access to both sides of the brain
  • 30% curiosity about pretty much everything
  • 10% drawing and writing treated as equals
  • 15% a wee bit of perfectionism
  • 10% tech savvy
  • 15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance

For those of you just tuning in, I’m talking about how Austin described his self-portrait in response to my snippet referencing Michael Surtees’ post about an image from Steven Heller’s book, Nigel Holmes on Information Design, which I probably ought to buy.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

In Believer Magazine, The Official Guide to Official Handbooks: The Rich Legacy of Putting Others in Their Cultural Place:

Americans love to believe that with the right wardrobe and vocabulary, anyone can become anything. We also love the righteousness and special insight that come with being an outsider, from being turned away from the clubs that matter. People don’t make their mark by writing books about how swimmingly they fit in at boarding school, or about how their blue-blooded family isn’t stocked with alcoholic lunatics. The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), along with lesser followers like The Official Slacker Handbook (1994) and The Hipster Handbook (2002), capitalizes on our ambivalence about exclusivity.

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn’t want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But… he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and it’s been all good ever since. This book has me fired up.

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If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its superiority depends upon its power of concentration—of bringing all its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon it.

From Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay On Noise. I think maybe he might have appreciated GTD, were it around in his day.

And I’m back

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I’m back from hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Go look at my photos from the past 2 months and 1000 miles. I’ll be easing back into regular duty here over the next couple weeks, as I mull over what new directions I’d like to take the website and my life in general. It’s good to be home.

And I’m gone…

~ Mark ~ 3 Comments

Like I mentioned, this summer I will be thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, which runs from north Georgia to central Maine along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. After a minor post-ponement I’ll be starting Sunday morning, April 22—things will be mighty slow around these parts until I get back.
I had a mostly incredible time back in 2005, and I’ve got a pretty wild mix of emotions about my trip this summer. I’ll probably be hiking around the same daily distance I did last time, aiming to finish in about 100 days, give or take a week. And like last time, this year I’ll be hiking under my trail name of “Whistler.” (Trail names are little nicknames that thru-hikers often assume.)

This year I’m leaving about a month earlier than I did in 2005. This should be interesting in a couple ways. For one, most thru-hikers start in March or April, so this time I’ll be starting with the crowd rather than catching up to them, for better or worse. The weather will also be a good bit colder at the beginning–I’ve even heard of freak snow in the Virginia mountains in May. It could happen. At least it looks like the weather for my first week will be pretty good. An April start will also let me see more of the peak of wildflower season that I missed last time.

Anyway. Tomorrow morning in about 10 hours my parents will drop me off at Amicalola Falls State Park and from there I’ll walk a 9-mile approach trail to Springer Mountain, where the AT officially starts. After that… a 2200-mile summer.

See y’all in August.