These sketchnotes by Mike Rohde are great. I was particularly impressed by Good Design Hurts from SXSW. Both the content (Gruber etco.) and the presentation (Rohde) are worthwhile.

Here is a clear visual about each of our impact on greenhouse gasses. Pretty effective, I think. (Tip o’hat to information aesthetics).

Twenty years ago today Mary and I shared our vows with a few hundred friends. This is how we shared those words in 1988.

We cherish this opportunity to see God’s web become visible among us. We know that for many people, especially our gay and lesbian friends, that opportunity rarelly, if ever, arises. We would like you to share in making this web even stronger and more visible by joining us—and joining hands—in a prayer for the people in our lives whom we love for better and for worse. Friends, family, lovers, community—all share bonds that stretch rather than break, and expand instead of explode. Please join us in this prayer with the one or ones you are committed to:

Before God and this community I promise that I will be honest with you, that I will share with you who I am and who I am becoming, that I will respect you and celebrate the ways you are different from me, that I will care for you always, that I will seek your forgiveness when we fail to live up to our shared covenant, and that I will dream with you and work with you to make those dreams come true.

I know I have failed to live up to this covenant countless times, and I thank Mary for her forgiveness and patience. I hope that many more years of dreaming together lie ahead, and I am so pleased we now get to share our lives with Alex and Nathaniel as well. Thank you, Mary. Ich liebe dich.

A few months ago I insisted to a potential employer that I could do the job they had posted in four days a week. They could not see that, I told them I was not interested in a five day per week commitment. We parted ways. I was very interested to read in the 37signals blog that they are now trying a four day work week company-wide. 37signals is a small company, but even so it is encouraging to see folks trying this out. In a way, Google’s “20% time on your own project” policy is similar, take a day of the week for your own interests. More recently, 37signals says the four day week is working and has, in fact, highlighted the poison nature of urgency. An interesting finding, I think.

I once got in trouble for sending Nathaniel to the gas station down the block for candy. I remember going three blocks away for candy when I was a kid. Is today so much more dangerous or are we more afraid? I was proud of this parent, I think she’s right. Kids need chances to express their independence. My fear is that if we don’t give them reasonable venues to be independent, they will find unreasonable ones.

OK, Thinking Machines was cool. Then to have the gall to imagine not just indexing, but also archiving the internet. And then to believe that for $10 a book we could scan the content of our libraries. Brewster Kahle just finds one amazing thing to do after another, this list isn’t even half complete. Anything seems possible. Now I hear that he has turned IA’s highspeed switch into a pathway to the internet for public housing projects in San Francisco.

The apartments are connected to the Internet at 100 megabits a second, a speed that contrasts sharply with the normal high-speed Internet service offered by telephone and cable companies, which is usually less than 6 megabits a second. [...]

“We are pleased to be the first nonprofit organization to bring public housing online,” Mr. Kahle said. “We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology.”

He just can’t be stopped! Way to go, Brewster.

The 37signals folks say this in Getting Real:

Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing. Constraints drive innovation.

Constraints also force you to get your idea out in the wild sooner rather than later — another good thing. A month or two out of the gates you should have a pretty good idea of whether you’re onto something or not.

My brother was in town this week and Mary had the wonderful idea of bringing some of her students and their friends together to talk with him. We had a great evening talking about entrepreneurship, church, spirit, and failure. One of the wonderful phrases Christopher uses is “failing forward.” Failure can’t be avoided, in fact failure is necessary to success, but he likes to try to fail forward, to at least end up somewhere new as a result of his failure.

Today Mary passed along a blog post by Ryan, who was with us yesterday. This post references a wonderful clip of Ira Glass talking about the importance of killing crap and failing forward.

Jill Bolte Taylor describes her brain to us. Vividly, since she is a brain scientist, dramatically, since she experienced a stroke, compellingly, since that stroke quieted the chatter of her left brain and left her in the “la la land” of her right brain.

Who am I? Why do I choose to be as I am?

UPDATE: An article in the NYT today.

“A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime ‘kills’ was his favourite author.” Horst Rippert learned that in July 1944 he shot down his favorite author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He says he would have held his fire had he known. “Who knows what other great books he would have gone on to write?”

I wonder what great books any of the other 28 victims of Rippert would have written. When we make a choice to kill, we must realize that we are killing endless possibilities.

“Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing.”

“They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”