Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS:
The real issues present themselves when you’ve chosen WordPress as the CMS for your client project. That’s when you’ll have to think a bit outside the box, or not really, but at least peek over the blog focus edge at least.
I take a picture of myself using my iPhone to take a picture of my friend Ashley using her iPhone.
An extensive article on the dirty tricks that infatuation plays on the brain. Said tricks include spiking levels of dopamine (the hormone triggered by most illegal drugs), lowering serotonin to levels that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder, shutting off the fear-producing amygdala, and generally stirring the limbic system with a big old crazy stick.
It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.
The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.
But my favorite nugget is in the sidebar. According to one psychologist, the key to a lasting marriage isn’t love or common interests. It’s the lack of attractive alternatives.
The best predictor of divorce, Aron says, has little to do with love, even less to do with initial attraction. It has to do with the availability of other options. If people are happy, other options are less appealing and they’re more likely to stay married. If they’re unhappy but can’t imagine an alternative that isn’t even worse, again, they’ll stay married. (This is the probable reason many abused women stay in their relationships.)
It’s not the first research to suggest that too much choice can be problematic.
Jonathan Rauch on the care and feeding of introverts:
Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.
The archived copy of Neal Stephenson’s famous explanation for why he is a bad correspondent. The short answer: he’d rather be a good novelist.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.
More in this vein (including similar quotes from other authors) on the archived copy of his homepage.
via 43folders
I’m pretty sure that one of my favorites of his (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) was drafted during a ferry ride en route to read with Robert Lowell. That is balls. And it’s also a better lesson than maybe any one of O’Hara’s works: your creative life is part of your life. When making things is just another open window, you’ve won.
If not for all the construction, it’d be easy to forget that Northwest Arkansas is one big boomtown. It’s the only place in the state where you’ll ever see luxury condominiums going up in an otherwise modest university town next door to a restaurant that sells dollar tacos on Tuesdays. (Pictured is a set of condos under construction on the side of Dickson St. in Fayetteville.)
Photo shot with the iPhone. Entry posted from WordPress for iPhone.
Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com.
Horror aside, there are a dozen plots for screenplays and novels in this exploration of the culture and real-world consequences of trolling. Post title is from the photo caption.
Dan Barry writes a stirring, lyrical report on wind farms in Nebraska.
One of the men featured is a retired soldier who fought in the Iraq war but now works to maintain the turbines and their 8.5-ton blades. Barry’s trying too hard for the lyricism throughout the opening graphs, I think, but he earns it with the parallel at the end.