Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I haven’t got much work-work done this weekend, except for a three-hour burst around midnight last night.

So far today, I’ve been focusing on little things: cleaning the apartment, scanning and shredding documents, doing laundry. Some days, I need this a lot more than I need to get the big stuff done, for my own sanity. I’ve been carrying about 20 items over from one daily todo list to the next, and it often feels like I’m not getting anything accomplished. On days like this, I need to spend a couple hours just doing the little stuff, to make some progress and knock some stuff off the list and get me started.

And for that reason, it’s been a pretty satisfying day already.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

From Cracked.com: 10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On:

The war that’s coming between the fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core Atheists probably won't be the most violent of the holy wars. But it has the potential to be the most annoying. Well, I’m going to try to stop it.

…So how about this: I’m going to throw out a few of these statements - things I think we have to agree on if we want to avoid disaster - and you can read until you see something you disagree with. We’ll see how long we can make it last.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

This one’s about four years old, but new to me thanks to kottke. Some of this stuff really irks me in my peers. My favorite:

19. Take care of yourself. If you are sick, visit a doctor. If you are sad, visit a shrink or talk to a friend. If you are unhappy in love, break up. If you are fed up with how you look, buy a new shirt or stop eating cheese. If you have a problem, try to fix it. Many problems are knotty and need a lot of talking through, or time to resolve, but after a few months of all complaining and no fixing, those around you will begin to wonder if you don't enjoy the problems for the attention they bring you. Venting is fine; inertia coupled with pouting is not. Bored? Read a magazine. Mad at someone? Say so — to them. Change is hard; that's too bad. Effort counts. Make one. Your mommy's shift is over.

25 And Over « Tomato Nation

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Christopher Hitchens doesn’t take shit: Is the U.S. a Christian nation? - Salon.com.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

This one has been sitting in my drafts for a while now. Greta Christina wrote a couple months ago about being an atheist in the LGBT community, and gay in the atheist community:

In a lot of ways, I think the atheist movement today is very much where the queer movement was in the early ’70s — newly visible, newly vocal, pissed off as hell, still finding its voice, just beginning to gain real strength. I think the two communities could learn an enormous amount from each other, and I think that they’re natural allies.

And yet, I’m having a realization that I’m finding extremely unsettling.

I’ve been an out queer, and an active participant in the queer community, for over 20 years now. I’ve felt for years like the LGBT community was my home base. I’ve only identified as an atheist for less than two years.

And yet I’m finding that I feel more at home — more welcomed, more valued, more truly understood — as a queer in the atheist community than I do as an atheist in the queer community.

Like, a lot more.

Part 2: How To Be An Ally with Atheists.

And a postscript: Greta consistently writes great posts about atheism and other stuff - including sex, so viewer beware.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Maybe you’ve read it. 10 Myths — and 10 Truths — About Atheism. Sam Harris’s famous op-ed piece for the L.A. Times. An attempt to clear up the most common misunderstandings about atheists.

The piece is a good idea. But something about it bugs me. Specifically, it bugs me how much time Harris spent dissing religion. Don’t get me wrong — I think religion deserves criticism. But here, I think it’s inappropriate. If you’re writing a piece saying, “Here’s who we are, and why the myths about us are incorrect,” IMO you shouldn’t go off on a “Here’s why the rest of you are losers” tangent. It’s not persuasive… and it’s seriously off-topic.

Read the rest on Greta Christina’s Blog.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I need thought I would be the kind of guy to clip coupons, but you see, Safeway includes some stats on their receipts. They tell you how much you saved with your club card, how much you saved from coupons, and the total percentage off your order.

Now, it’s like a game. Tonight, I got 34%. Not bad, and I saved about $21, but my high score is 44%.

Seriously, what am I turning into?

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Our incredibly yuppie Saturday started with Erin’s haircut from a very gay gentleman at a local salon. After that, we wandered into some little locally-owned shops and ran into Brian at The Bike Rack - he was getting his handlebars re-taped, I was looking into a helmet and pannier bags. We stopped into the new Yes! Organic Market to get some food for a picnic lunch in the park. Then it was another bike shop, a fancy chocolate shop, and our couple’s massage. We came home from there to walk our disobedient but adorable twelve pounds of fluff, showered, and went to dinner at the new Vapiano in our neighborhood. On the way there, we backtalked a fundie nut with a bible that was harassing people on their way into the Sixth & I Synagogue.

It was a good day.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

I really like this. Straight from dive into mark: The pursuit of happiness.

1. Stop buying stuff you don’t need
2. Pay off all your credit cards
3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in your house/apartment storage lockers, etc.
4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit on the first floor of your house attic, garage, etc.
5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in one room of your house
6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a suitcase
7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a backpack
8. Get rid of the backpack

I’m working on step 4.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

A perfect place to start on the Internet: Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

This has been sitting in my to-write-about bucket for a while, but I’m not going to get around to it. Go read: Greta Christina’s Blog: Atheism and the “Shut Up, That’s Why” Arguments.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Remember that dot that’s been showing up on my MacBook Pro display?  I caught it!  It’s definitely not a dead pixel or anything like that, since I was able to screen cap it and zoom in on it.  Still don’t know what’s going on, though.

Originally published at Brock Boland. Please leave any comments there.

Handy! Quicklook for Markdown files.

(via Daring Fireball)

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

Every now and then I notice a pixel on my MacBook Pro display that’s stuck on white. This pixel has a 1-pixel wide light gray border. And it isn’t a dead pixel in the display - it appears in different places in the display at different times.

Now, just what in the hell am I supposed to do about that?

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

I feel like I should want to write a lot more than I actually want to write. It’s a weird sensation, like I should take a lot of joy in something that I keep avoiding. And not just here, on my blog, but writing just for me, too. At different times, I’ve tried my hand at journaling and fiction writing, and as much as I enjoyed both, I just can’t find the motivation to anymore. Like so many things, I feel like it needs to be good, like there’s no point in sullying my nice, clean, fresh-paged Moleskine notebook with crap. I feel like anything I write needs to come out fully formed and halfway decent, so I avoid it because it feels like a chore.  It’s surely related to the reverence for books that kept me from making notes in the margins until pretty recently.

What I really need to do is just write. That seems to be the key for actual writers, from what I’ve heard. For me, it won’t be about getting a lot of ideas out or achieving some word count, but about simply getting over this bizarre hangup with a nice notebook, and the expectation that any content I put in it must be worthy of the honor.

The other thing about actually physically writing is that it is physical.  There’s no way to search it.  I can’t copy and paste out of a notebook into a computer.  There’s an underlying apprehension that anything I put in a notebook will never be seen again, because I can’t easily look for it, and I can’t easily do anything else with it.

This comes up every now and then, this time because several people linked to an article from a guy who amassed eighty-some notebooks over the two decades of his career, and someone else’s mention of Field Notes.  I can’t help but think that I would like to be able to look over a stack of my old notebooks someday, and that I’d like to be the kind of guy who always has great ideas that need to be sketched out in a handy pocket notebook like the Field Notes book.  I’m not sure I am that guy, but for some reason, I’d like very much to be.

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

Erin and a girl she works with decided early last week to do a detox diet together. They’re doing different versions if it, but Erin is doing two days of juice, then ten days of just fruit, then two weeks of fruit with raw veggies and nuts. And for some reason, I agreed to do it with them.

Of course, I kind of have a reason. I had been snacking more and more, and my meals were gradually getting bigger to satisfy me - the exact same things I was doing the last time I gained a bunch of weight. I didn’t expect any kind of detoxifying effects, I just wanted to break those habits. But, I also knew that two days of only juice would be too much for me, and I misheard Erin when she first told me about it and didn’t think it was ten days of just fruit. I decided to do a week of fruit, then two weeks of raw veggies and nuts. I started with dinner last Thursday, so the way I see it, I can start eating veggies tonight.

I think I’ve figured out why vegans are so skinny - they just get sick of food and don’t bother eating. I am so tired of fruit that the next banana I see may be used as a weapon. On the other hand, I’ve lost nine pounds since Sunday morning. For most people, that wouldn’t be healthy, and really, it probably isn’t for me, either.  But at my size, I can afford to lose nine pounds pretty quickly. And I’m OK with it - I’m at my lowest weight since who-knows-when, and today I’m finally wearing the smaller jeans I bought on a very optimistic day a year or two ago. I know it’s going to be difficult to keep the weight off, there’s no doubt about that. Of course, after this diet, a piece of bread sounds like a pretty great meal, so maybe I’ll be able to stay in the habit of eating better.

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

I’m not sure I really get people that believe the Bible is the word of God.

This is the word of God! This is the highest book in all the land! It is the literal word of God, and every word is sacred! Well, except maybe this part - “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.” I mean, that’s just plain un-American, right there. And that part about stoning your children or selling your daughter into slavery, I think that part’s a metaphor. But gays! Man, does God hate the gays! He didn’t put them in the top ten, but it’s definitely worse than that thing about my neighbor’s house.

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

Things

I talked about Things plenty when I compared it to OmniFocus a couple months ago. I’m still using it several times a day and love it. It has been updated a couple times since then, and now supports tags in the mobile version. No support for Areas yet, but it still serves my needs pretty well.

Byline

Byline is a pretty slick Google Reader client. I’ve gone back and forth between Byline and the mobile version of the Reader site, but Byline sealed the deal by adding folder support a little while ago. It allows you to share, star, and note items, and you can sync up to 200 items for offline reading - great for reading on the Metro, where I don’t get any cell service.

Instapaper

I fiddled with Instapaper on my desktop and didn’t really see the point, until I got the iPhone app. Instapaper gives you a bookmarklet that will save the content of a web page to their service, and for most sites, figure out which part of the page contains the content so you can just view the actual text.

Sort of useful on a computer; way useful on a mobile device. It will sync the articles you choose and save them on the iPhone for offline reading. Again, great for Metro rides. I typically use this in conjunction with Google Reader: when I come across a longer article or blog post that I want to read later, I save it to Instapaper and read it on the train.

There are two versions of Instapaper available in the app store: the free basic version, and the $10 pro version. The pro version includes several extra features, but the most important is that it will remember your place for you. The basic version just drops you at the list of articles every time you start it, which is a pain if you close the app halfway through a long article.

Evernote

Evernote is a web app for collecting your notes, and they also have clients for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. I’m finally getting comfortable savings things in here, like all the stuff that was in my “Reference” e-mail folders and personal wiki, and a bunch of information about our wedding.

Viewing the notes does require a net connection - it seems that they are cached temporarily but not stored long-term. However, they recently added a feature to mark your favorites notes, which will be saved on your iPhone. I used this for notes about prescriptions and medical information, and information about upcoming flights - basically, stuff that I need to be able to get at whether I have cell reception or not.

Tweetie

I’ve only been using Tweetie for a couple days, but it’s way better than the other Twitter clients I’ve tried. Granted, it’s been a while since I tried any - Twinkle was so slow and weird when I used it months ago that I’ve been using the Twitter mobile site for a long time now. Tweetie is really quick and has a pretty full feature set, so I think I’ll keep it.

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

Hurrah!

In addition, I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries.

via The White House - Blog Post - Statement released after the President rescinds “Mexico City Policy”.

Originally published at BrockLi Soup. Please leave any comments there.

• Coke Vanilla Zero
• Pretzels
• Not being a parent
• My new MacBook Pro and the huge cinema display I use it with at work
• Simpsons re-runs
• Our new apartment