At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

And then there was the fact that rowed across two oceans. Rowed! No sail or motor other than his back and arms row row rowing his boat across the waves. It took 180 days for him to cross the pond from England to the U.S., then 361 days from America to Australia.

The hurricane slowed him down a bit.

Best quote? Here you go:

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore.

Bloody stupid indeed. Rest in peace Mr. Fairfax.

My article/essay/blog post reading has become intensely social. I think easily more than half of the articles I read in the average day come from passed links on Twitter. Those social recommendations are a tremendous source of serendipity, much more interesting and unpredictable than they are given credit for. It’s not just an echo chamber of predictable fare from a close circle of friends, partially because I follow a lot of people from different fields who are not personal friends: musicians and political writers and food writers and movie critics, etc. And also because they’re often retweeting interesting links from people I’ve never even heard of. This is not a new idea: it’s the strength of weak ties argument essentially. But I’m surprised that people still underestimate the power of those weak ties in terms of making surprising and rich new connections.

This is very true for me. I find a lot of great new things to read that would never have crossed my radar thanks to my "fake friends" and have grown because of it.

Score!

Since my birthday is imminent and we already have our income tax refund we decided to whoop it up and spend the night downtown at the famous Read House hotel. We have reservations for dinner at Porter’s Steakhouse.

We needed a break so bad right now. The next 36 hours are going to rock in so many ways. After I finish this latté from Starbucks we’re going for a dip in the hot tub.

Pictures? Of course! Here are a few.

Just as I got the idea for this terrible metaphor, I froze. There are too many bit buckets to choose from and it’s time to take a big boy gulp of my own medicine (that I only wrote about last week!) and further refine my writing workflow. Before I get into that (What? Again?!), let’s take a look at the market because this post has a clearly defined trigger.

Look! Something shiny!

Last night I stumbled across a fascinating notebook app produced by @fabulouslyretro called Meernotes, which led to a similar product Pad & Quill. Both are, in fact, fabulously retro, but I don’t think they will end up in my writing stable. Ultimately, Day One is going to be the app I use for journaling.

And iOS apps like these two are only the beginning. A few others in neutral alphabetical order include Daedalus, Elements, Nebulous Notes, Notesy, Plaintext, Simplenote, Writeroom, and Writing Kit. These are just a few and all of them run on my iPhone and iPad with the exception of Daedalus, which has a super cool “piles of paper” file structure that is more functional than it sounds. That’s part of the problem for me though. I don’t need a cool filing system to play with, I need a place to write.

The problem isn’t finding a writing app, it’s choosing one that suits your writing habits and sticking with it. All of these apps share core capabilities of accepting your words and syncing with Dropbox, but likewise each offers a slightly different twist on appearance and function.

Then we come full circle from iOS to the desktop and Mac OS X for a virtually bottomless list of bejeweled bit buckets is available for a writer’s use. Many powerful tools tempt writers with their siren song of features. TextEdit is bundled with every Mac and is enough for most work. If not, Pages and Microsoft Word (among many other word processors) are waiting with a glut of features to catch you. Then, there is the world of text editors where you find TextMate, Text Wrangler, and BBEdit, and don’t get the neckbeards started on vi and emacs. Another goodie for round-tripping from mobile to Mac is nvALT.

Then, there are writing environments like Ulysses and Scrivener. Scrivener is the one for me and just about my favorite place to work couple with BBEdit for its syntax highlighting and advanced text handling. QuickCursor makes short work of switching between Scrivener and BBEdit.

Also, Markdown. And for the record, I wrote this post in BBEdit and posted it with MarsEdit.

There’s more. Groan. While writing this brief piece I also thought about Byword, iA Writer, Mariner Write, Nisus Writer, and VoodooPad and the real bit buckets like DEVONthink, Evernote, and Yojimbo (which I really want to like but it just doesn’t fit into my workflow). I just didn’t have the heart to go back and weave it into this piece.

Now that I’ve inundated you with fiddly bits, give them a review if you haven’t already and pick the ones that suit your needs. Then, delete the others. That’s what I plan to do today.

1. Learn about Markdown (can’t thank @gruber enough for this one)
2. Buy Scrivener for Mac for longer work
3. Pick a plain text editor for Mac OS X (it’s helpful to sync with iOS)
4. Pick a plain text editor for iOS (it’s helpful to sync with Mac OS X)
5. Write (this part is all you)

MultiMarkdown is worth checking out for writers who need another layer of formatting such as formatted tables.

You're probably on a budget. If you need anything else to make it pretty, I suggest Apple Pages over Microsoft Word. If you want to make it really pretty, then you should leapfrog word processors to Adobe InDesign. Then, I'll have to write something else for you.

Pro tip: for the serious writers who made it this far, you really should look at Scrivener. It's a game changer. You won't look at writing the same after you understand it.

After uploading a PDF using Interarchy, it’s easy to copy the FTP URL or the public URL, but neither is exactly what I need to make a working link. I would end up with one of two things, a public URL:

http://www.someDomain.com/somedirectory/filename.pdf

…or the FTP URL:

ftp://fooBar@/www/someDirectory/fileName.pdf

The first one would require a little more work to add a directory in right spot in the middle of the URL so I opted for the second option, which would allow me to delete a string from the beginning and replace it with one that suits my purposes.

Here is the TextExpander snippet that does the work:

#!/usr/bin/perl

// I don't know why, but "use strict" seems like it should be there

use strict;

// Grab the clipboard item snatched from Interarchy

my($text);
$text = `pbpaste`;

// Search for the part I don't want and replace with what I do want

$text =~ s/ftp:\/\/fooBar@/http:\/\//g;

// Paste it into place

print "$text";

// This isn't perl. This is a TextExpander placeholder to delete the space I use to
// delete the space I use to activate the snippet.

%-

Some of you are probably cringing right now. I'm sure there is a better way to do this, but I figured it out on my own (well, with a little help from several websites) and it does exactly what I need it to do.

Isn't that what it's all about?

Writing, clear and simple | Harvard Gazette:

“Simple does not mean ‘simpleton,’ ” [Thomas] said. “Simple often means quite the opposite, that you’ve really thought through the problem and found a clear way to express a complex thought. But students see a lot of different models of writing and think that they have to sound sophisticated by writing convoluted sentences. Really, they should take complicated thoughts and figure out how to render them in a clear way.”

This is so true and such hard work to do well.

(Via Harvard Gazette)

Several years ago, I found Michael Hyatt’s e-book titled Creating Your Personal Life Plan at his website, filed it away as something that may be useful some day, and ambled blindly forward with my life. Thank goodness I pulled that ace back out of the deck and invested several hours designing my own life plan today.

Checking out Hyatt’s …Life Plan would be a worthy investment of your time. The man himself lays it out for you in his video embedded below. It’s a little infomercially--he gets paid to talk about leadership, life balance, productivity, and social media--but it gets the idea across in 2min 20sec.

…most people spend more time planning a one-week vacation than they spend planning their life. --Michael Hyatt

Great point, and true. I have spent more time deciding where to go for vacation than deciding where I want to be in five years. Now I am working to change that. The outline I’ve crafted so far is looking pretty good and I look forward to filling in the details so I can have a map to navigate my future.

In Case You Forgot, NVAlt is Awesome « Macdrifter:

Copy a URL and switch back to NVAlt. Hit shift-cmd-V to paste as a new note. The source is downloaded into a new note and Markdown-ified.

John Gruber (who approves of Apple's implementation) and Andy Ihnatko (who doesn't) led the discussion that rapidly splintered off into hundreds of conversations like some fungus spreading across the Internet.

So, here is my input.

Step 1. Learn how your new phone works before you go to the symphony.

That is all.

Feel free to continue to grumble amongst yourselves. Please be sure to emphasize how right/wrong Apple is about this and how great/terrible the iPhone is when compared to other smart phones.

N.B.: Don't fool yourself into saying it's a Mute button. It's a switch.