It started with an email from a woman named Diana. It was December, 2010. I had just crossed the 6-month mark as a full time freelancer, and was being presented with a job opportunity at a little company in Palo Alto, California.

A little company called Aol.

After several phone interviews, I was asked to fly down to the Golden State for further discussion about the teams that were looking for fresh design talent. One of those teams—the mobile division—was headed up by a fellow Canadian by the name of David Robinson. David and I hit it off right away, and by the end of the trip things were looking like I’d be joining his team as a mobile user interface designer.

If only I’d gone to school.

You see, the immigration office of the United States of America has tightened up the rules for those coming into their country to work. Even with a job offer in hand, I wouldn’t be able to get into the US without a post-secondary degree. As a bible college drop-out, I simply don’t qualify.

I was bummed, mostly because I was excited to work with David and his team on some pretty awesome projects, including what would become their rather impressive iPad app, Editions.

Back in Ontario, my freelance career continued to grow and develop. I was working with awesome clients on awesome projects. At the beginning of the year, I found myself in California for a few weeks working with Ongo. California was awesome. The West Coast was awesome. And I wanted to see more.

So, I made my way to Vancouver, BC.

The city was beautiful. The weather was much nicer than what we were experiencing in Ontario and the people seemed very friendly. I really enjoyed my time there, relaxing and taking in the scenery.

And then, I got a Twitter message from David Robinson.

Turns out, David’s brother Danny was based in Vancouver and was working on a new start up business and I should meet up with him because we’d really hit it off and there might be an opportunity to work with Danny and his team.

He was right.

Danny and I grabbed coffee and talked for an hour or two about design, apps, user experience, the city of Vancouver, and more. The projects he was working on all sounded really intriguing, and he felt strongly that there was a place for my input and expertise.

I started doing a bit of freelance work with the team. They were really happy with what I was doing, and wanted to have me work from their office in Vancouver.

So, that’s where I’m going.

In less than four days I will be flying across this great nation of ours to a city I never dreamed I’d move to. I’m excited, anxious, and a bit nervous about shipping all of my guitars.

It’s been nearly two years working by myself. It’s been awesome, but I’ve definitely missed working closely with a team. I will be working full time with Danny and his team, as well as maintaining my freelance work on the side.

I can’t wait to share what we’ll be working on on the left coast. But first, I’ve got a plane to catch.

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It struck me as I watched Ben Gibbard sing. He wasn’t struggling one bit to get his words out. Every note was flawless, every inflection perfect.

Yes, Ben Gibbard has an incredible voice, but in a very different way than an Aretha Franklin or Freddie Mercury. Ben has his own range. It’s not very big, but he owns it.

Not long ago, I was trying so hard to sing like Ben Gibbard. Just as I had once tried so hard to sing like Dave Grohl, as I had tried so hard to sing like James Hetfield, as I had tried so hard to sing like Billie Joe Armstrong.

But they weren’t in my range.

But I pushed it. I wanted to belt the high notes in Iris. I wanted to scream the emotion in Monkey Wrench.

But they weren’t in my range.

Finally, now having seen a master of his craft stick to his range, I realize I’ve been wasting too much time out of my own.

Your most reliable work will always be within your range. Go just a bit outside of that to show your passion and stretch yourself. But go too far beyond that and you’ll be so strained that ultimately the work will suffer.

※ Permalink for “Range” published on date_to_rfc822

I became a fan of Rdio some time ago. I liked that I could easily see what my friends were listening to, and could listen to an album on-the-go without having to download it to my iPhone.

I started using Rdio in a site-specific browser. I had created an icon in the same vein as the Grooveshark icon I was using. Shortly after designing the icon, I decided to uninstall flash, rendering my Rdio browser useless. The icon I designed was never released.

When Rdio came out with a new Mac app that didn’t require Flash, I was really excited to for it to become a staple in my dock. What I wasn’t prepared for was the rather boring icon.

So, I dusted off the old icon I had made for the site-specific browser, and replaced that boring old square. I’ve had it there a few weeks now, and have been really happy with it. Then today I thought, maybe others might like the same thing?

So, here it is, available for you to download. I hope you enjoy!

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I have been very happy with my 15” MacBook Pro. I bought it in the summer of 2009 with hopes it would last me 4–5 years. This seemed even more likely once I upgraded my boot drive to an SSD.

All was looking good, until earlier this month when I made a big mistake while trying to replace a cooling fan. I called Apple and an Apple repair specialist about fixing the connector I broke, but neither were willing to help. The only solution given was to replace the logic board, which cost just a bit less than a new Macbook Air.

I have a temporary solution in place for the moment, but this unfortunate event has caused me to begin thinking about a new computer. The only problem: I have no idea what to get.

Tried and True

I could, of course, just buy a new 15” MacBook Pro. However, there are two problems with this solution:

1. There have been reports of the latest MacBook Pros having serious heating and fan-noise issues. Considering this whole problem started with a fan issue, I’d really like to avert this situation altogether.
2. There have been reports that the next 15” MacBook Pro will match the slimmer design of the MacBook Air. Assuming a similar 33% decrease in weight between the 13” Air and Pro, an Air-styled 15” Macbook Pro would be a welcome respite to my aching shoulders.

When it comes to forecasting when new Macs are coming, I trust the judgement of Marco Arment. His logic is sound: the next MacBooks to come out will likely sport the new Ivy Bridge processor from Intel, which is scheduled for release in late April. I’m not sure how long Apple needs once the processors are released to work them into the MacBook lineup, but let’s assume a couple of months.

It doesn’t make much sense to the geek in me to purchase a computer that may soon be upgraded. And, if we assume the 15” MacBook Pro never gets the Air treatment, I’m not sure I want another bulky, hard to carry notebook.

If, in a couple of months, Apple releases an Air-ified 15” MacBook Pro. Great. I’m in line on day one. But, if they don’t get the Air treatment, what do I do?

The Mighty Air?

I’ve heard from several friends who have MacBook Airs that they have been blown away by their performance. For most of these people, buying an Air was their first experience with an SSD. As we know, moving from an HDD to an SSD is a significant speed upgrade.

I, on the other hand, already have an SSD boot drive. Since the upgrade to an SSD last year, I’ve had the benefit of a great CPU, a fantastic GPU, lots of RAM, and the wonder of an SSD boot drive. So, in my case, buying a 13” MacBook Air would actually be a downgrade.

iMac?

I’ve often thought about getting a top-of-the-line iMac. You can get a specced-out iMac for less than a specced-out 15” MacBook Pro, and you get a whole lot more power, memory, and hard drive space with the iMac. Of course, the major downside to the iMac is lack of mobility.

A quick solution to the mobility problem is to buy a specced-out iMac for work, and maybe an 11 or 13” Macbook Air for mobile use. The cost of this option, unfortunately, is significantly higher than simply purchasing a single computer.

What To Do?

So, I’m at a crossroads. I don’t need to make a decision immediately, and I want to see what Apple has in store over the next few months. But, if they don’t release a MacBook Pro with better performance and design than my current setup, I’m really not sure what I’m going to do.

Of course, if anyone at Apple is reading this and cares to ease my worried heart, I encourage you to do so.

Addendum: Travel

I forgot to mention one major factor that I need to consider for this decision: mobility. I travel a lot. I travel to different cities for weeks at a time. I need to be able to work when I travel, so an iMac+iPad solution isn’t enough for me. With this in mind, it’s possible even a specced-out iMac and lower-end 11” MacBook Air isn’t enough for me.

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I’m really, really going to miss her.

※ Permalink for “Samantha Dryburgh, 1998–2012” published on date_to_rfc822

We have a great community on the web. Thanks to blogs, Twitter, Dribbble, and trusty old Email, we have an unprecedented connection to people doing amazing things all over the world.

Even with all of these connections, it is easy to feel lonely. Though I love being part of this community, I still live in a town where I have no friends (next to a city where I have many), work independently, and am still living the bachelor life (three years and counting).

Since the beginning of January I’ve been in Cupertino working with a client of mine. It’s been fantastic to get into the office to work directly with the team. The creative energy is palpable. The only downside to the whole trip has been living in a hotel in a city I don’t know. It’s an isolation I wasn’t expecting.

Frequent trips to San Francisco has helped. Working on weekends from a coffee shop filled with people has been good for my psyche.

But, no coffee shop could replace the incredible feeling of community I’ve felt over the last few days.

This past week, Macworld | iWorld was in town, and with it brought countless Mac and iOS geeks from all over the country. Included in the flood were some of the very people I’ve felt such strong community with through our various social connections online. People like Shawn Blanc, who I have known for almost four years now, and Ben Brooks, who I’ve known about a year and have worked with on various projects over that time.

I got to meet the intelligent and inked Brett Kelly, hear the southern drawl of Stephen Hackett, enjoy a salmon sandwich by the pier with Thomas Brand, share a pint or two with Matthew Panzarino (still have your room key, bro!) and Matt Alexander (thanks for the biggest margarita of my life!), and celebrate the beautiful socialism of Canada with Mike Vardy.

I also got to meet and drink with a couple gentlemen whose work I have admired for as long as I’ve been on the internet: John Gruber (thanks for pulling us from the couch next to the bathroom to have a drink with you) and Scott Simpson (I’ll be checking out the comedy festival this week!).

For those who were at the expo but we didn’t get a chance to connect: let’s make a point of making that connection next time we’re in the same city. For those who didn’t even make it to San Francisco for the expo: shame on you. You missed on one of the best experiences of any Mac-geek’s life.

I’m still in the Bay Area for at least a few days (my plans for heading home are up in the air, currently). So, if you’re free tonight or tomorrow and want to grab a drink, be sure to get in touch.

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Since writing this article, I’ve built a tool that makes it easy to design a customized DuckDuckGo search box for your website.

My friend and colleague Ben Brooks is tired of Google, and I can’t blame him. In an effort to reduce the number of Google services he’s beholden to, Ben asked me to update his site’s search with the DuckDuckGo search service.

Previous to this change, I’d used a simple form that pointed to google.com/search, with some additional parameters to limit the search to Ben’s site. With this form, I was able to style it using CSS to make it match the site’s design, as well as remove any Google branding.

To make the switch to DuckDuckGo, Ben first replaced the custom Google search form with a search box he made using DuckDuckGo’s Search Box Wizard. While this provided the functionality Ben was looking for, it was a long way from the nice design I’d come up with for the former search bar.

I started digging into the old code I’d made for the Google search form, to see if I could simply replace a few parameters to make it work on DuckDuckGo. I got close, but wasn’t able to pass both the search term and limit the search to Ben’s site; I could only do one or the other.

A quick email to the support team at DuckDuckGo resulted in a small modification to my code to make it work, as well as an introduction to the other custom URL parameters available to customize the search experience even further. Using a few of these parameters I was able to change the font to Helvetica, match the link colour on the search page to the links on Ben’s site, and turn off their sidebar.

I’ve included some of these parameters in the code below, which you can modify and use to add a custom DuckDuckGo search to your own site. To see what the codes used in the “name” attribute, be sure to read through DuckDuckGo’s URL Parameters page.

<form method="get" id="search" action="http://duckduckgo.com/">
  <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="YOURDOMAIN.COM"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="k8" value="#444444"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="k9" value="#D51920"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="kt" value="h"/>
  <input type="text" name="q" maxlength="255" placeholder="Search&hellip;"/>
  <input type="submit" value="DuckDuckGo Search" style="visibility: hidden;" />
</form>

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I have no clue.

※ Permalink for “How To Not Get Food In Your Beard When You’re Eating” published on date_to_rfc822

Update: Since publishing this post, I’ve been engaging in a very friendly and informative email conversation with Andrew de Andrade. Andrew has shed a lot of light on my situation, and has shown me that what I experienced was not censorship, but an attempt to provide the Hacker News with an experience they would benefit most from. I thank Andrew for providing this clarity. I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post. I’ve also issued an apology on this post’s Hacker News thread.

This experience has taught me a lot about community and social norms and behaviours, which Andrew has encouraged me to write about in a future post. If you have any input on this situation or topic, I’d love to hear from you!</em>

I’ve been a reader of Y Combinator’s Hacker News off and on for about a year now. I enjoy the mix of technical, business, and social news it provides. And, more often than not, the discussion in the comments can be just as informative as the articles the site links to.

After hearing my friend Ben Brooks remark that he often submits articles he writes to Hacker News, I decided to submit my post announcing the closure of Simple Desks.

I submitted the story to Hacker News with the title of the article, “Shutting Down My Porno Site.” Yes, the title was provocative. But, it felt appropriate given the context, which was the idea of what has come to be called productivity porn. Most of the article and especially the lead paragraph played on that very idea.

After I hit the submit button, I started getting ready to head out and join the New Year’s Eve celebration. Before I left, I took a quick look at my Hacker News submission and was surprised to see the title had been edited: the system removed the word “porno.”

I was also a bit confused. A quick search reveals 432 story titles that include the word “porn,” 173 with the word “fuck,” and 210 with the word “shit.”

Even more confusing, there are currently 9 stories on Hacker News with the word “porno” in it.

I wondered if my submission was censored because it had quickly made the front page. Maybe I had just missed seeing when it was edited. But, many of the stories found in the above searches clearly had enough points to have been on the front page.

I tried doing a Google search for other instances of people complaining about censorship on Hacker News, and came up empty. Any mention of censorship right on the Hacker News site seems to revolve around Y Combinator’s relationship with the startups that are covered on the site.

I’m not opposed to a site like Hacker News controlling the content that gets posted to their site. They have a brand they wish to maintain and a certain audience they hope to serve. As their guidelines state, they aren’t interested in “politics, or crime, or sports, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.”

However, no where in the guidelines does it say anything about the use of provocative language in a story’s title. They do warn against adding your own “gratuitous editorial spin” on a link to an article you didn’t write, but nothing is mentioned about language that should or shouldn’t be used in a link’s title.

Once I saw that Hacker News had censored my link’s title, I posted a quick comment to let potential readers know what happened. My fear was that visitors would see a title that read “Shutting Down My Site” and be offended once they saw the article’s actual title. My intention was never to trick people into seeing my article. I just thought it would be an interesting read for the Hacker News community.¹

If Hacker News doesn’t want provocative titles on their site, I would have preferred the entire submission be rejected rather than potentially deceiving the community into reading something that uses language they don’t want to see. It reflects poorly on me as a publisher and as the submitter of the link.

Whatever their policy is, it should be clearly communicated in the site’s guidelines. I’m cool either way, I just want to make sure I’m contributing fairly to a community that I’ve benefited from in the past.

※ Permalink for “Censorship On Hacker News” published on date_to_rfc822

It was pretty. Damn it was pretty. The subjects were all scantily clad in accessories and the lighting was just right. Whether it was an image I found on the web or a self-shot photo submitted by a reader, my standard was always “will this make my readers’ jaws drop?”

But, it was bullshit. It was such bullshit. We were creating this completely unrealistic ideal that no one should have to live up to.

Who has the most minimal desk setup?

The real question is, who gives a fuck?

I started Simple Desks—a Tumblr site for collecting photographs of minimal desks and work setups—back on March 15, 2010. Its initial purpose was simple: I was having a desk custom built by a friend, and I wanted an easy way of saving photos to use as inspiration. Tumblr’s bookmarklet was the easiest way I could think of to simply keep an archive of the photos I found, without having to clog up my own hard drive.

Shorty after I started the site, I published a link to it on Twitter and asked if anyone had a photo of their desk they wanted to share, feel free to submit it. Eighteen months later I had published over 350 photographs of people’s desks.

Desks.

Empty, lifeless, workless desks.

About 6 months into running Simple Desks I began realizing that what I was doing was running a porn site. No, not topless girls and chest-hairless guys romping around in a beach house-type porn. Just pointless, casual, look-at-this-empty-fucking-desk-you’ll-never-have porn.

And we were all getting off on it.

But I kept it up. I kept it up because, baby, it paid. Not in the thousands-of-dollars-a-month type of paid, but certainly more than what a guy publishing photos of desks should deserve.

Then, in October of this year we finished the short film my friends and I spent countless hours on, and I realized how incredibly proud I was of that and how excited I was to share it with people. I never felt that way about posting desk pictures. Never.

So, I started thinking about shutting it down. Once I returned home from LA in early December, the decision had been made: as of 2012, Simple Desks would be no more.

And, if I had any doubts about whether this was the right thing to do, hearing Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss the fetishism of minimalism on a recent episode of Back to Work quickly put them to rest.

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I want to spend my time creating work that is substantial. To hear someone tell me that a scene in Imprint made them tear up, that a lyric in a song I’ve written has uplifted someone who was down, or to see users enjoy using something I’ve created on the web, these are the moments I want to experience more often. These are moments for humans.

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