Dust dirt off your shoulders

To step up. The origin of this term comes from a story in which a donkey falls into a well and cannot get out. The farmer tries to get the donkey out by rope, unsuccessful in his attempt. He decides, instead, to just give up and bury the donkey in the well. As the farmer begins filling the hole with dirt, the donkey becomes depressed, realizing that all of the dirt on his shoulders and back were going to eventually bury him. He then thought of an idea: I can just shake it off and step up. Therefore, he could just die by doing nothing and getting buried, or shake the dirt off his shoulders and step up to the occasion. So when you have a problem, will you shake it off and step up or be buried?

A Simpler Future

In high school I thought that the future of computing would be networked machines constantly and transparently interchanging not only data but also computation. The world’s idle PC would help your computer when it ran out of processing power, working together as one big Distributed Operating System. You could start writing an email and then leave your computer and access it from any other device. I was right on that last part, everything else was slow, complicated, and unnecessary. The real future is a lot simpler: Webapps and Sharing Data via simple protocols.

Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

(From the excellent Daring Fireball iPad Review.)

We still have a long way to go to really make this perfect (sharing files is still hard), but computing is starting to get to the point where the device fades away and finally lets you focus on what you want to do.