John Hobbs

After six years of sameness, I finally redesigned the blog.

While I was at it, I made it responsive, so it should look good on mobile too.

Some content is bound to still look funny as I haven’t reviewed all of it, but for the most part I think it looks good!

Special thanks to @johnhenrymuller for design help and my cool new logo.

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1. BlowPass V0.60 – A Major Revision
2. In-Omaha.com

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“A large team is poison to small wins.”

- Dhanji R. Prasanna
The Mythical Man-Month

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“It is not enough to make a document easy to read, it should also be difficult to misunderstand.”

- Ronald B. Standler
Technical Writing

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“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

- William Gibson

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Look! A baby Hobbs!

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Chance for Peace

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“He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

- Rudyard Kipling
The Winners

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The creature laughed scornfully. “I,” it said, “am frightened of nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” it said.

Charlie said, “Are you extremely frightened of nothing?”

“Absolutely terrified of it,” admitted the Dragon.

“You know,” said Charlie, “I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?”

“No,” said the Dragon, uncomfortably, “I most definitely would not.”

- Neil Gaiman
Anansi Boys

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“Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.”

- Paul Graham
RAQ’s

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“We shouldn’t be doing math in front of the computer, the computer should do the math for us.”

- Josh Reich
BankSimple Demo

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“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain they were right.”

- Neal Stephenson
Anathem

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“I don’t want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work.”

- Will Wilkinson
Unemployment and jobs:
Work for post-materialists

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“We are only as strong as our signal.”

- Flobots
We Are Winning on Fight With Tools

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“To me, being a geek is about being allowed to be a child forever. To take passionate joy in your interests.”

- Jessica Mills
When Geeks Become Bullies

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“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”

- Neal Stephenson
Anathem

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Tyler Durden: Do you know what a duvet is?
Narrator: It’s a comforter…
Tyler Durden: It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No.

- Fight Club (1999)

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Three months ago we made some cheese:

Today we tasted it:

Turns out we didn’t get it squeezed out enough, so there was some milky leakage.

It’s definitely not Monterrey Jack, but it’s pretty good.

Soft and spreadable, and fairly sour/bitter. It would be good with a nice summer sausage.

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This weekend I slapped together a little project called in-omaha.com

It’s essentially a little parody on the fact that people discount Omaha, especially people on the coasts. This was born out of an NPR radio bit reporting on Saddle Creek and The Slowdown.

Here’s the choice quote that I took offense to:

“It all started with some young guys and some surprisingly good music.”

As if there is nobody in Omaha who appreciates good music, and definitely no one who can make it.

So if you make cool stuff, live in Omaha because it’s great, and enjoy some chuckles, feel free to play with in-omaha.com!

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This weekend Darcy and I went to Omaha’s first “Pop Culture Expo”, Contagion: Outbreak. This is true, for extremely small values of “pop”. Mostly it was “geek culture”, so Star Wars, Firefly, Robots, Zombies, Anime, and lots of Comics.

The big reason we went was Jewel Staite, one of our favorite actresses. We attended the Q&A on Sunday, and it was really neat. She’s just as nice as you would think she is.

Another cool bit was the R2 Builders Club. I’m really considering giving that a shot.

Anyway, here are some more blurry-cam photo’s I took. We’ll probably go again, but if they raise the price next year they better raise the quality of the content and organization, because it wasn’t that great this year, nothing compelling.

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There it was above him. A perfect, brilliantly bordered square of blackest night

If he held out his hand, the stuck up thumb masked the patch entirely.

As he watched, it eclipsed the waning moon, proving its crisp edges.

It slid through a sea of stars, occluding each in turn.

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Original

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I’ve used a lot of twitter clients over the years, I even wrote one back in ’08. TweetDeck is pretty good, but Air is shoddy on 64-bit Linux, and so it didn’t integrate well and would crash.

I rejected Gwibber and Choqok, just not my style. My old web standby Brizzly seems pretty lame these days too. Then I found Hotot. It’s awesome. It’s like a Linux native TweetDeck, but with a friendlier, more welcoming feel.

If you are looking for a Linux twitter client, you have got to give Hotot a try.

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First make it possible.
Then make it beautiful.
Then make it fast.

- Nathan Marz
Become Efficient or Die

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“I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.”

- Randall Munroe
Time Management

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If I’m the sum of all my friends,
then all my friends are some of me,
and if you’re some way just like them,
then I am you to some degree.

- The Matches
You (Don’t) Know Me on Decomposer

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Today was my first day at What Cheer! I’m going to make fancy websites, it’s going to be great!

View Original

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“you seem to think i’m random, but i’m only psuedorandom. you would be exactly this way, were you seeded at the very same time and place.”

- _why
Twitter

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“Spying is the fuel of fascism.”

- Naomi Wolf
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

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“…but remember, if it was easy, it would have been done by someone else already.”

- Allen Branch
Meeting Expectations

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“That little “pop” you just heard was a little part of your brain exploding to make way for new ideas. I’ve seen this happen before. You’ll be fine.”

- Brett D.
DreamHost Newsletter, March 2011

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He looked her straight in the eye, “I don’t love you.”

“What?”, she asked, groggy in the bright morning light.

“I don’t love you”, he repeated, in a neutral tone.

“Since when?”

He started, then paused with a puzzled look. “Since always, I suppose. I’ve never loved you. I love a model of you that lives in my head. I love the idea of you.”

“Oh”, she mumbled, slumping back onto the pillow, “that’s all right then.”

“No, no it’s not.” he nudged her until she opened her eyes again. “It’s not all right at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because when we create these models, we fill the missing bits with ourselves. We can’t help but love ourselves, it’s the downfall of man.”

He furrowed his brow.

“But the more we learn about each other, then more accurate the model becomes. Less me, more you, less to love effortlessly. Love becomes work, accepting the flaws that we didn’t even acknowledge at the start. Love is difficult.”

“Tell me about it.” she whispered, and rolled over.

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“When you’re a small company, you as the business owner are essentially the only person in the world who cares about your company brand/name/logo/etc.”

- John Casasanta
Kill yr ads… the don’ts of iPhone app marketing

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“Having a list of things you need to do is of no value if it doesn’t stare you in the face on a regular basis. Quietly judging you.

- Jerod Santo
Minimally Awesome Todos

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Courtesy of @alexpgates

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No, not me, a different John Hobbs.

Dude has skills: http://johndrewthis.tumblr.com/

Respect.

Also, yes I am the kind of person to have Google Alerts set on my own name.

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“Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.”

- Derek Sivers
http://sivers.org/multiply

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I am currently eating the best salad ever.

Yes. It is that delicious.

Grilled chicken, fresh romaine and an asian sesame dressing.

The Chicken

The chicken is el-cheapo boneless skinless breasts, with a little sea salt, black pepper, onion powder and garlic salt. Grill it. Lots of garlic is important to play off of the dressing, don’t skimp!

The Dressing

This one is easy, but it doesn’t make much. Double or triple it if you don’t want to make it on a per salad basis.

• 2 tbsp Rice Vinegar
• 1 tbsp Soy Sauce
• 2 tsp Sugar
• 1 tsp Sesame Oil
• 1 tsp Ground White Sesame Seeds

Mix it together and shake before using. I have only whole white sesame seeds, so I try to mash them a bit with a spoon first.

The dressing will filter to the bottom of your salad, so make sure you turn it a lot as you eat for maximum deliciousness.

Enjoy.

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So, I got a Droid 2 a while back and duuring setup I turned on the Verizon Backup Assistant. Garbage. Pretty sure it was responsible for several crashes.

I was looking for a way to disable it without a rom or hard reset, since its baked in. Hard to find. Eventually I found this nugget buried deep in a forum topic.

1) Be sure to have all your contacts backed up to your Gmail account. Check online before proceeding to step 2.

2) Log into your My Verizon account. Go to the contacts tab, sort by list view and select all contacts. Delete the entire list. There’s a deleted contacts tab as well. Select that and delete anything that’s in there.

3) Go into your Incredible settings tab, select applications, manage applications. Do not sort or filter, allow list to populate. Select Sync Service, (icon resembles backup assistant icon) select clear data.

4) Also in manage applications scroll down to backup assistant, select clear data. This should do it.

5) To verify backup assistant is now disabled, select settings, accounts and sync, then under manage accounts, select backup assistant. You should be looking at a license agreement screen.

I skipped step #2, but it worked all the same. Good fix, minimal investment, no crashes since.

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“Sometimes, people who say they’re “bad with computers” or “just can’t figure this out” are simply lazy.”

- Chris Stout
@hobronto

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So guess what Darcy and I did Friday night? That’s right, made a lame awesome movie. It’s called The Chase

You’re welcome.

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“Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.”

- Tim Berners-Lee

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“…it becomes nearly impossible to pursue long-term goals when you are guided solely by the most recent e-mail in your in-box or call from a client.”

- Scott Belsky
Making Ideas Happen

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Salutations!

It’s been another lovely year for us Hobbseses. This won’t be a long letter this year, as I am writing it the day of from the Borders cafe and there is a trekkie in the sci-fi/fantasy aisle eyeing the Death Star sticker on my laptop. Things could turn ugly at any moment. Any. Moment.

Good thing I’m packing my DL-44 with the shaved down barrel sight.

So, what happened to us this year? Well, I think this year has been defined by chickens. Against the outcry of friends and family we got four little chicks this February. Much to our surprise they do not stay small and fluffy. They turned into chickens. What the heck?!

What else happened? We went to Colorado to visit the hippies Rogers.

As you can see from the top photo, we had a great time.

I got to drive Steph’s scooter. We ate wild mountainside honey, and, um, you know, hung out and stuff. It was well worth the drive. Manitou is beautiful, even with all the crazies.

Darcy is rocking two jobs, working nearly full time. Well, she’s at work nearly full time, I can’t attest to how much actual working she does. At least a third of the time I bet.

She’s a pre-school teacher again this year, herding around a class of three year olds and a class of four year olds. Even better she works at Borders, where we go to spend all of our money on books, but at a discount!

I switched to a new job just two weeks ago. It’s going well, I miss the solitary work I was doing before, but this is pretty cool too.

Socially speaking it’s probably better, since I have to interact with other humans on a daily basis.

So, let’s see, other adventures of the year. Nan and Ryan still aren’t married. Lazy bums. Darcy made beer (like 5 gallons of it) and then everybody drank it. We grew pumpkins. Darcy went to Chipotle with me (twice I think).

Our last little bit of news is an addition to the family. No, not a baby, but another cat. Darcy got Pigwidgeon (or Pig for short) for Christmas this year. She’s a little speed demon, and we don’t think she’s going to get very big. Hence the name.

So if you are allergic to cats, our house just got a little bit worse for you. We don’t like you. Stop coming over. How many cats do we have to get before you take the hint?!

So that’s it for us, we hope you have a Merry Christmas, and if you are one of the people we have professed to love in the past, then we still love you!

- John & Darcy Hobbs

Photos From 2010

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You say “looks like somebody has too much time on their hands” but all I hear is “I’m sad because I don’t know what creativity feels like.”

- Dan Wineman

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