Tim Brown

Dog scurries down the stairs on Random, yes. Useful, no.

Been so busy leaving Vassar and getting ready to join Typekit, I nearly missed these bits of news, wisdom, and curiosity.

Andy Clarke and Carsonified are organizing a $150 online conference about CSS3. Speakers include Ethan Marcotte, Matthew Smith (of Squared Eye), Sean Gaffney, Andy himself, and Jina Bolton. Sounds fantastic.

Mandy Brown of A Working Library is now a contributing editor for A List Apart. I have worked a bit with folks at ALA and with Mandy, and this is a great match. Congratulations, all, and here’s to continued success at ALA!

Jeffrey Zeldman has written several posts about the forthcoming obsolescence of Flash as we have known it. This recent tweet of his sums things up nicely:

“HTML5 vs. Flash” is the wrong discussion. “Accessible rich media” is the right one.

… but he is equally articulate and fundamentally sound in his two blog posts, Flash, iPad, Standards and Ahem.

And finally, thanks to Dribbble I’m privy to a bit of what Shaun Inman is cooking up, but this recent tweet of his is even more exciting to me than the thing he’s making! Related: advice from Jason Fried about selling your by-products. (I really hope Shaun sells his by-products.)

Really cool found object installations by Swedish artist Michael Johansson. (via grain edit · Michael Johansson)

An experiment to detect gravitational waves may indicate that our universe is a holographic projection.

Recent evidence of horizontal gene transfer — in which genes are exchanged from other organisms, not from ancestors — has some scientists thinking that the dominant form of evolution for most of the Earth’s history was between non-related organisms and not among ancestors.

Photo: Eko: A Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars. - (37signals)

via www.weirdomatic.com

Today Eileen and I showed Kate a new toy. She put it in her mouth and watched us open and close, fill and empty, drop and pick up the parts. She watched us put it away. Eileen gave her a bath while I prepared a bottle.

When I came back into the nursery it was dim and peaceful. Kate was taking her bottle, eyes closed in mommy’s arms. I snuck over to the toy box, took out Kate’s new toy and a few others, and swapped them for the ones that had been in her playpen all week.

Tomorrow when we put Kate in the playpen for some solo time, she’ll find among a few other toys – hey! – that one from yesterday. And this time, freestyle. No mommy and daddy teaching.

Learn one day and freestyle the next. I like this idea. Especially when I think about that “hey!” she’ll experience when she recognizes the toy. That yet-to-be moment already has me walking on air. What a feeling. I’m growing her! The things I do to prepare her for success will change her entire life every day.

All it takes on my part is to remember to teach with different toys every so often, and remember to prepare the freestyle setup for the following day so she can explore.

Come to think of it I’ve been doing this same freestyle setup for myself, multiple times a day for years. Certainly some of my successes in life can be attributed to this preparedness.

It’s why I use Backpack. It’s why I use Field Notes and Google Reader and Instapaper and Pinboard and Tumblr and Yojimbo. It’s why I blog at Vassar and at Nice Web Type.

It’s why I’m late to the office, late coming home, and late going to bed, in each instance saving and organizing that which I had gotten up early, stayed up late, and tried extra hard to study in hours when I could just let it go.

I take time to digest, save, share. To prepare. So that the next day, when I happen to be working or talking or reading or writing, I say…

Hey!