Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker. … My drawings look like shit, but fidelity doesn’t matter as long as I can convey my ideas to others or to my future self.

Reading email is fun, but responding to email is work. Each new email that appears in one’s inbox carries with it conflicting feelings of excitement (breaking news!) and dread (obligation to respond).

Give up early, give up often. That’s one of the secrets to being an effective hacker, an effective entrepreneur, or an effective anything.

I’ve moved my comments to Disqus. This is a great service, incredibly easy to integrate (cut and paste two html/javascript snippets), with a simple and attractive UI. It also doesn’t hurt that its founders Jason and Daniel play a mean hand of poker, and that Jason helped me import my historical comments from an XML file.

The healthcare industry is starting to see benefits from being honest when they make mistakes. Denying that doctors and hospitals ever screw up has been the historical approach to avoiding malpractice suits; yet by being more honest, hospitals are seeing a decrease in such lawsuits.

EVDO cards rule. The speed and latency are good enough for working over ssh and other common development tasks like pulling up documentation on the web or installing a small gem or two. (Though I don’t recommend doing a git clone of Rubinius over EVDO). At Railsconf I used my EVDO card instead of the spotty wireless and was tapping away happily as everyone else struggled to load google.com.

Tiny projects keep it new, for sure. It seems to tie in a little bit with proof-driven development and personal projects - in each case, you’re escaping the mental cage of a monolithic, mature product to start something new. (Even if the “something new” is a component that’s going to plug in to said mature product.)

One of my favorite life hacking tips is how to use your morning time. (By morning I mean whenever you get up - for me, it’s technically afternoon.)