There’s great magic to be found by paring things down to their essentials.

‘The Finest Life You Ever Saw’ by James Salter | The New York Review of Books: “He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness.”

I still carry and frequently quote from Hemingway on Writing and often marvel at its connections with technology.

Go read the whole piece linked above… great story about a boat, a man and the power of honest narrative.

Ew…

Fire – cdespinosa’s posterous: “Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here.”

Doc Searls would not be pleased.

Basically, Amazon is re-routing every web action by Kindle Fire browser users through its own EC2 servers in the name of speed (by caching visited pages). Will they intercept user actions such as clicks on Google search results? They could easily have that capability.

SSL connections (like GMail or most social sites using https) won’t be intercepted.

Nonetheless, it’s all very icky and there are implications/tradeoffs for folks browsing on a Kindle Fire (beyond the normal implications of using ISP’s etc).

It is bad enough that the social web has been siloed into walled gardens of facebook-land and google+-ville. I’m hoping we can keep the general web out of the constrictions of a commerce driven factory farm and in the commons of information exchange.

Lots of bowties today!

Clean Well-Lighted Place – Ernest Hemingway: “Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

For the most part, I like Strauss’ ideas here:

How to fix the mess we call middle school – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post: “Let them learn about financial literacy by running small businesses. Knowing how to solve a geometric proof doesn’t help them balance a checkbook.”

I especially like the idea of encouraging middle school aged kids to be more entrepreneurial. It’s amazing what a 14 year old can do with free web publishing tools and a little geekery these days as a hobby.

Imagine what our country and world could be like if we were to turn the social crucible of the traditional middle school experience into a crucible of innovation and thought-provocation that young people might pursue the rest of their lives.

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

It’s been a longtime coming, but I finally found the straw to break the camel’s back for good and decided to kill off my Facebook account in lieu of what I have here (this is a much better space for me)…

See, not so hard.

Here’s to the cars and crazy ones who walk away from omelas.

I keep trying to wrap my mind around the nuances of Spotify’s decision to require a Facebook login for new accounts…

Spotify Blog – Spotify: “Having free access to music on Facebook also gives us an opportunity to express ourselves in a new way. We’re proud to share pictures of our lives. Now we can say something about ourselves through music. “Hi I’m Daniel – here’s some Daft Punk.”

Go read the whole post before you continue here.

I love Spotify’s service. The day it rolled out in the US (not that long ago), I canceled my Rdio subscription and immediately went the paid route option for Spotify. I was hoping, at long last, my dream of music-in-the-cloud and on demand was coming to fruition. For the most part, it did.

I continue to use Spotify on a daily basis (that’s a link to what I’m listening to there and on iTunes via my Twitter music account).

However, this decision by Spotify raises serious questions about how the company views music, consumption, culture and expression. Let’s face it, Facebook is the “social face of the web” but it is not the place that I want to lift up as the pinnacle of human expression, which to me, music represents.

I love music. I love music much more than I do Spotify (and especially Facebook). I recognize what Facebook is good for in terms of connections, social gestures and interactions. However, connecting my individual perceptions of human expression with what is basically a glorified shopping cart of social data gleaning scares the daylights out of me.

Doc Searls says it best (as always):

For independence on the Net and the Web, we need cars, pickup trucks, bikes and motorcycles. Not just shopping carts — which are what browsers have become.

I would substitute “browsers” here with “music” and it has even more affect. Go read his whole post. It’s quite amazing.

So where does this leave me?

I’m not sure.

I don’t necessarily want to kill my Facebook account as I do find meaning and value there in some sense, but I can definitely do without that space since I would much rather have this space as the cornerstone of “digital sam” and my online expressions (better to own than rent!).

However, I don’t like this unholy marriage of human expression, discovery and consumerism one bit.

Hand-wringing tonight.

As part of my whole “Bringing It All Back Home” thing, I’m running a quick test to see which service gets from here to my Twitter account… TwitterFeed or this plugin:

WordPress › WP to Twitter « WordPress Plugins: “WP to Twitter posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using your URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.”

Let’s see who wins…

UPDATE: Well that was quick. Looks like the little app I created with the WP to Twitter plugin is the clear winner…

The plugin requires a little bit of geekery if you want to use it with a custom url shortener domain (like my sams.tc one) via Bit.ly’s Pro service. Basically, you have to set up the app using Twitter’s OAuth service (API and customer keys) and Bit.ly’s (or Supr’s) similar functionality.

However, the speed and customization options are well worth those five minutes in my book given that I’m trying to consolidate as much as possible here and not rely on other services to post updates, pics, etc.

Speaking of… some people have asked why “sams.tc” as the shortened url. Basically, I wanted something with sam in it (short first names are great but not much available) and I thought it would be “cute” and memorable to stand-in for “sam’s twitter content” … sams.tc, get it?

Well, I think it is clever.

For some reason, I find myself using email more than Instapaper to “read things later” as of late.

I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this, but I actually have found it much more natural (and 1.0′ish) to use this old method.

Interesting.