ben delaney

Tumblr Theme TextMate Bundle

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:55:06 -0800

Handy, and nicely done. (Made by Ben Gold.)

(…and filed under “I should have finished and released the bundle I started months ago, and have enjoyed using ever since.” Oh well. Snooze you lose.)

I love everything about this (and the whole line of products.)...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:47:22 -0800

I love everything about this (and the whole line of products.) Read more about it here.

found via hickensian

Generosity Day

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:29:38 -0800

manalive:

I propose a national holiday to be held on June 25th of each year—six months from Christmas—in which we all dedicate a day to see how much of the stuff we already own we can give away to those that have less than we do. Nothing is off limits here: clothes, furniture, cars, computers, televisions, airline miles, money, unused gift cards, bicycles, musical instruments, vacation houses… You are limited only by your creativity and your generosity.

It’s not a time to get rid of your junk that nobody wants. Nor is it a time to buy gifts. It’s a day to free yourself from the syndrome of stuff.

Who’s with me?

This is a great idea. I’m in.

I present to the world: The Latin Lion Poster! Sizes:...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:30:00 -0800

I present to the world: The Latin Lion Poster!

Sizes:
60” x 37.5”
48” x 30”
32” x 20”

A gorgeous and rare hand-made lithograph poster printed on archival acid-free cotton rag museum-grade paper.

On sale soon as a limited edition. It won’t be cheap.

Sic Transit Gloria
Amor Vincit Omnia

It is said that if you display this on your wall and look at it daily, you will have good fortune and all who see it will admire you.

DOWNLOAD it for a very limited time as a desktop wallpaper.

FOOD, INC. Please, everyone, I beg of you: WATCH THIS MOVIE....

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:07:00 -0800

FOOD, INC.

Please, everyone, I beg of you: WATCH THIS MOVIE. Even if you think it’s all “political and polarizing” or just plain boring, please watch it. It’s not at all boring. It’s fascinating and powerful and profoundly important.

(For Netflix people, here’s a link to the free instant streaming version — no excuse!)

More info here.

Oh, and those of you that have seen it, you know the hidden camera scenes of the people loading chickens into cages at night? I have literally done that. It’s crazy! …and awful… long story…

Are you going to update your Notations theme to support the new pages feature?

Great theme by the way; one of the best on Tumblr!.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:27:12 -0800

If you were one of the first thousnd or so to install the theme then you will want to reinstall it. The current version handles pages nicely by putting the page links at the top under the title.

Did you know that Jeff Bridges also has one of the coolest...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:10:00 -0800

Did you know that Jeff Bridges also has one of the coolest websites ever? AND is a great photographer?

Yes and yes. He does. And he is. Etcetera.

The Dude does it all, and I’m so glad such a great guy was recognized.

This will make your Friday if you let it. :)

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:54:08 -0800

This will make your Friday if you let it. :)

The Tumblr Gang Rules

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:07:36 -0800

Quick story: On Friday afternoon I noticed that my new theme had been rejected by Tumblr (there must have been something I forgot or whatever; doesn’t matter). The note that the moderator left wasn’t entirely helpful… so after having a long, horrible Friday, and instead of just emailing them asking for clarification like I should have, I posted a slightly snarky post to my Tumblr dashboard about it (the post wasn’t publicly viewable because I use my _commentary tag).

Well, at about 8:30 that night (11:30 EST), I get an email from Peter Vidani (brilliant theme designer and Tumblr staffer) letting me know that he was the guy that rejected it, and asking if I’d resubmit it so he could take another look. I don’t even think Peter follows my blog, so I really don’t know how he even saw my snarky post. Point is: unlike me at the time, he was super helpful, polite, and professional. He even emailed me again Monday morning to check in and make sure I’d had a chance to re-submit it. I sent it in again and the rest is history.

Why am I posting this? Because, folks, you just don’t find that level of friendly, fast, not-rude customer service very often these days and when you do find it, it’s worth praising the people who do it. (and I’m not even a true “customer”! — Tumblr is FREE! — I really don’t deserve anything from them!)

So, Tumblr gang, you deserve a big “kudos” in my book. Thanks for making the greatest blog platform on the planet and for being good people in the process.

My new NOTATIONS Theme is now ready for you to install on your...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:45:07 -0800

My new NOTATIONS Theme is now ready for you to install on your Tumblr blog. :)

Here are the reasons I like it:

A nice font. It uses the very nice Quicksand font by Andrew Paglinawan. It’s base64-encoded and looks gorgeous in most browsers. There is also an option to not use this font and default to Helvetica if you don’t like it.
High res images. It uses high-res images whenever possible. To me, this really makes a big difference. I’ve actually had a blast going back through my blog and looking at photos. They just look better, bigger. It even makes Tumblr’s PhotoSet slideshows BIG. The images are scaled-up inside the Flash object, but they still look pretty good. (example)
Options. The theme allows you to turn off/on a variety of handy options, i.e., whether to show note counts, a word-count for text posts, tags, ask & submit links, etc.
Print this Post feature. For writers this might be nice. It’s a handy way to let a user pop-open and nicely print one of your text posts.
Keyboard shortcuts! Your viewers can navigate between posts using the “J” and “K” keys.
Has good support for all the Tumblr posts types including question/answer posts.

Anyway, you can see it in action on my blog, or give it whirl yourself if you’re inclined.

On Caring and Creative Guilt

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:35:03 -0800

This morning I found myself looking at my phototography website; really looking at it, as if I were a stranger stumbling upone it for the first time. And as I wandered through the photos there, I noticed myself having two distinctly different reactions. One was wow, there are some really nice photographs here, and the other was man, I really need to update this old dog… everyone must think I’ve fallen completely off the radar… this stuff is so old… where is all the new stuff?! Why am I such a failure?! WHY?!!

As I sat there, frustrated with myself for how neglectful I’ve been in regards to that site (and my photography career in general) in the last 9 months or so, I started trying to understand why. And as I got more honest and settled down, it became clear. The reason my photography life is supposedly languishing comes down to a simple, perhaps confounding, truth: I don’t care.

Consider, if you will, the nature of CARE. On the surface, saying “I don’t care” probably sounds either at best indifferent, or at worst caloused, even flippant. We use the phrase all the time, and it usually doesn’t make us bristle. The word can mean two different things. Indifference is one of them, and the other is a lot closer to attention, focus, or carefulness.

“What do you feel like for dinner?”
“Eh, I don’t care…”

vs.

“Why are you ignoring something that used to be a major life goal of yours?”
“I just don’t care”
“What?! WHY?! You SHOULD care!”

Merlin Mann wrote a fantastic article, entitled “First, care.” I urge you to go read it. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

You “focus” on the one thing you care about, as you “unfocus” on everything else. If not for every minute of your life, at least for the time you set aside to pursue the thing that matters.

If that sounds fancy and oversimpliﬁed, then you “care” about too many things. Period.

So, if I say that the reason my photography, at least in a commercial sense, is in a weird period of dormancy, and, upon reflection, it becomes obvious that the honest reason why is that “I don’t care,” then what? My knee-jerk reaction is to put an “enough” at the end of the phrase… “because I don’t care enough!” Most people would. Most people out there who are striving to become something that they aren’t yet, almost invariably speak in those kinds of terms. Need to… have to… should… not enough… And the people at the “top” (at least those who feel the need to constantly advise the struggling masses beneath them) reinforce it by using the same words. And frankly, I’m weary and even a becoming a little offended at that kind of thinking. It implies pressure and obligation and a system of measuring your involvement with anything based on an underlying motivator of guilt. Because if you don’t care enough, the real meaning is: you should feel guilty because you don’t care enough.

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE THAT WAY? You don’t HAVE to do anything. You don’t NEED to just get out and shoot more photos, or network more, or whatever it is that the guilt dispensers in your field would have you believe.

You simply need to care. About what? About whatever it is that you care about.

It really is that simple. If you deeply don’t care (even for now), then do something you care about and see where that takes you. Stop feeling guilty for what you don’t care about. Trust your gut for a change. Don’t think “Oh my god I don’t care! What’s wrong with me?! Why don’t I care anymore?!” Try instead, “hmm… interesting… apparently I don’t care about this right now… what DO I care about?” and see where that leads you in terms of personal happiness, satisfaction, fullfillment, and purpose.

Like Merlin said, “‘focus’ on the one thing you care about, as you ‘unfocus’ on everything else.”

So if you are reading this and find yourself identifying with the sensation of “creative guilt,” remember this: guilt implies crime. You, by honestly admitting that you don’t currently care enough to do something, have not committed a crime. No, you haven’t. Turn off that voice in your head that says you have. You are not committing a crime against humanity or yourself or anyone else by not doing whatever IT is. Stop it. Stop thinking that way and live your life. And forgive me, this will sound very ‘inspirational speaker,’ but: Live your life based not on guilt, but on Love. Do what you simply want to do because you love doing it. Follow the love. It just might lead you to the place where you actually create things that matter and that you can be proud of, regardless of whether anyone sees or knows about it.

A brief example: One of my best friends, Evan, has been sending myself and a few other friends songs, via email, for a few months now. Just one song at a time, attached to an email, sent to about 10 people. That’s it. There’s no website, no campaign, no Facebook fan page, no Tumblr blog, no fancy delivery mechanism/marketing device. He’s just writing songs, and (for now) sharing them with his friends the old-fashioned way. And we typically just listen and write back something boring like “cool man, keep up the good work.” It’s small, completely off the radar, and (honestly) seemingly insignificant. Except that it isn’t actually insignificant at all, for one important reason: He cares — not about what we think — he cares to do the creative act in the first place. He’s doing it because he cares to. I’m not gonna lie: it’s powerfully inspiring and forces me to rethink what it fundamentally means to create art and share it with others.

My version of what he’s doing is two separate websites that I haven’t told anyone about. One is for writing, and the other is for photos of mostly my family that I’ve shot on film and scanned. No one visits them, because (almost) no one knows about them. I want it that way, at least for now. I’m trying to work out my creative salvation by caring about something and doing it, even if no one sees it. And you know what? It’s working. I’m caring. I’m following the love and the love is starting to follow me back. I’m gravitating towards the things that I care about, and sluffing off the heavy burden that the guilt dispencers would have me carry. It’s liberating and happifying and fun.

So: First, care. Then, do. And don’t worry so much about the space in between.

"I wonder what it must have felt like to be creatively productive before there was a way to..."

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:01:00 -0800

“I wonder what it must have felt like to be creatively productive before there was a way to communicate it instantly with a huge number of people. I honestly can’t remember.”

Stunning. By Simen Johan

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:15:31 -0800

Stunning.

By Simen Johan

thebomb.com [.net]

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:31:20 -0800

thebomb.com [.net]:

A new favorite music Tumblr.

(And the theme by Jacob Bijani is killer.)

Hmm…. I guess releasing my new Notations theme will have...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:21:00 -0800

Hmm…. I guess releasing my new Notations theme will have to wait. Apparently (mysteriously) it is not considered to be “complete.” I’m not sure how having all the post types, notes, search, custom appearance options, etc. etc. is “not complete,” but I guess I’ll find out eventually.

If you’re curious about it, you can see it in action on my (seemingly “complete”) blog.

Another Open Letter To Apple Re: iDisk

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:51:49 -0800

Dear Apple,

Why have you not already used just a tiny fraction of the engineering horsepower you no doubt posses, to make iDisk what it truly ought to be? What? What’s that?… “what should it be, you ask?…” Well, funny you should ask; let me tell you what iDisk should be, in a word: Dropbox. You may have heard of it? It’s this little upstart-turned-juggernaut in your backyard that has made you look like a crotchety old fool, sitting on your decade-old WebDav technology and forcing people to hate you whenever they try to use it with any degree of efficiency or reliability. A few bullet points might be in order here to quantify the ways in which Dropbox embarrasses you (or ought to):

Speed. There is simply no comparison. I put a file in Dropbox, it’s in my friend’s dropbox in seconds.
Ease of use. I never think about Dropbox. It is as if it isn’t there. Except that it IS there, making my digital life easier. Dropbox is transparent. It’s just there, and I just put crap in it. iDisk acts like a poorly written third-party plugin. I can store important files, even application settings, in Dropbox and KNOW that they sync-up. Every. Single. Time. iDisk makes me cuss.
Versions. I deleted something the other day from Dropbox that I shouldn’t have. Oh wait—no I didn’t. Dropbox had a nice “restore” button happily greeting me and welcoming me back to sanity. Alternatively, iDisk announced to me today (via a fit of archaic error codes) that I could not even delete a file that I WANTED to delete. So that was fun.
Sharing. Interesting that although you control the entirety of the operating system and the MobileMe experience that supposedly integrates with it, you still can’t quite manage to make, oh say, sharing a file with a friend, easy to do. I have to go online, log in, go find that file, hit the “Share File…” button and hope. Dropbox version: right-click, “copy public link…” This is getting laughable.
Space. For $100 a year I get 20GB of all of the garbage I’ve been describing with iDisk. For the same $100 I can get 50GB of versioned, scary-fast, easy-to-share, pain-free, I-never-even-think-about-it Dropboxy goodness.
Speed. Did I mention that yet? Let’s make it perfectly clear: iDisk is slower than shit and Dropbox is faster than shit. So in The Shit category, Dropbox is.

In closing, I propose two solutions:

Take a fraction of your mountain of money, and buy Dropbox outright. For any amount they want. (Fine — feel free to apply your gorgeous user-interface to the web app, just don’t mess with how well it works.) Rebrand it as, gee whiz, how about “iDisk.” Continue to offer a free plan. Continue to develop (with your newly acquired Dropbox staff) the Windows and Linux versions. Don’t make it all “Apple-only.” Just replace the backside of iDisk, with Dropbox.
Make your own damn Dropbox. Just make it as awesome or better than the current one. The only requirement: START OVER.

Sincerely,

Ben Delaney

Gasworks Park. Seattle.

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:32:02 -0800

Gasworks Park. Seattle.

Check out this crazy theme I’m tinkering with. CHOOSY...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:28:00 -0800

Check out this crazy theme I’m tinkering with. CHOOSY THEME. I’m not fully sure where exactly to take it yet. It’ll never pass muster with the Theme Garden because it uses the Tumblr API to get the posts directly and not the normal Tumblr template system.

At this point, the theme is really more of an experiment. It’s really limited, but I thought I’d throw it out there and let people toss ideas at it if they want to. You can leave suggestions or ideas here..

(I’ve really only tested it in Safari so far, so be warned. And get Safari if you don’t have it.)

Also, I don’t have any caching working yet (would love some tips if anyone has any), so it may just break from time to time because Tumblr’s servers don’t always return the JSON consistently.

All teachers get pink slips at Rhode Island school

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:06:19 -0800

All teachers get pink slips at Rhode Island school:

mar-see-ah:

This seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A little extreme.

I disagree completely. This sounds like a case of a school board getting some stones and doing what a school board should do. Teachers unions have a strangle-hold on education in this country and it’s time more school districts and school boards started standing up to them.

This part is rich:

In a proposal based on federal guidelines, Gallo asked teachers to work a longer school day of [GASP!] seven [WHOLE] hours and tutor students weekly for one [ENTIRE] hour outside school time. She proposed teachers have lunch with students often [THE HERESY!], meet for 90 minutes every week to discuss education and set aside two weeks during summer break for paid[!] professional development.

Congratulations, members of the Central Falls Teachers Union, you’ve now been treated like the rest of the people in this country who decide to flat-out refuse to accept the terms of their employment.

What we look like (apparently) when we go for coffee &...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0800

What we look like (apparently) when we go for coffee & steamers. Ha! :)

ben delaney

Tumblr Theme TextMate Bundle

I love everything about this (and the whole line of products.)...

Generosity Day

I present to the world: The Latin Lion Poster! Sizes:...

FOOD, INC. Please, everyone, I beg of you: WATCH THIS MOVIE....

Are you going to update your Notations theme to support the new pages feature? Great theme by the way; one of the best on Tumblr!.

Did you know that Jeff Bridges also has one of the coolest...

This will make your Friday if you let it. :)

The Tumblr Gang Rules

My new NOTATIONS Theme is now ready for you to install on your...

On Caring and Creative Guilt

"I wonder what it must have felt like to be creatively productive before there was a way to..."

Stunning. By Simen Johan

thebomb.com [.net]

Hmm…. I guess releasing my new Notations theme will have...

Another Open Letter To Apple Re: iDisk

Gasworks Park. Seattle.

Check out this crazy theme I’m tinkering with. CHOOSY...

All teachers get pink slips at Rhode Island school

What we look like (apparently) when we go for coffee &...

Are you going to update your Notations theme to support the new pages feature?

Great theme by the way; one of the best on Tumblr!.