Autoposting Flickr to Twitter
I’ve talked before about how I don’t use Twitpic simply because I don’t want my photos stored in yet another place online. I like my Flickr account and like having all my photos in one spot. That said I do like the ability of twitpic to send out links to photos on the Twitter and have often wished that worked with Flickr and Twitter. Since as of yet they haven’t implemented that, I started thinking about how to do it myself. I use Twitterfeed to autopost new blog posts to Twitter, and that runs off an RSS feed which Flickr also provides for my photo stream. That should work the same way right? Well, we’ll see. I’ve just created a Twitterfeed for my Flickr recent posts RSS feed so keeping my fingers crossed, but that could be the solution I’ve been hoping for.
Looks like it worked!
Did you change the world yet?
Since I’ve finished with the “Change the world in 5 easy steps” series I thought I’d post a brief wrap up and see if what people thought overall. In case you missed any, here’s the 5 parts:
Part 1: Go Vegan
Part 2: Ride A Bike
Part 3: Stop Buying Crap
Part 4: Visit A Different Country
Part 5: Do Something You Love Rather Than Something That Pays The Bills
With the exception of losing and having to rewrite part 4 I really enjoyed doing this. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a while and the posts helped me sort out the ideas. I really appreciated the comments too, helps to see what makes sense and what needs to be refined more. I might still turn this into a talk, we’ll see.
I think overall I wanted to convey the idea that change doesn’t have to be this far off thing you pay lip service to but never actually see and with a little effort there are things you can do that really do have an impact. I hope that was clear. Anyway, now that it’s done, I need a new series to keep me blogging. Suggestions?
Guilt
Since a passing comment on twitter turned into an ongoing discussion I thought I’d move it over here where I could at least hash our some of my thoughts on the subject. The other day Neil Strauss proposed a challenge that consisted of going 30-days without any guilt-motivated behavior. He speculated this would include guilt from “friends, family, religion, society, etc” which is a pretty wide playing field for something that isn’t immediately clear as to what might be involved. He notes that guilt and ethics are not the same thing, and that self-induced guilt is certainly included and usually where it all begins. He also offered up a few examples that would be considered guilt-motivated behavior:
Hanging out with someone solely because you feel bad for having blown them off for months.
Returning a call or email you don’t want to, or doing a favor for someone because you feel like you “owe them.”
I thought this was kind of interesting and tried to think of what might constitute guilt-motivated behavior (or GMB for the rest of this post) in my own day to day. It’s not quite as easy to isolate as I thought it might be so I proposed the question on twitter asking if others could recognize things which might be included. Honestly I didn’t expect an answer but @bruin’s reply sparked the conversation. He suggested that if you weren’t acting out of guilt, the only other option was to be a “selfish asshat.” Needless to say I tend to disagree with that assertion.
Changing the world in 5 easy steps – Do something you love rather than something that pays the bills
[This is part five of the changing the world in 5 easy steps series]
Effort and perseverance always wins. Not right away, not today, and not tomorrow, but eventually it always does.
Doug Zell wrote that specifically talking about Mike Phillips when he placed first in the United States Barista Championship back in March. This weekend he placed 3rd in the World Barista Championship in Atlanta which is pretty awe inspiring when you take into account that 3 years ago he took his first job in the coffee world ever basically working in a warehouse at Intelligentsia in Chicago. Kyle Glanville once told me he’s regularly surprised by the lucrative careers people have given up to work in the field of coffee simply because it’s something they are passionate about.
Those folks are talking about their field but the same things apply to us in the rest of the world. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days in your life, and filling those with something you love I think is of the utmost importance. There was a time when prevailing wisdom was you should get a steady 9-5 job, work hard every day and save money for that one day down the line when you could finally retire and enjoy life. How the fuck was that ever considered wisdom? It’s the phrasing that tricks you, if someone had advised people to spend their entire lives doing something they didn’t like in preparation for a day that might never come I think people would have second guessed it a lot longer ago. Luckily we’re all starting to come around. The truth is that old way of thinking doesn’t ensure anything except that you, and likely those around you will be miserable for most of your life. Everything else is a crap shoot.