Posting will be minimal through Sunday as I am in the midst of a 4-day “Broadtrip” with my son. Just dudes. Traveling. Eating lots of ice cream.

Just one quick note about advertising: I’ve been outspoken in the past about advertising, specifically poorly-done advertising. Advertising done well, however, has the potential to benefit all parties — readers, publishers and advertisers. I would not have entered into the agreement with Yoggrt if I didn’t think the readers of StaticMade.com could benefit from the messages. Ads running through Yoggrt are relevant to the subject matter published on the site and they are elegantly designed. Please let me know if you feel otherwise.

It’s my hope that these ads not only help me keep the lights on around here, but also provide you, the reader, with value as well.

From the artist’s website:

“The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.”

What’s that they say about art imitating life? [ via ]

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“Suffice it to say, the American Dream is broken. It has been for decades. And attempting to go back to ‘the way things were’ will not fix it. ‘Fixing it’ would only perpetuate the inevitable, making it worse in the long-run. The longer we put off our troubles, the harder they are to deal with.”

Always late to the party, I only recently discovered The Minimalists, a site run by Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. Their essays are wonderful and this one is no different. I’ve long been a proponent of being stingy with the information I let into my life and Millburn’s take on pop culture here is right on the mark.

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“During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.”

Amazing.

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“There was too much noise. Even with the relatively small number of feeds to which I was subscribed, almost none of it was interesting to me. I realized that, for some reason I couldn’t quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such.”

An interesting piece here from Brett. I’ve had a completely different experience with RSS. Granted, I’m selective with my subscriptions and don’t include any of the tech blogs that update a bunch of times per day.

Most of the sites in my reading list are updated once or twice a day, or every other day. The majority are written by people I consider to be friends or those whose opinions and writing I consider to be remarkable. Currently, there are 27 sites in my subscription queue. I greatly look forward to checking my feeds in the evening to relax with some compelling writing.

Compared with the few other places I hang out online, I get the most value and useful information from my RSS reader. By the way, if you haven’t given up on RSS, you can subscribe to this site’s feed HERE.

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My wife and I are eagerly expecting our second child, a daughter, to arrive later this summer. We have a few good names picked out, but we’re always open to hearing about new and interesting options. That’s why I’m turning to the fine readers of this site to help with our name selection.

Below is a form with three fields. If you’d like to recommend a name for our future daughter, please send it in! I can’t promise we’ll use one of the suggested names, but I’ve found the hive mind can generate some great concepts. Only the baby name field is required, however you might want to add your name and email address because if we end up using your recommendation I’d really like to send you a thank-you gift.

A little bit about us before you begin: We like art, music and literature. My design preferences are based in minimalism, while I’d say Jill’s are more traditional. Our son is named Elliott, after one of the greatest songwriters in recent history — Elliott Smith. Our dog’s name is Monty. If you’re into research, much more detailed info can be found by perusing the archives of this site.

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“Perhaps one of the biggest advancements technology can make in our lives comes when we realize the power of simply turning it off for a while. Perhaps one it’s greatest potentials is the expansive, whole, endless space it gives us when we unplug. Perhaps what it does when it is off is equally as miraculous as at it does when it is on. The power that the smartphone gives us to connect to everything is matched only by its power to let us disconnect from everything…whenever we choose.”

The writing of James Shelley is quickly becoming some of my favorite.

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I use Evernote for all sorts of things. I store everything from expense receipts and official business documents to restaurant menus and meeting notes. I even archive my activity from several social media services utilizing the IFTTT service. All this content is organized and searchable through Evernote’s awesome OCR processing of images and PDFs. There’s a lot of value there for me and I’ve been a happily paying customer for a while.

I also think it’s great they, in the age of the “lottery ticket business strategy,” operate with a sustainable business model. The terms of our transactional relationship are very clear and I know exactly what I’m paying for.

A working but fractured system

One thing I haven’t been using Evernote for, however, is writing. When it comes to writing for this website and for my day job, I have relied on a Dropbox-sync’d plain text workflow that makes use of several applications including NValt, Byword and Simplenote. While this has largely worked for me, I always wished I could house these files inside Evernote so they could live with the research, source material and multimedia content already stored with the service.

The recent updates to Evernote’s applications have given me reason to try it out for active writing. In fact, this post was written in Evernote.

Getting the text files into Evernote

I could think of nothing more tedious than manually importing the hundreds of text files living in my Dropbox into Evernote. Not to mention losing the valuable metadata in the files such as “Created Date” and “Last Modified Date.” Luckily, I found this AppleScript from Veritrope that imports a folder of .txt files into Evernote without stripping the files of their metadata. The whole import process took me less than 5 minutes and now I have a comprehensive searchable database of both archival and creative content. Talk about an external brain!

Ubiquitous Capture

Increasingly, I’ve been using my mobile phone as a tool to capture ubiquitous inbox items such as ideas, tasks, to-dos, quotes and the like. Evernote’s iOS app, however, is slow on the start and wasn’t working for my ubiquitous capture purposes. There is still a good amount of friction there. I have been using Drafts to capture items, and in its most recent update the app includes a “Open in Evernote” option. Nice, but doesn’t circumvent Evernote’s slow start.

After a bit of research, I found FastEver. This iOS app seems to be the perfect solution to my Evernote capture problems. FastEver behaves a lot like Drafts, but with much tighter Evernote integration. It supports the notebook, tag and formatting structure inherent in Evernote. And as the name suggests, it’s fast. Very fast.

Will it stick?

I have no idea if my new Evernote-exclusive creative workflow will stick. If I were a betting man, I’d wager yes. I’ll give it a good go and I’ll reassess in a few weeks to see how these new processes have impacted my creative production.