Our society is no longer hierarchically arranged but instead develops in network form: everyone links to everyone and everything, and this is how unstable systems maintain their coherence, their changing shape.

— The Age of Instability, Institute for the Unstable Media

As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route.

Reading about Serendipitor, a map app that promotes moments of serendipity in a city, I came across the Institute for the Unstable Media in the Netherlands.

The evolution of the organization’s purpose is fascinating:

Unstable Media (87-93): focused on the use of new technology and electronic media in the audiovisual arts.

Network and Communications Media (93-98): Artist began to explore the possibilities of computers as an artistic medium, using digital techniques, virtual reality and 3D projections to immerse users in cyberspace.

Art and Media Technology (98 – Present): The often long-term research projects focus on the use of new technical possibilities for artistic means, research on the cultural and social implications of these techniques and the development of technically innovative (web) applications. They have resulted in software tools, but also in mixed media applications and interactive installations in public space.

A cool bit of serendipity on an internet walk. Waxy’s links → Serendipitor → Institute for Unstable Media.

8-bit OK Computer

Hosts adds a preference pane to your system preferences which lets you toggle your host file entries on and off, as well as add and remove them.

People are blind to email signatures. They’re dead weight, clog up email threads, and don’t add any value to a discussion.

When’s the last time you’ve read an email signature and thought “My god! This information saved someone’s life?

Never. Because email signatures are useless. I’ve had a link in the footer of my personal email for 6 months. It’s been clicked a tiny handful of times.

I deleted all my email signatures this morning. No one will notice or care.

The newsletter for May is on hold while I fiddle with some settings, articulate some spleens, and figure out how much awesome I want to rain down on you.

Check your inboxes towards the end of the month for a special love note. Until then — party on.

Welcome back to GFL! This time around, @kaisdavis and @TokuNJT chat a little more about the job search and how to compensate for lack of experience before discussing rejection, ambiguity, and abstraction.

I’m the luckiest man on the planet to get to record Grind For Life with my co-host and buddy Chris Zaborowski.

This week? The Job Search and Rejection.

Thanks for listening. Love you.

At first, it was great: my symptoms cleared nearly immediately and did not return! Over the next few days, though, I started to have jags where I was anxious or angry or both for no real good reason (I mean, besides “life”) and also more importantly I couldn’t seem to get, um, erections, which is really not normally a problem for me! I thought I was having a complete mental and physical breakdown and then in bed, panicking when I couldn’t pass out one night despite being tired, I did some kind of lazy googling of drug interactions and found out that if you have any history of anxiety/depression, anything with pseudoephedrine can cause lots of horrible side effects like the aforementioned things. Also they make meth out of it, didn’t you watch the first season of Breaking Bad? Now I take something that makes me powerfully drowsy, but whatever, it’s still a big improvement.

Justin Wolfe’s drafts are great writing and this bit about his negative reactive to pseudoephedrine came at a great time.

I’ve been suffering with grass seed allergies for 26 years and live in the grass seed capital of the world. I’ve been trying Claritin-D with pseudoephedrine for the last month with the same side effects that Justin describes.

It’s sucked.

Today is my first day not taking Claritin-D and I’d much rather suffer through 3-months of itchy eyes, runny noise, and sore throat than another day of pseudoephedrine side effects.

PSA: Go subscribe to Justin’s drafts and don’t take Claritin-D if you value your mental health, erections.

I need a change of philosophy.

I’ve spent the last 6 months shorting my sleep down to 7 hours/night and for the last 3 weeks an average of 4 hours/night.

My philosophy has been that by putting 25% more stress on my body I can achieve 50-100% better results.

And last night my body shut down. Halfway through recording Grind For Life, my temperature spiked up to 101º and I could feel myself hitting a wall.

It sucked. I needed to rest.

I spent the next 6 hours working. I met with 2 groups, helped a friend write her resume, and put a few hours in on the launch a new project.

And then I woke up sick.

I can’t keep trying to do more. I can’t keep shaving off another hour of sleep every night no matter how much joy and excitement I have for the projects and opportunities.

I owe it to my body and my goals to put the best effort I can into whatever I”m working towards.

That means focusing on quality of time spent, not quantity.

That means saying no to good opportunities, so I can say yes to amazing opportunities.

That means sleeping 8+ hours/night, so I can produce great work consistently and not in spurts.

The best move I ever saw a manager make was organizing a 15-person event by opt-out.

Hey, (event) is Thursday at 9am. We’ll be meeting in the parking lot at 7am. Email me if you won’t be able to attend.

The trick? She changed the psychological default. By changing the default from opt in to opt out, attendance skyrocketed.

Changing the default choice can have huge ramifications for changing behavior.

Think about saving for a vacation. Making the choice to save $200/mo into a savings account requires a decision every month — and gives space to make an excuse to not save.

Changing the default behavior to ‘the money is automatically deposited into my travel savings account’ removes the decision and makes the default behavior the one we want — increased saving.

Next time I’m planning an event, I’m going to steal this trick and change the default from ‘opt in to attending’ to ‘let me know if you can’t make it’.