Anyone who can drive below 25 MPH should be canonized

In these days of high gas prices and a failing economy, I’m trying out new methods to save a couple pennies. One of the best ways to save on gas is to simply drive slower. It makes sense—the less you accelerate, the less gas you use. The idea is to drive as if you don’t have any brakes—to stop slowly by losing momentum. Slamming on the brakes indicates unnecessary acceleration.

Since starting this practice, I’ve noticed a decent increase in my gas mileage. But the real story is in observation of my fellow commuters.

Once I started slowing down in traffic, I started seeing all this unnecessary acceleration. It’s amazing (in the negative sense). There has to be some underlying social regiment to simply move faster. I believe we have all been conditioned to drive at least 25 MPH at all times. This seems to be the magic boundary that every car should be . Think about it, how often do you see speed limits below 25 MPH?

What’s crazy is how drivers need to get to this speed no matter what. Accerating towards red lights, maintaining this speed with a stop sign ahead. Its rare to find a kindred slowsky like myself, coasting at 17 MPH towards the stop.

I myself am no stranger to this compulsion. Whenever I’m coasting below 25, I get this Jedi-esque sensory experience of the drivers behind me, fuming at the jerk in the blue car who’s taking his sweet time. I’ve witnessed people pass around me – in a race to beat me to the red light. I feel like I’m the crazy one for driving slowly and patiently and (as bonkers as it sounds) economically.

I hope that I’m just an “early adopter” to the new school of the slow—that more drivers will succumb to the you’ll-get-there-soon-enough mentality. But I’m lead to believe that we’ll all keep our lead-feet on the gas pedal. The impulse to get moving is just too great.

Finding the reins

Half-way through 2008 and two years after I originally registered nemoorange.com; It’s the perfect time for a State-of-the-Union address for this site. Personally, the past six months have been all about getting my life on track (not that it was ever off one). It’s about time I shared what’s been going on and what I see ahead.

New Moon and a new direction

The original intent of the new moon project was to re-acquaint myself with my creative side. In creating the entries, I re-discovered a part of my identity that I had neglected for far too long. Now that I’ve re-connected this piece, I have gained a whole new perspective on my life. I’ve found a purpose, an identity. Subsequently, I was able to set goals and take action towards a clear destination. I am going to be a designer. For the next year and a half, I’ll be going to school for graphic and web design. The goal is to be employed as a creative professional in one year.

This means that posting stuff to my website will have to take a back seat—although, now that I consider it, it’s probably just as important that I do put some content up. All the same, new moon entries will not come with every new phase the moon. So the bad news is that new entries to the new moon section are going to be less frequent and lighter in content. But the good news is that I’m on my way to happiness.

Blog

In the past two years, the blog has been especially under-developed. While I fantasize of typing passage after passage of fluent thought, the words have always been tough for me to put together. Putting together a sentence mostly feels like a game of Scrabble for me. I have the components set up on my little ledge, and I keep on mixing them around to see what works best. In shuffling around the key words and phrases, I stumble in expressing the original thought. For example, putting together this post took several revisions over the course of a week, flipping around sentences and paragraph structures.

Bread bag reins

Another obstacle in my writing has been finding a theme that would narrow the subjects to write about. Lately, I’ve felt mobilized to start getting everything organized. Simplified living is a bit hot-button topic these days. It coincides with the “going green” movement that’s become the story of the latter half of this decade. My aim is to write short—maybe 200 word—entries focused on the tips and methods to live simply and happily. Hopefully I can get into the habit of posting once a week. I’ll try not to sound too smug delivering what I think are tips. It’s more of a personal dialouge—how I continue to make sense of my universe.

Photo and Daily sections

The daily photo section has now been hidden away. It’s still available for you to peruse, but I hadn’t added a new entry to it since March. That month coincides when I started using Flickr seriously.

Since the beginning of my entry into blogging, my site has been primarily focused on posting up photos—typically of the previous weekend’s escapades. Nowadays, I’m less likely to bring the camera along for a night out. After all, how many pics of my friends at bars can one tolerate? Creating a photo post for this site requires several laborious steps. Instead, I’ve been spending more time devoting photo content to my Flickr account. With the Flickr Uploader, I can do the posts with just a couple drag-n-drops—very easy, plenty faster. Most important to you, Flickr is much easier to browse and search and discover and link my photography. Now that I’ve been using it for a couple months, I enjoy it more with each new submission. Eventually, the photo section might go away in favor of dedicating Flickr to all things photographic.

Now that I’ve declared this as a public commitment, hopefully I can stick to it. More content, different presentation.

Farewell to Plastic

I’m in the process of importing all my CDs into MP3’s, so I can keep the music and rid myself of the physical inventory. I found myself looking at these CDs I never play any more, wondering why I devote precious physical space to items I rarely touch. Yes, some meant a lot to me, but after a while, they just become clutter. The importing process gives me the chance to re-acquaint myself with some forgotten songs—music that meant a lot to me years ago. Of course, they are some I cannot bring myself to part with—namely my beloved Smashing Pumpkins discography. The nostalgia factor is just too great.

This act of getting rid of the CDs is just a part of a bigger plan. Ridding myself of clutter. More on that to come.

Keystroke for no more forgotten attachments

DISCLAIMER: I realize this entry nearly breaks the glass on the Cube Monkey Thermometer. Dwight K. Schrute and Michael Bolton would be proud. I would love to post something more stimulating or contemporary — maybe more along the lines of “Thrift-store or Name-brand: What flavor of Western shirts is totally in this season.” But I felt this lifehack was good enough to share at the risk of staining my non-corporate-hipster image.

After ten thousand emails sent, I’ve finally found a promising method for remembering to attach the file before I send it.

Alt, I, L

That’s the keystroke for attaching an email in Outlook (I’m not sure about other applications). I try to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible, so I love keystrokes.

I believe this technique works because it re-conditions the set of actions in the email process. Before, after I finished an email, I would move my right hand to the mouse. Typically, the move would be to hit the send button unless I remembered that I needed to attach a file. That moment is where the fault happens. When I make the move for the mouse, I’m already predisposed to hit send. The physical action of taking my hand off the keyboard has conditioned me to click on the send button. In this process, I have to go against the natural flow of my action set in order to make the attachment.

Now, sticking to keystrokes, the cognitive decision is integrated into the process. After finishing an email, the next step is to think “What next.” If I need to attach something, I still have my hands on the keyboard, so I hit Alt, I, L. If this email is good to go, I hit Alt, S — the keystroke for sending the email. I have removed the physical act that encourages to me to send the email right away. Re-conditioning is a success! Since I’ve started using the keystrokes, I can’t think of one time I’ve missed an attachment.

Having trouble remembering the keystroke? Try thinking of it phonetically. “Alt, I, L” sort of rhymes with “At File” like “attach file.”

I swear I’m cool.

Grid, Rhythm, and Secrets

Redesigning this site has been one of the more enjoyable aspects of keeping a spot on the Internet. The design, layout, and organization of nemoorange.com are always a work in progress. I’m constantly tweaking style tid-bits in the CSS, or revising the Textpattern forms. With the latest revision of the site, I’d like point a couple items that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Gridlocked

I finally revised the layout so it adheres to a grid. Grid layouts are the current hot topic in web design. See GridLayouts.com for a brief history of the subject. While I’m not completely sold on the wholistic benefits of keeping to a grid. It all feels a bit too inside-baseball. I imagine that the only people who appreciate grid layouts are designers who know what grid layouts are. Much like how the only people that care about Yngwie Malmsteen solos are novice guitarists. Regardless, employing a grid layout throughout my site posed a sort of puzzle. And since nerds love puzzles, I had to make an attempt to pull it off.

The grid I use consists of 4 columns, 210px wide, with 20px gutters. Four columns might not completely constitute a full-fledged grid-layout, but it can be split again, to make for a 8 column, 95px wide, 20px gutters. Apart from the words and daily section, the grid is all over this site.

Tricky Y Axis

The second component of the layout is the use of veritcal rhythm. Again, this achievement seemed to be aimed at the typophiles. The only reward is that text on two different columns line up. I originally put this in the CSS when I re-hauled the stylesheet back in October. Once the margins and padding are all kosher, the only difficult part is cropping images correctly to keep with rhythm. This site uses 20px line-height.

In order to keep myself honest, I’ve got a background image hidden in the CSS I can flick on and off to see if everything lines up.

New wing now open to the public

Both layout elements easily meshed with designing the new sections. I first had to tackle a dedicate page for the new moon section. I began the project without a dedicated page to collect all the entries, so I knew I had to get around to designing it. Once finished, that page provided the template I would repeat throughout the other sections.

The movies and words sections were both pet projects started up months ago, originally for my eyes only. Two secret sections now brought out in the open. I’ve always kept my movie ticket stubs. Organizing them into a web page wasn’t really hard, just a bit tedious.

As for the words, I remember my 8th grade English teacher first proposing the idea of keeping a word list. At the time, I thought it was a cool idea, but I saw no facility in keeping one for myself. Reading for pleasure was a foreign concept to me until college. Now, I’ve found that keeping this list has been one of my favorite aspects of maintaining my own site. If I had to write down those words on a list, I think I would have lost it by now. Or more likely, lost interest.

Back to tumble

The main page now has a proper tumblelog again under latest . This a perfect exhibit of the utility of the Textpattern CMS. Content in different sections can all be easily collected in one meta-section. Pulling it off requires a bunch of different if-statements. Looking into the source, you’ll see a lot of white space, where those if-statements should be.

That’s all for now. See you again in three months, for the next re-design!