Pink has an interesting back story – his last “real” job was as a speechwriter for Al Gore and as a law student he was bad such that “he graduated in the part of his law class that makes the upper 90% possible.”

Looks like fat is the new thin for guys.  The chiseled abs look is passé.   Blame it on the economy or having a super-president that stays thin, works out, shoots hoops and deals with world problems, making  it too hard for the rest of us to keep up.

Good news for me – I’m in style.

Read NYT.

Relationships are never easy, right?  Every say things you regret during an argument? I’m a master of this kind of regret.

When I saw this list on Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project site and couldn’t resist republishing it.

Gretchen’s book about her attempt to try the teachings of the ages on how to be happy is now available for pre-order.  I’ll be looking forward to the book and will review it when available.

Here’s her list of what not to say during an argument

Don’t start.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Haven’t we already had this conversation?

Can’t we talk about this later?

Never mind (sigh), it’s not important.

You always do that.

For once, could you XXX without making a big deal about it?

Enough already.

Can’t we just go?

My personal favorite: Can I tell you one thing?

As for me, I think I’m going to stop running to Twitter and airing how I’ve been wronged and looking for support.

Independent directors give advice to new film makers.   Since making a film is a mixture of creative and technique, it’s pretty much like any other endeavor.  This short video clip has a little advice for everyone.

Sam Raimi “Spiderman, et al” – Just make a movie every week and you’re a film maker.  Similar good  advice as “writers write” and “just do it”.

Guillermo Del Toro, “Hell Boy”  - “Don’t back off”

Quentin Tarrantino, “Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs” –  Have the passion and just make the movie even if you throw it away.  Then Tarrantion comes off as a pompous dick by giving the advice as to how to make it today, just make Reservoir Dogs, (his first film) because it’s a kick-ass f—- movie!

Robert Rodriguez – “El Mariachi, Sin City, Spy Kids” – Probably my favorite — he suggest “do it in Spanish and subtitle it — they’ll think it’s an art film.”  Starting immediately, Enquiringmimes will be written in Russian with translations available.

Living my life working via the Web, why shouldn’t I have friends the same way?  I have met two folks via the vast Internet who are thousands of miles apart.  I’ve known both for many years and visiting either would make an ideal vacation.

I met Jon Watson via a help desk request at my company, Virtual Bridges.  He was living in Calgary, Alberta at the time.  He’s a Linux techie, he’s written about our software products in the tech press, he’s a blogger – he once had a network of Linux blogs for which I wrote.  He and I keep in touch via Facebook, Linkedin and email. I once had a plan to hire him and move him to our offices in Austin but he had other ideas.  He and his wife, Kelly, wanted to move 5000 miles to Canada’s Atlantic provinces and start a Bed and Breakfast in Nova Scotia.  They did.

I could visit them at their Phoenix Hollow B&B in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

“Built circa 1873, the “Lion House” has undergone extensive renovations in order to offer the modern amenities of today while keeping the stately grace of yesteryear.

The Phoenix Hollow began life as a personal residence for ship owner and merchant Mark Curry and is now a Canada Select 4-star rated B&B.

The Hollow has also served its community well as both a boarding house and a refuge for the homeless after The Great Windsor fire of 1897.

Jon and Kelly are proud to be the 14th owners of this wonderful home and enjoy inviting people into our beautiful house.”  From phoenixhollow.com.

I think the whole family would enjoy that vacation, except maybe the dog.  Jon has pups of his own so doesn’t have facilities for visiting pups.

If I wanted more of an urban vacation I could visit another friend and engage in one of my favorite past times – eating.

I’m Dan Perlman, but it seems not the only Dan Perlman.  If you Google the name you would probably find me, but also several other “Dan Perlman”s.  One once contacted me because he kept a web page of “Dan Perlman”s and wanted to see if I had any interest in giving up the domain name danperlman.com for his Dan-Perlman collection.  I didn’t, but we kept in contact.  As Facebook became more popular we both connected on the site — constantly confusing our friends with wall posts from multiple “Dan Perlman”s.

Dan writes about food and wine and is Chef at his “closed door” restaurant Casa Salt Shaker in Buenos Aires.  While Jon is a mere 3000 miles from me in California, Dan is a bit further at about 6500 miles.

Having read Dan’s SaltShaker.net blog about food and about Casa Salt Shaker on its Facebook page and seen his food pictures on his Flickr pages, I know I could spend some very pleasant time exploring Buenos and enjoying eating and drinking wine at Dan’s restaurant.

Here’s how they describe Casa SaltShaker, the closed door restaurant:

“Welcome to Casa SaltShaker. We offer a unique dining experience in Barrio Norte. In essence, you are being invited to a dinner party in our home, where you will be seated at one of our two communal tables, with other guests. The setting is casual, the food eclectic, the conversation lively – and generally in a mix of languages. We consider our food “fancy home cooking” – we’re not trying for a multi-star experience – it’s about good food and wine, and meeting new friends.” From casasaltshaker.com

Here’s this weekend’s menu, celebrating Sunthorn Phu Day in Thailand,

• Egg Net with Shrimp Salad
• Tom Kha (peanut-tomato based soup)
• Vegetable Pad Thai
• Mussel Curry
• Banana Springrolls in Coconut Caramel

Anyway, that’s how I would spend my vacation.

Off topic:  Since Dan and I keep in contact via Facebook, I recently had the mischievous pleasure of beating Dan to the Facebook “vanity” URL of our name and in doing so met another Dan Perlman who is studying for the Bar in Boston.

This post is going to be short and sweet but your mind will still wander off while you’re reading. And that’s okay it seems.

Here’s the scoop on a new study that says that a certain amount of zoning out while you’re trying to concentrate is not just natural, it’s probably pretty good.  It seems when your mind wanders what it may doing is the important work of problem solving and looking at the big picture for the future.

Experiments detailed in Discover Magazine by Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara and one of the leading researchers on mind wandering.  His experiments found that when a group of undergraduates attempted to read the beginning of War and Peace, their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-period.

When they did further research they found there were two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without awareness. He calls this second kind “zoning out.”

He found that two areas of the brain became active during mind wandering, one is the executive control system which exerts a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought directing the brain to important goals.  The 2d region is called the default network and becomes active during self-referential things such recounting personal experiences and picturing yourself in the future.

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives.

That would seem to account for the phenomenon of solving a problem just when you’ve stopped thinking about it, but it also seems to be at conflict with some of the principles of meditation practice that has one always trying to bring back a wandering mind to the present and a state “mindlefullness”.

Did you wander off or are you still here?  The entire web experience is one of mind wandering.

There is a new talk on TED by Nancy Etcoff, a cognitive researcher, on the Surprising Science of Happiness.

In her 20-minute talk, Nancy Etcoff discusses our pursuit of happiness and how it’s not the same as just reducing unhappiness, our quest through the use of pharmaceuticals, like Prozac and the effects measurable effects of happiness and unhappiness on our bodies.

Worth watching.

My special way of feeling good and getting inspired is to watch videos on TED.

If you’re not very familiar with TED, you should be.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.  The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
Their site makes the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 400 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Today I watched Mae Jemison, the astronaut, make a case for teaching arts and sciences together. Too long, she says, has there been the belief that scientists are not creative and artists are not analytic.  Arts and sciences are both manifestations of the same thing.

One of her best lines is “science provides an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a person experience.” One her funniest was in quoting the microbiologist, Sydney Brenner, “It’s always important to distinguish between chasity and impotence.”

She makes the case for me of integrating the intuitive and the analytic. Time for me to supplement my very deficient science education.

I spent today watching the corgi and Sandra run dog agility, my job is to keep the boy happy.  While pushing Jake around the agility course I listen to recorded books and podcasts on an iPod.

I listened to a talk given at the recent  SouthbySouthwest Conference in Austin by Merlin Mann and John Gruber called “HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!“  The topic could have been How to Turbocharge Anything-You-Really-Want-to-Do with Credibility.   I found the podcast inspiring enough to listen to twice.  It’s good weekend listening, especially since you’ll need the time, it’s about 60 minutes.

John Gruber writes a well-read, well-written blog called Daring Fireball, certainly worth reading if you’re not already.  Merlin Mann is one of the 5 Web Folk I Admire – Something I don’t do easily. He’s interesting, funny, smart and very annoying. I once wrote to The Bloggess, who is the funniest person on Twitter, that I like reading her very much but was okay not being married to her.  I like reading Merlin Mann very much, but am okay not being married to him, either.

Listen to the podcast.

Covey sets the stage this way.

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

“Well why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire.  “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

Maybe that reminds you of the business cliche, “too busy to plan”.

So, Covey is saying,  the way to make your work easier is to improve the quality of the tools you use.  He’s not just suggesting the guy take a break and then go back to sawing with the same dull saw.  He says improve the tool and then the work will be easier.

Covey suggests that working in these four areas will make the work of life easier.

• Physical
  Taking care of your body, staying healthy, focused on vitality
• Spiritual
  This is at the core, your life’s direction, your inner journey
• Mental
  Taking care of your brain and your acuity
• Social / emotional
  Investing in relationships and interdependence

So what better time than this weekend to take a walk, do a little exercise, meditate or go to your church/synagogue (remember, one of the positives of organized religion is the sense of community as well as the spiritual), read a book, spend time with friends?

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