Microblog

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

. . .

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Don’t wait – life isn’t going to wait, the universe isn’t going to wait. Care – care about making, doing, creating, hustling.

Via Merlin Mann.

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Marco Arment has introduced the next version of Instapaper, now featuring a great social / sharing feature. “This is the biggest update Instapaper has ever had in one version, and I’m proud to finally show it to you.”

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This excerpt from Mandy Brown is going on my wall: “And yet, people do read online. They read more than they ever did. They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day–waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between tasks; they buy devices that permit them to carry more words than they ever could before–and with those devices in hand they read more and more.”

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Some guy upgrades his computer through every version of Windows starting with a clean install of MS-DOS 5.0 all the way through Windows 7, via Jason Kottke:

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Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb: “But Twitter’s recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars’ ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.”

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AHA president Anthony Grafton provides his thoughts on digital historical research in the March 2011 edition of Perspectives. Highly recommended.

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My colleague Andy Jewell’s latest book, The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, was just published by the University of Michigan Press.

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Mike O’Malley: “Suppose the job of editing and commenting looked more like this? Moder­ated, live interactions, and an ongoing discussion among peers. An editor might choose one article a week. He or she would post the article with a com­ment on its merits/weaknesses. Readers could then comment in real time, acting as peer reviewers, with the editor acting to ‘prune’ and police the com­ments. All readers would see opinion evolving, and see the process of peer review in action.”

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Looks like an excellent device. This may be the year I finally pick one up. It just doesn’t seem that the latest Android offerings I’ve been intrigued by – the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab – can quite match what Apple offers. Check out Apple’s promotional video.

Inside Higher Ed: “What might be good for graduates’ employability in the short term might not be so in the long term, Schneider said. ‘The question to ask is not: which majors do the best in initial job placement, but rather, which institutions are sending their graduates forth with big picture knowledge, strong intellectual skills and the demonstrated ability to integrate and apply diverse kinds of learning to new settings and challenges,’ she said. ‘This is the kind of learning that both employers and civic leaders are pleading with us to design and it’s the kind of learning that a strong liberal education actually provides.’”

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