Make Believe

This looks like a great documentary. I went to school with a guy who was big into his magic. His nickname was “Presto”. 18 years old and he would be doing magic tricks for people in the halls before class. Thinking back, he took an awful lot of shit for this thing he was deeply passionate about.

The last time I saw him, it was when Uri Gellar played in Dublin back in 2007 or so. He’d gotten all into Nu-Metal, he’d been arrested a few times and I’m fairly sure he was off his face on meth at the time.

Still – this looks like a great documentary.

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Everyday

I’m a man of good intentions. You should see my to-do list, it’s full of good – nay, *great* – intentions. Chances are I’ll get around to half of them. I start a project and lose interest halfway through. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m like Jay-Z, I do one thing then [I’m on to the next one](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM1RChZk1EU). For example, I was so impressed by [Brigada Creative’s Life Calendar](http://bblinks.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-calendar-how-was-your-day.html) that I spent a few hours and [knocked together a version in PHP](http://lowbrowculture.com/mood/). As you can see, that lasted all of nine days, before I got bored with that and moved onto the next thing.

But I think we both know that’s not true. The problem is that I’m easily distracted and this affects my follow-through. With the life calendar thing, once the novelty wore off, I started to forget it was there and I forgot to update it. I could have set a reminder in my calendar, telling me to update it, but this would involve clicking “okay” to the reminder, firing up a browser, logging into the back-end, and then updating it. That’s at least two steps too many for me. My browser would launch and I’d forget what I opened it for and then I’d get sucked into my Google Reader.

What I love about the [Everyday App](http://everyday-app.com/) is that it’s just the right amount of steps for me, for my weaknesses. It reminds me to take a photo of myself each day, and from the reminder, I can immediately take a photo of myself. It’s frictionless. It’s perfect for people like me.

Plus, I don’t mind taking photos in my lift with its really unflattering fluorescent light just after I have gone running and when I [look like a sweaty, exercising hobo](http://www.flickr.com/photos/thrillho/5632122167/). Win-win.

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Tons of great tips in here. I particularly like this one from Josh Sprague: ‘learning to say “How much,” “That’s too high,” “This one” and “That one” is way more useful to the short-term traveler than “Hello, how are you?”‘. And also ‘Eat it before asking what it is.’ (via Justin Mason)

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