Danielle Morrill

“If” by Rudyard Kipling

I’m working on my New Years resolutions – and yes, this is my favorite holiday.  For now, I’ll leave you with a poem I like to read when reflecting on the kind of person I’d like to be.

IF by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

MostRecent.net Soft Launch – Community Driven News Portals

As a member of the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list, I received the word from Ian on the list that he was ready for us to give it a try. I’ve created a page to track Mobile Social Network news, and spent 20 minutes getting it started. To get an idea of how this works, watch the quick demo video on their homepage.

Thoughts & Suggestions

1. Without RSS this page I have just created will not remain current for more than an hour – at best. I wish I could provide a feed URL (such as a Google search of blogs for the term “mobile social network”) to feed into the page in order to keep it current.
2. Once I have added component to the page, it appears impossible to delete it.  Update: I figured out how to do this, there is a button called “Archive” after you double-click on something.  Took me trial-and-error to figure out what this meant.
3. If I go back and then forward again, all the changes I’ve made are lost. That’s painful (I just did this on accident).  They have a note at the bottom of the page which I didn’t even notice – maybe that should be front and center.  Better yet, don’t flush the data so soon – you probably want to hang onto aborted sessions of contribution anyway for metrics purposes.
4. When I add a news story link, such as the link from TechCrunch, it seems like it would be nice to have a little Ajax lookup of the URL that grabs the meta data (author name, title, date posted, blog name) so that I wouldn’t have to enter all that as text.  Structured data is gold.
5. I’m primarily a keyboard user (avoid the mouse whenever possible) and the tab order did not include the “Save” buttons, so I had to use my mouse frequently.
6. I’m not clear on how I can get my friends to subscribe to this page, so that they will hear about updates when I add to the page.
7. I was unable to add more than one link to the 3rd (far right) resources box – seems like a bug.

Fundamentally, I am unclear on how this is better than a feedreader + forum combination for managing a community that is interested in a specific topic.  That being said, I know this is a soft launch so I can only imagine there is a more feature-rich version of the service in the works.  I can see promise in this, as a feedreader-style landing page that is public.

Holiday Adventures with the Clarks

I just spent the past four days peacefully with my family. We do three things a lot (and, I think, well):

1. read
2. play boardgames
3. drink

There was also a delicious dinner and some fudge in there. Here’s some video from the adventure:

Christmas Morning 2008 from danielle morrill on Vimeo.

My Mom is a Total Martha from danielle morrill on Vimeo.

My Goals for 2009

I wanted to come up with three high-level goals to encapsulate how I’m approaching 2009.  I made this video this morning at breakfast, and I’ll be explaining them more in depth soon.  For now, here’s what I’ve got:

We Are All Inventors of Our Own Lives

We are all inventors

each sailing out on a voyage of discovery

guided each by a private chart

of which there is no duplicate.

The world is all gates

all opportunities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson