I recently learned the story of Roman Opalka (via TodayTomorrow & Triangulation), a French-born Polish painter who’s work has left a huge impression on me.
In 1965 Roman began a work ‘OPALKA 1965/1-∞’ that would take him the rest of his life, more than 40 years, to complete. On that day in 1965 he began painting consecutive numbers, in white, on the top left of a black canvas the size of his studio door (which he called a “Detail”). He continued to paint in perfectly uniform rows until he reached the bottom right corner. Once he finished one “Detail” he would start another identical detail where the previous left off. Five years after he started he gave up all other projects to dedicate himself solely to this work.
Few changes were introduced during the course of those 40 years. He changed the background colour in 1968 to grey because grey was neither symbolic, nor emotional. In 1972 began gradually lightening the grey by one percent per “Detail”, with the objective of eventually painting white on white. He also introduced documentation to the method, recording himself speaking the numbers aloud as he painted, and photographing himself in front of his detail at the end of each day’s work. He avoided travel, but if it was necessary he produced “Cartes de voyage” a continuation of his numbers in black ink on white A4 paper.
In all he produced 233 canvases, right up until his recent passing on August 6, 2011.
I find myself drawn to this because of my predisposition toward projects at the intersection of art and science (I attribute that to my parents, I am the offspring of an english teacher and a maths teacher). More than that though, I am fascinated by this story of complete devotion to a task. Opalka would undoubtedly have had his detractors, those who said, either directly to him, or more likely whispered behind his back, that what he was doing was stupid, crazy, or ridiculous. But his strength of conviction, and commitment to his idea drove him to ignore that and complete something incredible. That to me is truly inspirational.
If you would like to know more about Roman Opalka and his work check out:
I am a sucker for a good web app. I will also give anything a go that I think sounds like a remotely good idea. This of course means that there is a litany of dormant accounts with my name on them floating out in the ether. Those few apps that have stood the test of time have become an integral part of my life, helping with productivity, fitness, being on time, keeping in touch with friends and family, organising myself, keeping track of things, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The following is a selection of five of those apps that are a little less mainstream, that perhaps you haven’t yet given a go, roughly in order of how long I have been using them. I don’t hesitate to recommend any and all of these to you if you think they might scratch an itch that you have.
Netvibes is essentially a beefed up RSS reader. I have lost track of the number of people I have introduced to Netvibes. Like actual ‘sit down and do a tutorial’ kinds of introductions, that is how much I like it.
People keep telling me that Google Reader is better, but frankly I don’t believe them. Last time I gave it a go, which admittedly would have been at least 4 years ago now, I went running back to Netvibes. It has been my default homepage for more than 5 years.
I love that it is a dashboard for everything that you care about. I love the option of viewing your RSS feeds in either the widget or reader view. I love the customisation options. I don’t use any of the public features because I am not really sure what value they add, but if I did have a reason to I am sure I would love them too. They also do a pretty good looking social media analytics tool, which you would really want to love to spend US$15k to set up. I love Netvibes.
TripIt is a travel planning tool. It organises your trip into a well laid out itinerary, which you can then use to keep those who care up to date with where you are and what you are doing, and to make sure you don’t miss your flight or show up at the wrong hotel. Well whoop-e-de-doo I hear you say. What makes TripIt really cool is how smart it is.
Once you give it permission TripIt detects booking response emails as they come into your inbox and automatically builds your itinerary. This can be for almost anything travel related: flights, hotels, rental cars, buses, trains, and probably other stuff too. Of course you can also add items manually if you like. It then also adds useful things like maps, directions, and weather forecasts. You can export your finished itinerary to your preferred calendar. It is like having an amazing PA.
Neat huh? Trust me, it is. It was the only thing that kept me organised on my two multi-week and multi-destination trips around Europe and North America.
When I was a kid I remember training for a kids triathlon. I was also a massive nerd. I diligently laid out a six week long training program, and set about completing it in the build up to the big event. Each activity had been measured (mostly thanks to Dad driving around my routes and reading the odometer), and I carefully recorded my time for each training session. Once I had got around a week in a began charting my progress on graphs (told you I was a nerd), watching my times come down, and this spurred me on train harder.
This probably helps explain why I like Runkeeper so much. It is a kind of social network for fitness. You can keep track pretty much any cardio activity that you can think of through the app. Thankfully the excellent accompanying iPhone/Android app or the use of Google Maps means I no longer have to drive my running/cycling routes to measure them. Keeping track of my times, distances, calories burned, weight, and a whole bunch of other stuff (all via beautiful graphs) still keeps me far more interested in training than I would otherwise be. It is also lets you compare your progress (in a friendly, non-competitive way of course) with your ‘street team’ – friends that you share all (or just some) of your work out information with.
You can check out my public Runkeeper profile to get an idea what it is all about.
If you are a to-do list kind of person then you will probably be all over TeuxDeux. I gave a few different web based to-do apps a go, and this is the only one that I have used for more than a couple of days. It is stripped back to the essential functionality, well thought out, and beautifully designed (by the fantastic swissmiss no less). The perfect tool for helping with that massive list of things you need to do before moving countries!
There is also a TeuxDeux iPhone app, and there might be an Android app in the works (although it looks pretty good and works perfectly ‘in browser’ on a ‘droid).
Gimmebar is a relatively new addition to my web app arsenal. As I understand it it is still in private beta, as such I am not sure that they are currently accepting new sign ups (I happened to luck out when they briefly opened up sign ups).
It is kind of like a beefed-up bookmarking service, allowing you to gather artifacts – pictures, movies, text, whole webpages – from around the web and keep track of them (and their source) for later. You can choose to share these things with others, or keep them to yourself. Interestingly your network of fellow gimme’ers is ready made as it is drawn from those you follow on Twitter. One of the best things about twitter for me is the way content is shared, so this makes a lot of sense to me. It is also able to automatically back up your bookmarked content on Dropbox if you so desire.
I have been using it reasonably regularly the last couple of weeks, and can’t see myself stopping any time soon. If you like you can check out my public Gimmebar profile.
An honourable mention only because I have really just started using this in the last couple of days, ifttt lets you set up web related automated tasks. It similar to the idea behind Yahoo Pipes, which was cool, but complicated. ifttt makes it super simple to set up your own custom tasks, or choose from one of their pre-cooked ‘recipes’. As the name suggests you can specify an action (that) to be performed if something (this) happens.
So far it has proven most useful in making Craigslist much more usable – you can ask ifttt to email you when a new item is posted matching your search term. It also looks like it will be really useful for creating automatic backups to the cloud (e.g. I have a task set up to back up all photos that I upload to flickr from now on to Dropbox). There are hundreds of ways this could be used, I am looking forward to experimenting with it further in the coming weeks and months.
(Bonus: the story behind ifttt is fascinating and beautifully told)
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