mypermissions.org – quick and easy access to the 3rd-party permissions panels of popular apps. Since I do a lot of work evaluating API usage, I grant permissions to a lot of sites I never come back to – this was a handy reminder.

Free online courses at Stanford: I’m trying out CS 101, technology entrepreneurship and human-computer interaction.

Regretsy’s Butthurt: it’s good to know my team isn’t the only team that deals with stuff like this.

Left of center there’s a dip with a small peak in the middle. They call that peak Mount Everest

This is largely prompted by Google’s disabling of sharing functionality in Reader, which was one of my favorite features, and has caused a significant void in the satisfaction of my online media consumption.

It’s also influenced by the thoughts of a lot of people I respect online, most notably Anil Dash, and his consistent promotion of people blogging on their own platform, rather than places like Facebook or Google+ or Twitter. I have love/hate relationships with all three forums, particularly the first two, and more importantly I can’t even begin to argue against the general merits of the argument – which I’ll clumsily boil down to “retain ownership of your own production.” I’ll also throw a shout-out link to this post on Quora, which upon reading – particularly item 1 – gave me chills about not being the person I want to be. Excuse me while I go check to see if I’ve been favorited on Twitter, liked on Facebook, or if anyone of note has looked at my LinkedIn profile in the last seven days.

It’s lastly pushed because I’ve been travelling abroad lately (hello from India!), which compels content out of me in ways day-to-day living simply cannot. The most success I’ve ever had blogging consistently was the now-defunct worldwideeyed.com, in which I chronicled – consistently, for several months! – my travels around Southeast Asia between 2004-05. People dug it. I dug writing it. I just didn’t keep it up. I’ll blame grad school, but the truth is equally crippling self-doubt about the things I post online. I delete a lot of tweets after the fact, too.

A caveat to those who may be particularly excited by this: I’d love to tell you that this time it’s for real and I’ll keep writing. I cannot promise you that. I may not publish here for two years again. But I do feel like I have some things I want to say and I don’t know where else to put them. I also really want to share the best things I read online. This is mine (at least I think so, I haven’t actually read the WP ToS recently). So, for however long this thing flies, add me back to your media diet and maybe I’ll be more protein than sugar.

Lastly,  two links I saw today and wanted to share that compelled this exceedingly long lead-in:

15 golden rules to live by while travelling the world: #6 in particular. Don’t listen to me. I’m not a cautious person by nature, I have no problem getting lost and getting unlost and walking for hours to do so, and I’m often terrified by the ramifications of people actually taking me seriously.

Steve Jobs’ vision of the world: “everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it…. once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

This is me, trying to learn that. Thanks for reading.

I’ve never been able to keep a blog and I’ve decided to stop trying. I still want a home of my own on the web, and this shall be it, but if you’re looking for content, my apologies but there’s little here. You can see the About page to see some places I am found.