6ix Passions

Eye Gazing

Ok for this edition of Show ‘N Tell, I’ve decided to talk about something unusual. Jason, the initiator of this project, told me last time there are no rules and I can talk about what I want. Remember Jason, you told me so ;-)

I’m currently reading the book of Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek. Probably one of most important book that has been written since the Internet exists if you ask me.

In one of the chapter, Tim introduces the Comfort Challenge. Most important actions are never comfortable, but according to Ferris you can condition yourself to the discomfort and overcome it by doing a series of uncomfortable exercises.

I’ve decided to play along and accept each of his challenges as I read the book.

The first one was Eye Gazing. For the next two days you had to gaze into the eyes of others - whether people you pass on the street or conventional partners - until they break contact. Some of his hint goes from blinking from time to time for not looking as a psychopath, to maintain eye contact while speaking and to practice it with people more confident or who impress you.

What did I discover? With all the technologies around us, we are more and more distracted and we are lacking attention and focus. The first victims of this technological omnipresence are the persons around us. By keeping an eye contact with them, we learn to really focus our attention and be more present. So it is not only giving you more confidence, it’s giving you the edge of reading the other person mind and body language by keeping all your attention at them and to what they say. They will also be more interested to you and tell you more about themselves.

Since I’ve done that exercise for two days, I’ve decided to always keep a regular eye contact with most around me. Some will ask you why you are looking at them, but then you simply need to smiles to distract them.

That was my little Show ‘N Tell contribution of the week.

My Setup - What I use to get the job done

Inspired by the interviews at The Setup, what do people use to get the job done? I decided to replicate it for myself for the Show N’ Tell Friday. Not sure it fits in what you had in mind Jason. Sorry!

Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Jean-Philippe Cyr. I’m a freelance user experience strategist in Montreal. I work with marketing agencies and private companies at transposing their business and communications needs into interactive solutions. I edit a blog since 2004 called 6ix Passions.

What hardware are you using?
I use a MacBook Pro 2.16 Mhz with 3 Gigs of RAM and a small hard drive of 100 GB. I use a PC Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard that makes everyone say: “Wow, your keyboard is broken!”. I listen to my music with a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pro. My sensitive data, including my music and photos are daily backup on remote server using iDrive. I use a small My Passport portable external drive of 500 GB to backup my computers and any other medias every month. I carry my laptop with me between my home and office. I always cary my iPhone 3G in my left pants pocket.

And what software?
I’ve been on Windows for many years before switching for OS X three years ago. I had the fear not to find the appropriate software for my needs, to loose productivity and to go from a power user to a user. I could not be more wrong and today I cannot think for a minute to go back.

I use Google App intensively for my mail, calendar, text documents and spreed-sheets. I synchronize everything with my iPhone using Google Caldav for my agenda and Google Mobile Synch for my mail and contacts.

I surf with Firefox. I tried Safari and Chrome, but both of them, even being quicker at rendering HMTL and parsing JavaScript cannot compensate for the increase in productivity I get from my customized Firefox. I use a single address and search bar with plenty of quicksearch shortcuts and “I cannot live without” the extensions: Tab Mix Plus, FireGestures and Easy DragToGo.

On a daily basis I use TextEdit and Notepad (on the iPhone) to take notes. I didn’t find anything more simple and easy to use.

I keep my workspace clean and to the bare minimum. My menu bar is clean and only the applications I use on a frequent basis are in my dock: Finder, Firefox, Adium, Transmission, Offline access to Google Gmail, Calendar, Docs, iTunes and Parallels Desktop.

I’m a shortcuts addict and always look to increase my productivity with little tools and apps. I use Spark to customize all the keyboard shortcuts to control system functions, iTunes and launch apps from my PC keyboard. I use TextExpander to speed repetitive writing and signatures and Google Desktop as a replacement for Spotlight to access files and apps easily.

I use Parallele Desktop to use Microsoft Visio in Windows XP. The only software I use with a custom build plug-in: WorkFlow, that I co-inspired to develop, to do information architecture and wireframes when I really need them into a digital format.

I use Dropbox to share files, but also as a hosting platform for the media on my blog. I have a custom script, that I called ImageReeSizr that resize any screenshot to 400 pixels wide, put it into the appropriate Dropbox folder and copy the public Dropbox link, so I can simply paste the link into my post when I’m ready.

On the personal side, I’m a big fan of Lightroom and iMovie. Inspired from the old days, when film strips where stick together manually, I think that iMovie 8.0+ is a little revolution in the way we edit movies. I enjoy doing personal storytelling in videos from the raw data I acquire.

If I had to choose a single app on my iPhone, it would be Instapaper to read the Web while I’m commuting. I would even buy an iPhone for that application alone (yes even before the possibility of making calls - yes I know, I should buy a iPod Touch then). Because of it, I read more (or should I simply say: I take the time to read). It is the most valuable application I ever used. Period. And I mean it.

What would be your dream setup?
I’m pretty close to my dream setup in term of software, I would just like to have Visio native for OS X or to find something better to do digital wireframes. I have tried them all and nothing is quite productive enough to my taste.

Regarding the hardware, I cannot live with a resolution lower than 1440 x 900, but I would dream to have a MacBook Air 15 inches with the CPU clock, graphic horse power, and battery longevity of the new unibody MacBook Pro 15 inches with SDD.

NOTE: This post is now featured on The Setup Community page.

Outdoor and Me

You may also read this post with a different title, like “Sport and Me” or “Outdoor gears and Me”, but let’s start by the beginning. When I was young, in time where teachers where still asking their students to stand in line from the taller in the back to the shorter in the front, I always been the closest one to the teacher. I only got to my full extension after high school, so all the harm to my self-esteem has been perpetrated during my junior years.

While my teachers was treating me like I was an angel - I always succeed to avoid detention after school even after having committed the worst of childhood crimes - to the other classmates, I was a continuous annoying pain. It was my way to defend myself against judgment and persecution for my lack of vertical inches. No way they will get it easy on me!

It was a pretty good all around technique except in the sport classes. Here’s the teacher didn’t really care about me. The line was mostly the other way around, the taller ones where favored for their athletic superiority while the short ones were the last considered when it was the time to choose the best assets by the team leaders.

I never succeeded to excel in team sports and my parents where not big fans either of our national sports (hockey and baseball). I didn’t grow liking sports in group and the competition around it. When I was a kid, I even asked my mother to stop going to a sport center every Saturday because I was missing all my cartoons! In fact, the reason was that the only sport I performed in was swimming. My mother was also a great cross country skier, so I learned to like it very young. 30 years later, I still practice cross county skiing almost every weekends in winter. During summer I switch my skis for my road bike going, two or three times week, at 30 km/h along side the Lachine canal here on Montreal. Both of those sports are outdoor, near the nature, and they are the perfect exit scenarios to my working life.

I got hook to outdoor, hiking in the woods in the good as the worst conditions, by getting an interest, more like a compulsive fanatic passion, for outdoor gears. I like tech gadgets, but I like even more outdoor equipments. I find the science of it fascinating. The ultimate goal being to feel naked while being protected from the outdoor elements. Meaning that your equipments should be as less heavy as possible for not slowing you down and the fabric of your clothing needs to protect you from the wind, rain, snow, sun, heat, cold while letting your skin breathes as much as possible, pushing the moisture from perspiration out. The equilibrium needs to be perfect and the quest for acquiring the best set of gears can become an obsession.

As for many things in life, like cooking, everything rests in the implementation and use of quality ingredients. To understand outdoor equipments, you need to know how it is done, but more importantly from what. For outdoor clothing, it means to know everything about the fabrics and how, in the field, the overall construction reacts and holds-on to its promise. For this reason I begun to read everything I could find about outdoor fabrics and gear reviews. I bought equipments, tested it in the field under various conditions, sold them, and bought ones I thought better, always in the ultimate goal of finding the perfect match. Once, I knew so much about each pieces of outdoor equipment, memorizing their little names, fabrics, weights, construction details, retail prices, performance on the field and how they compare to each other, that a manager, in a large outdoor retail store, has offered me a job on the spot, telling me that the only thing I didn’t knew was probably the SKU of the items. You learn with time that nothing can be a do-it-all, but certain pieces of gear have been so versatile that I can count on them in mostly any circumstances.

In short this is why I practice solitary sports and I got addicted to outdoor, in the most perverse way, by its outfits.

1500 posts later…

Yes, this post is the my 1500th!

The number, how impressive it can be, it just a number at the end of the day. What I’ve been the most proud of, after having blog for more than 5 years now (first in French on Blogger and then in English on Tumblr), is that I always wanted to add a personal note or an opinion on each of my posts, as small or brief it can be.

My friends know me as a big and bold person. I like or I don’t. I’m impressed or I’m not. It’s God, or crap. I’m white or black (even if I think in shade of grey). I’m passionate and I’m always looking for the next big wave or the small thing that would make me smile. I’m hungry for novelty. What I find interesting today is not what I would find interesting tomorrow. I have an opinion or I don’t and if I don’t than I’m not talking about it. People like opinionated people because they are simply damn more interesting than ones who simply follow the crowd.

I barely used Twitter for this reason because I find that only a tiny percentage of people succeed at being interesting under 140 characters. I find extremely difficult to share something of value and find the appropriate space to add an opinion or a structure thought. Tumblr is, in my opinion, the most amazing micro-blogging platform since the blog exists (Justin Hall begun blogging in 1994). It lets you share links, photos, videos, text, quotes, conversations and audios in a breeze. But easy as it is, I will always take the time to express my opinion, my appreciation or write my thoughts about what I share, even if it’s very brief, because I think a collection of things is just boring without a storyline.

For the ones who follow me since I started, I say thank you, and for the ones who have recently started following me, I say welcome and please feel free to share your thoughts with me.

I’m ready for an another 1500 posts now… Stay tuned.

Music And Me

I’ve decided to begin to talk about music on this blog. Not intensively as others can do it, but sometime by suggesting something to listen.

But first you need to know about how I perceived music. Many will say that I don’t like music. Where it’s true that I can enjoy peace and quietness for months, its not true that I don’t like music. I’m just extremely picky to the sounds I like and enter in my ears.

I’m attracted to harmonic and melodious sounds. I have a repulsion to any songs or tracks that don’t complied to my definition of harmony. I rarely listen to the lyric in a song, even after many plays. I hear the words, but I mostly never connect them together to understand the sentence and even less to make a sense of the all song. At first the song has to be melodious to my ears and then, maybe, after many plays, I will listen/understand what the singer is saying and what the song is about.

For that reason I don’t listen much to tracks with lyrics, I’m more attracted to electronic, house, trance. The only big exception is with French songs, I listen and make sense of the words (I admit not at the first play, but mostly at the third and subsequent ones). But as with all the others songs, the voices have to be in harmony with the music. If by any means the lead voice singer is singing to loud or shout continuously over the music, the song is certainly out of my collection. I’m not compelled by any sense of integrity of an album. I don’t listen to the songs necessary in the order of the album and if a song is out of my standard, there is a good chance that it is already out of my iTunes library. I rate all my songs (I know this is a pain, certainly the first time you do it for all your music collection) and all the songs under 3 stars are out of my system.

I can listen to an album over and over for months while commuting if the sound to my ears is harmonic. For this reason I will certainly never miss space on my 8 gig iPhone. I don’t care about old or modern, new trends, popular songs or new emergent artists. If an artist is good to my ear, the music is in near perfect harmony with his/her voice, there is a good chance that I like it.

So you will rarely caught me listening to rock, hard rock, jazz, rap, Whitney Houston (the singer I hate the most), but will almost go in trance while listening to electronic. I also rarely spend time trying to discover new artists, I rarely spend time reading, browsing about music, period. Suggestions come to me from friends or simply by bumping into them in a party, store, event (with the help of Shazam and my iPhone).

So this is my relation with music. It may sounds strange and weird for some, and maybe (but I doubt) normal for others, but It’s been like that from the first time I’ve begun to listen to music and I don’t see the day it will change.

Stay tune for some suggestions or simply a snapshot of tunes that I like (I don’t use Last.FM). And if you don’t like them, just a little note that I don’t care, I do ;)

See the posts tagged Music.