Choosy is Mac software, currently in beta, and works as follows: when you click a link… it let’s you choose what browser to open it with.

I’m certainly not a typical user, but browsers hijack my time in a number of ways. For one, I tend to have a lot of tabs open in them. If the browser is running, that means that I don’t want to close it; if it is closed and a tab-saving feature is enabled, I’m hesitant to open it. Not closing a browser with many tabs, means that your browser gets heavier and heavier. Having many saved tabs, means that opening a browser will be slower and slower. Another, less prevalent thing, is extensions. I no longer use Firefox on a day-to-day basis, but when I did, the more extensions I had installed (and they can be so addictive), the slower that browser would get.

The consequence of the many-tabs problem is that I tend to use different browsers at different times. On the Mac, my no. 1 browser is Safari, because it’s the fastest to start. Camino is no. 2, because it’s faster (to start) than Firefox. Firefox is no. 3, and was, until recently, browser non grata (Firefox 3 has been a massive improvement). And I now use them interchangeably, according to which has the least tabs in it.

Quicksilver is a big aid in browser-management for me; having each browser attached to a keyboard-trigger, means that I can quickly launch one of them as needed. But it didn’t solve one problem for me, which is the default-setting in OS X. You can only set one browser as your default, which means that when you click a link in any other app, it will open my default, Safari (even if that is currently browser non grata).

And that is the problem that Choosy solves for me and perhaps for you too. And even cooler perhaps, you can set it up to open the link in the browser you are currently running. It’s still in beta (there are actually some bugs), and will eventually be be pay-ware, but test it out and you can get a discount.

This isn’t the end-all-problems solution for me, but it’s definitely a good step forward.
Vincent

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Just like I seem to learn much more about business from an Arctic explorer, many non-business books have had a profound effect on my thinking about business as well. Here are some of them.

• Crime and Punishment: every choice has consequences and these consequences in turn affect future choices.
• Long walk to freedom: the things worth fighting for often involve falling & getting up over and over again.
• The Alchemist: You won’t achieve much without faith!
• What should I do with my life (nice write-up here): when in doubt, reinvent yourself.
• The Now Habit: a large part of productivity is scheduling time for fun as well.
• Surviving your dissertation (or any write-a-research-paper book): the right answer often comes from triangulating many wrong ones.
• Drawing on the right side of the brain: Anyone can be an artist, it just requires the right perspective!
• The elements of style (free here): saying less often means saying more (and vice versa).
• The art of happiness: it’s about giving more than you take.

Enjoy!

Comparing this list to the last one, I think that business books (can) serve as a general framework for success in life and business (I didn’t list business-biographies and may do so later, as they make a slightly different point). These books, on the other hand, are about the softer interactions that go on: why are we here, what do we do it for, where are we going, how should we act towards each other and ourselves, etc. Life-stuff!

What good non-business book have you read that has had a profound influence on your life?

Vincent

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Hi ! it’s Cecil here. (A copy of this post is also available on heavy mental)

I’ve been quite upset lately by a few essays from every blogger’s darling : Paul Graham. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem with Paul Graham writings about start-up (there or there or there) or Lisp : his background speaks for itself, and one will hardly find any blogger offering more insight regarding these topics.

How art can be good (ouch !)

The problem appears when he leaves his area of expertise. At that point his peremptory voice, fed by his success in IT business, starts to sound a bit annoying. I already have been quite surprised when I read the one about art. Our relationship to art in all its forms has been one of the main subjects of my thoughts for the last 20 years. The bottom line is rather hard to swallow “listen boys and girls, I’ve studied art in Florence and I found out, so I’m gonna tell you How Art Can Be Good and when it just cant“. I really felt uncomfortable about it : the essay was rather childish and narrow-minded, at time to some embarassing extent. Same with philosophy : just by reading the title you dont feel like reading any further.

I was just as uncomfortable reading lies and kids : it reads as if he doesn’t have any, or they just are abstract incarnations of the child concept. Then there is this essay on school and teenage popularity concerns, where basically junior high school is presented as the worst place on earth, and it is compared to prison and, worse, Manhattan society wives .

Paul just jumped the shark with the last one on Cities.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it’s more preposterous to claim about anywhere else

Thinking about a intellectual capital of the world is useless. Especially if the conclusion is the place where the author lives. The bits on London or Paris are terribly naïve and missing the point. Whoever is using the word hip for London or art for Paris can only have a vague understanding of what he is talking about. In addition, big blocks of human culture are completely overlooked here : how about Tokyo ? Shanghaï ?

Hackers are not Painters (thanks God!)

So far I didn’t really feel like blogging anything about that since Paul still is referenced on a regular basis on some of my favorite blogs. But the above is just preposterous indeed. So I have been looking around and via Coding Horror I found this brilliant and sooooooooooo funny post on Idle Words about the famous Hackers and Painters essay. Best parts :

To which I’d add, what hackers and painters don’t have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do. Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data. Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

The reason Graham’s essay isn’t entitled “Hackers and Pastry Chefs” is not because there is something that unites painters and programmers into a secret brotherhood, but because Paul Graham likes to cultivate the arty aura that comes from working in the visual arts

Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.

But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

Looking into Paul’s ferocious defiance towards school and corporate culture, it is easy to imagine Paul being a rather shy person, who would rather jump in the ocean than being part of anything looking like a team. I believe that his study of Art and Philosophy probably have been for him an attempt to gain back some of the popularity he has not been enjoying as a nerd in junior high school. Whatever the reason behind these choice, it still proves an amazing strive to learn such strict disciplines.

Writing a blog post ranting about something is one thing. Writing essays and coming up with theories engraved in marble is another one.

Great mind drowning

Computer science (including the related business) is a rather young discipline ; as such, a discipline you can embrace within a lifetime. Which is not the case of art and philosophy. I believe this is why his pattern of thoughts fall flat when he tries to tackle these disciplines.

Reason is surely not the main engine behind artistic creation, who, besides, has no functional purpose whatsoever. There is no way you can cover in a comprehensive manner a Philosophy topic, like you would a programming language or an operating system. This is quite embarassing to see Paul’s great mind whenever it comes to produce valuable sense and unwavering reasoning in IT business, drowning like it does in other areas.

Hackers definitely are neither artist nor philosopher. And reading these essays on the topic, I have the feeling this is not such bad news.

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