You might notice a new look to the blog. If you’re viewing this post in an RSS reader, pop on over and have a look.

The old theme was quite cluttered and not particularly pretty. I had made some design decisions based around a bunch of widgets and some advertising, rather than designing around the content. Dumb eh?

Update: Damn it looks like Safari on Mac is rendering my sidebar below the main content. Anyone have any tips to fix this? Content and sidebar are in a container div with a right margin. Sidebar has a negative right margin to bring it in to line.

I was brought up as a fairly devout Catholic. During my late teens I became devoutly atheist, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Lately I’ve started to feel a distinct absense of spirituality in my life. I can’t say why, but I can say that the daily drudgery had just seemed to be not enough.

Not that I begrudge anyone their beliefs, but personally I have an incredible aversion to Christianity and their One God. Though I’m happy with the concept of spirituality, I’m completely disinterested in faith, especially with a capital F. My heavily atheist period was centered around the fact that I had seen religion in general and “Faith” in particular as being the excuse of weak people too proud to say “I don’t know”.

I’ve become a lot more mellow in my old(er) age, and have no problem whatsoever with one’s personal choice of religion, or lack thereof. What I have missed is the introspection inherent in spirituality. I’ve drifted down the path of Zen, mainly because I was interested in the quiet introspection involved in meditation. The more I understand mindfulness, the more I’m able to observe, rather than get buried in, the variability of my energy and stress at work.

Today I stumbled across two quite brilliant items that riff on this theme:

• Steven’s post about Zen, spirituality, and work
• A twittered YouTube video regarding energy and work

In the former, Steven wonders about whether people should seek spirituality in work itself. I can see the point here. What’s the point in meditating, praying, or burying yourself in a hobby as a way to offset the negative energy at work? How about just not expending the negative energy in the first place? It certainly resonates with what I’ve been discovering with my (albeit informal) Zen practise.

Some Zen masters say that even the occasional “bad” meditation (where you are distracted) can be “good”, as long as you are mindful of the distractions. In this sense, even if you don’t particularly enjoy your work, is it possible that you can still find spirituality in the effort?

The latter link (which I’d highly recommend you set aside an hour to watch), talks about energy management versus time management. The concept being that it is better to intentionally lower you energy levels (take time out), while remaining positive, instead of dealing with highly negative energy (aka stress). The obvious problem is that low energy (aka mellowing out or relaxing) is usually frowned upon, whereas temporary stress is seen as “Ok”.

How do you deal with negative energy at work? And do you think you can find spirituality, or focus, or something else in your work?

The guys (and gals?) over at Disqus are absolutely legendary.

I had picked up Disqus as my commenting system because I loved the way it deals with comments, replies, and spam.  Based on the previous version, it was adequate.  The upgrade to the new version added all sorts of sexy stuff like proper search engine trawling, and a new plugin that does two-way exporting so you always have two comment stores (Disqus and local Wordpress).

Interested in the “Export” feature of the new plugin, I hit the button and got an error.  I didn’t really mind because Disqus has worked without exported comments up until now.

Then about 30 minutes later I got a completely unsolicited email from Disqus:

Dear Disqus user,

While most comment imports using our new Wordpress plugin have gone smoothly, several sites have encountered errors, including yours. From what we can tell so far, this is due to unexpected data in Wordpress’s native comment export format. We’re working on resolving these issues and will keep you updated. Please reply if you have any questions or comments.

Thanks,
Andrew

“Ok cool, no problem”, I thought.  “I’ll just leave it then.”

And now, about 4 hours after that original email, another one comes in:

Ben,

The specific problem that your installation encountered should be fixed now. Thank you for using Disqus.

Andrew

To reiterate: I haven’t complained ONCE to Disqus, I haven’t asked them to fix anything, and I don’t mind the functionality as it stands.  But despite this, Disqus have jumped out of their skins to fix my personal comment export problem.

Fantastic. +10 karma points to Disqus.

So Wordpress have written an iPhone application. It doesn’t seem to deal with links within posts, but with no copy-paste, what are you going to link to anyway?

One very interesting fact is that the application is Open Source and full source code is available online (see http://iPhone.wordpress.org). Assuming that the iPhone development NDA is still in effect, this poses an interesting challenge.

And yes, this post was created on my iPhone.

Here’s a testament to durability: my iPhone earphones (1st gen ones with the in-line mic and button) went missing a couple of days ago. I discovered tonight that they had been in the pocket of my jeans, and have in the interim been through a complete warm clothes wash cycle followed by a couple of hours in a hot dryer.

I’m not sure if it can all be put down to Apple quality contrl though. A few months back I followed some advice and detatched the stock Apple buds from the wires and soldered on my preferred Sennheiser in-ear buds. I can’t stand Apple buds.

So if you want clean earphones, just wash them.