When I was a kid, there were only two TV shows I was allowed to watch. One of them was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the other was Sesame Street, mostly because it came on right afterward. I grew up loving both Fred Rogers’ kindly ways, and the jazz stylings of Johnny Costa.

Because of my support of Wear A Sweater / Won’t You Be My Neighbor Day (via @andyfowler) a few weeks ago, Holly Yarbrough contacted me on Facebook and offered to send me a CD of her Mister Rogers jazz cover album.

(Sidenote: Holly’s father, also an accomplished singer, is Glenn Yarbrough, best known to me as the singer of “The Greatest Adventure” in the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit, which I saw at the James V. Brown Library when I was about four years old. See Dirk Gently’s “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”.)

I said “Sure, I’ve love a copy,” and when it arrived, I was impressed. It was in a punch-cut paper case (classier than a jewel case, in my opinion), and the CD was cleverly made to resemble an LP. But the music was even better. Backed by an all-star jazz band, Holly does a lovely job interpreting all of the songs, but especially two of my all-time favorites (click to hear samples):

• It’s You I Like
• You Are Special

The only song I listened for and missed on the album was What Do You Do, but there’s always a follow-up album.

You can buy Mister Rogers Swings! on CDBaby, and there’s no digital rights-management on the tracks (unlike the version on iTunes). This is really an album of which you should buy the CD, though, since it’s such a nice physical CD.

By the way, you can read the lyrics and download sheet music for Fred Rogers’ songs on his PBS Kids site.

(Congrats, Holly; you got Boing Boing!’d today: Jazzy Covers of Mister Rogers’ Songs)

Frank Bettger, the author, was originally a major league baseball player, but after an early retirement due to injury, got into the insurance business. After failing miserably for some time, he eventually built himself up into a huge success.

Here’s what I’ve learned from each chapter so far:

1. Be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm, even if forced, will engender attention and trust in others.

2. Keep records of your time and activities. Check back after a while and self-evaluate. What were the most valuable things you did? What can you cut?

3. If you are bridled by fear or lack self-confidence, enroll in a public speaking course (esp. one in which you must speak at every meeting). Or start a discussion/speech group, à la Ben Franklin’s Junto.

4. Plan your week’s schedule ahead of time, and then stick to it as much as possible.

5. Find out what people want, and help them get it. Not just when selling something, but in all of life. (See Mark 10:44)

(More to come as I read further.)

I’m going to try and implement each of these things. You might read about it here.

Sometimes I would go so far as to try to vaguely plan tomorrow. “Mom, are we going to the grocery store tomorrow?” Yes. “What time?” Um .. I don’t know yet.

It proved difficult to prepare on paper for a predictably bland future, and no-one was much help in coming up with things to for me to do. Except, you know, like chores and junk. Bo-ring.

When I was a teenager and got my first job, I followed my dad in graduating to a checkbook-sized DayTimer, with my initials etched in a little brass plate on the leather front. I mostly used it to keep a log of the hours I worked, which did not exactly justify the $50/year or whatever it was for calendar inserts. (And, honestly, I was always rather frustrated at actually having to write things down on every page. Where was the copy-and-paste?) So I gave up and kept my hours in VoodooPad (which was new at the time), and my erstwhile to-do list in a text file.

Meanwhile, I became an adult, and here-and-there acquired some responsibilities.

Fast-forward a few years. I’d been a fan of Merlin Mann (who has since thrown off his mantle of Productivity Prophet) for a bit, and he was now talking about something called GTD. What was that? He kept talking about these index cards, and this David Allen fellow, and it sounded to this kid like the organizational Magic Bullet.

But I could never wrap my head around it. I bought the book, but (quite ironically) never got around to actually reading it. I watched as people fawned over Things, OmniFocus, KinklessGTD, TaskPaper, etc., and wondered how somebody could actually use one of these things without a secondary Personal Productivity System, just to teach them how to use the first one.

That-was-then. This-is-now.

I may have mentioned I’ve recently become an adult. Turns out those predictable days of schoolwork and leisure only last so long; before I noticed them waving and walking away, my job(s), family, responsibilities, and some other things that I Shouldn’t Have To Deal With In A Civilized Society were jumping up and down in front of me and saying HEY WHAT ABOUT MEEE DON’T FORGET! and, frankly, whipping me into a constant state of mild panic.

Occasionally I would think, “Boy, I wish I could write all this stuff down somewhere so I don’t forget any of it.”

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Today I discovered — what I think — is the One True GTD App. At least it is for me: The Hit List, currently in “Public Preview”, soon to be published by Potion Factory (wonderful name!).

It’s like a glorified legal tablet. But it’s also like iTunes. And it has Tabbed Browsing. And /tagging, and @contexts, and a system-wide, QuickSilver-like task creator (with hot-key), so that when something hits your brain, you can type it in quickly and get back to real work.

I love the user interface. It’s colorful and easy-to-use, and makes julienne fries. It just makes sense .. but what’s more, it gets out of my way and lets me work with my to-do list just the way I’d expect it to.

According to the developer, it will be $69.95 upon final release ($49.95 pre-order). I’ll be taking some time to see if The Hit List fits into my workflow, but so far it looks like I’ll be buying a copy very shortly.

Sometime during the evening, the conversation turned to movies.

In my experiences with modern Christianity, there are two main schools of thought on movies and media. The first is that almost every secular media item has at least some sprinkling of “objectionable elements”, which, when counted, contribute to the measurement of whether a Good Christian ought not to see or consume it. (This brings up other issues with which I will deal later). “Whoever is not with me is against me,” (Luke 11:23) is sometimes quoted, but I’m not sure if the context bears applying it here. Especially since Luke 9:49-50, where Jesus is telling his followers not to stop unofficial helpers from doing His work, saying “Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you,” seems like a better fit to me.

The second is one by which I have more recently been stirred, and plays off the idea that all truth is God’s truth. Media communicates. Movies tell stories of life, death, redemption, love, loss, rebuilding. The characters aren’t perfect. Most of the characters in God’s story weren’t perfect, either. But He used their lives to illustrate parts of His character and plan. You can find aspects and illustrations of the Gospel in just about anything.

I almost posed the question to Jon tonight, but decided to write about it instead: how does one communicate that second, more inclusive idea to someone who is committed to the first, exclusive one (as I was brought up to believe)?

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Looks like the debugger is missing, and there’s no CSS or HTML editing, though you can “run” blocks of CSS (and JavaScript of course).

I learned a lot in 2008. A lot of stuff changed.

More on all that shortly. But I sincerely hope just as much education and change comes my way in 2009.

I love that Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit engine. I love that the version it uses is more advanced than that which Safari uses, so you not only get to use fancy CSS3-esque features like box-shadow: and border-radius:, but it features the improved Web Inspector.

But I find it rather silly to show rounded corners and drop shadows if you have this problem (Safari also shown for comparison):

Safari 3.0	Chrome 1.0

Remember, Chrome and Safari use the same layout engine. This bug only shows up when you use box-shadow: and border-radius: together .. in Chrome.

When IE & FireFox can’t show either the shadows or rounded corners, they at least fail gracefully.

If anyone has found a way to make Chrome behave, I’d love to hear about it. I’d like to be able to recommend people to a Windows browser (other than the awkward-on-that-platform Safari) in which to view my work with optimal presentation.

The following code snippet will refine jQuery’s browser detection (tested in 1.2.6, patch submitted for 1.3), and makes sure that if two or more IE version declarations are present in the userAgent string, jQuery reports the highest of them.

// Ensure that we report the highest IE version present in the userAgent string if ( jQuery.browser.msie ) jQuery.browser.version = (userAgent.match( /ie ([\d.]+)/ig ) || []) .sort().pop().replace( /[^\d.]/g, '' );

To use it, you can either paste it into your jquery.js just after the browser detection stuff (harder), or include it as a script plugin after your jQuery script tag (easier).

This all comes about for several reasons: the True IE 6 obviously won’t be mentioning IE 7 because it didn’t exist at release time, but the True IE 7 might want to pretend it was IE 6 for compatibility with older pages. There’s also apparently a situation wherein an extra-long Windows registry entry will overwhelm IE 7 to the point where it falls back to reporting itself as IE 6.

If similar situations arise after IE 8 (final) is released, this code should take care of those, too. I say “should,” because I obviously don’t know what IE’s going to do in the future. (Sometimes I don’t even know what IE’s doing right now.)

I’ll finally say it: I’m disappointed with Apple.

Since before it was cool, I’ve wanted a device that consolidated all my pocket gadgets: iPod, phone, PDA, etc. More than a year and a half ago, Apple finally introduced the long-rumored iPhone: everyone’s dream device, promising convergence, productivity, and the sheer joy users and developers have come to expect from using an Apple-designed user interface.

I didn’t buy one when they were first announced, in large part because of the wallet-busting $600 price tag, and in small part because there was no official way to develop or install my own applications and games on it. When I had my Palm, I’d become rather attached to SimCity and Pocket Quicken, and the thought of being able to carry Real Software with me wherever I went was very exciting.

When the SDK was announced nearly a year ago, the stage was set, and with the 3G iPhone came subsidization. Finally, an iPhone was nearly within my financial grasp.

Then this mess happened. First, Apple inexplicably kept all developers under an NDA, which had the (however unintended) effect of stifling collaboration and developer assistance, traditionally very important processes when writing software for a new platform.

Second, Apple has now decided that not only will their App Store be the sole source of iPhone software, but that they reserve the right to bar any software from the store they see fit. The gist of it is that a prospective developer (let’s call him, oh, I don’t know, Daniel) can conceive an idea, spend six months of his free time pouring his creative energy into it, submit his software for distribution, and be denied the fruit of his labors without any warning or real explanation.

I usually try to give Apple the the benefit of the doubt. But I was excited about using and possibly developing for (should I find any holes to fill) the iPhone. This doesn’t exactly make it sound like fun.

The idea is that you can type something like ‘esv gal 5 1’ or ‘wiki cumberland valley’ and be taken to the appropriate page, bypassing several pages you’d normally have to navigate through, like search results.

I was having trouble today with the next-to-last one on that list: the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. But it looks like they fixed it while I was writing this post. Unless I clicked the actual “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on their front page, Google was just taking me to a search results page, even if I pasted in the google.com url I was redirected to for a split second.

I save a lot of time using these shortcuts. If you don’t use them already, why don’t you start now?