Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

The nose is bizarre. Orange juice, smoke, maple syrup soaked pancakes, bacon. It took me a minute to place the smell, but now I realize what this reminds me of: it smells exactly like Denny’s at midnight. Sticky old orange juice residue, chewy, reheated bacon from the previous day, burnt, caramelized sausage links, cold, soggy pancakes. Intriguing.

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all.

For about $200, young Nevadans who face a statewide 13 percent jobless rate can hop a Greyhound bus to North Dakota, where they’ll find a welcome sign and a 3.3 percent rate. Why are young people not crossing borders?

…Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook.

No soldier should be allowed to think that loss of nervous or mental control provides an honourable avenue of escape from the battlefield, and every endeavour should be made to prevent slight cases leaving the battalion or divisional area, where treatment should be confined to provision of rest and comfort for those who need it and to heartening them for return to the front line.

I recently exper­i­mented with an alter­nate approach in design­ing the UI for Lik­ables for iPhone, with a 4-pixel rhythm. No major no minor. Just 4 pix­els as a basic inter­val unit. Firstly, both the width and height of the iPhone and even the iPad screen can be divided by 4. Using 4 as a basic unit we can con­struct hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal grids with equal parts of 4, 8, 16 and 32-pixel inter­vals. It is highly flexible.

….deindividuation is as much about anonymity of the self as it is about anonymity of the victim of the abuse; the belief that one need not face the consequences for his or her uncivil actions plays a major role. Does this suggest that people are not so inherently good as I have argued? Perhaps, or perhaps self-anonymity is connected with a perceived anonymity of the other. Just because you see the ref and know he is a person does not mean you see him as anything more than stripes. You don’t know who he is outside of that set of circumstances. Whether the cause is the concealment of one’s own identity or the concealment of the target’s identity, however, is irrelevant. The fact remains that the problem happens and it is the result of anonymity.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

There are just two different worlds, and I don’t think it’s even that helpful for people from one world to complain about the other world—like people from a literary culture complaining about the majority of the world that doesn’t read for ideas. It’s futile.

Even if the user is an absolute expert, able to remember almost everything, I’m always interested in the difference between what you might call stark meaning and adjustable meaning.

I did quite a bit of study on that over the years to understand the influence of having something that you can read. It’s known that our basic language mechanism for both reading and hearing has a fast and a slow process. The fast process has basically a surface phrasal-size nature, and then there’s a slower one. This is why jokes require pauses; the joke is actually a jump from one context to another, and the slower guy, who is dealing with the real meanings, has to catch up to it.