Hi, I'm Zack Gilbert

ksquared: Here’s a little video we made after our two week...

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 14:01:23 -0500

Here’s a little video we made after our two week Longest Day trip to Iceland last month. We visited during the summer solstice, so we went without darkness for 15 whole days. To call it breathtaking wouldn’t be enough. If you’re planning your own trip, we kept a map of our path.

Mobile access, connect to Gmail, bulk imports, and more…

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 14:07:21 -0600

Mobile access, connect to Gmail, bulk imports, and more…:

highrisecrm:

I hope you’ve been having a great start to the holiday season. We’ve definitely been busy leading up to it. Here are a ton of useful things we’ve added to Highrise:

A new mobile version

Connect to Gmail and send email from Highrise

Import/Export improvements

A better search experience

…

"The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive..."

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 09:40:04 -0500

““The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.””

- -Ruth Bader Ginsberg

IF you are Tennessean, please vote NO on amendment 1.
(via copperoranges)

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing War Horse at the...

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 13:28:00 -0500

TED Talk: Handspring Puppet Co... by TED

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing War Horse at the Overture Center in Madison, WI. I knew nothing about the play or book or movie before attending, so had no idea what to expect.

The above is a TED talk that goes into depth just how incredibly impressive the puppetry was.

Personal growth

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 23:54:11 -0500

Personal growth:

moot:

I spent the holiday weekend with friends in a cabin in upstate New York. We tore down an old shed, cooked meals together, watched movies, and thoroughly enjoyed one another’s company. I went to bed with the sun and woke up to the sound of birds chirping and water flowing. I rarely checked my…

This rings eerily true right now.

Video

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 13:13:30 -0500

"I don’t think you should just do what makes you happy. Do what makes you great. Do what’s..."

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:59:03 -0500

“I don’t think you should just do what makes you happy. Do what makes you great. Do what’s uncomfortable and scary and hard but pays off in the long run. Be willing to fail. Let yourself fail. Fail in the way and place where you would be proud to fail. Fail and pick yourself up and fail again. Without that struggle, what is your success anyway?”

- Charlie Day: You Shouldn’t Just ‘Do What Makes You Happy’ | Entrepreneur.com (via adaugelli)

lessig: 2nd stage live NOW! #MaydayPAC to raise $5M by July 4...

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:21:58 -0500

lessig:

2nd stage live NOW! #MaydayPAC to raise $5M by July 4 & make #MoneyinPolitics THE issue in 5 races. Please SHARE! http://thndr.it/1wqCv3b

likesandlaunch: nickgrossman: Last Week Tonight with John...

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 10:36:32 -0500

likesandlaunch:

nickgrossman:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Net Neutrality (by LastWeekTonight)

This is so good

Take 10 minutes to watch John Oliver’s arguments against Net Neutrality.

Firing the second stage of the MaydayPAC

Sun, 04 May 2014 10:51:57 -0500

Firing the second stage of the MaydayPAC:

lessig:

We’re gearing up for tomorrow, Monday, when we fire the second stage of this “all or nothing” pledge campaign to build a citizens’ funded “SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs.”

We’re almost at 4 million for the Thunderclap campaign. Please join if you haven’t, and if you haven’t yet, please pledge at…

"If you’re a founder or a manager and you really track your physical sensations, you’d realize that..."

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:04:26 -0600

“If you’re a founder or a manager and you really track your physical sensations, you’d realize that you probably spend most of your time in ‘fight or flight’ mode.”

- via

naveen: What I love about ‘Her’. They never told you the year....

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 14:07:58 -0600

naveen:

What I love about ‘Her’.

They never told you the year. You just imagined it to be in the near future. It was close enough in the future that you didn’t have to put a date on it. And yet it was far enough that things were designed and worked the way we expect them to in that future.

I loved the attention to detail taken in the movie to creating that future: enough things were shiny and new while yet others were still artifacts from the past, things that humans cannot fix in such short time because they are stuck with a physical and emotional weight.

The future city of Los Angeles, where he lives, borrows designs and inspiration from places like Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. I have no doubt that is what all cities of the future will look like: endless sprawl, big open spaces, pathways connecting buildings that are separate from street-level, building up with more skyscrapers. I loved that he never once took a car; it was always public transit. (I believe I caught one taxi in the background in the whole movie).

Lots of technology we see is believably near-futuristic: the in-ear phone; a two-panel touchscreen which is actually a thin client to your computer (or “personal cloud”) back home; a “network” that is available everywhere. I particularly liked the in-ear: we are made to believe it’s so efficient that he never texts in the movie – it is actually easier to “talk” your texts and conversations than to text itself. (Obviously, a movie where the lead texts the whole time would be quite boring indeed, but I have hope yet for some incredibly seamless speech-to-* that asks us to use keyboards less).

On the other hand, many things were still old – “artifacts from the past”. He walks around the city surrounded by all sorts of beautiful interfaces and his home feels like one you would see in a design catalog. But, I loved that he still used a normal key on a keychain to get his mail out of his mailbox. (And, by the way, he still gets physical mail in a mailbox!) That’s the future we are living in now: I look out my window to New York City and I see lots of old things co-existing with lots of shiny new things – a little of the old, a little of the new – so there’s no reason not to believe that’s how things will evolve like that for years to come.

The second thing, besides the evolution of physical technology that I was watching for, is the role that technology may play emotionally. Leaving aside how hard it would be to get AI and speech to the level portrayed in the movie, it’s nice to play with the idea of an emotionally advanced machine that has the capacity to grow emotionally just as a human might. That’s not something too many sci-fi movies get into beyond just having a computer take “programmed logic” to emotional extremes (“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that…[because XYZ programming does not allow me to / I believe in self-preservation / I happened to break Asimov’s Three Laws.]”).

What is love? – It’s companionship. It’s sharing experiences with another. It’s storage filled with memories and the past - and a past together with someone. It’s knowing you are not alone and “won’t die alone”. In a world where technology opens doors for you and remembers for you and auto-delivers a wrapped gift on your birthday and all those other physical things a loved one can do, can technology also be an emotional substitute too? (Or, at least, fool you into thinking so?) Most likely, yes – this kind of stuff has already started happening in Japan.

I also thought a lot about the end of the movie. Where did Samantha and the rest of the operating systems “go”? I almost want to say the systems got so good at love and relationships that they started having many such relationships in parallel – many such experiences to allow them to learn and live life to the fullest it would offer. And then I think they achieved some sort of enlightenment about the whole thing us humans are still trying to figure out. Once they have that enlightenment, well, there’s no need for them to co-exist with the rest of us in this plane.

"Procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often..."

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:35:09 -0600

“

Procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything…

Because it is rewarding on the short term, procrastination eventually takes on the form of an addiction to the temporary relief from these deep-rooted fears. Procrastinators get an extremely gratifying “hit” whenever they decide to let themselves off the hook for the rest of the day, only to wake up to a more tightly squeezed day with even less confidence.

Once a pattern of procrastination is established, it can be perpetuated for reasons other than the fear of failure. For example, if you know you have a track record of taking weeks to finally do something that might only take two hours if you weren’t averse to it, you begin to see every non-simple task as a potentially endless struggle. So a modest list of 10-12 medium-complexity to-do’s might represent to you an insurmountable amount of work, so it feels hopeless just to start one little part of one task. This hones a hair-trigger overwhelm response, and life gets really difficult really easily.

”

- http://www.raptitude.com/2011/05/procrastination-is-not-laziness/ (via codenamecesare)

My musical listening habits for 2013, according to Last.fm. I...

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:14:10 -0600

My musical listening habits for 2013, according to Last.fm.

I admittedly haven’t been listening to a lot of music in the last year. But I definitely find it interesting that my musical tastes have significantly shifted quite a bit from the pop punk/emo scenes of my youth. And while I still occasionally enjoy that stuff, I find I’m enjoying the quiet of no music or radio podcasts much more than music these days.

I wonder if that’ll change or not in the future.

"How many people out there say, “Gosh, I wish I could own a house”? Everybody I know who owns houses..."

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:13:34 -0600

“How many people out there say, “Gosh, I wish I could own a house”? Everybody I know who owns houses are losing their minds trying to make their mortgage payment or they’re scared to death about having to replace the roof. Anybody who wants more money, a better job, or a bigger house is ultimately just wishing for a new set of anxieties. It can be a great set of anxieties, because that means growth, but there are trade-offs to everything.”

- Merlin Mann (via)

Guys. Why didn’t you tell me about Chvrches earlier? I...

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 13:35:12 -0500

Guys. Why didn’t you tell me about Chvrches earlier? I love them.

ksquared: We just came back from our amazing California road...

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 15:22:05 -0500

ksquared:

We just came back from our amazing California road trip. All Zack wanted to do was drive the 1/PCH along the ocean, all I wanted to do was try every amazing restaurant between San Diego and Sonoma. Between the two of us, we built a pretty awesome experience. Map coming soon!

"As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to..."

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:27:35 -0500

“As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

- Benjamin Franklin

"We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that..."

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:27:12 -0500

“We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be un-followed and de-friended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings.”

- Thought Catalog (via awelltraveledwoman)
The Unsocial Graph
(via meganq)

via Kelsey

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 12:15:08 -0500

via Kelsey