I just returned to Austin from San Diego, where I was head-deep in the world of five-gallon buckets, toolbelts, aluminum ladders, and drooling paint cans. Yes, construction. You see, my friend Josh Beagle and his partners Ray and Albert are starting a meat-curing business, and I spent the last several days helping them build out their new warehouse facility.

Wow, where does one start? The makers of the world convened in Austin, Texas one weekend in October to make, build, rebuild, battle, and exchange their stuff and their ideas. I even had visitors from two other states join in the fun. Perhaps the best way to approach a summary of Maker Faire’s controlled chaos, of this menagerie of goods and good-doers, of this DIY carnival, of the impossible to sum up is a list with occasional pictures…

My friend and mentor Howard Bloom created this video with Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell, and a crew of renegade NASA insiders to raise awareness about space-based solar power as a possible remedy for the global energy crisis. They introduce the piece with the line “A Message for the Next President of the United States.”

My friend Ben Hiltzheimer once said that riding a motorcycle was a such head-clearing experience because while riding all you could think about was not dying. Riding a fixed-gear bicycle is similarly head-clearing. It’s chess not checkers. Being connected to the bike and its motion feels right in a way that riding bikes with freewheels and brakes never did, but you have to think several moves ahead.

The staff over at O’Reilly Media‘s magazines, Make and Craft, asked around to see what features The Ultimate Notebook would include. The result is their newly published Maker’s Notebook. “Clearly, lots of DIYers dream of designing their own project notebooks. We incorporated as many ideas from this Notebook Braintrust as possible,” explains Gareth Branwyn, friend and contributing editor to Make. Well, being the journaling, notebook geek that I am, I got my hands on a copy as soon as I could.

The much-discussed, much-explored interface between humans and machines is seemingly our final frontier. Comparing the interface to the Victorian novel and the 1950s television show (both of which shaped society’s understanding at the time), Steven Johnson wrote, “There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.” The graphical user interface has come to represent all of the many processes going on inside the computer — and the way we interact with each other through them.

Daniel H. Pink has been exploring the way we work for over a decade now. From Free Agent Nation (Warner Books, 2001) to A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2005), he’s been unearthing the intricacies of the working world from the abstract to the concrete. His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Riverhead, 2008), is a career guide written in the Japanese graphic-novel style of manga (a trailer for which is embedded below). As the world of work continues to get more and more confusing, we need all the help …

Networks and network protocols are often seen as sites of control, but extreme connectivity eludes control. Diseases, worms, viruses, these all spread beyond our control because of connectivity — networks — that are beyond our control.
When networks cause problems is it because they work too well, not because they are broken.

Over the past ten years, I’ve been rejected by graduate schools no less than twenty times. This year, however, I was accepted by three of them. This proves at least two things: 1) Persistence does indeed pay off, and 2) I know a little bit about applying to colleges. A lot of the following might seem like common-sense advice, but once deep in the fray of applying, I find periodic reminders quite helpful.

In a post called “Kill Your Email” on his guest blog on the Powell’s site, best-selling author Neil Strauss made the statement that “most of us are constantly busy but not constantly productive.” It’s a simple, but key insight. At what point does your day consist of more distractions than plans? There’s a threshold in there somewhere, and finding it is crucial not only to getting things done, but to enjoying your everyday existence.