Off the Top: Personal Entries
Showing posts: 31-45 of 368 total posts
Car Talk Down One
Life eventually gets to a point where things just start going way, in bulk. I’ve missed Car Talk new episodes for a while. For a long long stretch of years, spaning both coasts, I spent Saturday running errands listening to Car Talk. I’m not sure if I stopped running errands Saturdays or Car Talk stopped new episodes first, but I long hoped to have new Magliozzi brothers jabbering in my ears again.
Today the Tom Mgliozzi obit at Car Talk had that wish put to rest. I wish Ray and all who knew Tom condolances and peace.
Life doesn’t repeat itself, even if you are going around the block a few extra times to listen to the rest of Car Talk. Things just change and things that were arent’ and new things are.
Refinement can be a Hinderance
Refinement can be a hinderance.
We learned the lesson in early blogging years (late 90s and very early 00s) that just getting things out there in rough form has value. I look back at my early blogging at vanderwal.net from 2001 to 2003 and it is not exactly refined.
(Now for the big but)
Those early blog posts, up through 2006 are the ones I continually go back to and refind (or more of Google surfacing them for me when thinking I need insight on something that I want more insight on). They were a paragraph or few. They were straight brain dumps. Most importantly they were nodes that brought conversation, next thing colleagues, invitations to explain at conferences, and a great cadre of like minds.
Over time I was encouraged to be more refined and edited, which slowed things down. It slowed down to the point I am sitting on a massive amount of text and markdown documents tagged “blogfodder”. So, much I fear being called the godfather of blodfodder.
The past year my most valuable inbound content has been from a few voices sending things in TinyLetter. A few blog friends have sparked up their old blogs with old school medium length (one paragraph to eight or so) blog posts. Both TinyLetter and these medium length posts are most often stream of consciousness, not heavily edited, and are incredibly valuable as they are good smart insights from real perspective, not contrived want to be smart BS that just rehashes what was common knowledge for the last 6 to 15 years.
Enter the Tilde
This past month Paul Ford popped up Tilde.Club and the old internet and web was reborn. It is pure nostalgia, less for the tech, but for the mindset of discovery of people, how to do things, how to do things better, and connecting like souls and minds. Everybody was a maker and striving to understand the tools, but also to connect to a wider world. It was the new way forward, which didn’t exactly play out at all like that as the band of hacker / maker / understand deeply to make better for all was just an incredibly small group that connected in a couple thousand or so in the early 2000s out of the billions of people on this planet. We thought it was the mainstream as a couple thousand looked like a lot of people to have in a convention center in Austin (in 2001 there were about 1200 and that was the best tight group of similar minded people I’ve ever run across).
But, the early 2000s the hackers and makers blogged. It was unfinished. It was raw. It was fluid. It was quite valuable.
I’m loving Tilde (yah, most don’t understand it and may never and that is all good too). Also loving those back to writing and sharing regularly, nearly daily with short blog posts.
Manufacturing a Habit
I’m going to make an attempt to get back and make a habit of posting daily. I’ve been writing daily and just not posting. The more I write the shorter the pieces. The more I write the more I focus on writing better. But, this blog on vanderwal.net is going to be rough and non-edited (okay maybe lightly and after posting), while Personal InfoCloud will have a little more time and editing put into it (I have 40 to 50 social lenses related posts and about 15 Shift Happened posts to get posted there, along with a lot more that fits in neither of those categories).
As I found in the early 2000s getting things out there in rough form has a lot more value than just sitting on my hard drive, now tagged blogfodder. Sitting on things to refine may be the dumbest thing I’ve done in a long long time. I’m tired of the dumb things ruling.
Others that Pushed This for Me
Good Bye Robin Williams
[I posted on the morning of August 12th in Facebook]
Saddened yesterday evening to get the news of Robin Williams, but I’ve always wondered how he kept it together. There are few people who have had more influence over how I view the world and how I see things as well as how I think a good inventive mind works.
Not only did I wear out every stand up performance video tape of Robin, tapes of him on the Tonight Show and Letterman, but also wore out records. The timing and framing of his pieces was stellar. Sometimes his impromptu pieces were well planned, but other times they were utter magic.
I had many friends who met him, some partied with him (before rehab), and others had chats. But, I really liked it when I would run into him in Green Apple books (mixed new and used books) in SF. Nearly always he was dressed in avant guard homeless, with my favorite was the occasional Elmer Fudd hunting cap on with one flap up and one down. He was usually roaming the shelves, often in philosophy. I’ve long wondered if it was Robin who inspired Green Apple’s “Used Dreams” section in the store.
For Rebecca
Last night I came home to a message that flattened me and I stepped away to regroup. I cobbled the following together and share today…
There are times in life where you take a break to realize what life is. You see and embrace its beauty, joy, and grace. But, you also are grateful as it is ever so fragile.
An internet friend whom I have known (and shared beers and meals with) for 14 of my 19 years working to build a better web, Eric Meyer has been sharing a very human journey on his blog, Twitter stream, and Facebook pages since last August. Eric’s daughter was discovered to have cancer growing in her brain last Summer. Eric wrote the trials of all of this, but in doing so he wrote Rebecca in to thousands of hearts.
Today Rebecca moved on to the other side ahead of the rest of us. I feel deeply for Eric and Kat. Rebecca is still in all of our hearts and minds and will be, likely through the end of each our time here as well.
Take a moment to appreciate life. Appreciate children. All those you love. All those who are there to make the world a better place.
Not only appreciate them, but love them. Life is short and fragile.
To Eric and Kat and all of theirs I offer nothing but the deepest love, appreciation, and anything I can offer. But, most of all I offer prayers and wishes that peace may find you and be with you.
Mind the Construction Dust
I’m in the midst of a structuring here across all the pieces of vanderwal.net. It started in January with another project, a meetp-up hack to dive into Zurb Foundation. Within a couple weeks of starting down that path I decided it would be fine time to rebuild and redesign vanderwal.net using Foundation. Before I started down the road leaving the horses behind I desided I was going to update the structure of the HTML of these pages and bring them into modern times with HTML5 and CSS3.
This thinking and tinkering has been finally fixing some of the underlying details that bugged me, but it also allowed to set a much better and more object focussed semantics. This shift will also enable the content objects to flow better and be better foundations for a redesign as well.
While I have no idea what the redesign will be and not even thinking of that, I did find the original photo that I modified to be used for the header image and I put that to the pages I have touched. The new image now is much wider to allow for a fluid page and the “vanderwal.net” text is now out of the image and I a truly proper H1, that has alluded me for a long time (and bugged me to no end). The menu of the updated pages has brought back the selected portion of the site with a bleed to page, which was there at the beginning, but some shift in CSS caused it to go away.
I may, possibly likely, shift hosting at some point in the near future, but that may wait until I have some of the underpinnings of the blog tool updated a little. Some of those changes will wait a little, but have been brewing a long time. I don’t think I am bringing comments back, but will likely bring in web mentions (Jeremy Keith has a great explaination). There is a lot going on in the IndieWeb that has been inspiring and may trigger some more changed that I have longed for to finally get put in place.
BTW, this is the short version of this. Two prior attempts at writing up something short both ended up over 2,500 words.
Tipping into the 14th Year of This Blog
Pwhoooo… Pwhoooo… Just blowing a little dust off this blog.
Here at vanderwal.net this blog started in the final hours of 2000. It started on Blogger and within a year moved off onto my own held build platform, which occasionally still gets tweaks. The volume and frequency have gone through vast swings over the years, lately things are a bit more sparse, as words floated into various services, like Twitter and Facebook, and more professional posts over to my other blog that started in 2004 or 2005 , Personal InfoCloud.
This blog has remind my personal space on the web. It tipped over 2000 posts a year or two back even in the relatively sparse posting of the past few years. But, I still attend to this blog and post things. Between here and my Personal InfoCloud blog there is a lot of content brewing to be finished and posted.
Blogging Still Matters
One of the best summaries about blogging was posted this week by Euan Semple, on why blogging still matters is brilliant and nails it. Blogging when done successfully is not about proclaiming brilliance and answers (as those never meet their goals as the world is too large and there are millions of people with more experience and understanding who can and often will point out the flaws). Blogging is about sharing perspective and experience, often not fully formed, but are a part of a collective of humanity in trying to think through things in out in the open. The best business and professional blogs (best meaning they get passed around like mints at the exit gate of a garlic festival) follow this model. They are open and honest. They are full of observation, good thinking through things, explaining perspective, and honest. Honest as in humanity is embraced, in the we are all in this together honesty.
One of the best quotes I stumbled into in recent years, nails the blogging perspective (from the from The Book of Tea):
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
The humility and finding great things in others and the understanding of the little things that make a difference is key.
Your Blog is Your Own Home
Along these lines I really liked Frank Chimero’s Homesteading 2014 post sentiments of bringing things that were placed elsewhere and posting them on one’s own site. Along these lines my KM World articles, which I have rights to do what I want with I will be posting fully into Personal InfoCloud.
As well, there are some vanderwal.net site wide changes to the CSS I have been wanting put in place for quite some time. The code for the whole of the site was last widely tweaked in the 2001 to 2003 timeframe (a mobile version of the blog was made then along with a mobile blogging interface, which logged the impending entrance of the kid to the world from my HipTop / Sidekick as I walked from parking to the hospital maternity ward). It may be time to up date it a bit more. There is a long list of mods to the blog categories (160 or so) and discovery for the blog, including in site search, that I may tackle. Also considering a full rebuild and redesign using Zurb’s Foundation. Who knows what or when it will happen. I think writing may take some precedence, but I am badly missing building things and the long latent hacker mind is itching to build, hack, and test.
Here is to a Great Blogging Year
Here’s to a great 2014 to all. Maybe it is time to think about blowing the dust off your blog and let things fly again.
[Oh, by the way, this is posted on United States Eastern Time and the blog date and time pick up those from the server, which is in Eastern Australia (I fixed this on the development site and then over wrote the adjustment before moving it to the production side of the house - features)]
Driving Out of the Valley
The stretches of time after my mom passed and I was back in California’s Northern Central Valley I found a rather deep appreciation for it that I had lacked much of my life (moved there before 8th grade after living in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, and the Bay Area - by comparison in my limited life span there was nothing there).
What I found was beauty in the breezes, the long sky, the long drives next to farm land, and the fog and clouds coming over the Coastal Range to cover and fill the Valley as they headed to the Sierras. The lighting was bright with tinges of amber, yellow, blue, and green hues bouncing around. There was an old school charm that settled back to past centuries. Lunch in the bar with friends and the bill settled with dice cups, with the bar covered with small dents from many years of the dice’s resolution to bills and a few bills passed between hands under cover of the bottom side of the bar.
The drives to the Bay Area were regular and helped keep sanity and connected to a larger world that spanned beyond the hills and mountains to the East and West and the rich soil running North and South.
The drive down I–5 became wonderful as the turn West beyond though Tracy pointed to the Altamont and the wondrous golden brown hills. That part of the drive was the most boring, but driving and having the right music turned it into a dream space of dancing bathing light with clouds moving in time lapse pacing in real time driving at speed. The Altamont turns into graceful enwrapping curves you drive to and into them. The occasional clouds hanging in the hills give the sun a halo of golden light or the occasional spherical rainbow that only can happen in a land of magic and light.
A World without Aaron Swartz
It was a weekend not focussing on technology or internet much, but I saw some usual patterns that are the usual signs that something is not well, but I had other things that took priority of focus. Sunday I gave a quick look and let out that human deep gasp and my kid looked up and asked what was wrong as my head slumped. I was late to the news that Aaron Swartz had taken his life. I don’t know what site I read it but all my screens of services and people I follow closely where sharing the news and their remembrances.
Aaron’s passing was beyond the “he is too young” and “what a shame”, he was not only someone special he was changing the world and had been for quite a while with his sorting through the battles of standardizing RSS, working with the Creative Commons to create a modern equivalent that could be relatively easily used attach to published and shared content allowing much better and more open access to it, he helped contribute to Reddit as it was hatching and stayed with it through to it being purchased. He has done so much more since. But, he died at 26 years old. At 14 when he was partaking in the RSS discussions on listserves nobody knew his age. Nobody had a clue and it wasn’t known until they asked him to come to a gathering to discuss things face to face. This story of his age and the wonderful story about how people found out was spread on listserves I participated in and at around post conference drinks in the early 00s. At the age of 14 Aaron had lore. He had earned the respect and right to be a peer with the early grey beards of the Web that were battling to understand it all, help it work better, and make the world better because of it. Aarron fit right in.
I was at a few events and gatherings that Aaron was at in the early 00s but I never had the chance to work or interact with him. But, I have worked and interacted with many who did have that fortune and even with the lore Aaron had they were impressed by his approach, capabilities, and what he could accomplish. In the tech community it is a meritocracy and you earn credibility by doing. The world has always been changed by those who do, but also by those who are curious. but are guided by an understanding of an optimal right (correct way).
What we lost as a society was not only a young man who earned his place and credibility, and earned it early, but he gave to others openly. All the efforts he put his heart and mind to had a greater benefit to all. The credo in the tech community is to give back more than you take. Aaron did that in spades, which made thinking of a future with whatever he was working on a bit more bright and promising. Aaron’s blog was at the top of my feed reader and was more than worth the time to read. He was a blogger, an open sharer of thoughts and insights, questions as well as the pursuit of the answer to the questions. This is not the human norm, he was a broken one in all the understandings that brings as being outside the mainstream norms, but much like all those in the Apple “Think Different” ad campaign he made a difference by thinking different and being different from those norms.
I love David Weinberger’s Aaron Swartz was not a hacker. He was a builder. as well as his Why we mourn. From the rough edges of hearing friends talk about their working with Aaron and following along with what he shared, we as a society were in for a special future. Doc Searls’ Aaron Swartz and Freecom lays out wonderfully the core of Aaron’s soul as a native to the Net in the virtues of NEA (Nobody owns it; Everybody can use it; Anybody con improve it). Doc also has a great collection of links on his memorial posting, many from those who worked with Aaron or knew him well on his Losing Aaron Swartz page.
Dang it, we are one down. We are down a great one. But, this net, this future, and this society that fills this little planet needs the future we could have had, but now it is ours to work together to build and make great.
How to we get there? Aaron’s first piece of advice from Aaron Swarts: How to get my job is, “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”
Peace!
Dim Warm Glow Over the Stove
The light over the stove left on at night until off to bed brings back memories of having corn flakes with Gramps late at night as a snack before bed and turning off the movie after the late movie and heading to bed at my parents house. It was warmth, family, comfort, and more in that dim warm glow over the stove.
My Landline is Out, But Do I Have a Landline?
It is quite apropos that Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOM wrote a piece on Over half of American homes don’t have or use their landline, as earlier this week I pick up my landline phone so I could call my cell phone so to find it, as I didn’t want to wake up the laptop to Skype or Google voice call it, then found there was no dial tone. I messed with the connectors a few times and still nothing. I think I only used it to check dial tone once or twice (it was less money to get a landline phone with internet and tv channels than with out it) as to sort out if internet or cable were out as a first step. I was a little peeved I didn’t have a landline dial tone, which is really odd as I haven’t had a landline phone since early 2008, as when I did it was never for me as my cell phone was my contact number from early 2000s.
After a couple days I was looking at the back of the cable router and noticed it had two RJ–11 jacks for landline phone. I thought I would try the other jack to see if I got a dial tone. Sure enough I did. Within 10 minutes the phone rang and it was a wrong number in a language I wasn’t quite familiar with. I then remembered a call in the middle of the night with a non-intelligble caller and I had then unplugged the phone. After hanging up, I reconnected the phone to the non-working jack again. Now I don’t really have a landline again. Phew.
For those about to ask, “What about those people who are going to call that number?” Well, I don’t give that number out and the only people that may have that number is the cable company and I have them sending email and they use my mobile number. Heck, I don’t even have that landline number should I want to give it out. Being that it is a cable landline and not the old copper landline, it will not even work if the power were out.
Prepping to Move Personal InfoCloud
I am in the midst of moving my Personal InfoCloud blog from TypePad to SquareSpace, so blogging there has slowed down a little bit. The move is related to some of my modifications and TypePad updates after they SixApart was sold and the TypePad pages picked up a ton of JavaScript for Facebook and other things I do not use, but the scripts add to the download time and occasional funky display. Some modification on their end broke all of my pagination that I had ensured was still working even though I use my own templates. The point of having a hosted service is things just work.
I have all my posts and comments from Personal InfoCloud moved over and it is just a clean-up of the HTML and getting the CSS set properly. I am going to move the domain before the rest of the design is done as it may be some time doing the a redesign.
I am not using SquareSpace 6, the latest and greatest version as that did not automatically import form TypePad and and version 5 did. The template I spent a couple nights a month back modifying was built for version 5, so for now it will stay there. I’m not sure when I will flip the switch on it, but it will likely be in this next month.
August is the Time that Now Forgot
August is slow. August is hot. August is lazy.
On the East Coast of the U.S. August, particularly mid-August, takes hold of the cities and squeezes the now out of them. Time slows to a crawl and little gets done. Many people go away to the shore or other destinations to unfocus, untether, and unconnect from progress and time speeding forward.
This doldrums of August is meant for great bookstores. The aisles are ghost towns on usually hectic Saturday errands. These are the days bookstores reconfigure and shift the aisles and restructure. Time lingers even more slowly than usual great bookstore time. Each book on the recommendation shelves of the local well curated stores calls out to you with the beckoning come hither enticement that you will have time to read it in the next week or two while things are still floating in the suspended time of August hot Summer days.
The days are slowly filled with favorite places where you can always get your favorite table and window seat. You can stay much longer than usual as people normally hovering for you to move on have taken their well honed practice to the edge of the ocean to pester some soul there. You can stop moving enough to let all the drifting thoughts and dreams catch up to you and ferment and mature into something ripe and juicy to flow from your mind. You can remember that great idea from February, or was it June, that was going to change the world and you let it simmer in the August light on a screen or paper to see what it looks like out in the free world.
These are the days where driving is a breeze and shifting to a new location takes minutes and little frustration as traffic is light. You find parking right in front of the next favorite place. You go there and linger. You wonder when they painted. Has the store’s typography in the window always been that wonderful and perfect for the place? You have time to notice. Time to wonder. Time to embrace the world around you. You have to be no other place now, you are where you are, and are enjoying it. All of it.
The Natural Progression of the Thought of Man
In an attempt to try and remember (still flailing) the rhetorical and or narrative style that James Burke uses in Connections I was also recalling other times I heard the same or similar style used. One of them was by a tutor/lecturer in Oxford, Dr. Allan Chapman, with whom I took “The Natural Progression of the Thought of Man” lecture class from at The Centre for Medieval & Renaissance StudiesThe Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies in 1988. ()Dr. Chapman has also been on James Burke’s Connections talking about inventions and discoveries in astronomy during the early renaissance).
The class was a once a week amazing hour (or so) of Dr. Chapman laying out the drastic shift between medieval understandings and the more enlightened renaissance approach across a wide swath of subjects, from medicine, populations studies, war craft, astrology, and much more. One of the amazing things was there were no questions allowed mid-lecture, as he had structured and memorized the lectures verbatim. After the hour lecture of so he would take questions and often he would recite exactly what he had stated in the lecture. He would not let on to the method of how he did the memorizations, but his method allowed him to roll the lecture off with ease and at a rather quick pace.
This class is one of many in undergrad that deeply changed how I saw the world, but also how I saw the potential and the collection of all the things happening as fodder for more optimal ways of doing things. Seeing pitfalls and gaps at the same time as advancement and improvements. Seeing the shifts in underlying understandings and grasping the echoing across its own and other disciplines it will have in a relatively short time, when taking the long view.
In my search to see what Dr. Allan Chapman was up to these days I found his joint address to the Royal Society and Gresham College Annual Lecture on the subject of “History, Science, Religion: Capturing the Public Imagination” on Vimeo.
Dr. Chapman’s lecture style is much the same as I remember and much more enjoyable not taking notes as fast as one could (his lectures were the only source of information for our one and final exam).
Baseball and Sports Open One's Eyes to the Exceptional
Tonight (Sunday the 6th of May) was a good evening if you are a baseball fan. There were some great games that are out of the norm. It seems that there are quite a few extra inning games this year, but two of my favorite teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Baltimore Orioles both took their games into extra innings. The Giants game started 3 hours after the Orioles game and yet they ended within a minute or so of each other. With the Giants going into the 11th inning to get a walk off single to win and the Orioles won in the 17th after a 3 run home by Adam Jones put them ahead in the top of the inning.
Looking for the Exceptions
One of the announcers for the Boston Red Sox and Orioles game that went to 17 innings had said he met a friend of his who brought his kid to the game and the announcer said to the kid, “I hope you get to see something special today”. That is a big part of the fun of baseball, and sport in general from a spectator’s vantage, it is the exceptions and the things that are special. It is also a great way to pick up the norms and customs in a culture (Gunther Barth’s “City People” is a great book on human social interactions and how the the social norms are found and set in cities includes the baseball stadium as one of the core elements for enculturation and social interaction with others). But, the understanding of norms and exceptions while watching a game being played with skill is where one learns to see the world. Sports fans stick out in the workplace, whether they are male or female as they often see things differently. They look for the exceptional and often look to see hints of things that stand out.
It is that seeing a world for the norms and the exception to appreciate them, but also to look to emulate them. This really is the standout out trait quite often for the deep fans. It is also the weaving of the story before your eyes and the potential for a great ending. But, it is also watching the unexpected player, or even the expected player, do something far from the norm and maybe even spectacular.
Tonight’s Orioles and Red Sox 17 inning gem had two unusual pitchers as the winning and losing pitchers, in that neither was a pitcher. The winning pitcher, Chris Davis is the Orioles designated hitter and occasional first baseman. He went to bat eight times tonight and didn’t get one hit. But he was called on to pitch in the 16th inning and stayed on in the 17th as there were no more relief pitchers available and Buck Showalter the Orioles Manager put him on the mound to pitch. This is exceptionally rare. What was rarer was Davis did rather well and in the two innings he struck out two batters. Really amazing.
Two Summer’s back when my dad was on in his last weeks another amazing game took place. It was the ninth inning and two outs with Armando Galarraga pitching a perfect game up to that point. All Galarraga needed was one last out. he pitched and the ball was hit and thrown to first base ahead of the runner and the umpire called the runner safe, a hit. The perfect game gone, but it was the wrong call. The manager argued his case and the replays clearly showed the runner was out and Galarraga should have the perfect game (there have only been 21 perfect game pitched in all of recorded major league baseball). The umpire Jim Joyce stuck to his call as that is what he saw as the runner safe. The game was over minutes later with the final out with Galarraga getting the win, but not the perfect game.
Following the game the Jim Joyce went off field and looked at the replay and realized he made the wrong call. He went to find Galarraga and apologize and admit he made the wrong call. This was gut wrenching for Joyce, who is known for getting the hard calls right so often. But, the humility and deep showing of humanity in Joyce reaching out admitting he was wrong and feeling horrible as his call stood between perfection and it incredible rarity. Hearing this story choked me up (I had watched the end of the game and was in awe). I called my dad and told him about it, but he was medicated and not really able to share in it. The thought of the game and story of it is something I still get choked up with, because it is utterly amazing.
With an eye to the exceptional I hear designers talk with the same alertness, as well as others in various other professions. Quite often the best of any field have this same focus and often they see the world much the same way. Often when you sit and get to know them the stories of games watched come out where something amazing happened or something out of the ordinary. They have learned to look for that and keep their eyes and mind open and attentive to just that the seeds of exceptions starting and the desire to see it this time, the one time will they see the exceptional happen, as it happens.
Path Finder and VoodooPad Major Version Updates
Two software applications on my Mac that I love were update this past week and they are running much more efficiently in Mac Lion.
Cocoatech’s Path Finder just became version 6. Along with the ease of file management in double paned windows and a much more robust quick viewer with more file types quickly viewed it has file tagging enabled built using OpenMeta. This is the first build of Path Finder I have used that I can leave running and not see a performance hit. Loving it. The upgrade price is $20 and new is $40.
The other software app that updated this week is Flying Meat’s VoodooPad, which is now up to version 5. VoodooPad is a Mac based wiki built into an app. It is mostly for personal use, but now that it has Dropbox compatibility it is open for use across machines and people and shows last edits by who and where. Also new is publish to ePub and improved PDF and HTML publishing (I have not tried either of these so I can not vouch for them). The update provide native Marckdown editing as well as the ability ability to write scripts in the app using JavaScript.
VoodooPad has been a great resource to tuck notes for projects and allows for easy linking to local resources, such as: type a person’s name you have in your address book and it links to that person’s card in your contacts and you can drag the proxy icon of document into the page to link the document directly to the page. It has been a nice way to keep things in reach and collected in one nice space on my mac.