Mike Vardy

Laurel Resting

There’s nothing wrong with resting. Everyone needs to rest. It allows you to come back fresh and do really great stuff. There’s nothing wrong with comfort. Everyone needs comfort. It allows you to focus less on what you are good at so that you can work to get better at other aspects of what can […]

The Worst Kind of Hat

I’m not a hat person. I rarely wear them, as my head generally doesn’t suit them…and I’m afraid of the (possible) myth that wearing hats speeds up the thinning of one’s hair. I wear only one hat — a black baseball cap — that I wear from time to time (when I’m camping, for example)

Simply Podtastic: My 2011 Essential Podcast Diet

I tend to listen to a lot of podcasts, borderline on being a bit of a junkie. I listen mainly when I’m unwinding from the day, doing yard work, commuting and doing housework. If I’m not blaring something from my Rdio collection, I’ve got a podcast doing the blaring instead. The problem with a heavy

Decluttering iStuff: iPhone Camera Apps

I have a ton of camera apps on my iPhone, even though I would never claim to be anything but a mild hobbyist when it comes to taking photographs. This makes culling this type of app the ideal place to start in the Decluttering iStuff series. First off, when decluttering any of my iStuff, price

Apple will win the case war

Why? Because it has the resources to alter the footprint of its products with such frequency that third-party creators can’t possibly keep up. Because consumers will stop buying from said creators due to frustration in having to ditch a case when they pick up the latest iThing. The Smart Cover appears as if it will

Dyscultured: Number 145

I may not have been on the show this past week1, but the crew certainly was. The gang discussed the state of Bell (it’s not good), the Canadian government funding Shatner’s “shatty” movie (it’s not going to be good) and that robots are finally going to do the work that only suicidal folks used to

What we can learn from jugglers

Juggling is hard. Even when you start out with the lightest of items, the degree of difficulty is pretty tough. While throwing only one single item in the air, catching it, and repeating that series over and over again isn’t all that tough, it can be tiring if you do it for long enough. But

Getting into Flow

Last month I began a series of posts outlining my transition from task management software solution OmniFocus to one of the newest players on the market, Flow. If you’re not aware of Flow, give Back to Work a listen as Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have been discussing it (Flow has sponsored some recent episodes

Talking is Dead: Number 23

While all of my hype has been around a certain new podcast that I launched this week, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another podcast I co-host with my pal Anth1 that just reached its 23rd episode. I’m talking about Talking is Dead.2 While it isn’t always short, it’s definitely a sweet offering. I