I’ve just been off to college. My friends have left too and I want to keep in touch with them. Unfortunately, I’m terribly forgetful.

Somewhat inspired by CRM, I came up with a solution: Add a series of tasks to my task list for “friend relationship management”. Every month, I’ll “keep in touch with Camille”, and “keep in touch with Brian”, and more. This may be a simple Facebook wall post or a Skype call, but I’ll keep in touch somehow.

This post assumes you know about both Evernote and Simplenote.

Currently, I am an avid user of Evernote. However, I’m constantly being enticed by a competitor, Simplenote. I cheated on Evernote a little and tried Simplenote, but I came back to my baby. Here’s why:

While Simplenote and Notational Velocity are nice, they lacks a certain feature-set that I desire. I would gain three things by switching to Simplenote/Notational Velocity. They are thus:

1. I would gain forced simplicity, which is often good
2. I would gain a faster program with less clunkiness
3. I would gain the ability to have simple but preserved formatting across any application

Those features are absolutely compelling, most notably (get it? Notably??) the simplicity. Evernote is not a very clunky, complicated application; use Notational Velocity for a few minutes and you’ll feel that way.

However, Evernote has Notational Velocity beat on the following fronts:

1. It allows for far deeper organization
2. It has a slew of formats other than text which I use daily — images (with OCR), voice memos, file storage
3. While rich text is often a formatting nightmare, it is also a tremendous help, especially in longer notes
4. I feel that it’s much more sustainable of a business than Simplenote is

For these reasons, I am sticking with Evernote, though the simpler option has a lot of appeal. I’d love more simplicity and ease with Evernote, but I can’t live without Evernote’s lovely depth.

How do you feel, oh reader? Let me know in the comments.

(PS: I believe you cannot email a note into Simplenote, but I’m not sure. If you cannot, then I am certain I won’t switch.)

(PPS: I composed this post in Notational Velocity.)

FastEver is an iPhone app that advertises that “you can start typing as soon as you tap FastEver icon.” I did some speed tests in this video.

We see that a cold start of FastEver takes 1.767 seconds where Evernote takes 4.733.

That’s right. This guy means business.

I often plan to Skype with someone at a certain time, but they are not online at that time. I text them and ask them to get online, to which they reply that they already are.

This is because Skype has not tried to connect to them, it seems. To remedy this problem, give them a Skype call. If it goes through, they’re online. If it doesn’t, they’re offline.

This has the awkward disadvantage that, if they are online, it may seem that you’ve initiated a call for no reason. But this is a way to check if they’re online.

This also allows you to see if someone is invisible or actually offline.

I got this photo while ziplining on Maui. Turned out a lot better than any of the other pictures I got while ziplining.

In short: I made a ton of changes that don’t matter much to you.

If you are crazy and you frequent Evan Hahn dot com a lot, you’ll notice a few things that are different around these parts.

A new design

Although I can code things, I don’t have a notable eye for web design. Still, I could tell that my previous website was fugly. I was on an airplane and decided that I’d redesign the site, so I did!

My own domain

When my site was on Tumblr, I had it redirect to evanhahn.tumblr.com, which was a hack. The other pages (like the About page) would link to PHP files on my domain. That was embarrassing.

Because I’ve brought the site to my own domain, I don’t have any of that nastiness.

If you’re curious about my tumblelog, I have some bad news. It’s now a page that links to here. I don’t feel too badly, though; I never made my tumblelog what it is “supposed” to be as defined by Wikipedia. My Twitter fills that role.

WordPress

I switched the site from Tumblr to WordPress for a variety of reasons.

In my opinion, it’s a lot easier to set up WordPress on your own domain than Tumblr is. I’m comfortable with FTP and the tiny bit of SQL that you need to install WordPress, and I think it’s easier than dealing with what Tumblr does.

While I like the simplicity of Tumblr, I would like more control. While it’s much harder to theme WordPress, it’s a lot easier to do complex things…and it comes with comments. I would like to thank the “So you want to create WordPress themes huh?” lessons on WPDesigner.com — they were invaluable.

Tumblr2WordPress was a marvelous tool that I used to do the migration.

I’m still working out the kinks because I’m not a WordPress expert, so I apologize if you notice any issues.

Enjoy the new stuff!

Wind was blowing on my face hard, and it was cold, and I felt like I was falling, and I relaxed. I took in smells, smells of clouds. I tasted them, I felt them, I heard them, the pleasant white in the sky. It felt like an otherworldly experience. I opened my eyes.

I was falling out of a plane with no parachute. I kept on falling. It didn’t look like I was about to stop any time soon.

I tried to think. It didn’t work. It didn’t most of the time. Falling out of the sky was part of “most of the time.”

I kept falling.

I tried to think a second time. This time a thought entered my head. It could have been about anything, because it died of loneliness. It could have been about rabbits, or pumpkins, or my favorite holiday, which is Christmas, if you should ever ask.

I kept falling.

I tried to think a third time. This time, a number of thoughts entered my head. One of them was “You are falling from the sky.” Another one told me “You need to find a way to live.” Another thought screamed both of those at once. I listened to all three of them, and decided that if I was going to focus on one of them, it would’ve been the screaming one, because it was the loudest. I don’t like things that are loud. They give me headaches.

I kept falling.

This thought would not stop screaming. “YOU ARE FALLING FROM THE SKY! YOU NEED TO FIND A WAY TO LIVE!” It irritated me. I tried to make it be quiet, but it wouldn’t. I supposed I would have to stop falling from the sky, and live, too, which was not going to be easy. But I would try my hardest.

I kept falling.

I looked around. It didn’t make me fall any slower. I checked what I was wearing. It was what I would normally wear, a T-shirt, some jeans, things under those jeans, socks, but no shoes. I noticed that my feet were cold.

I kept falling.

I checked my pockets, hoping that I could devise some brilliant device out of the perfect parts I would have in my pockets. Crushed raspberries, I learned, are extremely ineffective if you’re trying to safe yourself from falling out of a plane without a parachute. I did have a walnut, which I ate. It tasted okay, like a walnut should.

I kept falling.

I looked below me. There was what looked like a country house owned by a somewhat wealthy family, and that was because it was a country house owned by a somewhat wealthy family. I had a great view of it. I wish I had my camera. It might have been more effective than a crushed raspberry, and it even takes pictures.

I kept falling.

This somewhat wealthy family had a small lake, or maybe it was a pool made to look like a lake, or maybe it was a pool of poison that the somewhat wealthy family would feed to people that came by, because no one was to know of their secret lake filled with poison. In a bet, most people would have bet on it being a small lake. I bet on it too. Most people is smart.

I kept falling.

The thought had been screaming this whole time. It began yelling words that were easy to understand. By the time I was close to death, it sounded like a little girl screaming in a dodge-ball game after she has just had a ball thrown right next to her head. The thought said no words that I could make out any longer, and proceeded to just shriek. I tried it too. It made me feel better.

I kept falling.

I approached the lake of poison from the sky and angled myself, through some unknown form of instinct, so that I would land in this lake. It seemed to work. I seemed to land in this lake and I seemed to dive to the bottom. I seemed to not be dead, which must mean I was alive, and I also wasn’t falling from the sky. The thought sat down and enjoyed some brain fluids, as if it were tea.

Imagine starting at the top of Mount Everest, but there isn’t anything below you for the 29,028 feet of Mount Everest. You can’t see 29,028 feet below you, so you don’t know what’s there. It could be one thousand jagged rocks, ready to impale you many, many times, after you fall that distance. It could be a city, where you might land on a taxi driver that speaks a language of his own, that is literally only his. It could be the middle of an ocean. In my case, it was a pool that I had no hope of landing in.

You begin to fall this 29,028 feet, and you fall this distance. It is certainly very cold at 29,028 feet, and will stay that way perhaps until you are 150 feet from almost certain doom, and falling 150 feet happens rather quickly. I would know. It just happened. You will be cold, and your feet are part of you. Now imagine falling, feet first, into a non-heated lake from 29,028 feet. (I repeat the word feet, by different definitions, only to confuse you. Confused is how I feel most of the time.) Your feet would not only be cold, but they would hurt a lot. This is why I could not walk well after I got out of the lake.

I learned that this lake was not made of poison. In fact, it tasted exactly like water, and had no permanent effects on my health. I was shaking wildly afterwards, however, which may have been a side-effect of the fall from the sky, or perhaps from drinking what could have been a gallon of water-poison.

I stepped out of the lake. I realized my body thought the lake was freezing. That may have been because it was. I never found out. I was shivering from the cold, the shock, and the shivery water-poison.

I must have looked ridiculous. I laughed at that, right then, at my own expense. The laugh sounded dead, or dying.

Then white puffs, like clouds, began to roll onto the world. It was pleasant. I suddenly felt as I had before. I smelled the clouds again, and I tasted them. Those beautiful, white clouds, like misty puffs across the sky. I felt them touch my skin, and I heard the sound of soft wind. But my eyes were open this time, and I saw them, and only them, and nothing else. It was a world of clouds.

I then heard the grass embrace something, and it was me, and I was unconscious.

It’s accessible via this link, or by way of tinyurl.com/blackiphone. Enjoy!

In many of my blog posts, I have a section at the start that says “in short” and then explains the gist of the piece in a few sentences. Why do I do this?

I recently had a discussion with a member of an older generation — let’s call him Venustiano — who criticized the medium of digital information. He claimed that it doesn’t allow people to go into depth. This got me thinking.

I agreed that there is far more skimming in the digital age. Some examples: my RSS reader is absolutely packed with feeds, and I almost never read an entire blog post from start to finish. Twitter and Facebook feature streams of information that are almost meant to be skimmed. I can’t have deep debates in twelve different IM windows. 

Is this bad? Only if it comes at the expense of ever going into depth.

The new digital medium allows more depth than ever before. Never before could readers of a newspaper debate a story with people they will never meet. Reference texts have always cited their sources, but the ability to read those sources in a click is unprecedented. Text can be easily supplemented with images, video, audio, and other interactive elements.

The danger that Venustiano was talking about was valid; skimming is easier now than it’s ever been, and it almost feels encouraged on a computer. But depth is also easier.

The beauty of digital information is that consumers can decide whether they’ll go intodepth. If they care, they can read infinite volumes. If they don’t, they can read a tweet.

And that’s why I write my “in short” messages — if people don’t care, they don’t have to read a novel.