Is talent immaterial compared to disciplined work? Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrrated suggests as much. Colvin prescribes that deliberate, difficult, challenging practice is what leads to extraordinary performance. This book affected how I think about parenting and very much influenced my daily routine.

Here are a few of the most interesting ideas and quotes I found in the book:

• Focus relentlessly on performance.
• Be intensely specific.
• “Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results.”
• “Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team.”
• “While it has often been observed that those who work the hardest seem to be the luckiest, the fact remains that if a bridge collapses while you’re driving over it, nothing else matters.”
• “Above all, what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.”

The stories about memory research reminded me of one of my favorite Morning Edition commentaries: Speed Rules in Match Class. Math freaks… awesome.

These are tiny details from my back yard. The red trillium shot is my favorite in the set, and capturing the bumble bee was a lucky break.

Here are just a few shots of the amazing people that make WordPress work—taken the week after WordCamp San Francisco 2010. Hat tip to Matt for inspiring me to pick up a dSLR again and for lending me a totally completely awesome D3S.

I’ll be helping out with WordCamp NYC on November 14-15, 2009 this year. The venue is Baruch College, CUNY, and it’s shaping up to be a really nice WordCamp. Lots of Automatticians will be in attendance. The tracks, announcements, demos and Q&A all look really interesting. I live in NY but I’ve never been to NYC, so this should be good fun.

Follow wordcampnyc on Twitter to get the latest news. Tickets for WordCamp NYC are on sale now.

Also, we’re currently looking for volunteers, speakers, and sponsors. If WordPress helps you do your job, forms part of your business, or just plain makes you super happy every day, please consider becoming an individual ($250) or consultant ($500) sponsor. These tickets will get you full pass access and goodies, plus a little publicity and public thanks.

The WordPress 2.8 Release is cool, smooth, and simple as Michael says in the latest video announcement. I like that. My favorite new features are the theme search and install that pulls directly from the WordPress.org Theme Directory (amazing!) and the new syntax highlighting that let’s you “navigate your way behind the code behind the poetry.” I’m so looking forward to the improved media handling coming up in the next releases. test

Goodbye, old. Hello World! WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is here. It’s faster, more customizable, and prettier. The hardest part about upgrading to WordPress 2.7 for me was making the backups beforehand.

Michael Picks‘ introduction video begins, “this Winter, a tale of heartwarming usability, breathtaking beauty, and thrilling flexibility…”

A completely amazing amount of user testing and community involvement went into this release. Everyone that participated has done a truly superb job. This is a brilliant way of developing software.

What is WordCamp you ask? It’s a conference of sorts where bloggers of varying levels get together to talk about all things WordPress such as blogging, web design, code, publishing on the web… what it means and where it’s going. WordCamp Utah 2008 has a seriously amazing line-up of speakers including Matt Mullenweg, Richard Miller, Cameron Moll, Thom Allen, Ash Buckles and Alex King. If you are interested in blogging or are a local web designer, and you will be in Salt Lake City on September 27th, then you MUST not miss WordCamp! 

Looking for a way to SMSify your website? Look no further. DOTGO is a new service designed to let you access your site via text message. In the past, the high cost of shortcodes have made texting prohibitively expensive for smaller websites. Now they can SMS for free with DOTGO. Try it out by texting “cnn” to DOTCOM (368266). To customize the response for your site, you just need to create an index.crml and place it in your root directory. Check out the Hello world! example cmrl file and try it out. The CMRL documentation has more examples.  

Even though you can see some of my featured design work in my gallery and some of my earlier work from the U of U School of Business, the Junior League of Salt Lake City, and Myriad Genetics, Inc. on this older portfolio, I noticed there isn’t much print design work displayed on designsimply.com. So, I’m posting a few pieces of recent work here. Enjoy.

Here are some examples of a brochure, a registration form, and a banner ad that I designed:

Because of my interest in photography, I have always ended up serving as the official product and event photographer at most any job or event I undertake. Here are few product photography highlights from Myriad Genetics, Inc. in Salt Lake City, UT:

When it comes to stock photography, I am very proud of my iStockphoto.com/designsimply portfolio. Here are my most popular files on iStockphoto:

Another photography claim-to-fame, my duct tape picture was used on the NPR story page for “Best Tool Ever” by JJ Sutherland. I love this.

I will post more soon. Thanks for reading!

I just noticed that the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is showing actual numbers instead of the usual progress bar style indicators for the approx search volume columns. This is a nice (more transparent) move for Google. I like this change.