From: Calvin from Simplero <calvin@simplero.com>
Subject: The Longest Distance

Hi Lovely Simplerista,

Since last week, I've had lots of travel and -related challenges.

First we flew from Tucson via Dallas, to New York. Our flight was delayed so it was over 3am when we finally arrived home, and we had less than 12 hours to unpack, repack, and get out the door for our flight back to Denmark on Friday. Then we got stuck in traffic in Manhattan so bad that we missed our flight to Denmark. The distance from our apartment to the entry of the Holland Tunnel would normally take 9 minutes according to Google Maps. It took us over 90 minutes. About 20 minutes just to travel a single block. Why? Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend. I hadn't realized. To us, it was just another day of the week.

So while in the Uber, I found tickets online out of JFK that would take us to Denmark in time for Phoebe's workshop on Sunday. They were via Warsaw, Poland. We had to get our dog with us, but didn't know how to ensure that she could travel with us, so we took the chance. Right before the entry to the Holland Tunnel which would have taken use to Newark, New Jersey, we turned around and went to JFK instead. Here we had plenty of time, since the flight was at 11pm. Unfortunately, our flight got delayed by 3 hours, which meant we missed our connection in Warsaw, and we weren't home until late that night. Thankfully we could bring Yasmine :)

As challenging as that travel was, it's all pretty manageable. It's not life-threatening. It's just a matter of time, money, and inconvenience. We'll get there eventually. And, hey, I got to try the Dreamliner!

No, when it comes to travel, a wise man once said to me that the longest distance is the distance from the head to the heart. 

I think that's so true. And that's what last week's workshop was about for me.

Latest from the blog

During Wyatt Webb's "It's Not About the Horse" workshop last week, I got to a point on the third day where I felt like I wasn't getting much out of the workshop. I thought the things people were saying were uninsightful, I thought Wyatt was doing a poor job facilitating the workshop, I thought about how I would run the workshop differently myself. It was all bullshit, of course, but such is the mind.

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For as long as I can remember, I've been so filled with shame that I don't "have my shit together", that I don't know what I want, and can't get their in a straight line. That I'm not more successful than I am. I have a broken family and managed to put myself in a situation where I live on a different continent from my children. It's certainly not the way I would have liked to design my life.

But something happened last week that make me wake up a little bit. I met someone who was incredibly...

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One among many things that I learnt from Wyatt Webb, was his simple rule for how to do anything:

  1. Do what you know or think that'll work
  2. If that doesn't work, try something else
  3. If that still doesn't work, ask for help

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New in Simplero

No big things this week, but a bunch of small ones.

The most challenging one, by far, was a fix for a bug in Firefox where it doesn't honor the max-width property of images. That means we cannot automatically scale down images that are too big for where they've been put. It works in other browsers, but not in Firefox. I looked and looked and experimented and experimented, but it wouldn't budge. We could make all images full-width, but that wasn't what we wanted. We just wanted to make images that were too big small enough to fit inside the area.

Since nobody else seemed to have solved this particular problem, I set out to do so myself with some Javascript. The solution is open-sourced here.

We've also fixed a problem with podcasts using the original versions of files, instead of our re-encoded versions. That has been going on for a long time, so we're really grateful one of our lovely customers caught that and were willing to help us track it down. We've also fixed lots of little issues caused by the design changes, including the Firefox one above.

We've added automatically saved drafts for posts, so when you post to spaces - either in forums or blogs - we'll save your draft to your browser, in case something goes wrong.

Finally we've added you unread tickets to your admin interface so you won't miss a response. We also send it out by email, but sometimes emails go astray. This way, you'll always find the answer next time you log in.

Fun stuff from around the interwebs

This Intelligent Details ad from Bentley is brilliant marketing. The video is pretty good. Not outstanding, but nice. Or maybe it's just that Bentley's are not really my taste.

But the genius is that it's shot entirely on an iPhone 5s, then edited on an iPad Air, in the back of a Bentley Musanne. What this accomplishes is getting Apple's head of marketing Phil Schiller to tweet it to his 125k followers, which then in turn gets it picked up by Daring Fireball, and now it's doing the rounds. And it's reaching a tech- and design-savvy audience, something I'm sure they'd like more than anything. Well played, Bentley.

This Aug(de)mented Reality video  caught my eye, too. It's pretty sweet.

Have a great week!

Lots of love,
-Calvin